Watch out what you wish for.  Sure everyone says that and it always carries these ominous undertones.  Like somehow if you wish for something and it comes true that it is always this bad thing.  We recently had a “watch out what you wish for” moment.  Last Wednesday I had the pleasure of sitting in on a speech from Brian Solis (@briansolis).  If you don’t know who he is, it is easily summarized as one of the most influential people in social media.

As I was sitting in the front row waiting for the presentations to begin, Brian walked up to me to congratulate us on the launch of Bawte.  First I had no idea how he knew who I was and second how he knew about Bawte (He later said it was through the Twitterverse).  Either way, I stammered through a ‘Thank you’ and sat anxiously waiting for everything to commence.

As Brian started talking I kept thinking about what he was saying and how this correlated almost exactly to what Bawte is all about.  Tweets with the hashtag #socialirl (which in my head I still read as ‘social girl’) were flying around and many even commented about what Brian was saying and how that closely correlated to Bawte.

@Jackovin he's talking about @Bawte

— Becky Mollenkamp (@beckymollenkamp) June 6, 2012

I was grinning the whole time.

As the presentation concluded we were notified that there would be a little social gathering at El Bait Shop down the road.  I thought to myself that I really needed to talk to Brian considering the close tie his vision has with Bawte’s business and goals. So I was lucky enough to get introduced, handed Brian my card and spoke about Bawte for a few minutes and asked that he check out our home page video.  I thought it went well.

The next day I shot Brian a quick tweet asking if had the time to check it out.  About 15 minutes after that, the phrase “watch out what you wish for” came to light with this tweet…

Watching a video about @Bawte, a mobile app that connects products, people, loyalty + advocacy bawte.com

— Brian Solis (@briansolis) June 7, 2012

A few minutes after that tweet our server crashed.  Tweets-a-plenty were flying how Brian took down our server, which indirectly, was true (meaning he did not hack our site ).  That left us scrambling to get it back up, which we did about 15-20 minutes after it went down.  But here is the cool thing, that while our server crashed and my blood pressure level peaked to all time highs, it was one of the coolest things that has happened to me.

The interest amongst those that would never have known about Bawte was awesome.  And you just never know what could come of it.  After that first tweet and many conversations that spawned off of that, Brian followed up with…

@MundoShevy @bawte @ErikBoles It's worth checking out!

— Brian Solis (@briansolis) June 7, 2012

So, while the event, what I am calling Solis Flare (because it knocked out our server), maybe wasn't the smoothest in history it was well worth it.  And I would absolutely love watch out for what I wish for more often.

Image of Brian Solis courtesy of www.BrianSolis.com