My Great Kids

The following was submitted by The View Staff Reporter Jerry LaVaute:

I’m very proud of my children. When you raise children, the connection between parental effort toward ensuring exemplary behavior, and the child’s response, seems sometimes tenuous, and you wonder at times whether they’ll ever get it.

This is made more difficult as these fledgling adults begin to pull away from you as a parent and, God forbid, even challenge your thinking and judgment.

There are several years, particularly following high school and even more so following college, when you wonder whether the effort will pay off.

But slowly, gradually, the evidence begins appearing that you’ve raised a couple doozies for children, that you’ve hit it out of the park with both of them as adults.

I see consistently bad behavior among select young people and I think, this person will subtract from the world; he or she will get in the way of mankind’s progress. And I’m saddened, because some parents didn’t do their job.

You know, you’re never really sure about this. My son may be convicted as an axe murderer in a year; my daughter may become a crystal meth addict and leave for a beach in Mexico.

But this week, I received more solid evidence that my children Matthew and Kelly are indeed adding to the world, reflected recently in how they do their jobs at their employer, Quicken Loans.

Kelly is the manager of Social Media at Quicken. Owner Dan Gilbert received e-mail from someone who challenged Quicken’s effectiveness at social media.

The e-mail was forwarded to Kelly, whose very job, and job performance was being challenged.

Kelly, who is a very effective writer, dashed off e-mail to Gilbert in which she described Quicken’s depth and breadth in its use of social media, and specifics and data regarding its achievements and plans.

Now, I wouldn’t have known about this, except that older brother Matthew, who was proud of his sister, forwarded it to my wife Jan and me. Way to go, Kel. You indeed add to the world.

Speaking of Matthew, Kel sent us a brief video in which Matthew’s smiling face and native enthusiasm and confidence will be featured in upcoming TV spots for Quicken Loans.

Matthew is an executive mortgage banker with Quicken, and his enthusiasm for his job is evident in his TV pitch. Way to go, Bud.

Quicken must be proud of both my kids and, although I’m proud of them absent the recent accomplishments, it’s icing on the cake, and further proof that my wife’s effort and mine toward raising our children to be good people is paying dividends for the world at large. And it doesn’t get much better than that.

Tweeting through Facebook?

This is a bit of a shocker. Facebook, who has seemingly been in a race to emulate many of Twitter’s features, just announced that it’s launching the ability for Facebook Page admins to simultaneously update both their Page and Twitter.

Facebook explains how this will work in a blog post:

“If you manage a Facebook Page, you now will be able to decide whether to share updates with their Twitter followers, and you also will be able to control what type of updates to share: status updates, links, photos, notes, events or all of them.

If you have multiple Pages, you will have the option to link each of those Pages to different Twitter accounts. This new feature will only link Facebook Pages to Twitter, not your individual profile. It will soon be available at http://www.facebook.com/twitter”

While that makes a lot of sense from a convenience standpoint – many big time Twitter users also have popular Facebook Pages and vice versa – it’s surprising to see Facebook so openly acknowledge Twitter’s reach. That said, by giving users the ability to update both services via Facebook, they’re clearly hoping that the Facebook Page will become the first stop for admins.

That would mean lots of “via Facebook” messages showing up in tweets, and in fact, it’s not hard to imagine Facebook quickly becoming one of Twitter’s most popular clients. However, I wouldn’t expect this functionality to be extended to user profiles anytime soon, which would clearly be a bigger win for Twitter than Facebook.