All the right people are taking notice of Columbia. Yes, Putin, I'm talking to you!

Saint Basil's Cathedral and the GUM Department Store in Red Square - Photo by Jorge Lascar

Saturday marked the conclusion of the first week of the Columbia campaign.  Based largely on some LinkedIn posts and a few emails to my own and my family's personal networks, the book has 156 pre-orders.

By Saturday night, it seemed it was time to start working hard. I asked my wife and daughter to share the book on Instagram and planned my own return from five years of self-imposed social media exile, re-establishing a Twitter presence.

It quickly became clear that this phase of marketing was going to result in all the right people taking notice. Who, you ask?

Well, just hours after my wife and daughter posted Columbia to their Instagram, I was the recipient of this charming message from the social media site (note the Red Square*):

See, when your public LinkedIn profile indicates that you were an intelligence officer and that you were educated in Russian at the Defense Language Institute, the blanks fill themselves in and life can sometimes be interesting.

This was not a spear phishing message. I logged into Instagram separately using their Forgotten Password feature and discovered that in the hours after my wife and daughter's posts, "my" Instagram account had suddenly posted several pictures of me and my family that are available elsewhere online.

It was a thoughtful message from some old friends that they had not forgotten about me. They could have just faked the Instagram account and used a spoofed email and waited for someone who knew me to alert me to the presence of the account, but instead they thoughtfully used my real email, certain in the knowledge that Instagram would notify me of the login.

Awww, how sweet!

Of course, it is possible that this was all the result of a sophisticated bot which had done some keyword matching and generated actions based on a coded script. The nature of the activity is not at all the hallmark of such a bot, but it is certainly possible. And the timing of such a bot might just be coincidental to the week when I began to broadly share about my experience in intel as part of the Columbia promotion. It's possible.

If you believe that, I'm sorry I only tried to sell you a book. I have some great oceanfront property in Idaho you might have preferred.

The day's lesson was a valuable one for my teenage daughter, and a good reminder for me. When you put something on social media, you never know who might see it!

But, I can't sell books without talking about them. One week down, three to go for Columbia. We must strike while the iron is hot (for those who may be reading and wish to have that idiom translated, I offer for your convenience: куй железо, пока горячо).

Thank you for continuing to spread the word about Columbia, the book that Vladimir Putin (maybe) doesn't want you to read. If you have not been able to pre-order a copy yet, please do so today!

* Fair enough, this is more of a rectangle. But it is a great pun and quadrilaterals are quadrilaterals. As Pythagoras would surely have said, it's all Greek to me.