Setting up cost-effective communications between the U.S. and China isn’t simple.

Skype certainly is – you can’t beat free – and I intend to use Skype (on my iPhone, iPad, and MacBook Pro) over wifi as much possible. I’m staying in business class hotels, so I should have reliable wifi.

But I also need to be accessible to folks from their phones in the U.S. and to be able to call phones in the U.S. from China. I’ll be using Skype for both of those options too:

• SkypeIn – which lets people call my Skype from their phone via a unique U.S. phone number, $12.05 for three months after a 33% discount for buying SkypeOut
• SkypeOut – which let’s me call phones from Skype, $13.99/month

Together, these will let me talk with people on their phones in the U.S. very cost-effectively. But they still require me to be on Skype.

To bridge to a phone in China, I have a China mobile phone – thanks to a friend who travels there frequently – for which I’ll buy a SIM when I arrive. Rates seem to be in the $20 for 1-2 hours of talk. I’m pairing that with a calling card (yes, cheeziest site ever, but she says they’re for real) at $.032/minute after the caller enters a jillion numbers.

The last element is a separate China mobile that Eisenhower provides that is exclusively for local calls about scheduling and logistics. Yes, that totals three phones.

Not addressed yet in this solution is text. I bought $5 credit on Skype for SMS, but messages cost $.09 each! I think that I’ll get text on my China mobile, but I won’t know until I’m there.

The goal of all of this was to have a call from the U.S. to my U.S. mobile reach me in China cost-effectively. It doesn’t seem that that’s possible today. But my Rube Goldberg solution should get me most of the way there. I just have to remember to forward my iPhone and put it in Airplane mode (with wifi on) for the duration of my trip when I board the flight on Saturday.

I’d love to hear if anyone has a better solution than all of this complexity…

I’ve been actively using and thinking about social media and how to use it effectively as a tech start-up CEO for over a decade. Finally, in just the last month, I think that I have achieved a balance of channels that works. I use each for a specific type of communication with a specific audience.

I started this blog a year and a half ago, and hardly ever post. I find it difficult to prioritize the time and, more importantly, I usually can’t write about the things that consume me and that I think would be really valuable for those in my community. I’d like to write about how we think about strategy and our competition, corporate development and major deals, the capital raising process, the dynamics on our board and with our investors, and our culture and people issues. Mostly, what would be interesting and informative are the big opportunities and big problems. These are, however, exactly what I can’t share here. My conclusion is to keep the blog as a place for writing like this but not to worry about posting regularly.

In contrast, 347 updates ago I started using Twitter (@LucindaDH), which works a lot better for me than blogging – not that they’re the same thing at all. I started during the SXSW conference when everyone else did (as @LucindaH) but I couldn’t get going; I just didn’t get it. Then, afraid I was aging, I made a month-long commitment to Tweet. And I was hooked. It’s a terrific way to keep in touch with friends, get to know acquaintances and colleagues better, and connect with people beyond my network. I found that the most constructive effect was that it connected me better to other C360 people. And it gives me something to do when I’m sitting at red lights.

I do love that I can update Facebook with my Tweets. Facebook is purely secondary for me, but there are a lot of very active users, and I can keep my page fresh through Twitter. It’s a place that you have to be if you work on the Internet, it’s a great way to connect with old friends, but it’s not a main platform for me. There are many other networks that I use but don’t contribute to (Yelp), some I find intriguing but don’t use regularly (Tripit), and those I choose to ignore (MySpace).

Again in contrast, LinkedIn has become critical to my business life. I use it to find new employees, to get background on people I’m going to meet with, and to find paths to get to people I’m trying to meet. It’s great, but it’s more as a database than a social space.

So if I blog as an occasional way to publish long-ish thoughts, Twitter to connect a level deeper, maintain Facebook as a seat at the table, and leverage LinkedIn as a business tool, is that the right mix?

No. This all brings us to Yammer. I love Yammer. Yammer fills a key void in the social media mix to date. I introduced Yammer to Commerce360 a month ago and find it invaluable already. People post really interesting things (to me anyway) like what they’re working on, competitor announcements, industry news, client feedback, that there are cookies in the kitchen, or that they’re going to lunch. Our dev team updates Yammer automatically through our source control system so we can all see hour by hour what’s happening. It all adds up to giving me a finger on the pulse of the organization in a way that’s hard to get otherwise, particularly because I spend so much time out of the office. I also think that it helps people to have more visibility into what I’m doing. I post things like meetings that I’m in, what we’re talking about, what I’m reviewing, client and sales call outcomes, how the board meeting is going,… My hope is that this helps everyone stay excited about what we’re doing, and that how I spend my time is a signal about what is important to the organization.

Which, back full circle to the beginning of this post, is really the promise of social media for the CEO: it can help us connect to our constituencies in a more direct, genuine way.

So, with the addition of Yammer, I’ve finally developed a mix that works:
1.    Yammer for inside the company
2.    Twitter for quick exchanges with the tech community (and their spouses)
3.    Facebook for a broader community
4.    LinkedIn the business world workhorse
5.    This blog for occasional longer posts

Yes, I have an iPhone. Russell stood in line at the Apple Store. Mostly with Indea – I had to drag her away she was having such a good time.

I wanted one since before they were announced. Russell has been waiting with a $20 eBay phone for a year and a half.

And, despite all of the activation hassles, it’s pure bliss. It’s like having a concept car of your very own, that works. I’ve never interacted with a more beautiful piece of technology.

My Brooklyn posse in about 1973. I just love this photo.

Wrote this when the family was just back from our second – well, Russell and my second – Renaissance Weekend. We went the first time we were invited, in 1999, then stopped while the kids were little.

The goings-on at a Renaissance Weekend are very strictly off-the-record, so I can’t report on anything specific, which is a shame. It’s an exceptional group of people in an extraordinary situation which makes for something really wonderful.

I do, nonetheless, want to comment my personal take-aways. First, and most fundamentally, I leave the weekend intellectually, spiritually, and emotionally reinvigorated. Mainly, I’ve been motivated to live an even better life – to live more fully, love more deeply, to make a bigger difference. It’s magical to interact with octogenarians who are activists, people who have been to 80 countries – in the last 5 years, astronauts, B52 pilots, priests, cosmologists, politicians – including a serious Presidential candidate, battlefield reporters, and homemakers. I was consistently awed by the richness of these people’s lives, and grateful for their openness. The dialog is genuine and deep, with people striving to find ways to bridge gaps, often across wide and deep chasms. I can’t help but believe that the world is going to get better when there are so many very powerful people with such genuine desire to do good and a willingness to listen to and to learn. So, I leave the weekend 1) rededicated to doing the right thing 2) convinced that it will make a difference and 3) excited by all the possibilities of life.

In addition to these large lessons, a learned one very important thing: that the world I live in is far from mainstream, that the edge terrifies many people, and that we, the 53,651 have done a very poor job at telling the story of our work and our lives. I was on a number of panels on a variety of topics, but almost always the fears that people have about the things we do were palpable. In this group, the fears weren’t the typical base fears of predatory pedophiliacs. Rather, the fears were a step higher. Attendees were struggling with teenagers’ different sense of privacy. They worry about content producers and the meaning of copyright. They can’t understand and ~ our electronic multi-tasking. This group was trying to understand, but the gulph was so wide that I found myself evangelizing today’s internet. I showed a chart of the old distribution versus the long tail over and over (drawn on the back of my folder, since there aren’t really visuals at Renaissance) and telling stories about Etsy, Kiva, Donor Direct, and a guy who bought Harris tweed from a guy on the Isle of Harris and had his local tailor make him a jacket rather than buy it off the rack for 50% more. We have to do a better job helping everyone understand the wonder that is starting to unfold in our world and how it will make the world a better place.