Recently Rachel Levy sparked an interesting discussion on her blog when she posed the question “To Cross-Post or Not to Cross-Post”. Rachel was of course referring to the dilemma some social network users face when deciding whether their Facebook friends want to see what’s happening in their Twitter streams, or their Twitter followers want to see what’s happening in their LinkedIn accounts, or the various other combinations of conversations on one social network finding their way onto another. Todd Clayton & I had similar conversations as we prepared for the recent Defrag conference, and you can see some of the results reflected in Todd’s presentation.
Looking back on some of those discussions and comparing them with the comments that are flowing into Rachel’s post, there seems to be one thing we can all agree on: LinkedIn is the No Fun Social Network. If all the social networks got together for a party, Twitter would be the person who talks a mile a minute, never lacks for conversation starters, and loves meeting new people; Facebook would be having lots of fun conversations with some occasional business ones mixed in, but would generally confine them to people he already knows well; MySpace would be provocatively dressed and flirting with everyone in close proximity…
And finally, over there in the corner would be LinkedIn. He’d stick out like a sore thumb, the stuffy guy in the tweed jacket who confines all conversations to business and has zero sense of humor. Don’t bother trying to say hello to LinkedIn unless you already know him. The only way to meet him is to have an associate in common OR to correctly guess his e-mail address. If you’re fortunate enough to be introduced, you can expect a long spiel about his great credentials and degrees, his career accomplishments, and all the people who recommend him. LinkedIn is a name-dropper if there ever was one.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I think LinkedIn is an invaluable resource that plays a vital role in the social space. There certainly is a need to connect people who want to succeed in their careers and promote their businesses. I’m not suggesting LinkedIn should do anything to change the features I just indirectly described. However, I do believe it’s time for them to have some fun with that image. How easy would it be for LinkedIn to produce a web marketing video with the LinkedIn character doing some wild and crazy stuff that we’d never expect to see? For example, can you imagine LinkedIn recreating the canonball scene from Anchorman? Instant win, right? People love to laugh, and the potential to produce a marketing video that goes viral is always there. Sometimes proving you can laugh at yourself is the secret formula to making everyone stop, take notice, and maybe change their opinion of you. I would imagine content producers like my friend Eric Guerin at SmartMarket Media would have a field day with this opportunity.
My advice for LinkedIn: it’s fine to be the No Fun Social Network, but at least have some fun with it!
Todd gave the following presentation at the Defrag Conference 2009 in Denver yesterday. It’s also featured today on Slideshare’s home page in one of the Spotlight secitons. As usual, feedback is welcomed.
UPDATE: We have posted a video of the presentation.
Follow the links below to view the slides or view the slides through the embedded presentation:
Last Friday night I attended the very special NomX3-GaryVee taping at The Estate in Boston. Prior to the event, my experiences with @GaryVee had been hot and cold. There were some days when his energy level on WineLibraryTV was nothing short of infectious; there were others when I was ready to throw my laptop out the window if I had to hear “hustle” one more time. Authenticity is a word that gets thrown around the social media universe quite a bit, and I wasn’t sure if Gary had it. I wanted to support my friends @MikeLangford & @JeffCutler so this was a great chance to go try to uncover the true @GaryVee. These were some of my observations from the evening:
It didn’t take long for me to have my first brush with Gary since I walked in the door right behind him. He checked his coat ahead of me and bantered with a couple of the other guests, then when he turned around I introduced myself. As I later tweeted, it surprised me that he traveled solo. I was expecting some sort of entourage on hand to direct menacing stares at people who got too close, fetch drinks for him when he was thirsty, and emit that “the person I’m with is so important that he needs me to do what regular people do for themselves” vibe. Not seeing this presence immediately elevated his status in my eyes.
My other thought as we shook hands: I hope this guy uses LOTS of hand sanitizer. Flu season is approaching and I can only imagine how many hands he’s going to shake during his book tour.
The Estate’s dress code bans many items including flannel shirts. I’m guessing that L.L. Bean didn’t spend much time partying here during his younger years.
Prior to the taping, Gary mingled with the crowd and welcomed conversation. This was a change from other events I’d attended where the keynote speakers preferred to spend their time “backstage” rather than engaging the audience.
If Jeff was going for comedy with the wines he chose for the taping, he succeeded! I wish the vintner had been on hand to hear his or her creation compared to animal feces.
Mike, Gary & Jeff had a nice stage chemistry. The conversation was easy with no awkward pauses. I was curious whether Mike & Jeff would be able to rein in Gary and keep to the standard format of their NomX3 show, but that proved to be no problem.
Had Forrest Gump attended, he could have reused his description of the Vietnam protest emcee for Gary: “He liked to say the F-word, A LOT!”. I didn’t sense that he was forcing the adult language into his talk.
I won’t document what Gary had to say since you can watch it for yourself. Obviously he was there to promote his book and his belief that the Internet can be anyone’s pathway to the American dream. It’s hard to argue with his call for people who hate their jobs to pursue something that they’re passionate about. I’ll be curious to see how much substance there is behind that message as I read the book, but Friday night convinced me of one thing: @garyvee is real, and he’s not going to change whether you love him or hate him. I’ll take a genuine person who occasionally annoys me over someone who fakes it any day of the week.
Big thanks to @MikeLangford & @JeffCutler for organizing a great event. Be sure to watch NomX3 if you don’t already. It’s a fun show that doesn’t lack for strong opinions.
I’ve been a big fan of Saturday Night Live since my freshman year in high school. The first episode that caught my attention was hosted by Tom Hanks, and his “Mr. Short Term Memory” sketch was all I could talk about when I went to school on Monday morning. Gradually my friends started watching, and we would do complete recaps/reviews during study halls. To this day one of my more vivid high school memories was dressing up with a friend of mine as Hans & Franz to attend our sophomore Halloween dance. I wonder if it was a coincidence that I didn’t participate in any slow dances that evening?! But I digress…
We’ve all grown accustomed to the acronyms that are bandied about in our electronic conversations to mask the use of offensive language: WTH; WTF; LMFAO; OMFG. But every so often, people will come out and use the real thing (WARNING- don’t click that link unless you’re willing to view “the queen mother of dirty words”). I follow a handful of folks who use vulgar language in every other tweet, while some save the language for when they’re very worked up about something. There are plenty in my list who probably would never think of using vulgar language on Twitter.
I’ll admit it – I fall into that last camp. You might see me use an occasional swear acronym like WTH, but you won’t find any adult language in my stream. I just don’t want to risk having someone view it and form a negative impression of me based on some choice words. After all, there are plenty of folks on Twitter who feel certain language should be reserved for comedy clubs & HBO:
On the other hand, it would be unlikely for me to base a decision to follow or unfollow someone on bad language unless there was some sort of abuse or personal attack associated with it.
So what’s your Twitter language policy? Do you censor your own tweets in any way? Would you base follow/unfollow decisions on vulgar language? I’m curious to get your take! Just don’t curse me out for bringing up the topic…
Recently I was annoyed with one of my personal online service providers. SmugMug, the photo sharing site I pay $39.95 per year to use, was intermittently failing to accept my uploads. With 2 children starting school and a new soccer season, I have family members & friends chomping at the bit to share in all the excitement by viewing my photos. Obviously any delay in getting these albums posted is a problem, especially when it results in a “where are those photos???” phone call from my mom.
Soon after that a couple things happened: SmugMug founder & CEO Don MacAskill started following me, and I received a tweet reply from SmugMug offering assistance via their help page/email. This got me thinking back to about a year ago when I tried using SmugMug as my HD video service. I upgraded to a Pro account and found that the upload speeds were too slow for me (note: this might have changed over the past year!). At that time I emailed SmugMug support and they could not have handled things better. They immediately downgraded my account and refunded the difference on my upgrade without any hassle whatsoever.
That’s when I started to feel remorse over my tweet complaint, for a couple reasons:
This was a company that had established a track record of reliable support with me. Perhaps I should have sent an e-mail instead of delivering a public spanking-by-tweet.
SmugMug is family owned and operated. Don is an entrepreneur just like me. Normally I tend to give small operations the benefit of the doubt when it comes to issues because I’ve been there before and I understand what it’s like to support a customer base with limited resources.
Looking back, the main reason I tweeted was because SmugMug is not free. As a paid service, I hold it to a higher standard even though it’s basically a start-up.
Obviously social media channels give people voices and influencing power they never had in the past. It wasn’t long ago that a terrible interaction with your phone or cable company might result in a bashing session around the office water cooler and perhaps a letter or e-mail complaint which never received a response. These days we can notify a mass of users in seconds via tools like Twitter & Facebook. Due to the viral nature of these broadcasts, one negative situation can quickly snowball.
So now that we have these public channels available to us, the question becomes: when do we use them? What causes consumers to take that next step and go public with their issues and general complaints? Here are some factors I consider before I “go public”:
Free vs. Paid: I generally expect more from a service I pay for
Previous Support Interactions: if I’ve gotten quality support from you in the past, I’ll lean toward keeping things private
Provider’s Background: entrepreneurs/start-ups usually get the benefit of the doubt because I can relate; big corporations like cable companies, phone companies, etc are easier to scream at because they’re nameless/faceless
Do I aspire to do business with your company one day?: no sense burning bridges before they’ve been built!
I find there are no hard and fast rules on this list. Facebook is a free service (at least in terms of monetary payment), yet I wouldn’t hesitate to rant about Facebook in a public forum. On the other hand Charter is a big company that has won me over through its proactive use of Twitter.
I’m curious to know how others feel about public gripes. What’s your main reason for complaining about a product or service on public channels? Do you get a better response from providers when you go this route? Do you consider the size of the company or what you’ve read about them before you complain? Please chime in below!
Since we’re heading to Digital ID World next week, we thought it might be interesting to show a demo of why virtual directories can help companies build social media driven applications. This post is a follow-up to my previous blog posts on “Virtualizing Social Networks” (Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3) by using a virtual directory to incorporate social media information into a virtual directory like Radiant Logic’s RadiantOne VDS. Our demo shows how you can leverage Twitter to promote products to your users based upon the people following and followed by the user.
Here is the general scenario. Company A is building a portal and would like to expose enhanced information to their customers. They are interested in enriching their user profiles by combining social network information into the data. This makes the information available in the portal more relevant for the users. They decide to start by incorporating information from Twitter into the system. This will allow them to promote products purchased by people following the user and whom the user is following. The following identity/data repositories are involved:
Enterprise Directory containing a list of all users in the portal
Order database
Twitter
One of the key requirements is that they want to minimize the application development costs and also position themselves for incorporating other social networks. They decided to leverage a virtual directory to create a view into the identity and data repositories which allows them to easily consume this information within their application. This also allows them to incorporate additional social networks without making other application changes.
Our demo highlights how you can easily incorporate data from Twitter and combine the data with information coming from both the enterprise directory and the order database without needing to make significant application changes or modify the underlying data sources. The following diagram highlights the logical design:
We used the following approach to create the demo:
Created an Enterprise Directory with the list of customers
Joined the customer directory to the order database to get a list of products purchased by the user
Joined the customer directory to Twitter to get the list of followers and who the user is following
Set the Twitter handles of other users in the VDS store to Twitter handles that match so that we show the relationships (note that we could use something like ICS to do more sophisticated matching without necessarily needed the matching Twitter ID)
The demo shows how to create two different directory tree structures for consumption by the portal:
The “Following View” shows the orders purchased by the user and the people following or being followed by the user on Twitter. The “Purchased View” extends this information to show what products have been purchased across the user’s social graph.
As a sneak peak, here’s a video walking you through what we are showing:
Charlie asked me to take a break from the “wordy” posts I’ve been doing and write “something that any monkey can understand” (his words, not mine). So, let’s give it a shot!
For employers, Twitter—where users post updates, or “tweets,” of no more than 140 characters—offers one more way to find and attract candidates, and a cheaper alternative to big online job boards. It also helps companies target social-media-savvy job hunters and convey an innovative image. For job seekers, Twitter offers the chance to interact one-on-one with companies’ recruiters and can be more convenient than job boards.
No doubt Twitter is a great way to engage with recruiters and potential employers, but how do you find what you’re looking for AND keep track of it? That’s where ChatterBox comes in:
Create a ChatterBox focused on the job search terms and/or job feed handles you’re interested in
Customize your Categories to distinguish different types of roles or specific areas of expertise
Customize your Status to reflect where you are in the process (initial response, sent resume, etc)
Create as many similar ChatterBoxes as you’d like
There you have it- a quick, easy way to manage your Twitter-based job search and know exactly what you’ve responded to.
Well, I am back from our launch at the 140 Twitter Conference (#140tc) in Mountain View, CA. Charlie dispatched me to represent the product and what we are doing. I got to meet a bunch of great people and also received a nice reception for the product. We can’t thank you all enough for being included and the opportunity to spend some time to show you what we have put together. The Parnassus Group put on a great event.
People had some good things to say about ChatterBlox. Here is quote by @justinjwilliams I captured from Twitter (using ChatterBox of course):
People also loved the monkeys we brought as our giveaway. Apologies to everyone for the #MONKEYFAIL during the keynote where one of Charlie’s brethren went off accidently.
Attendees found lots of great uses for the monkeys (aside from a screaming slingshot). @krystyl wrote:
We also presented at the launchpad session. It was a nerve racking 5 minutes, but I think we well positioned the application and the demo went smoothly. The audience was great and the other presenter showed off some really interesting tools. Definitely check out TwittyLinks.com by Loren West. TwittyLinks is the fastest way to tweet about a web page. One click lets you tweet without leaving the page you’re on. Loren was very kind to take this picture of me presenting at the launchpad session:
Well, we’re busy taking a look at all the feedback and suggestions for improvements and are building out the app for full open beta. Expect to see open signup at the end of June. In the meantime, use our Contact Us form to request immediate access. I can’t wait to see everyone again at the next event!
There is no doubt that Social CRM is the future for traditional CRM. CRM tools are swarming to build functionality to monitor your brand across the various social networks. There are lots of great blog articles out there discussing this topic, including posts by Jeremiah Owyang (”The Future of Twitter: Social CRM”), Brent Leary (”Social CRM in Pictures….and Words” and “Social CRM: Not Your Father’s Customer Relationship Management“) and many others. I really like Brent’s definition of Social CRM which is as follows:
“Social CRM adds a whole new dimension to the traditional view of customer relationship management. The focus is undoubtedly on people and not technology. It’s about joining the ongoing conversations our customers and prospects are already engaged in — not trying to control them.”
The key statement to me from Brent’s post is about joining ongoing conversations and the value in building relationships. However, what is missing here is the fact that this is still CRM, social or not. The ultimate goal is to manage your customers, partners, etc. to obtain the most value you can out of that relationship and to build that 360 degree view of the customer. Don’t get me wrong. CRM has value. Social media needs a different approach, though. Companies should come to these conversations as participants and not overseers using tools to monitor the social networks to help fix a customer’s problem or clean-up after a PR debacle. The real answer is to give users the tools to manage these relationships and not just the organizations themselves. Users should have the capability to share information with their vendors on their terms and not the vendor’s terms. These tools should still give vendors the ability to easily participate in those conversations and extract the value needed from them, but I do not see the same value for Twitter providing the Social CRM capabilities that Jeremiah outlines. Twitter’s value comes from the users and not the brands. Twitter should instead focus on providing improved capabilities for users to be able to express their preferences and issues. Admittedly, I’m still not sure how you monetize this any more that what they have now, though.
So, is this Vendor Relationship Management (VRM)? Doc Searls leads ProjectVRM at Harvard University to support the development of VRM tools and methodologies. Wikipedia defines VRM as:
“VRM, or Vendor Relationship Management, is the reciprocal of CRM or Customer Relationship Management. VRM describes a set of tools, technologies and services that help individuals go to market and manage relationships with vendors. In turn, vendors who align themselves to these tools, technologies and services will have the opportunity to build better relationships with their customers.”
Sounds like it. Or does it? VRM advocates putting tools in the user’s hands. VRM also describes transactions, relationships, conversations, user-based control, etc. Paul Greenberg presents a good case for VRM and Social CRM being the same thing in his “Vendor Relationship Management: Jumpin’ On The Three Wheeled Bandwagon” post. VRM, however, has its own set of challenges. In Graham Hill’s post on “Four Fallacies of Vendor Relationship Management” he outlines a strong set of reason why VRM is overly extreme. Ultimately it comes down to the management of information and whether or not the VRM economic model works. So, perhaps VRM is not the answer for social media either. This makes sense if Social CRM is the same as VRM as Paul describes.
So what capabilities really are needed for social media tools so that both users and organizations can get the most value. Here is my high-level feature list for this new type of tool:
Designed for users and not organizations
Organizations should be equal participants in the conversations and not observers
Inherently free so that everyone can gain value with value-added services provided on top of the core system
Exposes interfaces so that organizations can extract data approved by the users
Social network independent
Perhaps this is what Graham calls “Customer Managed Relationships?” I’m not sure. I do know that this type of tool needs to focus on collaboration more than just relationship management. Perhaps the best name for this is Social Collaboration Management instead.
While Twitter provides a great platform for global information, how do you get to just the subset of information relevant to your local area. The answer is a system of Twitter distribution hubs (a.k.a. spoke-hub distribution paradigm). The idea is not a new one. Distribution hubs are used across the board for a multitude of purposes, including airline flight patterns, shipping, networking and many other reasons. According to Wikipedia, this distribution model is defined as:
“The hub-and-spoke distribution paradigm (or model or network) is a system of connections arranged like a chariot wheel, in which all traffic moves along spokes connected to the hub at the center. The model is commonly used in industry, in particular in transport, telecommunications and freight, as well as in distributed computing.”
Wikipedia uses this picture as the way to show how this works for airlines. So, in this example Denver serves as the hub for getting to and from place that do not have direct connections.
Twitter does not have a direct model for creating these types of relationships, but it does have a virtual way of setting up distribution points- search and hash tags. While Twitter’s search operators page at http://search.twitter.com/operators lists two operators that could apply (near and within), those work in the opposite direction. “Near” finds all Tweets sent from a specific area and “within” constrains the search to a specific distance away. This would be interesting for an aggregation approach, but since we are trying to distribute messages to the spokes and not consolidate messages from the spokes, we need a different approach.
Fortunately, a standard has emerged around using hash tags (#some_topic) which allow people to find things around a common topic without having to follow a specific handle to be notified of the information. You can then use Twitter search to find all messages related to that topic. While not as convenient as near and within, a hash tag model could be applied to describe messages destined for specific areas. You could also tack on other tags to further refine the distribution path. Since these tags are currently freeform, a standard would be needed to ensure that everyone leveraged common formats for the tags. The critical piece here is that Twitter searches can be made into RSS feeds. So, I can easily set up a search for a specific hash tag and am notified when a new item matches that search.
So, how would this work. The first step would be to establish a set of hub information providers. Next, you would establish a set of Twitter searches based upon a hash tag specific to each spoke. Using a tool like RSS to Twitter (no affiliation) you could feed the results of those search to Twitter handles specifically set up for the spoke location. Users could follow the spoke to then be notified of the specific items of interest.
There are a multitude of sample uses for this type of a model (e.g. local advertising), but a more interesting use could be to create a localized emergency broadcast system for things like Amber alerts, weather emergencies, or other types of local notifications. The system would look something like this:
An organization like the Homeland Security Department would operate as the hub sending a stream of messages tagged appropriately for distribution. The messages could embed links and pictures for longer text or photos of missing children, persons of interest, etc. Local agencies would then follow the spoke accounts to get the subset of information relevant for that specific area.
The benefits of this approach include the following:
Notification logic can be centralized to a single point of access which simplifies distribution
Instant global reach
Little development is required to integrate with Twitter
Twitter is easily accessible by mobile devices
Content can easily by filtered down to a specific interest areas
There are a few drawbacks to this approach. The main drawback is the stability of Twitter itself. Without a reliable mechanism for distributing these messages the usefulness of leveraging Twitter in this fashion is extremely limited. The second drawback is that spoke-to-spoke (or point-to-point) messages can not easily be sent directly since all communication flows through the hub. Fortunately, Twitter provides an easy mechanism to forward messages. A spoke could send a message back to the hub with a hash tag for another location. The hub would then re-tweet the message and it would be picked up by the other spoke. Another thing to keep in mind is that traffic would be bottlenecked by the hub account. So, if things like API limits were not lifted, message distribution could be delayed. Additionally, without a standard for hash tags, coordination across the network would incur a high level of overhead.
Overall, this is another idea to keep in mind when looking at notification systems. Email and automated phone calling have already greatly improved response times and awareness of incidents. Leveraging Twitter in this model is yet another improvement.
Recently Rachel Levy sparked an interesting discussion on her blog when she posed the question “To Cross-Post or Not to Cross-Post”. Rachel was of course referring to the dilemma some social network users face when deciding whether their Facebook friends want to see what’s happening in their Twitter streams, or their Twitter followers want to see what’s happening in their LinkedIn accounts, or the various other combinations of conversations on one social network finding their way onto another. Todd Clayton & I had similar conversations as we prepared for the recent Defrag conference, and you can see some of the results reflected in Todd’s presentation.
SNL has provided plenty of 
Well, I am back from our launch at the 
we brought as our giveaway. Apologies to everyone for the #MONKEYFAIL during the keynote where one of Charlie’s brethren went off accidently.
Wikipedia uses this picture as the way to show how this works for airlines. So, in this example Denver serves as the hub for getting to and from place that do not have direct connections.
