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:
We also also added the video of the actual presentation given at Defrag:
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…
SNL has provided plenty of memorable moments over the years, some for sheer comedic power and others for miscues and awkward moments. On last Saturday’s season premiere, another clip joined the SNL Hall of Infamy when new cast member Jenny Slate accidentally uttered the queen mother of dirty words during one of the last sketches of the evening. As one would expect in this new age of social media, the slip did not go unnoticed. Mediaite’s Rachel Sklar noted that “Gawker had [the clip posted] 19 minutes after the show ended”, and 4 days later Twitter is still abuzz. Smarter folks than I have analyzed profanity and the social mores that govern its use, but this incident got me thinking specifically about the use of vulgar language on a social network like Twitter.
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.
On Sunday night I was annoyed enough to express my frustration on Twitter:
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:
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”:
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!
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! 
Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal contained an article about how Twitter is revolutionizing the traditional job search:
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:
There you have it- a quick, easy way to manage your Twitter-based job search and know exactly what you’ve responded to.
How’d I do, Charlie?
My previous post described how every company can benefit from using ChatterBox. Today’s post will focus on a specific type of company: the Public Relations (PR) firm.
Before we begin, let’s quickly review what ChatterBox is all about. A ChatterBox is a shared team workspace built around a Twitter search. The Twitter search itself can be a simple list of terms and users, or it can use advanced search operators. Once you have Tweets coming into your ChatterBox, you can:
You can create as many ChatterBoxes as you want, and you can share them with whomever you want. The Tweets that get pulled into a ChatterBox are searchable and accessible for as long as you’d like them to be.
When we began sharing our ChatterBox concept with folks outside of the company, we noticed a consistent pattern of people predicting that PR firms would love the app. These predictions were based on a couple of key features:
Let’s get one thing settled before I continue- I am not a PR professional or an expert on what makes a good PR firm. Most of the information I know about the industry comes from blogs (PerkettPRsuasion.com is a favorite of mine) and Twitter. But part of the inspiration for ChatterBox came from this Jeremiah Owyang post in the fall of last year. While commenting on what PR firms can do to enhance existing functions, Jeremiah writes:
Be a filter for clients: There’s a tremendous amount of noise now being created, creating an opportunity for PR folks to filter, sort, and prioritize what matters. You’ll need both access and understanding of brand monitoring tools as well as the ability to see patterns in the noise.
ChatterBox certainly enables the filtering that Jeremiah mentions. As an added benefit PR professionals can manage multiple clients through a single interface, ensuring that the proper internal AND external users are able to participate.
Let’s use the example of Roger, a PR professional who is assigned to listen and engage on behalf of 3 companies:
Roger works with a team of 3 other Account Managers to services these 3 clients. He’s able to easily listen, engage, and collaborate on behalf of these clients through ChatterBox. Here’s an example of how easy it is to set this up:
ChatterBox #1: MufflerStop
After the save, Roger has created a workspace that provides full visibility to his client.
ChatterBox #2: Ready2Wear
After the save, Roger also sends an RSS feed for assigned items from the ChatterBox to Ready2Wear’s CEO Jennifer, who is an avid fan of Google Reader. This way Jennifer is able to keep track of interactions with the click of a button.
ChatterBox #3: WarningTrack
Using ChatterBox, Roger & Sherry will be able to tag and track the success of the promotions and contests they’ve recommended to WarningTrack.
That’s all there is to it! In just a few minutes time, Roger has:
I’d be interested to hear from PR folks about the use case I just described. Are there additional feature you’d like to see that are specific to your industry? Please leave a comment or reach out to me with your ideas on Twitter!
In 1997 I became a member of the professional services team for a CRM company called Onyx Software. At the time the CRM concept was just taking hold, and the idea of creating a “360 degree view” of customer relationships was something that interested companies in a variety of different fields. As Onyx acquired more customers within verticals such as High Tech, Healthcare, and Financial Services, common business rules and feature requests began to emerge within each industry. In an effort to create a new revenue stream while simultaneously reducing the time it took to deploy a new account, Onyx began combining these common business rules and features into named service packs (ex. the “High Tech Service Pack”) that it could sell as packaged solutions. The advantage of this approach was clear: make the product work in a customized way for the companies whose industries required it, but keep the core product generic enough that anyone could use and benefit from it.
When we put together the development plan for ChatterBox several months back, one of our immediate questions was “exactly how will this application be used??”. We didn’t doubt the value of collaborating around Twitter and other social networks, but we wanted to be sure we weren’t missing industry-specific features that were critical for growth. After discussing our options, we opted to take a generic approach with the ChatterBox feature set. This is not to say we can’t specialize down the road, but for now we’ve opted to provide features that we believe ALL users can benefit from and see where we end up.
The good news about this approach: ChatterBox maintains flexibility, and users are free to dream up any use cases they can imagine. We remain in feedback collection mode, looking to surface common issues & feature requests that we can use to improve the app.
The bad news: some users don’t know how to begin. 
With that in mind, we’re going to begin a series of blog posts for those who are interested in learning how to get started with ChatterBox. We’ll describe some possible ChatterBox setups for the following use cases:
For the potential ChatterBoxers who fall outside of these buckets, perhaps seeing what can be done for a different use case will stir up some ideas for what YOU can do! Keep your eyes open for more entries in the coming days and weeks. For those who are already part of the private beta, we’d love to hear about all the unique ways ChatterBox is helping people to engage and collaborate around social networks like Twitter.
-Chad
Todd & I traveled down to NYC this week to attend Jeff Pulver’s 140 Characters Conference (#140conf on Twitter) and show off ChatterBox. We manned a table in the exhibitors’ area and were fortunate to chat with many of the attendees as they circulated around the venue. As is usually the case when attending a Twitter-focused event, we met a diverse set of people from a variety of different industries. The common theme among them was that they were passionate about social networking and excited to learn about innovative new apps like ChatterBox.
Some memorable moments from our trip included:
Here’s a quick recap of the show in slideshow form:
-Chad
So, ChatterBox has been in private beta now for three weeks and things are rolling along nicely. We’ve been learning a lot since the launch to our beta users. So far the feedback has been very positive and we have been lucky to be able to attend some great events.
After our initial launch at the 140 Twitter Conference (#140tc), we were invited to attend Mass Innovation Nights. A huge thanks to Bobbie Carlton for organizing such a great event and for giving us the opportunity to participate. All I can say is that I am never going anywhere without a few ChatterBox monkeys. People love screaming monkeys. If you create a ChatterBox for the #MIN3 hash tag and the word monkey, you’ll see what I mean. I think I might need to invest in the Super Fly Monkey company!
As with all initial releases, there are some things that we need to improve in the application. I thought it might be useful to share some of these items. We’re working on planning the next release now. Aside from addressing some of the general usability items from this release (and some exciting enhancements), we want to make sure that your feedback is included. So, please send us anything you can think of and we’ll start to factor it in to our plans.
So, here’s the list of things we have found so far:
1. Expect a lot more data than you think!
So, believe or not, there happens to be quite of bit of content on Twitter. During 140tc, we opened up private beta invites for 24 hours and got about 70 users signing up to use the app. After 24 hours we found that about 10% of the users on the system had already accounted for 1.2 million conversations pulled-in from Twitter. Now for some that may not seem like much, but for us those numbers made us a little concerned. We want to have quite a few users on the system and to scale up to that amount of capacity over a short period of time will pose a challenge for us self-funded start-ups. So, we decided to make a couple of changes to the application. The first change was to put in a limit for the number of conversations a ChatterBox will pull in for that day. This helps by limiting content for very broad ChatterBoxes that may not be in use regularly. We also added an option to restart the ChatterBox conversation collection if needed.
Personally, I don’t think this solution is optimal. We’ll be improving this over the next release to give you a more “live” feel to the information and to try to take out limitations like this one from the system.
2. The workflow isn’t working out exactly as planned
We love the fact that when a conversation comes in to a ChatterBox, it’s easy to put that conversation into workflow and categorize and tag, prioritize and assign those conversations to other ChatterBox participants. The UI makes it easy to get to the conversations, respond and then update them with additional information. However, it’s not so easy to see which items you have already reviewed and also which items have been updated since you last looked at that ChatterBox. While we have a number in the ChatterBox tab for “untouched” conversations, 
it’s not all that clear what that number means. Also, in looking at the conversations, it’s not blatantly obvious which items have been updated since we present the conversations in a collapsed view. Notifications fall into the same camp. We underestimated the value of email notifications. That’s quickly become the #1 piece of feedback on our UserVoice forum. So, RSS is great, but email is better for notifications. We’ll get that addressed.
3. It’s a team app with a limited sense of team
One of the main ChatterBox features we’re proud of is the ability to collaborate with other members of a team in the management of conversations. It’s a powerful capability that let’s teams see the full trail of conversations and respond easily from a single account (or individual accounts if desired). One problem. You can’t really tell who is participating with you in the ChatterBox. If you are the admin of the ChatterBox, you can see who you have invited and who has accepted, but as a participant, the only way to really know is to look in the assignment drop-down. This will change in the next version. It was one of those oversights that will be addressed.
Well, that’s all for now. Keep the feedback rolling-in. We’re very excited to have people using the app and we’re on a mission to make sure that it provides the best user experience possible.
Thanks!
Charlie
As we approach our open beta launch, I thought it would be nice to follow-up on an item we wrote about previously. In our post “Meeting Jeremiah’s Developer Challenge,” we set out to meet a challenge for a set of functionality described by Jeremiah Owyang. Jeremiah created a post issuing a challenge to developers to create a crowd managed feed reader:
http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2009/04/11/developer-challenge-create-a-crowd-created-feed-reader
I’m happy to let you know that we achieved the goals described in our previous post. The challenge was to create a solution that addressed the following pain points:
“Finding people on Twitter, then following them is already a challenge. Sharing your hard earned list takes time. I deal with a lot of executives at companies, that want to quickly scan the topics in their industry, or see what their employees, customers, and competitors are doing. Searching by keyword isn’t sufficient. Carter Lusher has this large Twitter list of analysts, but in order to see their streams, adding each one is a manual process.”
You can easily meet this requirement with our new application. ChatterBox is a collaboration platform used to discover information pertaining to topics of interest on Twitter. An intelligent, single point of access, this web-based interface pulls in conversations and creates a collaborative workspace that provides topical views of information – along with features such as personalized views, assignment, categorization, prioritization, notifications and tagging – creating a more streamlined process to listen, organize and respond to conversations. As a result, social media power users and corporate teams can become far more effective in participating in relevant conversations, providing excellent customer service, and generating stronger business leads.
Jeremiah wanted to achieve the following use cases which we allow out of the box:
There are some other items identified as requirements that we’re still considering. This includes things like public views, additional data sources, ChatterBox access requests and automated prioritization. If you would like to try out the private beta, please use the Contact form to request access. We would love to get your feedback.
Thanks!
Charlie
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!
Update: I have uploaded my interview with Brian Shields of KRON4 News. The full report can be found here: http://www.kron4.com/LinkClick.aspx?link=465&tabid=36
– Todd
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