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:
- I want to track all analysts in my industry, then I could [give] my executives a single URL so they can observe
- Give a sales rep a single webpage to see all the tweets coming out of their client
- Professional to quickly track all their industry counterparts tweets
- Have further features that allow very large feeds to segment by a variety of filters perhaps by location, popularity, and other metadata
- Be easy to use (feedback so far on this has been very positive)
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
Posted by: charlie | June 2, 2009 | | categories: ChatterBox Info | tags: ChatterBox, crowdsource, Development, Social Media
Hi Everyone,
Today, Jeremiah Owyang 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 glad he did. We’re definitely thinking the same thing. Jeremiah outlines the following pain point:
“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.”
A ChatterBox allows just this capability. When configuring a ChatterBox, you can define a list of interesting topics and can filter those topics to a set of Twitter handles. You can then invite other users to participate with you in the ChatterBox. Not only can those participants respond back right to Twitter right though the ChatterBox, but the threaded conversations can also be assigned, categorized, tagged and put into workflow.
Once the ChatterBox is created, users can create their own custom views and RSS feeds into the information. Individual users can create an unlimited number of ChatterBoxes. So, you can create one ChatterBox to follow a set of concepts/handles and another to interact with your business partners to respond to tweets through a common process.
Jeremiah Outlines the following use cases (in quotes):
“I want to track all analysts in my industry, then I could [give] my executives a single URL so they can observe”
Yes, we do this out of the box. Additionally, you could create a view/RSS feed for that executive and assign them the ones they should read so that they do not need to filter through the full list.
“give a sales rep a single webpage to see all the tweets coming out of their client”
We also do this out of the box.
“professional to quickly track all their industry counterparts tweets”
Again, we do this out of the box. We also let the professional tag, categorize and archive the tweets so that they can be viewed and searched at a later point in time.
We think there are some other interesting use cases, including:
- PR agency that wants to set up a shared workspace with their client as part of their social media program.
- Team that wants to easily share the responsibility of responding to tweets.
ChatterBox capabilities like assignment and prioritization can also be used to better streamline management of responses. The are many more use cases, many of which we can’t wait to learn when our users come up with them.
Jeremiah also lists some required features (in quotes):
“Allow anyone to create a public stream of Twitter users, later it could evolve to include blogs and articles.”
We will allow users to create a stream of tweets that can be shared amongst ChatterBox users. The stream itself will not be public, but it could potentially be in future releases. Adding other content sources for elements that can be pulled into a ChatterBox is high on our list of priorities.
“It should allow members to submit themselves to these lists, or allow anyone to volunteer others.”
The ChatterBox creator (moderator) can invite others into the collaboration space in the initial release. We don’t have an option for other people to submit or volunteer other members. That could be added if it becomes highly requested.
“Have administrative controls.”
Yes, we have administrative controls although they are limited in the first release. This is an area we will focus on enhancing.
“It should be public.”
We won’t have fully public facing information available in the initial release. We are thinking about pages for public facing information, like latest updates, status and background information.
“Be easy to use.”
We hope so, but we’ll really know when users start providing feedback.
“Have further features that allow very large feeds to segment by a variety of filters perhaps by location, popularity, and other metadata.”
ChatterBox will have meta-data capabilities for assignment, categorization, prioritization, status and tagging. All of those values are configurable. Other data elements could be tracked as tags or through future potential enhancements.
“Aggregate then prioritize. Feeds on their own are a bit messy, if you’re not in front of in real-time you may miss something. This feature should bubble up the most important tweets based on popularity or weight.”
Yes, we agree. We won’t be there from day 1. It’s definitely something on our radar, though.
Please check out Jeremiah’s post. We’re very excited by the vision he outlines for this type of solution. ChatterBox will be here soon and we can’t wait for you to start using it and providing feedback. I’ll definitely keep you updated on our progress. We would love to hear your ideas as well!
Thanks for the time!
- Charlie
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Charlie Chatterbox
Celebrity Mascot
Posted by: charlie | April 11, 2009 | | categories: ChatterBox Info | tags: ChatterBox, crowdsource, Social Media
Well, one of my assistants tipped me off to an interesting debate going on between 37signals and Get Satisfaction. You can find the details here:
http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1650-get-satisfaction-or-else
To summarize and over simplify, 37signals is mad because Get Satisfaction had a page out there where people were asking questions about their products. It was not obvious (enough) to some that this was not an official channel for support from 37signals and as such 37signals reputation was damaged because of this. They’re probably right.
However, should we be surprised? You could easily substitute Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc. and the post would have looked exactly the same. The reality is that people will talk about you, your company, your products, etc. whether you like it or not. The answer is not to try and control these conversations, but to effectively participate in them. You need tools to better manage these conversations regardless of the platform. I am not at all ashamed to tell you is this is exactly what we are trying to help you do. With ChatterBox we want to let you find these conversations and participate even if it is not coming through an official channel.
There are a lot of comments on the 37signals post on both sides. It is worth a read. Just to set the record straight, I am a huge fan of both companies. That’s not easy for a monkey like me to say.
P.S.: I thought about adding some nice battling logos here, but with all the litigation talks on that thread, I figured it was best not to do that. So, I used the mic logo instead. If you don’t like it, sue me. Um wait. Don’t do that. Please send me a polite email offline requesting to take it down.
P.P.S.: 37signals please don’t be mad. We’re not even out the door yet and I would hate to end up on the wrong side of one of your posts… I’ll send over some ripe bananas if that will help.
- Charlie
Update: Get Satisfaction created a blog post on the topic as well: http://blog.getsatisfaction.com/2009/03/31/kissing-and-making-up-with-37signals/
Update 2: There is now also an open letter to Jason Fried: http://blog.getsatisfaction.com/2009/03/31/open-letter-to-jason-fried/
Update 3: 37signals posted a response on their earlier posting: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1661-follow-up-on-get-satisfaction-or-else
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Charlie Chatterbox
Celebrity Mascot
Posted by: charlie | April 1, 2009 | | categories: Social Media | tags: crowdsource, customer support, reputation
