Archive for September, 2008

by Adele McAlear. Originally posted at Marketing Monster

Crowdsourcing is one of the best uses of Twitter. Sure, it’s easy enough to poll people with questions or to ask for information, directions and recommendatons, but it’s another thing entirely when you’re in a pickle and need someone local to physically come to your aid.

Last night at about 10:30 pm, as I watched the Tweets fly by, I caught this from Guy Kawasaki (@guykawasaki), famed Apple evangelist, venture capitalist, entrepreneur, speaker and author:

A few of us re-tweeted his request, not that he’d need much help with 20,500+ followers, but you never know if people may have missed it the first time around.

Sure enough, within 8 minutes, the offer of help came in from Jerry Jones (@jetskier79):

Confirmations were made and, voila! Within an hour Guy had a magsafe power supply for a Macbook in hand. And what did Jerry get besides some good karma, Guy’s thanks and a few new followers? His good deed was rewarded with a signed first copy of Reality Check, Guy’s new book, set for release on October 30th.

As for Guy’s test, he wrote about his best Twitter story ever and documented the exchange with a smile and a photo.

How has Twitter come to your rescue? Let me know.

Microblogging is great but the way it’s articulated by Twitter provides a river of often random disconnected messages, most of which have little relevance to the things in which I am interested. Put another way content without context and purpose is meaningless and for business, that combination is crucial. That was the state of play when I first heard about eventtrack in November 2007, developed by Craig Cmehil, SAP’s developer network evangelist, buddy and fellow Irregular.
The idea behind eventtrack is very simple. Track and aggregate the messages around a particular event so that anyone following a specific (at the time hashtag) could get a sense of what was going on in a way that makes it easy to consume contextually relevant information. In other words, tracking people in the moment around an event.

Since those early days, eventtrack has grown, morphed and is now an indispensable part of my daily life. So when Oracle held OpenWorld this week, I created an event called #oow08, the main recommended tag, and tracked all the conversations, photos and videos posted using that tag. Eventtrack doesn’t capture everything because some people didn’t use that tag but I got enough to allow me a good sense of what was happening from my spot in the cheap seats.

Eventtrack is great for what it does, reflecting the needs of people like me who want to research, analyze and comment upon specific events of this kind. But it is dependent on a pool of interested people employing a specific tag. Fortunately, there are usually enough people around for me to get a solid amount of data around which I can form opinion. It comes down to the old adage: it’s not what I know but what I can see you know that matters.In that sense, eventtrack provides me with a ringside seat for events on the other side of the world.

Craig Cmehil. Image by cote via Flickr

What about results? As I write this, OpenWorld is coming to an end and the snapshot (see image above) tells me that there have been 1,773 messages, 662 images and 28 videos. Even if eventtrack misses 20-30% of what was ’said,’ I have more than enough information to digest. Parse that against people who matter to me who may not have used the #oow08 tag and I have as complete a picture as I need for my purposes. I also have the added benefit of discovering people I didn’t know but who are now important to me because of what they add to my store of knowledge. And of course, eventtrack data is publicly shareable.

Does eventtrack solve all my needs? No. As a researcher working in a loose network, it’s enough. What if I need to solve ‘real’ business problems? What if my question now becomes: ‘What are you struggling with?’ That’s where services like ESME come in and is the subject of part 2 of this discussion.

Dennis Howlett is a full time researcher, consultant and blogger on enterprise software whose primary outlets are at ZDNet. He is part of the ESME core team.

Ed. note: We’re honored to have this and future guest posts from Dennis because he’s been right at the core of enterprise microblogging discussions for a long time. As disclosed, he is affiliated with the ESME project. We’d like to make clear that others affiliated with related applications and projects are also welcome to guest post, and that such affiliations will always be disclosed.

UPDATE: Best Buy CMO Barry Judge explains Twitter to Chairman Richard Schulze…

BusinessWeek profiled 10 CEOs who Twitter. CIO considers it one of the four best things companies can do on Twitter.

Executives can generate substantial business value by posting their thoughts, resources, news and their ideas to microsharing tools like Twitter.

ROI vs. Blogging

Twitter’s much more practical, accessible and more easily integrated into demanding executive lifestyles. Blogging requires hours a day and a whole new skillset. Microsharing is easily done from the mobile devices executives already carry and use.

Done well, microsharing can generate even more value than an executive blog because the ROI equation is so much better. Twitter is deeply networked, so important ideas and information flow to and from your executives quickly. Ideas spread further, faster and it’s much easier for employees, customers and other stakeholders to follow. It’s so powerful that it can replace core responsibilities and functions for a net time gain.

Executive time and attention are valuable, and Twitter converts them into content and conversation much more efficiently than a blog. Here are seven reasons why:

• Lightweight: content requirements and time commitment are both highly scalable.
• On the Fly: ideas and observations are captured right when they hit. Resources are immediately passed along into and out of the professional network.
• Fast: news, shared ideas, responses and innovation all happen essentially in real time. Executives can stay on top of breaking news and the day-to-day pulse of their brands.
• Networked: microsharing is inherently networked. Blogs, for all the linking, are really not. Twitter is a de-facto social network or “human computer”
• Easily consumed: one of Twitter’s greatest strengths lies in its many versatile access points (the user multi-face). You consume it the way that’s most convenient for you. It avoids that inbox-filling-up feeling that plagues email.
• Pub/Sub: From JP Rangaswami (blog) coined I picked up the term “Pub/Sub.” The publish & subscribe model means that you have control over who you hear and who you talk to. Natural affinity groupings form on their own time and in their own ways, and nobody gets subjected to the torture that is an endless “reply-all” email chain.

Stories about executive microsharing will become an ongoing series for the TouchBase blog. We’ll talk to executives who are active on Twitter, FriendFeed, Plurk and other platforms about why they do it, what they’re learning and what advice they have for others giving it a try. Watch here for ideas, interviews, analysis, best practices and case studies that you can use at your company.

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• The Role of Twitter in Brand Management

Social media platforms of all sizes suffer from a common problem: generating income. While venture capital continues to breathe life into twitter, as the U.S. economy tanks, it’s only a matter of time before developing a self-sustaining business model becomes critical.

One new entry into the monetization game, hailing from Sydney, Australia, is ut.ag. I was contacted by one of the founders earlier this week and quickly engaged in a discussion.

Background

uTag is a turnkey system that allows content producers (site owners, bloggers, twitterers, etc) to generate revenue and retain attention from every outbound link. It’s dead simple, quick and non-committal and can be implemented link by link or or a site-wide basis within a few minutes. uTag automatically generates contextual advertising for your outbound links using the major online advertising networks.

Details

Approach: Framed-ad delivery

Payment: via Paypal

Use: URL shortener and javascript widget that can be deployed in a blog/Web site. These are classified as vanilla and cherry flavors (or flavours).

Initial thoughts

To be fair to the guys at ut.ag, this is a beta and likely has more tweaks before it is publicly available. I tried the service with several URLs: a climate change practice at a large, international law firm, BMW USA and the home page of uber-foodie Andrew Zimmern. The results?

• Two of the three Web sites properly displayed in the delivery frame. BMW gave me a browser compatibility message, no doubt crafted by Web developers who don’t like such framing.
• All ads were delivered from Google, but the content was the same each time (all for Utah, go figure)

Summary

Given the (growing) level of noise online, will such a monetization approach pay off? One post by someone who viewed this service at a start-up workshop noted a range of responses. My exchange with ut.ag co-founder revealed a number of Tweets using the account: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=ut.ag. Users will ultimately decide if this service is worth its salt. I would personally improve ad-serving, determine how to support all sites (frames may not be a good approach) and make sure that the approach itself is legally permissible. At least in their own jurisdiction:-)

Guest Post by Becky McCray

Lorie cites these direct results from Twitter:

• Allowed me to build a relationship with important industry partner, resulting soon in an article on their website that will also be emailed out to their 250k mailing list.

• Met a guy who tweeted me he was putting together a group of local Austin internet marketers. Went to the first meeting, I met a very well-known internet marketer who wants a demo DVD of me to share with one of his partners! Not sure what will happen yet with that. Also met about 25 of My Peeps who speak the same language of SEO, Twitter, blogging, sales letters, etc. Just the beginning on that group, lots of great possibilities.

• Met another person in my industry because she followed me, whom I did not realize had an online store. We ended up talking and she is now carrying my closet product. Cha-ching!

• Have used Twitter to keep in touch better with my local Austin American-Statesman reporters, who are now my very cool friends. Technology writer, Life & Arts writer are good pals I have met in person. I have been in the Statesman a whole bunch this year.

Image via Wikipedia

• “Important People” have followed me out of the blue recently, even though I did not yet follow them at the time. That can only mean good things.

• Have gotten closer with people in my industry whom I normally see only once a year at our conference.

Becky McCray profiles small business successes and failures at SmallBizSurvival.com.

Ed note: “Met” Lorie when I accidentally appropriated #CTT to play a Twitter game. (”Complete This Tweet: If my closet was a TV show, it would be __________________________ (mine? “What NOT to Wear”)) Ironic that I started the meme out of closet frustration. Great to stumble across this small business Twitter success story in such a typically Twitterly way.

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• Newspapers that Twitter

Today I am at Ford Motor Company “World Headquarters in Dearborn, MI for the F-150 Forum. Our job here today is to take offsite participants — journalists, truck enthusiasts and anyone who’s curious — behind the scenes at a small, exclusive “press conference” style event at Ford’s Allen Park Test Labs in Dearborn, MI.

Watch the presentation live via UStream at 1PM EDT

Live video by Ustream

And then, tour the testing facilities with me in snippets of video, conversations and interviews via my mobile video phone (Nokia N95) and Qik.com. You can even chat with me live while I’m on the tour.

Technical note: The Qik camera malfunctioned — we’ll remain uStream only.

From the event invitation…
When the Ford truck team set out to design the next-generation F-150, sacrificing comfort for capability was not an option. The team redesigned the truck, both inside and out, to deliver best-in-class capability, unprecedented choice and a host of game-changing features.

You may have seen the new 2009 F-150, but now it’s time to gain more insight into the capability, power and choice behind America’s favorite truck.

Please join us for a rare, live glimpse inside Ford’s Allen Park Test Labs for the F-150 Forum on Thursday, Sept. 18. Ford F-150 Chief Program Engineer Matt O’Leary and Truck Marketing Manager Doug Scott will discuss all things F-150, and make some news along the way.

Follow Laura “@Pistachio” Fitton live on a tour of the Allen Park Test Labs and see what goes on behind the scenes and how the new ‘09 F-150 was built for you.

Rafe Needleman/CNET’s Webware review of Present.ly finds several advantages over Yammer for enterprise microsharing. Present.ly:

• supports file attachments
• permits groups
• does not require all users to share an email domain
• can be installed behind the firewall
• supports the Twitter API

Twitter API support is significant. Many tools that work with Twitter would be very useful to have for an internal version.

Rafe dislikes the email domain requirement for Yammer: “it makes it impossible to invite an outside contractor into a work group.” That’s easily solved by issuing an alias from your company’s email domain. Possibly more of a problem is that many companies have divergent sets of email domains (by brand, by business unit, or with different TLDs such as .com vs. .co.uk).

On the other hand, the ad-hoc, sign-yourself-up nature of Yammer fosters spontaneous adoption and use of the tool, which may later help employees “sell the concept” of microsharing and demonstrate microsharing’s value to decisionmakers. On the other hand, it may piss off IT departments enough to inhibit subscription growth.

Keep an eye on the TouchBase blog for our side-by-side comparison of all publicly announced enterprise microsharing tools.

(Via Chris Brogan.)

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• Yammer: A ‘Twitter for the enterprise’ (Rafe Needleman/Webware.com)
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In the spirit of Chris Brogan’s wonderful “workflow” posts that show how you can use social media in everyday life and work, here’s a simple “Event Attendee Workflow” for using Twitter to find out about, attend, share and make better connections at an event. This is around a local luncheon. I do a LOT more when it’s a conference or in a distant city.

• RECEIVE direct (private) message from a local friend inviting me to an interesting lunch.
  
• FOLLOW the link and decide it’s perfect for the Microjournalism panel I’m speaking on this weekend with Doc Searls and Robert Scoble.
• (PRE?)-TWEET about the event (I didn’t in this case, but usually do) to spread word, and possibly to discover that friends will be there/encourage them to go.
• TWEET on arrival Tweet a link to the live stream of the event or other “I’m here” message, preferably with useful content.
• SEARCH Twitter for tweets from other people in the room/related to the event.
• SHARE interesting comments, key ideas, links to resources discussed and the speaker’s site, etc.
• CONNECT to people you met there, as a low-key way to maintain loose ties and possibly get to know one another’s work and personality better.

What would you add?

Yammer, the 2008 Techcrunch50 competition winner, is the newest entry in a growing pool of internal (or “enterprise”) microblogging applications. We’re working on a side-by-side comparison of the many entrants to that realm of microblogging and hope to share it soon.

But what about the many “public” microblogging tools? Which tool is best in which situation? Here’s a brief comparison of five established applications and the situations where they perform at their best.

The applications that we’re examining in this article are (with unique monthly users from August 2008 by Compete):

Twitter – 2.6 million
Pownce -160,000
Jaiku – 100,000
Identi.ca – 60,000
Plurk – 250,000

TWITTER

Twitter is the most famous microblogging tool. It has gotten mainstream press coverage in newspapers, BusinessWeek, and other mass media outlets. Recently CNN’s Rick Sanchez started using Twitter. Many of the US Presidential candidates have had a Twitter presence for months. Creative types like Wil Wheaton, Warren Ellis, John Tesh, John Cleese, and Henry Rollins also have a Twitter presence.

Twitter’s strengths are its large user base and massive collection of third-party applications that extend the basic Web interface with more powerful functionality for searching, automating microblogging entries, and organizing the user interface. Twitter is designed to work with instant messaging (IM), E-Mail, and mobile phones using SMS messaging. Twitter’s DM (Direct Messaging) capabilities, which you use to send private messages, are also popular.

Twitter’s reliability, once a sore point, has improved greatly. The 140 character limitation can be frustrating, as is the lack of threaded conversations. There’s also the impact of the “river of noise” phenomenon that builds as you follow more Twitter users. If you follow hundreds or thousands of Twitter users it becomes easier to miss interesting or important posts as they drown in a raging torrent of posts.

Twitter is effectively the benchmark for other microblogging services due to the size of its userbase, the large number of supportive third-party applications, and its simple but effective functionality. It is capable of handling many microblogging needs. You can’t go wrong by having a Twitter presence, even if you intend to use other microblogging services.

POWNCE

For months Twitter’s main competitor was Pownce. Pownce launched on June 27, 2007, but only emerged from invitation-only beta on January 22, 2008. On the surface, Pownce has many features in common with Twitter and its competitors, but it has a few strengths of its own.

Sample Pownce screen

Pownce allows you to build lists of friends and followers and send both public and private messages, just like Twitter. One of Pownce’s biggest strengths is its ability to transfer large files between users. The pro version of Pownce can send files up to 250 MB; the free version has a limit of 100MB. In addition, Pownce uses integrated event scheduling that’s similar to Facebook’s event functionality. Links are very easy to publish using Pownce. Its private message system is very similar to Twitter’s Direct Messages. Pownce also allows threaded replies and the ability to rate the quality of other people’s posts. In fact, in many ways Pownce is more powerful than Twitter.

Pownce never caught on the way that Twitter did, possibly due to a later exit from invitation-only beta. It only added mobile messaging functionality in December 2007. However, its additional features give it an advantage over other competitors.

JAIKU

Then there’s Jaiku, acquired by Google in 2007. Jaiku has more in common with services like Snurl and FriendFeed than Twitter, as Jaiku has lifestreaming capability. It allows you to import and display virtually all of your activity that publishes an RSS feed. It does not support private messaging, but it does have channels, which allow you to create places where a limited number of people can read messages.

Jaiku only switched to unlimited public invitations in late August 2008, which effectively kept user growth at a very slow pace. The acquisition of Jaiku by Google and recent reengineering to use the Google App Engine may be the key to a promising future if the search engine giant continues to make improvements.

IDENTI.CA

Identi.ca, on the other hand, is possibly the most basic application of the five reviewed in this article. The most remarkable thing about Identi.ca is that it’s created using Laconica, an open source application. Anyone can download and install their own instance of Laconica for internal microblogging. Now that the popular Twitter desktop client Twhirl can interface with private installations of Laconica, this becomes a more attractive “enterprise” or internal collaboration tool.

This also means that people can take the Laconica source, create their own copies of it, and add to it. This makes Identi.ca feel like a prototype: a hint of things to come. An Identi.ca end user might not see the potential of this platform unless people start coding some really amazing things with the Laconica source.

Identi.ca has the smallest userbase of these five public tools. It lacks a direct or private messaging feature like Jaiku does and it is bound by the 140 character limit. Identi.ca does have a clean and simple interface, and it’s popular with several influencers who are pushing for more interoperability and standards in microblogging. If you’re looking to use a simple microblogging solution in a quieter part of the Web, or if you want to extend it on your own, Identi.ca might appeal to you.

PLURK

Our final service, Plurk, is different than the other services and so it deserves some special consideration. The other four offer streams of updates in reverse chronological order like blogs do. Plurk uses a unique timeline feature which lists the newest entries to the left and the oldest entries off to the right. You can choose views that show only your “plurks” (Plurk microblog entries which work within the 140 character limit restriction); those of you and your friends; and all plurks in the system. The web page looks like a series of swim lanes full of colored bars that represent plurks.

Sample Plurk screen

Plurk has a somewhat playful, fun feel. You can arrange your friends and followers into cliques, similar to mailing lists. You accumulate Karma points through being active on the website. Karma gives you access to different kinds of emoticons; consequently, you lose Karma through inactivity. There’s a few different views of the Plurk webpage that you can toggle between but they all have a bit of a cartoonish feel.

One thing that Plurk does VERY well is the ability to cluster comments around each plurk. This definitely works better than Identi.ca, Twitter, Jaiku, or Pownce because it allows you to track a conversation similar to the way that FriendFeed works. Plurk users are very loyal to the service; they include both casual and professional users.

Will all of these applications eventually become interoperable via standards, the way email did, or by aggregation in applications like Twhirl, the way Adium and Trillian pull IM accounts together? We expect so. Laura has been talking about this for a while - that you will be able to follow your Pownce friends in Twitter and subscribe to a Jaiku user without leaving your own tool of choice.

For now, each microblogging application has its own strengths, weaknesses and capabilities. Knowing them helps companies and individuals can use these applications to their best advantage. Currently, Twitter has the most substantial audience, set of user data and opinions and “off-platform” benefits for commercial use, but companies should be aware of the other applications for specific uses. In the comments, tell us what you think of the various tools and what each is best for.

The TouchBase Blog will feature case studies of companies using these tools to their advantage, to give you ideas on what you should try. Stay tuned! Contact us to submit your company’s story.

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Any brand looking to “get” social media must learn to listen, first. People are talking about your company, brands and products. They’re also discussing preferences and desires about the market your product serves.

You can learn a LOT about consumer opinions, trends and wants with simple Google Alerts, Twitter Search and other free search and tracking tools.

Twitter’s huge cloud of remarks being made at any given time has become a powerful new measure of what people think, feel, talk about and find interesting. News breaks fast (and usually, first) on Twitter.

Tweetgrid provides an auto-refreshing at-a-glance display of up to 9 Twitter Searches at once, so that you can easily stay on top of your brand.

• Choose display dimensions (1×3, 2×2, etc.)
• Add search terms (your product name and related keywords)
• Click share this grid
• Bookmark the URL or add it as a start tab in Firefox

Here’s a 3×1 display for my business that searches “Twitter Business” “Enterprise Twitter” and “Pistachio.”

The interface isn’t sexy, but it works. It’s also convenient, free and fast.

Companies that are serious about tapping into the wealth of information in the social mediasphere should use professional grade listening tools, Tweetgrid makes an interesting and easy place to start.

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