social media

Mashable’s startup review for TigerBow has raised a few questions regarding the subject of privacy and security online. This is a service that will allow anyone to send a real gift (movie or book at this time) to anyone they want via an email address or social networking ID such as their Facebook name. The gimmick is that you’ll be able to receive things without having to divulge your actual address which is nice when it comes to security. However, something about it bothers some people. They feel a little uneasy about this prospect of allowing potential strangers to send you things with someone easily attained such as email addresses and social media names which are splattered all over blogs and websites everywhere.

Tigerbow isn’t the first to do this virtual to reality delivery trick. I remember SocialFlowers being one of the first services that allowed people to ship to unknown addresses from within social networks. The way they did it was by
being the middleman that brokered the deal, much like PayPal distributes money from the buyer’s real bank account to the seller’s real bank account. SocialFlowers did the same thing but instead of handling money, they managed the real addresses of both parties, providing the cloak of anonymity for both parties involved in the transaction.

There are other services now like You Got Beer that let you send things like beer to others across the country. There are also many Facebook apps that do the same thing, and not just beer but also other items such as flowers, candy and more.

This crossover behavior has infiltrated the microblogging world as well with services such as TrackThis which lets members of Twitter receive notifications in real-time of real-world shipment updates for packages. Also, as everyone has witnessed by the deluge of new followers, there are increasing numbers of brick and mortar establishments jumping on Twitter to setup shop. Rumor has it that we will be able to place orders on Amazon from Twitter directly with a tweet. The same will happen with all types of businesses someday soon.

Now that there are services such as TigerBow and SocialFlowers that have become in essence the middle man between the virtual world (social networks) and the real world (customers), then whose to say that a microblogging platform such as twitter couldn’t also be the broker for such deals? Companies took a leap of face many years ago when they allowed customers to place orders with faxes and then even riskier emails. Why wouldn’t they go a step further and embrace the current standards of communication (social media, social networking, microblogging)?

I firmly believe that we will be able to place orders not only with a tweet on Twitter for anything we want but also instant messages. As long as the social identities can be verified and confirmed and ultimately linked to some form of financial account (PayPal or bank account), then there shouldn’t be any problems with doing business with people on Microblogs, any instant messenger or social network. If they want to keep their real address a mystery to the business then so be it. As long as payments are made and products or services have been delivered then what does it matter?

The thin line between virtual and reality continues to blur and fade. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? What do you think? Does it matter if the sender knows your real address or not?

P.S. Earlier this year, a business partner and I came close to launching a service in ultra stealth mode where we planned to allow people to place orders for anything they wanted (pizza, coffee, flowers, etc.) via twitter or even instant messenger. However, we backed out due to several factors including not only the gloomy economy but also because we found a great deal of services that failed trying to let customers place orders online for one reason or another. I still believe without a doubt this type of service will succeed someday soon if done right.

Doriano, A.K.A. Paisano or Pai to his friends on Twitter and elsewhere, has been in the I.T. Industry ever since the MS-DOS 6.22 days. Besides his day job as an IT Admin he also writes for Mashable.com as well as his own tech blog (http://ThePaisano.com) and ocassional guest posts elsewhere. His favorite service is Twitter where you can find him as @Paisano (What else?)

Ever since Twitter was launched in the latter half of 2006, it has grown from a small niche network to an incredibly popular one with millions of users who utilize the service to communicate with friends, broadcast events, and share breaking news. As many people claim, Twitter is a phenomenon.

But that’s not all you see of Twitter. Twitter has enabled developers to go wild building applications that can utilize the service for just about any possible type of activity. Brian Solis has written a comprehensive guide of the many tools available to enhance your branding, whether as an individual or as a company. In his post Twiter Tools for Community and Communications Professionals, Brian shares the following tools: Twubble, GroupTweet, Twitt(url)y, TwitLinks, TweetDeck, Grijit , TweetLater, Twist, Who Should I Follow?, Twitter Twerp Scan, Twemes, #hashtags, TweetScan, twInfluence, TwitterGrader, Twittertise, Twitteriffic, twhirl,TwitterWhere, TweetBeep, TwitterFeed, TwitDir, Ping.fm, Brightkite, TwitterLocal, TwitPic, SnapTweet, DoesFollow, FollowCost, Qwitter, Twittelator, Twitterfon, Twinkle, and Twitterberry.  (Yeah, pretty exhaustive.  Can you really believe that there are more?!)

What’s in your Twitter tools arsenal, and which of these is your favorite? Share them in the comments.

With great appreciation to Chris Brogan, Paul Gillin and David Meerman Scott for inviting me to participate in their New Marketing Summit this week, I’d like to share and expand on my talking points. This doesn’t “map” to the actual panel, it’s the logic flow I prepared.

When the tape video is up I’ll be sure to let you know what all we actually said. Speaker’s amnesia.

1. Tough Economic Times are Predicted.
It’s time to start teaching others how to “fish” and derive value using social media. Social media can create value throughout the enterprise in many different practice areas. Asking who should “own” social media is as ludicrous as asking what department “owns” email? In any context, the focus must remain on effectiveness

2. “Step Off.” Get Over Your Enthusiasm.
Step off your enthusiasm about how “cool” all this stuff is and cut straight to the value. Speak their language and address their needs and pains. Demonstrate how core business processes and challenges can be done better.

Case studies are good. So is mainstream media coverage. That’s validation they trust. But if you really want to dangle a carrot:

SHOW THEM. For example: Twitter search your company’s brand, products, keywords and product class, and show them in real time precisely what your customers want and how they are interacting around your products and the entire product class.

FREE Samples rock. SHOW the business significance, using examples from your own business in action. Show direct applicability and context to their challenges and opportunities.

3. Manage Objections.
Here are five objections (budget, audience size, loss of control, priorities and uncertainty) and ways you can address them:

Budget
Don’t limit yourself to a new “social media” budget, and don’t even remain within the confines of marketing, publicity and other outbound communications. Look long and hard at the company’s full budget mosaic. Social tools can make substantive contributions across the organization — HR, R&D, project management, customer service, administration, IT — again, think of social tools the way you think of email: a tool to adapt and execute on within many segments of the enterprise.

Taking this idea one step further, be as clear as you can about the value or potential value social tools can contribute within each of these areas. What can be done less expensively or more profitably?

Audience Size
The audience value proposition just does NOT work the same way old school “tonnage based” advertising via expensive mainstream media buys always did. You’re not just trying to scoop up tons and tons and tons of eyeballs, hoping to extract actual business results out of some crap small percentage of those that you “reach.” Things can be more closely targeted and more tightly mapped onto fundamental metrics of business success. “Tons of eyeballs” metrics at their best are usually just proxies for “a hope of selling more.”

Three takeaways about social media/social networking audience sizes:

1. It’s Social media and social networking audiences are growing fast
2. Even small audiences that are well-targeted or influencers are quite valuable
3. Off-platform benefits.You’re not always just trying to reach the direct audience. On Twitter in particular, we see massive applicability and advantages in SEO, market knowledge, word-of-mouth “passability” to others outside of the platform, and as a content-generation engine the pulls together flows of content that can be displayed and syndicated using widgets and other RSS-based tools.
   

Loss of Control
You can argue that they’ve already lost control. You can argue that they never even *had* control. Instead, underscore the increase in learning. Companies can learn an incredible about of information about their products, their customers unarticulated wants and needs, how to make it easier for customers to buy, how to serve customers better, and THATS’s just talking about the customers. This magnitude and value of learning is also available for the engineers, the researchers, the manufacturers — compare notes, parse problem-solving, crowdsource and figure out more, faster.

Priorities
Get laser focused on management’s existing business problems and pains. Apply the tools and opportunities you know about to the priorities they know they already have. Be very diagnostic in understanding and maturely articulating what could be achieved and how.

Uncertainty
Don’t forget folks, this stuff can be really SCARY. That’s okay. Encourage them to take a flexible stance, to start dipping their toes in, and to remain learning-focused whether or not they are ready to jump in whole hog. Some of my social media agency colleagues may disagree with this, but I think it’s okay for a company to engage in an extended listening period, where they dive deep into social media listening without necessarily responding.

Yes, ideally, the company should start to respond and manage its message contributions as soon as there are issues to respond to. But I don’t buy that they should not engage in formal listening until they’re ready to engage in formal responding. In many cases, the longer they listen first, the better their response skills will be.

If something major breaks, by all means address it, but it’s MORE important that the listening period not be delayed by fears over how the company can respond. It’s NOT okay to clap hands over eyes and ears just because the mouth - and corporate mind - need more time to prepare.

5. Call in the Cavalry
Well OF COURSE I’m biased. Pistachio obviously provides these services. But sometimes nothing beats bringing in an outside consultant, speaker or evangelist to inspire, instruct and lay out a map for “what could be.”

Your turn. How do you “sell” social media up within your organization? What challenges have you encountered and how have you worked them out with productive results? What have you *not* been able to address that you would like to find better answers and solutions for?

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• New Marketing Summit Round Up - Thanks Chris Brogan and, of course, Braintree
• New Marketing Summit: Convincing Management About Social Media
• Hear Chris Brogan Speak at the New Marketing Summit
• World Wide Rave Talk at New Marketing Summit by David Meerman Scott

Either directly or indirectly, Twitter is loaded with market intelligence for your business. With an estimated 3 million current users who are voraciously talking about what makes them happy and what makes them angry - your products and your market segment are likely being discussed. Let’s take a walk through how this works.

Using Twitter search, we can quickly find mentions of our products or company in specific context.

Here we see an easy one (unfortunate for Qwest), but as Qwest we’d like to see who is talking about us. A quick check for “Qwest Sucks” brings up a litany of complaints about Qwest and its service. Many of these are very specific complaints that can be cross-checked, verified and used to improve service. It’s also an excellent measure of popular opinion about our company.

Mind you, opinion’s not always negative. Another search for “Qwest Rocks,” shows that sentiment about Qwest isn’t all negative.

Qwest customer services has indeed made some users happy. Qwest should be directly thanking these users for their patronage and letting them know they enjoy working with them.

For the less positive ones, Qwest should also respond and let them know they have been heard.
But we don’t need to be so specific. Suppose we are opening an Italian restaurant in Portland’s Pearl District. Maybe we want to know the buzz on other Italian restaurants in Portland and the Pearl District in general.

Here we see that there are a few tweets talking about Italian food in Portland and at least one pointing us to more detailed information in specific blog posts.

We can also look at the frequency of posts to tell us how hot Italian food might actually be in Portland and compare that to some other types of food.

We can also check on the Pearl District itself. Are people going to the Pearl District? Why are they going there? Is an Italian restaurant going to fit there?

We can see by the age and frequency of tweets that the Pearl District in general is more popular in Portland than Italian Restaurants.

Is Twitter going to be your only source of Market Data? Certainly not.

But Twitter is a great, free repository of general and honest conversation from which we can gather a wide range of information.

Jim Benson is a partner at Modus Cooperandi and blogs at Evolving Web. Jim is a management consultant who uses social media tools and principles to help his clients communicate.  Follow him on Twitter.

If you’ve been following the online buzz with Congress using social media, Dr. Mark Drapeau’s series on Government 2.0, political campaigns online and more, then you know that the use of social media tools for government and military purposes is a hot topic right now. Dan Bricklin sat down with Vice Admiral John Morgan recently to talk about how the military uses technology and social media tools.

The interview touches on the many ways our military has incorporated social technology and software over the years, both internally via chat rooms and externally via use and observing of the tools we all use everyday. I found much of the interview fascinating, especially hearing about the use of chat rooms and other technology to both assist in efficiency and, on occasion, to expedite a solution by enabling a direct route to the right person, bypassing traditional paper-based chains of command.

Another intriguing concept from the interview is the burgeoning refocus in the military from a mentality of “decisive win” and defeat of an enemy to one of collaboration and global solutions that benefit more global citizens. Social media and the technology behind it is inherently geared for collaborative efforts, crowdsourcing, information gathering, information sharing and finding joint solutions to complex problems. That the military is taking this into consideration is a good thing going in to the next stage of our future development.

One example of social media in a strategic military application is the use of chat to direct a missile campaign. From the transcript of the podcast (John Morgan speaking):

John: [5:44] Let me give you a very specific military example. You are right, I brought the Enterprise Battle Group south through the Straights of Hormuth on the night of the 10th of September, and on the 11th of September we watched the events unfold in New York and Washington and Pennsylvania and the reaction around the world and we pressed up off the coast of Pakistan.

[6:05] But, when we launched the first strike in Afghanistan we did so by firing Tomahawk cruise missiles. And here’s the technology example: We directed all those Tomahawk cruise missiles by means of a chat room. It’s staggering..

The entire podcast fascinated and intrigued me. On one hand, I love the idea of the global society benefitting from a more collaborative strategic approach instead of a combative one. On the other hand, to hear that whole missile campaigns can be directed via social technology (such as the use of chat rooms, monitoring and use of Twitter and similar applications) is a bit staggering as a concept. I highly recommend you check out the podcast and transcript, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on the military and strategic uses of social media and technology in the comments here as well.

Version 2.0 of Gnip (pronounced guh-nip) launched this week without much fanfare, but I believe it’s just a matter of time before enterprises that are serious about social media in general and microsharing in particular will be asking how they can tap into Gnip’s Data Streams.

Gnip’s Flow Diagram below explains why: Gnip acts as a one-stop-shop for social media data streams, including public data from microsharing services Twitter and Identi.ca.

Gnip is a one-stop-shop for social media data streams

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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.

In the last session at New Marketing Bootcamp yesterday, we did a case study on www.youcastr.com, which offers a live and recorded audio (and soon,) video broadcast and interaction platform for high school, youth and college sporting events.

They want to know where they can find more users and demonstrate how easy it is to produce your own content using their site.

We brainstormed a number of ideas as a panel (CC Chapman, Michelle Riggen-Rans, Adam Darowski, Aaron Strout and I), so the list is a bit “live-bloggy” but I thought it was worth sharing.

• Listen in on Twitter for keywords (for example) HS Sports, high school sports, HS football
• Use your Twitter account @youcastr to follow people who tweet about high school sports, and to offer useful, compelling content.
• Search YouTube and MySpace to identify who is uploading video already, and consider whether your tool can be interoperative with what they are already doing there.
• Have a great widget strategy so that individual producers can syndicate their own shows across multiple websites and platforms
• Reach out to those who are already producing audio and video school sports content, via youtube, Facebook & MySpace search, podcasting groups (and iTunes), cable companies to tap into those who are producing for community access TV, college radio stations,
• Focus the efforts above on areas where high school sports are big business or college sports are popular but not aired
• College alumni groups might be another interesting point of contact
• Partner with flip video camera producer or simple audio recorder companies to do promotions that show how easy it is to produce coverage
• Look for points of leverage, like statewide all-star games, etc. where there are players from many different districts and systems at once. Go in with those with inexpensive recorders and let people practice recording and covering the event.
• Run contests around mascots, producing good broadcasts, funny voiceovers for a semple “reel.”
• Make everything that youcastrs do really easy to pass along and share (”get this widget,” email to friends, etc.)
• Create simple, inviting ways, at the website and at promotional events, to encourage people to try their hand at doing a show.
• Highlight interesting personalities - like a 6 year old who does his own sportscast - that are using the service.

They’re revising their user interface to make the home page more accessible, and in the live session they captured these and a bunch of other useful ideas that I may have missed in my notes. Good luck to them going forward.

Image via CrunchBase, source unknown

On a slight tangent, Happy Anniversary to Seesmic! Why include that here? Perhaps the best thing Seesmic does for web video is make it dead easy to try, and that’s the main challenge YouCastr faces. On Seesmic, you give your browser access to your webcam, hit a big red button in the middle of your nose, and you’re recording. It lowers the bar and encourages more people to experiment with the medium. You even can install a blog plugin to make it easy for readers to leave video comments on your website. People I have met and accessibility I’ve gained through Seesmic have both made a tremendous difference in my world this past year. If you haven’t tried it yet, I think you should.

We will have lots more on this later, for now just check it out.

Last night my friend Dennis (re-)tweeted that Facebook passed 100 million users. (Congratulations, Facebook.)

I already knew this (it had been on Twitter a few hours) but his “does anyone care that much” got me thinking.

I’m not a fan of Facebook. But certain contacts and friends in my network are much happier there, and that’s where I go when I want to see them.

Life in college was very much like this. I’d drop by certain buildings and know that I was more likely to see the folks I knew who worked or studied or otherwise did their thing there. I might not go very often, but when I wanted to connect with those folks, I went specific places to do so.

So while Facebook isn’t my favorite application or my core community, it’s more than worth it for the great “visiting” that goes on. You simply don’t have to be wall-to-wall on a social network to still have value from it.

This closely aligns with the “favorite/different bars in a city” metaphor that I use a lot when I talk about an interoperable future across many microsharing platforms, but more on that later.