27 May 2008
Twitter has been getting a ton of complaints lately that stemmed from them having downtime and not adequately reporting the issues or keeping people posted. The interesting part of this debacle is that most of the complaining wasn't due to the service being down or extremely slow, but rather because the Twitter team was not utilizing the tools to talk back to their users and acknowlede the problems. Eventually Twitter realized its wrongdoing and started to update people on Get Satisfaction, their blog and their site. While they managed to control the damage, it was after negative comments hit mainstream and after everyone at TechCrunch to Scobleizer shared negativity and named a replacement. While most doubt that FriendFeed or anyone else will be able to overtake Twitter anytime soon, negative publicity can have a detrimental effect on your product/service. Here is a quick bullet point list of things you can be doing to avoid bad customer…
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23 May 2008
In the midst of Community Managers, new tools and "social media experts" is the reality that most social media marketing boils down to conversations among people. People "buy in" with their time, and that's what ultimately creates community.
A good clergyman friend of mine is always saying, "you can't make community happen." Because it's about relationships, it's an organic growth that requires investment (in time) from all the participants. You can facilitate community with tools that help you to reach out, connect with others, foster conversations and organize people – but you can't grow meaningful relationships with just tools.
Any social media effort with a community that doesn't have invested time from people who are committed will eventually implode or fragment into nothing. With that in mind, keeping community practical becomes an important endeavor. And one of the most practical things you can do within a community is offer people something to do.
Simple…
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20 May 2008
Just recently I've come across two extremely cool crowdsourcing services.
crowdSPRING for design, and moviebakery for video production.
What is Crowdsourcing?
Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee, or contractor and outsourcing it to an undefined generally large group of people, in the form of an open call.
crowdSPRING
Anyone seeking logo designs, marketing materials, websites or other creative can post their project into crowdSPRING, state when you need it and how much you'll pay for it.
The cool thing about this process is that it requires the buyer to put the full project cost into an escrow account until the a designer is selected.
Designers, illustrators, writers or photographers from anywhere in the world can submit their work for selection.
NO BID MANAGEMENT AND NEGOTIATIONS
So with the crowdSPRING model the buyer can actually review the final work presentations, not portfolio or bids. This is a huge barrier for buyers. Skipping the entire portfolio and bid…
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19 May 2008
Twhirl is a great tool to use to manage the inflow of Twitter posts.
Here's a video of Ingrid at Room 214 managing at least seven different Twitter accounts in Twhirl.
With the introduction of Twhirl's Friendfeed support, which includes the ability to search, lookup users, write comments and bookmark items from the stream of content from your friend's Friendfeed.
To me the best feature is when you look up a Friendfeed user, you have two tabs to select from:
1. User's feed display: including stuff from all services they have shared
2. Discussions, which are the entries they commented or liked on Friendfeed.
I've been using Twhirl's Friendfeed support this weekend, and even though it seems like 90 percent of the content is coming from Twitter, but the ability to see friend's updates to other applications such as Digg, StumbleUpon, YouTube is a huge plus.
Here's the video from Seesmic, the creators of Twhirl:
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peterahall:
BrandonSings:
dominicdimarco:
AndyinColor:
lpmaynard:
Room_214:
JamesOClark:
bencastelli:
JasonCormier: