Found Results
May 2008 Archive
The following posts were made in May 2008. You may subscribe to the RSS feed for this archive if you would like to take your time reading through our posts.
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Posted on May 27, 2008
Talking Back to Your Customers – The Web 2.0 Way
BY STEPAN MAZUROV
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 experience:
- Blogging - keep a company blog updated with latest news and status updates
- Get Satisfaction - a place for your customers to express their opinion and help you identify bugs. A Suggestion Box 2.0
- Easy access to contact information - let customers know that they can always call, email or mail in their issues, never hide your number
- Respond to complains quickly - never go silent.
- Never deny the obvious - its much better PR to admit your mistakes than to actively deny they exist.
Read on as I touch on some of the points above.
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Posted on May 23, 2008
Social Media Reminder: Relationships = Community
BY JASON CORMIER
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.
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Posted on May 20, 2008
Crowdsourcing Your Design and Video Needs
BY JAMES CLARK
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 negotiation is huge.
The seller, knows for fact that the money for the project is available and if selected will be delivered in a timely fashion.
moviebakery
Gotta say, this process is brilliant. If anyone has ventured into video production they can tell you how complex the process is, from script writing, to story boarding, etc. If the process is not scope and managed properly the costs and frustration go up on the buyer and seller sides.
moviebakery takes a professionally managed crowdsourcing approach. That is the moviebakery team acts as the executive producer and campaign manager of the video, and then leverages the crowdsourcing model of top video professionals to generate 10 concepts to bring back to you.
As you can see from the image, moviebakery takes the positive benefits of the agency model, and the positive benefits of the crowdsourcing model and efficiently drives production.
Two Things I Like Best About moviebakery
1. From a buyers perspective, what I like best about moviebakery's process is the clear 10-Step Process. So there are no hidden mysteries or confusion about the process moves forward, when payments need to be made, etc.
2. Simple pricing. $10K and you're all in. Again, like crowdSPRING, the pricing is set, no negotiations and bid management. Just pure project focus.
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Posted on May 19, 2008
Twhirl adds Friendfeed for Lifestreaming Stalking
BY JAMES CLARK
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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Posted on May 16, 2008
Google Friend Connect Didn't Connect
BY JASON CORMIER
Earlier this week, Google unveiled its Google Friend Connect functionality, inviting folks to sign up for a "pre-release" review.
In a nutshell, Google Friend Connect enables website owners to paste snippets of code into their website to leverage a wide and powerful variety of social networking applications supported by the OpenSocial development network.
The benefits are numerous when you consider the power of enabling people to include your website as part of their social networking activity. A key to effective community-based websites is actually giving people something to do… as opposed to just something to read. Google strikes at the heart of this issue by enabling people to participate, invite, share and upload all in the context of your web property. But before you think I'm singing Google's praises, just keep reading.
I thought I'd let the dust settle for a few days before dipping in myself to take a look. This morning, I spent about 30 minutes thoughtfully reviewing our web analytics and filling out the application that would hopefully qualify our early participation of this review.
Google wanted information about our daily page views, unique visitors, how we would use Friend Connect ("be very specific"). I wrote about our experience with social media and search marketing services through Room 214, our application development experience with Post Zinger for advanced blog, podcast and RSS management. Surely, we could be selected to take some first looks under the hood.
I hit the magic submit button. And now I will end this post with the same dose of reality that was served up to me. "Something bad happened. Don't worry, though." Happy Friday.
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