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Posted on January 13, 2010
#Haiti, By Way of Twitter
BY LAUREN MAYNARD
Social media helps information spread like wildfire, and there is no better example than what is happening today with information, relief, and fundraising efforts regarding the devastating earthquake in Haiti.
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Posted on October 16, 2009
Realtime Web is Coming, is your Brand on Board?
BY STEPAN MAZUROV
[Disclosure: Buzz Room is a Product of Room 214.]
What is realtime web?
The early adopter crowd has been joining in the choir filling our ears with realtime web, an way to get instant feedback and encourage participation in web applications. Not so long ago, all content on the web was old, research papers, thought out articles. When you searched, what you looked for was most relevant, tested information.
Boy, how things change, now its all about instant feedback. With tremendous adaptation of smartphones by everyone from heavyweight business users to teenagers, mobile access and easy publishing of geo/event-enabled information is more accessible than ever.
Enter Buzz Room, a way to follow live conversations and start your own. It's Room 214's premiere product to answer ever-growing need to attract the realtime web crowd.
What does Buzz Room do?
Buzz Room is a social network enabled chat room with provided commentary from keyword-based twitter feeds as well as facebook pages. In addition to pulling very relevant information from top realtime sources, it gives our clients full customization of the front end, keywords, banning of users, in-stream and in-app advertising, metrics and just a slew of other, awesome features which are in constant development.
It also allows us pull in special twitter users such as presenters or subject experts into its own tab as well as give them a premiere spot in the main stream. This allows for greater interaction as well as more relevant conversation.
Why Buzz Room?
We saw a need for a fully customizable app that our clients can drop into their web properties or large conference screens and it would seamlessly
blend in with the environment. Also as mentioned earlier, realtime web is a rapidly growing portion of the web that has seen limited adoption as a tool to drive conversation, and as pioneers in social media we saw the need to provide a marketable solution in that field. Lastly we wanted to capture the conversation and consolidate all the buzz inside one room (I can't even count the number of puns in that last sentence).
How does it work?
As some of you may know but I am one of three developers here at Room 214, other 2 being Dominic and Joe. We also just hired a full time designer, Andy, due enormous amount of need for creative work. One of the biggest things we recognized this year is the ever-growing need to have a development team inside the agency, because there is just so much opportunity to build awesome things. Every day a new API is released, new way to engage the audience is discovered and to make sense of it all, we want to create tools and apps help our clients achieve success.
Buzz Room uses Twitter OAuth to login into your twitter account so we can post on your behalf and Facebook Connect so we can do the same with facebook. This also allows us to provide very detailed usage statistics to our clients.
We also pull in Twitter keyword stream via very powerful search APIs, grab specified special users as well as pull in chatter from specified Facebook Pages. What this does is helps us fill the room with relevant, real-time content.
Check it out
You can see Buzz Room in action over at Lifetime's Project Runway page. With this and other exciting new apps we are constantly cranking out, I have no doubt this isn't the last time you hear from our development team.
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Posted on September 3, 2009
Hammer Time!
BY BRANDON WHALEN
Mc Hammer is a guy who really understands social media. He really lives and breaths this stuff. This week he spoke at Harvard for the Gravity Summit on social media, which was streamed on CNN.com/live. What really caught my attention was this: He was asked to speak at the conference via Twitter DM. He accepted the offer, and flew himself out to speak.
If that doesn't tell you how seriously he takes his tweeting, consider this: Someone asked him if he was affected by Twitter's outage a few weeks ago, he responded by asking if that person was affected by waking up in the morning.
The man follows 30,000+ people, so he of course does not see every tweet. However, Hammer has several huge monitors at home so that he can see as much Twitter activity as possible. In fact, while promoting one of his projects, he randomly saw a negative comment come into his stream. Rather than letting it be, and letting the negativity grow unchecked, Mr. Hammer decided to inject his opinion into the conversation. The negative commenter, was basically blown away that Hammer paid enough attention to his stream to catch his comment. The negativity ended there.
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Posted on April 9, 2009
Computers Are Computers. Humans Are Humans.
BY BRANDON WHALEN
Today I found some pretty appalling examples of people misusing automatically generated updates on twitter to over-promote themselves. It inspired me to highlight why auto-tweets are a really bad idea.
First of all, if you are thinking about using Twitter to get your name out there, or tap into this social media stuff, please consider a few things first. People are not going to follow you, or help you achieve any sort of promotional goal, unless you understand how to operate within their realm. They can easily spot fakes and spammers.
If you want to promote something on Twitter, you have to do the ground work. You can start by being a human that knows how to listen, being respectful, and putting others before yourself. Take a look at Qwest's Twitter (@talktoqwest) for a good example.
Out of all of the bad examples I dug up today, one particular account struck me with it's extraordinary misuse. In the nearly two years this account has been up, it has amounted to a whopping 107 followers. They have been kind enough to follow zero of them back. Instead, they thank their followers by pounding them with an outrageous 211,291 tweets.
Here is an example of one of their tweets. I must note that every single one of their 200k+ tweets looks exactly like this (I changed the link to keep the computer Twitterer anonymous):
- www.newestfindings.com update: Zimbabwe parties 'agree timeline' (Mediators say Zimbabwe's rival parties have agreed to share power...)10:05 PM Jan 26th from web
There are a few fundamental things this computer is doing wrong:
1. Every tweet is self-promoting and comes out in the same format.
2. It does not interact or converse with anyone.
3. It is is sending way too many updates for any real Twitter user to ever want to follow.
You are never going to experience any kind of success running your account this way. In fact, it only showcases that you do not belong on Twitter.
Now lets take a look at the way a human uses Twitter:
One of my favorite persons to follow is Mr. Chris Reinhard. Chris' stream comes packed with plenty of humor and down-to-earth friendliness. He responds to people. He communicates with his friends. He shares his thoughts and feelings.
He even took the time to do a favor and let me interview him on his Twitter use:
1. Are you a human or a computer?
I am human. Or am I dancer?
2. Why do you Tweet?
I use Twitter as a news source, a writing and editing aid, and a place where I can make small talk without having to answer any questions about the weather.
3. Do you use Twitter to interact with other humans and physically meet them at some point?
I've only met people from Twitter who came recommended by other friends. Random folk...no thanks, unless it's a job opportunity.
I was able to get Chris to fill out an interview within 3 minutes of sending him a direct message. It demonstrates the kind of connections you can build on Twitter if you just use it in the appropriate way. It can be far more effective than any of the banners or links you see everyday.
I was able to get someone to stop what he was doing, open an email, and fill out an interview by sending him one direct message. The auto-generated account has failed to make a real connection with anyone in two years.
There are no shortcuts, but having a well-run Twitter is valuable and important for any company.
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Posted on April 8, 2009
Why Social Media is Succeeding at Qwest
BY JASON CORMIER
Qwest announced its "Talk to Qwest" program today - a comprehensive social media effort effectively helping Qwest customers resolve a range of issues online - including billing, tech support, product/pricing inquiries, etc.
Starting on Twitter, @TalkToQwest, Qwest has put together a super-group of people clearly demonstrating their care for customers through daily outreach and response (in 140 characters or less). That is actually the short answer to why they are succeeding in social media: their people.
As the social media agency hired to assist them, it's a privilege to share a little personal insight on Qwest with respect to both challenges and opportunities. But first, I have a confession.
Frankly, I was a little concerned about the project before we even started working together. It's one thing to focus on a project within a department of a large company - but when multiple departments are motivated to participate, and impassioned individuals are talking about literally changing how the company does business… well, I'll let you fill in the blanks from your own experience. Exciting? Yes. Quickly and effectively executed? Often not.
My internal questions were simple. How quickly is Qwest really going to be able to move on this? Would even necessary things like "messaging" and legal stand in our way of doing it right? Could they be relevant? Could they be cool? Could they be timely? Would the people we worked with have enough buy-in from the rest of the organization to really show the world that Qwest "gets it?"
Today, you (and Qwest's customers) are in the position to answer some of the more important questions I had early on. Socialmedia.qwest.com is a good start for seeing how the company is introducing and addressing the relevance factor.
And cool?! How about those Viddler videos of the people behind Qwest's Twitter presence? I can't tell you how glad I am about the avoidance of over-production that could have so easily been present here. And you just gotta see what this Qwest guy does at the bowling alley after hours (see video below). Classic!
In answer to my own questions - it's refreshing to say that early on, what we discovered within Qwest were groups of extremely committed people excited to work across multiple departments to make this happen.
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