08.03.30
A moment of comic relief…
This video, in the style of Lee Lefever’s Common Craft videos, made me laugh. It’s a nervous laugh – I fall dangerously close to this definition of a “new media douchebag.” I fail on a few accounts though:
Still, this gives me something to aspire to 
(from the Cinnamon Pants blog)
08.03.27
Robert Scoble wrote a post a few days ago saying that the secret to Twitter is following a lot of people:
I’ve gone through stages with Twitter. At some point I thought it was important to get lots of followers. But lately I’ve been telling people that the secret to Twitter isn’t how many followers you have, but how many people you are following.
Sorry Robert, but I think you’re dead wrong.
Following a lot of people doesn’t guarantee you’re going to get any more out of Twitter.
What does following a lot of people mean?
I won’t argue that aiming solely for lots of followers is “the secret” either. There’s still no guarantee that it will generate conversation or value for you or them. I’ve seen lots of people on ego trips trying to increase their follower numbers while not engaging with them. Yuck.
Here are a few not-so-novel, but not-frequently-expressed ideas. I think they make sense.
Follow people you find interesting and who talk about whatever interests you. Don’t follow people who don’t.
The noise-to-signal ratio is high enough already; don’t dilute it further.
As you follow more and more people, you’ll have to change how you use Twitter. I was ok with that. If you’re not, don’t do it.
Lots of followers is a good indication that you’re adding value for other people, but only if those followers occur naturally. They’re not the end of the world, though. If you’re into niche topics, you have a smaller number of people who are likely to follow you. Nothing wrong with that.
Having lots of followers won’t get you anything if you don’t talk with them, rather than at them. Unless you’re well known, you’ll find that those followers won’t hang around in that case anyway.
I’d rather follow 10 people that know and care about the same things as me than 2,000 people that I have nothing in common with. Numbers aren’t everything.
Don’t try to ‘game’ an opt-in system like Twitter. You’ll fail.
Instead, write about what interests you. Post interesting links (not just to your stuff). Ask interesting questions. Communicate. Don’t believe the crap about following lots of people, or the importance of having the most followers.
There’s a lesson for companies here, too. The mass marketing approach doesn’t work in this medium. Following thousands of people in the hope that a few hundred follow back and you can push out the same old tired messages is pathetic. Instead, try speaking in a human voice and engaging with people, and see what happens. Dell is doing this effectively. Other companies aren’t.
Be genuine, add value, and you’ll get value out.
What’s your “secret” to Twitter?
08.03.25
If you’ve followed this site recently you’ll know that I have been working towards an auction to raise money to support cancer research.
Well, we did it! Keith Burtis‘ custom-designed and -made ornament is complete, Tommy Vallier‘s coding wizardry is done and it’s time for the auction.
Bidding will open 9am EDT on March 25 and run through to 9pm EDT on March 27. All of the proceeds will benefit the Campbell Family Institute for Breast Cancer Research at the Princess Margaret Hospital Foundation.
Bid on the ornament, or read on for details of the item itself.
Be sure to keep checking back in to make sure no-one has outbid you!
Update: The auction is now closed.
The ornament itself is approximately 9 inches tall, and the sphere is about 2.25 inches across. The sphere is made from a type of australian burl. The top & bottom finials are made of rock maple, and although they are very delicate and intricate, the tight grain of the maple keeps these strong.
The base, the upright spindle and the smaller cross spindle are all made from American Black Walnut. These pieces were turned one by one on a lathe, and made to fit snugly into one another.
This auction is one piece of a larger fundraiser that I am holding, benefiting the Campbell Family Institute for Breast Cancer Research through the Princess Margaret Hospital Foundation.
The Institute aims to become a world-leading program in breast cancer research by leveraging basic, translational and clinical research into dramatic breast cancer breakthroughs.
On April 21 I will run this year’s Boston Marathon. I aim to raise $3,000 in sponsorship and donations for the institute by the time I cross the finish line.
I’m using social media to raise awareness of my fundraising and chart my progress as I train for the race. You can follow the training on my running blog, and you can sponsor me here.
Thank you.
08.03.24
I spent some time recently reflecting on all these new online services, and their real-world uses. Not just services that I’ve written about like FriendFeed and SocialThing! but a whole bunch of the tools that I use.
Here’s my dilemma: to a large extent, I’m inside this thing we call ‘the bubble.’ This makes it difficult to stay objective sometimes.
I try hard to step back and look at both the pros and cons of these new tools, and I’m not shy with pointing out flaws. Hopefully I’m on the right side of the "kool aid" line most of the time.
This weekend I found myself thinking a lot about the new so-called "lifestreams" like FriendFeed, Spokeo, SocialThing! and Profilactic. I wondered:
From my perspective, aggregators are useful for people like me for two reasons:
I’m not sure of the value that the ‘average’ person or business can get from tools like these.
I threw the above question out to my friends on Twitter (another service that is still firmly within the bubble, for now at least).
A few themes that emerged:
I’m a little cynical about these.
Networking:
I think there are much better tools for networking. Plus, most of these services are still one-way, so you’d still have to go out to each of the original sites to truly connect with people.
Promoting:
If you mean that they provide another channel for brands to pimp themselves in then, sure, every new service is a promotional opportunity. I don’t buy for a second that they’re valuable channels to use for promotion, though. All they really offer is another RSS feed to subscribe to. For one thing, RSS is still emerging at the moment. For another, there’s no extra value in the content of that feed. Yuck.
Feedback:
This is the one potential use that I buy. However, I still see a big flaw – the sheer volume of information.
I’ve already started ignoring my FriendFeed RSS feed. After just a day or so, I have over 400 unread items there. There’s too much information to keep up with, and I’m only connected to 28 people on there so far! I can’t imagine what it would be like with hundreds, let alone thousands, of people.
B2C companies, in particular, target thousands of customers. There’s no way you can track that much information without an additional tool to filter the stream.
I do think there’s some potential for tracking competitors and their products. However, most of these services have barriers to this kind of use – for example, some require those competitors to have a presence on the same service. I just don’t see the scale-ability of this approach across all of a firm’s competitors.
These services are great. They’re interesting, they’re useful, and they’re often fun to boot. I’ve already written that I can see them becoming useful for me as they develop.
However, by their nature, require people to be heavily into social media. They don’t just require you to sign up; they also require you to use a bunch of other services to get any value out of what they offer.
FriendFeed, Profilactic and SocialThing! target people with a heavy online presence. For now, that means people inside ‘the bubble.’
Am I missing something here? What do you think?
(Photo credit: mbollino)
08.03.23
A quick update on the auction we’re holding as part of my Boston Marathon cancer research fundraiser – Keith Burtis has finished the ornament!
If you haven’t been following this story…
On April 21, 2008, I will run the Boston Marathon for the first time. As I do so, I will raise money for breast cancer research at the world-class Princess Margaret Hospital in Canada.
I’ve worked closely with the hospital’s cancer research institute in this effort, and they set up a website that channels donations directly to them. They send me weekly updates on donations.
As of March 20, 2008, I’d raised roughly $1,200 in donations.
I met Keith Burtis at PodCamp Toronto, and we’ve been in regular contact since then.
When Keith heard about my fundraiser, he leapt to help. He offered to design and create a beautiful piece of woodwork that we could auction-off to the highest bidder.
Well, the ornament is now complete!
The auction will start this Tuesday, March 25, at 9am, and end this Thursday, March 27, at 9pm (friend and fellow PodCamp Toronto organizer Tommy Vallier is coding the auction site for us).
I’ll post more details on the auction in the next couple of days.
08.03.21
Lately, I’ve noticed a growth in aggregation tools. For me, SocialThing leads the way.
Last October I wrote about my concerns with the incredible number of social media tools out there.
Rather than diving into more and more tools, I wrote that I needed to find tools that would bring all my information flows together.
Here’s a (very top-level) look at a few.
JaikuJaiku nearly didn’t make the list as its been around for a while and I’ve written about it in the past. I’d feel weird leaving it out though.
Jaiku has done this kind of thing for a while. With Twitter-like conversation and the options to plug in other RSS feeds and comment on other peoples’ posts, it had a lot of potential. I hear it’s pretty big in Europe. Unfortunately flaws in its implementation, combined with limited access after the Google acquisition, have hobbled the service for me.
SpokeoSpokeo was another service that caught my eye last year. It bills itself as “a friend finder/tracker that automatically brings you friends’ updates across the web.” Perfect!
Unfortunately, Spokeo is spooky. You can follow people without them knowing. All you need is their email address and you can find their Twitter updates, their Pandora music, their Flickr photos and their Digg favourites.
If your friends sign up for online services using multiple email addresses, Spokeo makes it hard to bring them together.
Spokeo is also largely a one-way tool – you can reply to and share updates, but only via email to the contacts.
FriendFeedFriendFeed is the darling-of-the-minute for the kool aid kids. It lets you share content from 28 different services via a single stream, and subscribe to the streams of your friends. You can also indicate which updates you like and post comments on FriendFeed. The service is very clean and easy to use, which seems to have contributed to its popularity.
Interestingly, from the feedback I’ve received, many people are just subscribing to an RSS feed of their ‘streams’ rather than frequently using the site itself. It’s a good step forward from older services, but I wonder how sustainable interest in the site will prove.
SocialThingUnfortunately for SocialThing, it got overshadowed at its launch by FriendFeed. However, having played around with it, SocialThing is the closest I’ve come to a one-stop solution for aggregating my services.
Why?
Let’s start with the negatives.
SocialThing currently only allows you to aggregate six services, compared to FriendFeed’s 28. That’s a big difference, and one that people have seized on.
FriendFeed has a cleaner, simpler interface that leaves less room for confusion. However, once you’re used to it, SocialThing looks better and is relatively easy to navigate.
Ok, that’s the negatives. Here’s the positive:
SocialThing lets you reply to updates on the original site.
This is my number one desired feature, and SocialThing has it. I just don’t have the time to add more services to my Twitku does a similar thing with Jaiku and Pownce; really, Twitku is the only reason I still use those two services. The feature is limited right now – you can only reply to Twitter and Pownce on the original sites, but the service is still in invite-only alpha so hopefully the list will grow.
I’d like to see a few things added to SocialThing, which would get it much more attention:
If SocialThing strengthens its service in these areas, it would catapult to the top of my must-visit sites.
I know I’m missing a bunch of sites off this list. Tumblr is an obvious candidate. If you’ve tried out similar services, let us know what you think of them in the comments.
Do you like the look of SocialThing? Do you prefer FriendFeed? Why? Do you care about any of these services?
08.03.19
Last Saturday I announced that as part of my Boston Marathon cancer research fundraiser, my friend Keith Burtis is designing and creating a beautiful piece of woodwork that we are auctioning off to the highest bidder.
At the same time, Keith posted pictures from the first stage of creating the piece.
I mentioned that I’d post regular updates as Keith creates the ornament – well, Keith has now posted more pictures of his work.
This will form part of an intricate ornament at the centre of this wonderful piece. For more details, keep checking in!
Tommy Vallier is also working away, creating the site to enable us to hold this auction from March 25-27.
Please help to spread the word about this however you can. Keith and Tommy are doing a wonderful job and it’s for a very worthy cause.
If you’d like to support my cancer fundraising efforts directly, you can donate to the Princess Margaret Hospital here:
(All donations go directly to the charity, not through me. Please choose “Campbell Family Institute for Breast Cancer Research,” when prompted for who to donate to)
08.03.19
This post is a little out of the ordinary for me. I’m floating an idea to see if it would work or not. I often do this via Twitter, but this one’s a little more than 140 characters.
Dave Jones posted a note on Twitter the other day that sparked a few thoughts for me.
Dave said that he’d turned off notifications for a bunch of people during the SXSW conference recently so he didn’t get a deluge of messages with no context.
This makes me wonder – is there room/potential for an application that:
I’m not just talking ad-hoc conference groups here, but also more stable, long-term clusters of people. So, I might create geographically-based groups, or themed groups (running, PR, marketing, etc).
Why would you want this? A few potential uses:
The “hashtags” would allow you to display messages for each group separately. Boom! You’ve got an app that lets you customize how you organize your twitter reading. Twitku does a similar thing, with separate panels for Twitter, Jaiku and Pownce. You could do this for each group.
I’m no programming expert (I did do my share of web development a few years back, but nothing recently) so I’d love some feedback on whether this works under Twitter’s API.
The idea needs a few details fleshing out, too. Would it be better as a conference-focused tool, or broaden the scope to everyday use?
Even more importantly, if you’re a heavy-duty twitter user, would something like this be remotely helpful?
What do you think?
08.03.18
Utterz is an excellent service (currently in open beta testing) that lets you create multi-medias post in voice, video, picture and/or text, right from your mobile phone, or online.
Like Twitter, Utterz lets people subscribe to your posts. Unlike Twitter, however, people can reply via any media, regardless of what was in the original post. Very cool.
However, I’ve had a problem with Utterz recently.
Utterz asks you to associate your cellphone with your Utterz account, and it automatically recognizes your phone when you call. Each cellphone can only be associated with one account.
I have two Utterz accounts – one for PR and social media-related posts (see my sidebar), and one for running.
I found posting to the two accounts very frustrating – I had to juggle my cellphone number back and forth in my account settings. As a result, things got confused, posts went to the wrong account, and I pretty much reached the end of my tether.
So, I asked the folks at Utterz if there was a way to post to two accounts from one phone. Here’s how you can do it:
Apparently the folks at Utterz are working on something a little simpler. For now, this solution isn’t elegant… but it works.
08.03.16
As communications professionals, it’s very easy to get caught up in the hype and excitement about all the new online communications tactics we have available to us today. YouTube is a great example. It’s tempting to view tools like this as a silver bullet for our communications woes.
YouTube used to be primarily a great source for videos of music and kids hurting themselves on skateboards. No longer. It’s becoming a more common tool for corporate communications.
Your management may want to rush out, jump into the deep end and start using YouTube to communicate directly with people. If you can, you should get them to pause and consider several questions first:
What do you want to get out of this communications effort?
What do you want to achieve? Do you want to drive people to your website? Increase sales elsewhere? Raise awareness? Stimulate behaviour change? Generate discussion? Does video help you reach this objective?
A few interesting stats for YouTube’s U.S. audience:
Not what you’d expect, is it?
Is this a one-off, or part of a sustained campaign? Who will produce follow-up videos? What will they be about?
It may not be necessary to publish regular videos (the Dove Evolution video, for example, was highly successful without being part of a frequent series). However, if regular videos are the intention, consider how that process will work.
Do you have the resources to do this in-house? Do you have the budget to outsource it? You may be better off buying a decent video camera and editing suite and training your staff to produce and edit video. You’ll re-coup this cost quickly if you’re producing videos regularly.
Please, oh please, don’t use views as your only success criteria.
Yes, video views are a helpful indicator of your video’s reach. However, they don’t tell you whether people absorbed your message or whether they took any action based on it. I’m no measurement guru, but video views SUCK as a success criteria. It’s like citing TV audience as a success criteria for TV advertising.
Find a way to at least measure a proxy for your objectives.
Rigid, scripted talking heads make for boring video. Don’t expect great pick-up if your video is boring. Be interesting or be forgotten.
Decide how you’re going to deal with comments on the video – both text and video.
First, are you ready to accept negative comments? Assuming you enable comments, how will you respond to them? And who will respond?
The Wall Street Journal recently published an article outlining five approaches that companies use to deal with "negative consumer- and employee-generated content on the Web."
If your company plans to do anything other than options four or five, consider whether you should enable comments. You may get criticized for not doing so, but it may be better than the criticism you’ll get if you allow them and don’t respond or respond inappropriately.
Are you going to let people rate your video?
I would suggest that if you’re not confident about the video, you shouldn’t upload it but we all know that sometimes these decisions are out of our hands.
This may be a no-brainer, but the last thing you want is your boss calling you up and asking why your video is up on someone else’s website. You could argue that if people don’t like the possibility of this happening then maybe you should re-examine YouTube videos as a tactic for your campaign.
YouTube can be a great tactic but if you’re looking for a traditional one-way, controlled information flow, perhaps it isn’t the best tactic for you.
This is a basic list of fundamental questions you should answer before you launch into using videos on YouTube (or another video site) as a communications tactic. This is just a start, and some of these questions should already be part of your communications planning process.
Also, please remember, don’t have a YouTube strategy. This is just another tactic to add to your toolkit.
If you treat YouTube videos as a standalone piece, handled separately from the rest of your communications, they’re likely to fail. Throwing out random videos is about as likely to get you somewhere as throwing out random press releases (if a video is published and no-one views it, was it really published?). Think strategically. Think about this in conjunction with your other communications products.
If you’ve used YouTube as a communications tool, what lessons have you learned? What other questions should people ask before diving in?
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