Social Signal Archives - Page 49 of 56

Viral marketing

by Rob Cottingham | Mar 2, 2009 | Social Signal

(one virus programmer to another) Awesome! Now just disguise the worm as a private beta invitation, and we’ll infect every social media consultant on the planet.

Designing for Democracy: Thursday, March 5 in Vancouver

by Rob Cottingham | Feb 28, 2009 | Social Signal

Frequent collaborator and Friend Of the Show Jason Mogus tells us about a fantastic-sounding event this Thursday, March 5 in Vancouver. Alex met the keynote speaker, Favianna Rodriguez, at Web of Change last year and was blown away; this is your chance to experience something amazing.

Here’s the scoop, directly from Jason:

Join your fellow social change and tech leaders at the bar, then stay on for a dynamic presentation by leading artist and technologist for social change Favianna Rodriguez. This will be a rare opportunity to hear, first-hand, how artistic skill and cutting edge web tools can be brought together to solve social problems — all in a dynamic and funky downtown setting.

Designing for Democracy is a one night event set for Thursday, March 5th. Doors open at 6pm, with presentation to follow at 7pm, and finishes with an after party featuring live VJ sets produced by Reed Rickert (Putrabumi.com). Ticket price is just $20 ($15 for students and non-profits), and includes a free raffle ticket to win original art by Favianna.

Book your tickets in advance at http://webofchange.eventbrite.com, and we’ll see you there!

Favianna is the President of TUMIS, a flagship of innovative web design that has participated in hundreds of progressive projects challenging racism, classism, homophobia, sexism, and corporate irresponsibility. Through TUMIS, Favianna also supports Oakland’s Eastside Arts Alliance — an artistic collective and multi-ethnic community that she cofounded. She is a Web of Change Alumni and a passionate professional working for social change.

Full event details:

WHAT: Designing for Democracy
WHERE: District 319, 319 Main Street, Vancouver
WHEN: Thursday March 5th, 6pm doors, 7pm presentation + after party
TICKETS: http://webofchange.eventbrite.com

Rob’s Northern Voice keynote now available online

by Rob Cottingham | Feb 28, 2009 | Social Signal

Video genius Bruce Sharpe has just posted the video of my keynote from Feb. 21 at the Northern Voice blogging conference in Vancouver. It’s my look at what makes the world of social media so damn funny. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry… and maybe you’ll comment on it.

Graphic by Nancy White

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Bruce has a great post about how he captured and edited this beast together; it’s a lot more complex than I’d appreciated at the time, and the audio in particular gave him some real headaches – so it’s astonishing (and a tribute to his skill) that the final result is so polished.

One of the really cool things about the video is something called Profuzion, a plugin for Apple’s Final Cut Pro video editing software. It allowed Bruce to synchronize video from several difference cameras, including cell phone cameras, with a single click.

That gets my attention because it opens up some intriguing collaboration possibilities. For example, you could get all the parents who are videotaping a school play to send you their footage, and easily sync up the footage and switch from camera angle to camera angle, closeup to wide to medium. Or crowdsource the video coverage of a public rally. You can probably think of even cooler applications.

Profuzion bears watching – and so does Bruce. (Podcasters will already know him as the guy behind The Levelator, a one-click utility that quickly and automatically adjusts the sound levels in a podcast.) Check out his blog, 25 Hour Day.

(And for a little more technical prestidigitation, check out how Alex managed to reverse the flow of time in this Twitter stream of comments from the keynote. As someone who was present, I can attest that it involved an Excel spreadsheet, NASA and three pints of salamander blood. I can also attest that that’s a lot of salamanders.)

10 ways to maximize your blog’s ROI: Part 4, building relationships

by Rob Cottingham | Feb 25, 2009 | Social Signal

So far in this 10-part series, we’ve seen how blogs can help you give your organization a human voice, gain valuable feedback and create a communications alternative to news releases and advertising. Now we’re going to look at how it can help you build relationships with your customers, your public and your team.

Most traditional communications and marketing stresses top-down flows: pushing out a message, and interrupting whatever your audience members would rather be doing to get it through to them. Feedback from your audience typically comes in the form of metrics, impressions, survey results and – if it all works out – the desired response to your call to action.

What’s missing is human-to-human connection.

Blogging can help change that. It allows you to open a conversation, find areas of common ground, develop trust – and ultimately build a relationship.

Relationships can be valuable for both parties. They can get you through tough times: a kink in your supply chain, a cash flow crunch or a safety recall (peanuts, anyone?). People – customers, supporters or members of the public – who trust you are willing to give you more leeway, more time to solve problems, more benefit of the doubt. They’re more likely to give you honest feedback, pass along valuable suggestions… and take your brand out into the world, and make it their own.

They might even stick with you if your prices are a little higher than the competition’s.

And the value doesn’t end with external relationships. Building links within your organization is at least as important. Those relationships can break down internal silos, bridge departmental divisions and cultural factions, create organizational resilience and surprise you with innovations and insights.

Blogging helps build those relationships because you’re speaking with a real human voice, and because you’re listening – the two critical ingredients of a genuine conversation. Here’s how to make the most of it:

Enter conversations as yourself, not as The Organization. Use your real name and upload an avatar photo. That doesn’t mean you pretend to be someone off the street who just so happens to have a passionate interest in Flegmar Steel-Reinforced Cupcakes Inc.; make your affiliation clear, so readers know where you’re coming from, and you’re starting your relationship off on the right foot.
Wear your listening ears. Watch your posts for comments, and monitor the wider social media world with tools like Technorati and Google Blog Search.
Open your hailing frequencies. Turn on commenting, and if at all possible, let posts go live before you moderate them. (A spam-fighting tool like Akismet or Mollom can help you loosen those reins.) It’s a sign of trust on your part… trust you want your readers to reciprocate.
Answer promptly. When people do comment on your posts, reply to them – and not just a generic “Thanks for your thoughts.” Engage them the same way you might in conversation: asking for more details, offering your take on what they’ve said, inviting another reply.
Talk about your readers as well as with them. Mention readers by name in subsequent blog posts, and credit them for the ideas they’ve offered. The same goes for bloggers who’ve posted about your blog.
Take an interest. Ask people questions directly and, if your growing relationship makes it appropriate, start venturing into personal territory: shared interests, concerns and challenges.
Knock on their doors. If someone’s commenting about you on their blog or social media presence, strike up a conversation with them there. Think of it as dropping by for coffee.
Give a little link love. Linking to their posts from your blog is a way of giving them a little profile (plus traffic), as well as paying them a compliment: you think they’ve posted something worth paying attention to. That can go a surprisingly long way in building your relationship.

You’ll know you’re building those high-value relationships when:

Bloggers and readers begin talking about your organization and brand in the context of their relationship with you.
Your conversations are growing in density, with longer exchanges and more repeat visits.
More people are talking about you and your organizations, and they’re talking about you more often.
People you first encounter on the blog develop relationships with you on other sites or – especially with internal blogs – in the workplace.
You find yourself posting and hoping particular individuals comment…
…and they do.

Photo credit: istockphoto.com/poco_bw

SpeakerRate: an online community for reviewing and rating speakers

by Rob Cottingham | Feb 24, 2009 | Social Signal

A few months ago, I left a conference thinking how great it would be if I could have checked up on the speakers beforehand: not just their bios, but their reputations for delivering engaging, useful and, yes, entertaining talks. From that spun out the idea for a site where anyone could rate speakers and their presentations. My back-of-the-napkin diagrams got pretty elaborate… before I filed them away in our now-bulging File Drawer O’ Great Ideas.

Well, thankfully, someone else didn’t file their napkins away. And the result is SpeakerRate: an online community for speakers, attendees and event organizers.

The core of the site, as you might guess, is rating speakers’ talks. Speakers as well as attendees can comment on the talks, but only attendees can offer ratings: numerical scores on content and delivery.

And apart from the fact that individual talks can be part of larger events (such as conferences), that’s pretty much the site. Fair enough: if this catches on, then being the place to review speakers is a pretty compelling proposition.

There are a few more features on the way too, judging by SpeakerRate’s Get Satisfaction page. They’re working on adding news feeds and mobile support (two of the more obvious gaps in the drywall). But while I salute their decision to launch with a light feature set that speaks to their core value, there’s more that I hope they consider soon:

Better content navigation. While there is a page that lists three well-reviewed and three recently-added speakers, as well as five speakers with upcoming gigs, that seems to be it as far as browsing speakers goes. If you want to find anyone else, you’ll need to do it with the search feature. Much the same holds true for events and talks; browsing is very limited. Topic categories and tagging would also be helpful; tech talks currently rule the site, but if it’s successful, that won’t hold true for long and there could be a confusing mishmash of events.
More qualitative speaker descriptions. The two rating dimensions, content and delivery, leave a lot of room for interpretation. And presentation styles are often a matter of taste, not numerical rating; for many audience members, “high-energy” and “motivational” would be just as repelling as they would be irresistible to others. Instead of forcing users to dive into the individual comments for a speaker, it would be handy if they could see some combination of structured keywords – tagging a talk as “funny”, “informative” or “practical”, for instance – and free tagging. And it would help that those keywords would be less vulnerable to gaming than raw numbers.
An API. Get Satisfaction user Catherine Devlin points out that “Con organizers who want feedback for speakers can pre-enter the talk data into speakerrate to make it easier for attendees to rate… but for large cons (like this year’s PyCon – over 100 talks and tutorials), nobody’s going to do it by hand. if we could use a script against an API to enter the talks, it would become very plausible.”
Social and collaborative features. There’s huge, huge power in connecting the offline and online worlds, and a site like this is poised to tap deeply into it. Let me indicate that I plan to attend a talk; let me see which of my friends are also attending; let the speaker talk with us beforehand to gauge everything from our level of knowledge to our expectations. And afterward, if she chooses, let the speaker ask for feedback on a particular aspect of her presentation.
Video. This one should be high on the list. There are few better ways to assess a speaker than to see them in action… and assessing speakers (should I book her? should I attend his talk?) is the reason most visitors are probably going to be using the site. Conceivably, videos could be provided by the speaker, event organizer or attendees.

Where could a site like SpeakerRate go in the future? A lot of possibilities jump to mind – but it’s not hard to imagine these:

Partnering with event organizers to provide a detailed speaker evaluation platform.
Creating widgets to add to an event’s site or a speaker’s social network profile. (A LinkedIn application seems like a natural step.)
Selling paid profiles for speakers, with more detail, rich media and customization.
Offering post-event discussion, wikis and media downloads.

However they proceed, SpeakerRate is already providing a potentially valuable service: to audience members, sure, but also to speakers. One of the toughest things in presenting is getting the kind of honest feedback that can help you improve, and understand why one talk foundered while another blew them away. SpeakerRate could turn into an important channel for creating better presentations and better presenters.

An even bigger picture could emerge from asking how SpeakerRate – or another site – could help build a sense of online community around these real-world events. Granted, some of the highly technical talks that occupy much of the site’s current real estate probably wouldn’t generate much social capital. But there are other gatherings where people make profound connections that could be sustained and strengthened afterward on the web – and then reinforced at subseqent events.

That’s light years from a 3.5 for content and 4.2 for delivery. But it’s at least as worth talking about.

I’ve created a profile for my recent keynote at Northern Voice, Teh Funny, on SpeakerRate. If you attended the keynote, please consider taking a moment to rate it, and help our ongoing assessment of the site. Thanks!