Category: social media
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Improve your digital listening skills
Of all the benefits of social media for business, the greatest come from listening. Consider this: you can listen unobtrusively – no one needs to know you’re paying attention. You don’t even need to sign up for accounts to listen. This is a great place for the socially-shy business to dip its toes into social media. After you’ve observed some success from listening, it’s also easier to make the case to senior management for social engagement.Here are some tips to help you improve your ability to monitor the online chatter:
1. Get right with Google. You might use Google and other search engines regularly, but you’re probably not making best use of advanced features. Not everyone knows the basics of Google. It’s common to do a search and get millions of results. But you’d be better off getting fewer, but more relevant, results. Your overall goal is to improve your “signal to noise” ratio. So learn these basic tips:
- Put the exact search term in quotes, such as “Bob Jones University” to eliminate spurious results when using common words
- Use the “site” operator to restrict your search to only one website, such as “Form 990 site:irs.gov”
- Use Boolean operators, such as OR, as in “Bob OR Bobby Knight”
- The exclude operator ( – ) eliminates specified words: “Bob Dylan young -forever” eliminates references to the song “Forever Young” from your results
2. Use Google Alerts. (This service requires a Google account). Use Alerts to track mentions of your name, your company or your senior executives. As your alerts come in, you may find that you need to fine-tune your mix using the techniques above. You should also be a contrarian – be sure to monitor keywords that reflect your business category and your competition. It’s best to set your alerts to show up in your RSS feed rather than via email. Then monitor the feed regularly.
3. Set up your RSS feeds. Some say RSS is in decline, in part due to “black box” technologies that don’t include RSS and in part due to the rise of social sharing. But you can’t count on social sharing when there’s a cost associated with missing important news. RSS is a powerful way to aggregate most of your listening in one place. The most common RSS listening client is Google Reader (requires a Google account). But once your feeds are running in Reader, you can monitor them using other clients by syncing the feed (on iOS devices you might try NetNewsWire or Reeder).
Some argue that it’s too much work to set up and monitor RSS feeds. But if you’re a high-volume consumer of news and information, it’s too much work NOT to use RSS.
4. Use Twitter Advanced Search. The best way to find out what’s happening now is on Twitter, the beating heart of the real-time web. The next time a popular live event is on television, see this for yourself. As you watch the show, follow the most likely hashtag (or search term) on Twitter. Note the volume of tweets. Observe the tone of the comments. People on Twitter don’t hold back – if you’re watching the Oscars, you’ll get detailed feedback on every dress and performance.
The real money comes from the advanced search page (using “advanced search” pays dividends on almost every search). With advanced search, you can specify a location, very useful, say, if you’re a local chapter of a national nonprofit. Or, you could track response to a political speech in different regions. You can also search multiple keywords in one search and use other tools for a more tailored search.
Unfortunately, Twitter no longer publishes RSS as part of its API, so you’ll have to do this manually or use a workaround unless you subscribe to a premium service such as Salesforce Radian6.
5. Remember, you are the analyst. It’s your job to process a mountain of data, sift it, and then find the few insights that are worthy of action. Sometimes there’s no substitute for intelligence and experience. Some terms don’t search cleanly, so you’ll have to find ways to throw out the irrelevant results. Sentiment filters are notoriously unreliable. So never forget: you’re in charge.
Remember also that the Internet never sleeps. If you’re working for a national brand, or for a smaller brand in the news, you need to monitor constantly. Online, a crisis can blow up in minutes. And when something good happens, you’ll want to capitalize on it.
6. Listening doesn’t always require action. It’s good to remember that you can’t please everybody. Some critics fall below the noise floor. But when an influencer is talking about your brand, good or bad, you need to pay attention. These tools will help you get started. If the scope of listening or budget allows, you might graduate to a paid service, such as Sprout Social or Salesforce Radian6. These tools are not only more powerful, they also include dashboards so a manager can delegate jobs and create activity reports.
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Three trends for today
Name your own price
Radiohead did it with their album In Rainbows; Louis CK did it with his Live at the Beacon performance video, and now Panera is experimenting with the model in its CSR initiative, Panera Cares. If you let your customers name their own price, will they pay? What principles govern this model? Three experts kick it around in this Chicago Tribune article.
A new entrant in the daily deal space
Daily Deal sites like Groupon have focused on building reach. SaveLocal, a new service from outbound email service provider Constant Contact has created an affinity program to reward existing customers, increase the purchase cycle, and empower small merchants to compete. Interview with Constant Contact CEO Gail F. Goodman in the New York Times. (paywall)
Sidebar: Two merchants consider their experience with Groupon, Living Social and SaveLocal.
Mobile payments heat up
This credit card terminal at Macy's is also equipped with Google Wallet, an NFC-based form of mobile payment. This week PayPal announced its entry into the mobile payments area, with a triangular smartphone attachment very similar to the Square Payment Service. This is one of several mobile payment models, the smartphone as cash register. (see infographic below for the other four flavors). What’s at stake? More than 2.7 percent of all transactions in a rapidly growing market. Today we have a plurality of ways to pay with a mobile device, but I expect there will be a shakeout as the big boys (Visa and MasterCard) get things sorted out. Meanwhile, Starbucks continues to go its own way with a smartphone-linked app that uses bar codes to link your Starbucks card to your mobile device.
Sidebar: Jonathan Stark used Twitter and his Starbucks card to share coffee with complete strangers. It was a sort of “leave a penny, take a penny” for the wired set. The experiment hummed along for awhile until Starbucks shut it down last summer.
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GrubWith.Us: meet up with new friends over food and drinks
OK, I admit it. I was anxious beforehand.I had signed up to share a meal at The Girl and the Goat, a hot restaurant in Chicago’s west loop. The meal was coordinated by GrubWith.Us, a “social dining” site whose motto is “never eat alone.”
I was there in part for the food (it’s hard to get a reservation at the Goat) and in part for the experience. Last semester, my digital marketing students took on GrubWith.Us as a client, and I wanted to see things firsthand, as a customer would.
Social media can seem anything but social. Walk into any coffee shop, and you’ll find people clacking away on their laptops. Most are on Facebook or other social networking sites, yet no one talks to their neighbors. The “social” opportunity is there, but the action is not.
There’s a lot of speculation going on about the future of social media (the current darling is “gamification”) but one hunch is that social can lead us back to “IRL social.” (IRL is an acronym for “in real life.”) So far there’s but one breakout IRL social leader, meetup.com. Through Meetup, people register and coordinate to meet in real life around a common interest, such as kayak fishing, scrapbooking or vegan cuisine. According to Alexa.com, Meetup is the 127th most popular website in the U.S.
So that brings us to GrubWith.Us, which is currently active in seven U.S. cities. Browse for active meals at specific restaurants on specified dates, and sign up for the one that interests you. The price for the meal slowly rises as more people sign up. Your social graph is pulled through Facebook, so you can see whom you’ll be dining with. You pay in advance for a prix fixe meal, tip included. At the meal, all you pay for is any additional drinks.
At my grub, the table seated 10 people and was full. Because the restaurant was bustling, I could really only talk with about half of the grubbers. They were friendly, interesting, and conversation flowed easily. Most of the grubbers were in their late 20s or early 30s.
For us, chef Stephanie Izard (winner of Top Chef season four) prepared eight dishes as part of a chef’s tasting. There were three servings of each dish for the table, so by the end of the evening servers brought us 24 dishes. It was a generous amount of food, and really showed off the range of the restaurant. I particularly liked the ham frites, the chickpea fritters, and the sugo (braised pork, goat and lamb, served in pappardelle with rosemary and ground cherries).After the meal, diners can reconnect on the GrubWith.Us website to talk about the meal or exchange contacts. As you Grub your way through your city, you add badges and friends to your profile. Many of my dining companions had participated in several meals, even though the site has only been up for about five months.
The possibilities of this concept are great: think of GrubWith.Us as a connector for the convention-goer in a strange city, who wants to have dinner with like-minded souls. Or a grub before a concert, attended by fans of the artist. Ultimately, the number of organizing ideas behind potential grubs is limitless.
Unlike Groupon, GrubWith.Us is not a deal site. People attend the Grubs for social reasons rather than to get a discount. So restaurant owners are likely to prefer this service to daily deal sites, which commonly take 50 percent or more of the revenue from the deal.
GrubWith.Us just received a $1.6 million round of funding, with digital rock stars participating (Google’s Matt Cutts, Ashton Kutcher and Andreessen Horowitz, among others). They are currently expanding into new cities.
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The digital singularity
A barcode for the CueCat, circa 2000 Technologists have long talked about the “singularity,” the day when the machines can outthink us and surpass human intelligence. That day is a long way off. But we have reached another kind of singularity. In this event, our expectation is that the information we seek will be digital and easily available on demand. In the first Internet, our digital presence was a supplement to the dominant analog model. In the second iteration, a social layer moved many of our conversations online, alongside increasingly social content from mainstream publishers (think: Amazon book reviews, blog comments and “social” stores like eBay).
In the digital singularity (I dare not call it Internet 3.0) old-fashioned, grubby, in-real-life – ANALOG – assets are clamoring to join the fracas. And so far, it’s been a bumpy ride. Leading the way are web-friendly bar codes that push us to web sites when we take a picture of them with a mobile application. These have been deployed well (such as on product displays at stores like Best Buy; seriously, who can keep track of 40 different TV models without some help?) and poorly (almost every newspaper or magazine has an ad with a bar code, pushing you to some crummy commerical on a web page).
These bar codes are easy to create, print and share, but chances are they haven’t yet materially affected your daily life. If you don’t use a smart phone, they are out of your grasp. If you do, you must load the app before you point your device at the code. Sometimes it doesn’t work. It’s a reasonable technological approach, but still too tweako to become useful to the masses. We have yet to see the killer app that will make these codes part of our daily lives.
But if you would like to learn more about moving the analog world online, I highly recommend this post by Joshua Holland at Edelman Digital, which includes this slide deck (95 slides) from PSFK:
PSFK presents Future Of Mobile Tagging Report View more presentations from PSFKFurther down the line, augmented reality holds more promise, though the technological base is pretty complicated for widespread adoption today. Layar, an augmented reality app for the iPhone and Android platforms, uses several layers of technology to deliver a locatin-based experience with a web overlay. It begins with the camera in your mobile device, which “looks” at the landscape in front of you. Next, the GPS in your device kicks in, associating the visual with coordinates in a Google map. Next, a “screen” of software is loaded, indicating points of interest on the map, floating on top of the image. Then some content flows onto your screen when you touch the points of interest. You might be led to a phone number, which you can dial with one touch, or some information about store hours, or the location of the nearest accessible entrance.
While it’s easy to use Layar, the different “layers” aren’t easy to find or load onto your mobile device, and there’s no critical mass of applications that will drive use of the software. Still, for niche use, this is promising – and powerful.
Today, the crush demand for digital content must be measured against the many hurdles that these new technologies face. We mustn’t become technological determinists. If we build it, there’s actually little chance that people will come. Failure is the norm. After all, we’ve done this before. During the first Internet boom, one hot technology was the CueCat: yes, a bar code reader to guide you to a web page. Of course, it was a colossal failure; Gizmodo voted it one of the worst inventions of the decade (2000s).
Wrote Brian Barrett:
“If you subscribed to a magazine in 2000, there was a decent chance you were sent a CueCat, and an even better chance you never used it. The CueCat was a barcode scanner that you plugged into your computer. The idea was that users would scan ads in magazines and thus be shepherded magically to the advertiser’s website. If it sounds like a needlessly cumbersome way to use the Internet, that’s because it is! Fortunately, the CueCat was put down for good in 2001.”
As you go through your day, watch for evidence of the “analog bridge”: technology that brings the analog world online in a meaningful way. The CueCat was ridiculously ahead of its time. After all, back then, going online meant booting a computer, firing up a modem and logging on to AOL. Today the barriers are much lower. And, with the digital singularity, there’s a pull – an expectation – that the conversation will be online.
What will be the killer app? Who is effectively using bar codes or augmented reality today?
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Emergency communications out of Egypt
photo courtesy mar is sea Y at Flickr.com via Creative Commons Two years ago in Iran, and now in Egypt, digital communications have helped level oppression and censorship. You would think that blocking the Internet in an entire nation would silence people, but, like water seeking its own level, small leaks have turned into rivulets and have flowed back to the world at large. And we are watching – and listening.
Here is a chilling graphic, showing normal Internet communications in Egypt – then, on January 27, 2011 – almost nothing. The Egyptian government hit the kill switch. (See related article).
How do you communicate when communication is blocked? The key principles seem to be resourcefulness and redundancy. Lifehacker and the Wall St. Journal have documented how ordinary phones have become digital lifelines through good-old dialup service. So think twice before ditching your wireline service. Or your modem. Telecomix, through its Wiki We Rebuild has created resources dedicated to a free and uncensored Internet, including this page of resources for Egypt.
One of the marvelous things about Twitter is how it effortlessly jumps to and from the Internet and SMS networks. Another benefit of Twitter is the critical mass of people who use the service. If you communicate on Twitter, you can be confident someone will get your message.
Got hacker skills? Here’s how to repurpose old television satellite antennas to beam a Wi-Fi signal up to 125 miles.
If you’re more old school, you might want to jump back into analog technologies, including shortwave or ham radio, sneakernet, or good old face-to-face communication.
As our communication becomes more centralized on the Internet, you might ask yourself: what would you do in an emergency or natural disaster? How will you be resourceful? How are your communications channels redundant?
