Aug 0925
From homemade movies on YouTube, to movie and book reviews, comments on blogs, and entries in Wikipedia, user-generated content (UGC) has changed the Web forever. I can’t imagine the Amazon shopping experience without comments and ratings from other moms, the posts from the 500 or so people I follow on Twitter could keep me occupied and interested all day, and I thank God every day for the thousands of homemade Thomas the Tank Engine movies on YouTube that keep my five-year old enthralled on a rainy day. Mashable reported that more than 82 million people in the US created content online in 2008.
So how come most organizations shy away from incorporating UGC on their sites? Read the rest of this entry
Jun 0930
One of the people I’m following on Twitter (who shall remain nameless) recently commented: “Prefer getting updates from my friends via Twitter. Much more efficient and I don’t need to see them.” Hmmm….
I don’t know about you, but even though I love Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, yada, yada, I still really like getting together with my college buddies, grad school buddies, fellow DC Web Women, fellow volunteers for Doorways, etc.. Yes, it’s “efficient” to get updates from friends in far away lands via their social network pages, and I have strengthened ties with folks via Twitter and FB, but will my social networks ever trump my traditional networks?
I don’t think so.
A recent article in The Economist maintains that “(o)ld-style networks… are usually stronger than online ones, , and the trust between their members facilitates transactions of all sorts.” Transactions like doing business together, hiring staff, and lending money.
For me, however, it’s not a black and white issue. Here’s what I think is happening:
- Family networks will probably trump all networks because “blood is thicker than water” although we all know that families are also our craziest and most dysfunctional networks.
- School, fraternity and work networks will remain the strongest because these are ties that get developed over time and involve shared efforts. So for me, my Stanford and Matrix Group networks will continue to be my strongest networks.
- Offline networks that involved shared interests will remain strong because members have a common interest. These networks, however, will be expanded to include online members. In fact, I expect these networks to be strengthened by the ability to connect with others worldwide, in different languages. Read the rest of this entry
Jun 0923
I love Twitter. Yes, it’s information overload and there’s a lot of noise, but I love the commentary and the interesting links. I also appreciate the updates from friends and family. More recently, I am loving the Twitter visualization sites that are popping up everywhere.
So, what the heck is a Twitter visualization? If you’re on Twitter, you know that there are millions of individual posts, replies, and discussions every day. Figuring that people out there would want to do things with this flowing data, Twitter publishes an API (application programming interface) that lets developers have real-time access to tweets and some user information. The result is hundreds (thousands?) of sites that let you search, map and analyze tweets, relationships between users, and topics. Here are some of my favorite Twitter visualization sites.
- Twistori is my favorite. Click on the words love, hate, think, believe, feel, wish and see a real-time stream of posts that contain these words in the tweet.
- WeFeelFine is a visualization of not just tweets, but blog posts and images as well. Explore Murmurs and see a flood of tweets with the words “I feel” in them.
- Twittervision shows tweets from around the world, overlaid on a world map so you know where the tweet are coming from. Twittervision is even available in 3D.
- Having an event? PepsicoZeitgeist shows real-time tweets about Internet Week in New York City. I especially love the top words from IWNY tweets.
- TweetStats lets you enter your Twitter username and see a bunch of statistics about your tweets, including when you tweet, average daily tweets, who you tend to retweet, etc.. Did you know all this about yourself?
- Twitter Friends Network Browser lets you see your Twitter network and click and drag to do fun things.
- Hashtags shows you the top hash tags on Twitter right now.
- MyTweetMap lets you see tweets from the people you are following, overlaid on a map.
- Dipity lets you explore tweets in a timeline format.
What’s fascinating to me is how Web designers and developers have found countless ways to transform the universe of Twitter data in new and different ways. Each site introduces me to new people to follow and gives me insight on new topics.
How about you? What are your favorite Twitter visualization sites?
Jun 0909
It wasn’t a call I get every day. Last week, my nanny called to say that two neighbors had knocked on our door to report that there was a dog on our roof. Yes, a dog, not a cat. And since it was pouring rain, she wondered if I could come home and help out the poor dog.
The first thing I did was call my husband to see if he could deal with the dog on the roof. The second thing I did was tweet about the dog on the roof. The third thing I did was contact a few neighbors to try and figure out who the dog might belong to. By the time I figured out which neighbor had left his 4th floor balcony door open, Maki had coaxed the dog (his name is Kerbie) down from the roof, brought him into our house and dried him off. Within an hour, dog and owner were reunited. I duly tweeted the happy news to my Twitter followers.
Why does this dog on roof story matter? It matters because:
- My dog on roof story became news to my community – my staff, my neighbors and my online network. Within minutes of tweeting about the dog on my roof, I got tons of tweets about said dog on roof.
- Kerbie’s story reached hundreds of people within minutes. Remember the plane crash in the Hudson? Janis Krums posted the first photo of the crash on Twitter. Within minutes and hours, the news was all over Twitter and the blogs. By the time the 6 o’clock news covered the story, it felt like ancient news.
- I bet that if I had asked for help, I would have received a dozen offers within minutes. People would have tweeted and retweeted until I got the right resource to solve my problem.
Read the rest of this entry
May 0923
I’m headed out for a short vacation today. Before I left the office, several co-workers asked me if I will be tweeting while I’m out. I had to pause for a second before responding with a “no, yes, maybe.” Hmmm….. Just what are the expectations these days about being on vacation and tweeting or maintaining your status on the various social networks?
When I’m on vacation, I like to really unplug, which is why my husband and I go to places like Japan, Cambodia, Vietnam, Prague, Costa Rica. We go to places where we’re not tempted to go online and work because there is so much to see and do; often, the time difference makes it difficult to stay in touch. Read the rest of this entry
May 0912
What do the iPhone, Facebook, Twitter and Google have in common? They have great platforms that have contributed greatly to their success! What’s a platform and why does it matter?
Wikipedia defines a platform as “a place to launch software. It is an agreement that the platform provider gave to the software developer that logic code will interpret consistently as long as the platform is running on top of other platforms.”
I’m convinced that Facebook zoomed past MySpace because it launched a developer platform earlier. The developer-friendly platform lets developers create zillions of cool apps and suck more of our time, energy and loyalty. How many quizzes have you filled out on Facebook?
The iPhone is no different. Apple opened up its platform, hosted a user-friendly store and nine months later, iPhone users had downloaded 1 billion applications, most of them free or under $5. My husband says he can purchase or download apps for his Blackberry but it’s not easy and the apps are on multiple sites. No fun at all.
Twitter’s platform lets developers capture streams of data from the millions of tweets posted every day. Born from these streams are apps that let us visualize tweets, manage tweets, search tweets, map tweets.
Read the rest of this entry
Apr 0915
Many clients ask me how to get started with social networking. Should they blog, be on Facebook or LinkedIn, or should they start tweeting? For many organizations, I recommend Twitter. The concept is simple: Twitter lets you broadcast short updates (140 characters or less) to the people who “follow” or subscribe to your updates. These updates are called “tweets.” Twitter is also called micro-blogging because people tweet about what they’re doing, thinking, eating, reading, yada, yada. So how do you get started?
- First, you need to set-up an account on Twitter.com. Unlike Facebook or LinkedIn, you don’t connect your organization’s Twitter account to a personal account. And both people and organizations have equal status on Twitter. Not sure if you’re ready to start tweeting? I recommend setting up an account anyway so that somebody else doesn’t grab your name. And be sure to record the username and password on the account so that if the person in charge of tweeting for your company leaves or goes on vacation, someone else can do the tweeting.
- Next, you need to personalize your account. I recommend uploading a logo or image, and entering a short description of your organization plus your Web address. This is critical to helping others find your company, and to encouraging others to follow you. For example , I generally don’t follow people or organizations that don’t have a description or URL. You can also get fancy and customize your background image. Check out how ClearedJobs.Net customized their Twitter account with images from their Web site and job fairs. I also like the backround image for IThinkMedia.
Read the rest of this entry
Apr 0906
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve met with clients about their social networking (SN) strategy. A common refrain is this: “Social networking takes too much time. I don’t have extra time in the day. And I don’t want my staff wasting huge amounts of time on social networking.”
There’s no question that we can fritter away hours reading Twitter posts, watching random videos on YouTube, updating our Facebook status, yada, yada.
But for organizations that have made the decision to incorporate social networking into their communication, conversation or marketing strategies, how can we be sure that social networking sites aren’t just a sinkhole of time?
As someone who is fairly active on different SN platforms (I tweet and update my profile on Facebook regularly, I browse sites on StumbleUpon, and I certainly watch my share of YouTube videos), here are my top time management tips:
- I set aside time during the day to read blogs, tweets, Facebook status updates, etc. Typically, I set aside a half hour in the morning and a half hour at night.
- I may update my status on Twitter and Facebook during the day, but I don’t do a lot of reading.
- I don’t read everything. I’m really good at skimming.
- I use Tweetdeck to manage the tweets from people I follow. I set up groups for the people whose tweets I really want to see: family, friends, clients, CEOs, thought leaders, research orgs. Love Tweetdeck!
- If I find something I like, I either read it right then, or I save it to my Delicious account (social bookmarking) site for later consumption.
Read the rest of this entry
Mar 0917
Click on the image to see a larger version of a screen shot of the Twitter search I used to get info about the iStockphoto site being down.I get nearly all of the photos for my blog from iStockphoto, an online photo service. There’s a good selection and pricing is great. A couple of weeks ago, I was dismayed to find that the iStockphoto Web site was completely down; all I got was a Service Unavailable message.
So what did I do? I tweeted about the iStockphoto site being down, of course. Then I had a brainwave. Surely other people were tweeting about the site being down; what were they experiencing and what did they know?
So I went to the Twitter search, which is a real-time search of all tweets, not just the people you follow. I typed “istockphoto” and got a stream of tweets about the site being down. Okay, so I knew I wasn’t alone and it wasn’t me. But then I started seeing tweets from @istock. Aha, perhaps I could get some answers there. Sure enough, @istock reported that their site was under attack and they were down as a result. I direct tweeted and got a reply back, apologizing for the downtime.
A few hours later, the iStockphoto site was back up. I was still monitoring the tweets on the Twitter search and someone recommended changing your iStockphoto password. I tweeted @istock and got a personal response back, agreeing that I should change my password. Read the rest of this entry
Feb 0918
Many of my friends and family ask me, “what’s your favorite site?” Recently, my answer has been “Twitter and StumbleUpon.” I love these sites, I keep them open all day long in my browser, and I tell everyone about them.
I can give you all kinds of reasons why I love Twitter. It’s terrific for knowing what my friends are up to, it’s a great way to promote my company and blog, but most of all, I love the crazy variety of sites and pages I learn about. My favorite tweeters are people who introduce me to new sites, interesting statistics, gorgeous photos, and news articles I would otherwise never chance upon. One of my favorite tweeters is Guy Kawasaki. Some of the recent gems I learned about from Guy are: 9 resistance-boosting foods and ingredients to help you win the cold war, 50 of the world’s best food blogs, and 10 evolution stories Darwin would love. I suspect that Guy spends all day trolling the Web or has a vast staff that does same and then he tweets the coolest and most interesting of his finds. Thanks, Guy! Read the rest of this entry
