SOBCON08 - definitely a good event on all fronts - hotel, venue, food, people and content. There are plenty of great re-caps online about what took place at SOBCon from a content perspective, lessons learned, visuals and a even musical spins, but not a whole lot on the sponsors of the event which definitely help make the event a success. Several key sponsors participated throughout the Jim Beam, Utterz, Buzz Logic and Network Solutions, which I’ve labeled “platinum sponsors” based on my ability to remember mainly. There were a couple of bronze and tin sponsors thrown in, but since no of the other stuck in my head, I’m focusing on the platinum sponsors.
With a focused group of bloggers north of 100, each of the sponsors below innately improve the impression of their brand with the group and create awareness for their offerings and brand.
They brought the brand manager and his pitch seemed completely honest, if just a little bit unstructured. Even a little humorous with his public declaration of “what is blogger casual”? I didn’t know either, so my laughter was for a different reason. Brand guy spent 3-5 minutes doing a recap of their nascent social media strategy while acknowledging this was all a new thing for them and they came to learn. Thanks to his rambling confession of lack of knowledge, every Sicilian Kiss I order going forward will be with Jim Beam.
What is a Sicilian Kiss? A Sicilian Kiss is a drink which is 1/2 Whiskey, 1/2 Amaretto and a splash of orange juice chilled (shaken over ice) and served as a shot.
The bald guy was there - he pimped a Bessie or two, did some demos and did the video ad thing which Jen won. The selection process Sim engineered was very egalitarian and represented the voice of the people. The process also offered another opportunity to meet folks and share ideas.
Overall the Utterz participation was a cool thing all around. I just seem to like this company just a little more after their sponsorship and am wondering when I will just make the call and shave my head. What was your tipping point Sim?
A company I had previously not heard of which apparently does influence visibility, ok I have see folks post on them like Jeremiah, but didn’t spend any time figuring out what they did. Know that I know, there are just a bunch of uses for this for businesses and bloggers alike. Uses from companies range I suspect from competitive intelligence, brand influencing and as strategic planning tool for social media. It could also be used potentially for demand shaping. Buzz Logic invested throughout the event starting on boat night. Great music and a reasonable liquor thanks to their willingness to throw down some hard earned VC cash.
Buzz Logic not only was nice enough to sponsor, but they sent two hotties as the demo team, Valerie and the other one. Both provided real-time product demos on topics of interest for each person they engaged - personalized demos WORK! Good stuff for everyone which got the opportunity to work with both of them over the conference.
Active participants throughout the event. Provided web site analysis for the participants which I personally didn’t benefit much from, but I may not of asked the right questions or something which impacted the value. They even had a guy who was now going to blog after his attendance based his newly found understanding of blogging. Dude, let us know the the URL when you’re “online”, as I would like to see what you do. Your name would be cool tool.
A Humanized Brand
After re-reading my post so far, I’ve noticed a common theme - humanization. By deciding to engage people and not crowds with their sponsorship each company developed relationships with users/buyers/influencers/evangelists. While I may not remember all the components of everyone’s solution, stories or names - I do remember the effort. By sponsoring this event these folks have done more than an Ad, blog post or “coordinated” social media campaign could.
At the end of the day, that’s what SOBCon was about - meeting people, learning thier stories and trying to improve. There was very little personality driven discussion or focus it was more about process - trust me as the short guy with that cool chick Emily.
PLEASE NOTE: I authorized the use of the term hottie prior to posting with both Valerie and the other one, Sandra Ponce de Leon.
I had the opportunity to catch up with John Price last night in Austin and he is doing some REALLY cool stuff at Vast, a focused search tool. Vast is a vertical search platform for autos, travel, and real estate, where users make decisions leveraging Vast partner websites, such as AOL, Overstock and Away.com. The site represents an interesting community tool for organizations to deliver search capabilities focused on areas of interests and providing incremental capabilities which are not core to a given community platform. Search is definitely changing - going narrow and focused, vertical.
The growing number of companies out there improving search (Xobni and Twing) marketers, small business folk and communities will clearly benefit as more and more smart folks are looking at delivering the next generation of search. What cool search tools have you found?
That’s right - honesty is the best policy. So in full disclose this is Just a traffic update, yesterday was the worst traffic this blog has had since I’ve been paying attention! (Nov. 07). That’s right, celebrate the little things, because it appears y’all are transitioning to rss readers. Thanks team!
Maybe it is that no one is searching of relevant terms for what I’m writing about, so let’s highlight the top 10 search items, since we have analytics.
bob’s ichthyosaur - A Great book and apparently the top search term.
what is scientific management - High school students everywhere are googling.
mbifm - A made up acronynm, which apparently means Member of the British Institute of Facilities Management.
calculating gross margin
danielle pribbernow - Chick on the Check out blog, wonder if it’s just her searching on herself? Way too much traffic for a Wal-Mart employee. No I mean WAY TOO MUCH.
dijouri - I made up this name for my second son, 12 years old. I think this IS my son searching on himself or people trying to figure out if I made up his name or people looking for movie made in 2003.
things i am thankful - This is encouraging.
afro - Right on.
giggly quotes - Who searches on giggly quotes?
So if you don’t find anything interesting above interesting, perhaps one of the top 10 “trafficked” pieces, mainly produced via keywords - which you will notice via the relationships between keywords above and titles below. That being said,I REALLY am partial to the Stuck in the Middle series — and — I like the Mosaic piece the most, mainly because it plays well in my head. Yup, I’ve sucked you into a replay post, but a replay of posts everyone else seemed to like too, or at least this is 10 most visited posts here.
There is so much noise about the market opportunity and the necessity to fund community initiatives for enterprises but little has materialize in respect to direct revenue and meaningful metrics. This is a challenge for traditional marketers on many levels and the type of topics I suspect are being at the Forrester Marketing conference. There is a after the show workshop that asserts the following which might be close to revenue:
Experiments with rich media, blogging, RSS, and social networks show how dynamic marketing techniques can touch on buyers’ emotions, educate and persuade them, measure interactions more effectively, and generate additional business.
2. Perpetual Social Markets
Shel’s interviews of Jeremiah Owang and the Sea World folks are both emblematic of the challenges of linking social media investments to a return. How can you effectively measure and manage social media as a growth engine? Examples exist where a specific event or a series of inferences can be leveraged to assume the impact of social media, as evidenced in the description of Sea World video at Fast Company:
Measuring social media is one of the pain spots for the enterprise. As Kami Huyse, says in this clip of her client SeaWorld San Antonio. “It all depends on what you measure.” …
What to measure indeed - hits, downloads….. Ultimately most businesses measure revenue from Marketers, so perhaps Sea World is an anomaly and most businesses know how to convert the social media marketing budget to revenue and understand how to successfully deploy/develop a community. Let’s see if this is the case from Shel’s interview of Jeremiah, you probably only need to listen for say, the whole thing:
3. Social Media as Infrastructure
With the metric challenges and elusiveness of revenue is social media a function of retention more so than demand? If marketers are unable to deliver/verify incremental new revenues base on investment, should the metric hunt move to revenue retention and customer satisfaction?
Cool technology should never be relegated to the “post-transactional” budget fight…..
4. Platforms as Markets
Is Twitter a market? Facebook? Myspace? With increasing platforms for exchange more and more opportunity appears to emerge as populations flock to platforms. Where people gather transactions happen right? There are many example of this in the physical space - Burning Man, dead shows and in the parking lots of panic shows. So if people are gathering, there has to be transactions to be had - right?
Information as currency and messaging as a service continues to be the key commodities being exchanged on social media platforms….
5. Community as a Commoditizer
The transactional efficiencies of social computing by it’s very nature puts downward cost pressure on goods. Ease of comparison, ease of purchase and ease of access to other consumers/product customers. Ease of discovery. Product differentiation through a cost center represents…
Maybe the title should have been 5 Incoherent Thoughts…
So I started my little tool initiative last week with a little help from Kevin Shea of Twing. This post’s tool is Sphinn, I was reminded of it because of a Twitter post which lead me to Social Media Mom. As an aside, Twitter does in fact make blogging just a little more fun and generally improves the conversation.
Social Media Mom (SMM) is a fun little blog, which taunted me to Sphinn for several articles I read, but not being a user I didn’t. SSM’s header is peppered with tools including Mixx link and Propeller, so I now have 3 posts because of 1 tweet. Mixx and Propeller are in currently in progress - a little more complex and extended content. Sphinn’s content is a considerable more narrow - focused on the SEO and SEM segment, with a dash of social media and news. Sorta news, kinda like Reno is sorta like Vegas - both have gambling. Yup - Sphinn is the Reno of social news, it has voting just like Digg. That’s my metaphor and I’m sticking to it! Sphinn has ads too, just like any good SEO oriented site, one of the better ones was a Ninja ad.
Yes - a SEO Ninja! That IS a lofty goal. Question: Just how much content do you have to consume to become a ninja? I clearly would like to be all stealthly and DEADLY while killing it with ad based revenue. I spent the better part of the week experiencing social media through the Sphinn lens, mainly because of that ad. Phinn is essentially what you would think from a content perpective being kin folk of Search Engine Land and all. This is essentially where social media tweekers hang to get thier next fix of tips, tricks and search algorithm updates. There is one BIG twist - a fully engaged conversational community.
Despite the extremely limiting taxonomy, the community is an engaged and passionate group of folks. Quality of the content is managed by an actively engaged community, example conversational comments below from a single post around fake articles:
What’s more annoying? A story is submitted to Sphinn and the story may not be true? Or readers assume that the person who submitted the story is the one who created the untruth? Don’t shoot the messenger….
or
So its ok for people to submit a bunch of junk on Sphinn and waste my time by lowering the signal to noise ratio? Submitters’ reputation on Sphinn depends in part on a submitter pushing quality content.…
It is this very core community value which essentially provides all the relevant headline content for SEO in an easy to reference list of top Sphunned articles. The popular Sphinns for a segment are more or less quintessential nuggets by category. There is one interesting thing about the “optics” of the community’s content; there seems to be a challenge to get to 300 sphinns, two digit rankings are the norm. The highest Phinn, Seattle SEO John Andrews challenges Sphinn to top 300 Sphinns, has not yet reached the elusive 300 since August. I find this a little odd with such a search engine optimized title (place, category, name, keyword and keyword pluralized), but not when content is limited. You can just put your content into the big watercooler bucket.
Net-Net, I have learned a great deal from the community and the content over the last week, but the value just appears to not be sustainable over time for me. Is Sphinn a victim of it’s own specificity? It IS a capable social news platform that is easy to use. I hope Sphinn take the opportunity to leverage a vibrant community to provide more diverse content with extended categories. With extended content it’s possible 300 will no longer be a relevant number.
So I continue to just be amazed with the increasing value of Twitter for me as a person. Twitter is helping me be less verbose, although you can’t tell from my posts and it continues to expose me to new folks, ideas and online resources I would have never known about without Twitter. That being said, the Big Bang of the Twitterverse continues to expand the population at an amazing rate, it is increasingly becoming a the platform of choice for communication for many folks.
Twitter-centric content is everywhere! I am easily able to find posts on Twitter which are rewarding and provide for a better understanding of the value of the platform, but there are increasing number of ideas around effective Twitter management which is an interesting twist. The growing number of how to better manage the stream recommendations are not only interesting, but confirmation that the community is evolving. Perhaps the most honest piece on managing the stream I have read is Dopp’s. (If you haven’t read the Juice you should, the content is amazingly honest and insightful - not the kinda stuff you will find here.) Tips, tricks and how to’s are becoming a staple when it comes to Twitter references online.
Despite the Twitter land grab underway, the utility of Twitter is still non-trivial. With the recent increase in reliability and the platform stabilization of late, which is much needed with the increasing visibility; there is a growing need to understand the use of the platform by new folks. The community does self-monitor and reject poor form, but it will take some time for users to push back against the over crowding, so anything that help improve the usage hopefully is a good thing. So how can you use twitter as a tool for more effective communication? Below are 5 areas for consideration to improve your Twitter experience:
Listen and Participate: People are on Twitter to connect. No, really… use twitter to express and share. If someone in your group asks a question and you have input, respond - that’s sorta why they asked. You may want to listen for a while until you participate, your call.
Use it for a Place to Get Ideas: The people in your stream will amaze you with their creativity and insight in <140 characters. Actively use the information and the links shared to understand more about what interest you and your followers. You just might find a topic or two which you can share with others or even blog about.
Meet New People and Develop Relationships: You will find people on Twitter who will expand your network and your understanding of a topic or a region - it will also expand others views of you and your region.
A Place to Find Stuff: This could be content you are looking for or other stuff, such as restaurants or other things to do. I’ve been reminded I need to go see a movie and how much fun an afternoon at a museum can be.
People Watch: Sometimes passive is good. More than likely there will be many folks in your network that you won’t engage, but just watch. That’s ok, just because I don’t play with some of my kid’s toys, doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy watching them play with them.
Need to understand a little more about twitter? Here’s a brief little video for you:
Have fun with your new shiny toy and find a way to make it useful and productive for your and your friends.
The great thing about networks is you find out about things you would never know anything about and Twing is one of those things. I tooled on over and gave it a try based on a link from someone. Initially I wasn’t too impressed with the functionality, but I am VERY impressed at the conversation I had with Kevin Shea, the GM @ Twing. It started with the brief comment below:
So not only did Kevin respond, he was kind enough to A) confirm the stuff is earlier stage B) informed me that there was a little bit of “stupid” user in the process, me and C) started a conversation which asked for input and feedback. As an aside, Kevin is also very good at using his blackberry with near real-time response, even though he was a little under the weather, but that also is a sign of his passion in improving search. So with several emails and encouragement to provide feedback, I went and registered.
So I spent more time on the site and there is 1 feature set that once it is all “crawled” out should be REALLY useful - community buzz. The Community Buzz page has some interesting tools. Tags, posts and linked content which is being searched on and posted on @ bulletin boards. I would have never thought Montauk Fishing was so popular, but I also wouldn’t have thought Aaron’s North Georgia Trout online was one of the largest such community on the planet. So now I have my use case - I did a search on NGTO to see how it worked and it returned meaningful content on NGTO.
So the biggest challenge is how can WE help these folks out? Let’s all use the tool and provide feedback, but before we do that, let’s understand what the intent and purpose of Twing is, in Kevin’s words:
Build awareness about the growing value (and volume) of forum discussion content. We feel this is an under served emerging market that is seeking a true leader.
Enhance the search user’s experience by giving them access to forums across multiple taxonomic categories.
Conversational search will be an increasing important tool for business, more so than individuals I think, so my recommendation is move the tool to have alerts for marketers and product managers. This will also have significant use for technologists, as people and business users, to solve issues. To that end, perhaps a new tab which is focused on support forums, this would help folks find information on software or hardware support issues.
For personal users, I might add just a little more granularity to the first level of the directory and group the content into “smaller” boxes which may have less content, but doesn’t fall below “the fold”. I’ve always wanted a dynamic directory of forums and this looks like it could be one of the largest out there, I looked around and I think that’s a true statement. Bulletin boards have always been an example of niche communities that rarely are found by accident, typically someone in the know pointed you there. With Twing you can join the conversation a good deal easier without being part of the cool kid group.
Search is rapidly moving from shotgun approaches and brute force solutions to deliver results in context of a content type. Few things are as hidden on the web as the conversations on bulletin boards and a narrow search tool can “turn up the volume” on these conversations for more folks to participate in and drive value from. The platform provides personalized views, once registered, which could be useful for businesses and individuals alike to stay on top of areas of interest, brand feedback and competitive intelligence. I agree with Kevin that their are “millions” of folks which could find utility from this solution - let’s help them find Twing.
Kevin’s outreach is a great example of how companies can leverage social media for input and to understand how to improve what they are delivering to the marketplace. I’m glad I was able to virtually meet Kevin and get the low down on Twing. Give it a try and let them know what you think because they are listening.
Twitter is most certainly one of the more interesting tools in social media. Small- terse messages of random interaction. My specific twitter network is just a little more eclectic than other social segments I frequent.
Twitter just like any social network continues to evolve to include an increasingly diverse set of media snacks for a growing cross section of the population. With the recent service/scale issues and exponential references on television, it is becoming increasing evident that the twitter stream is mainstream. Just as in any type of social network - you need to tend to the stream to maintain quality, conversational purity and value requirements.
5 Ways to Initiate a Stream Remediation Program
Identify the maximum thread of velocity and prioritize it’s value. High velocity twitter-ers can rapidly obscure the conversation. Bye BBC!
Contribute and interact to enable conversations. The size and shape of your Tweets significantly impacts the conversational velocity.
Channel friction and boundary shear are givens - so add new folk and erode others out.
Various conversations depths exist and the variability is driven by network depth. Engage people - not the just the network to identify YOUR thread of maximum value.
