Twitter to SXSW: You’re Using Our Product Too Much.

On March 11, 2010, In New, By Tac Anderson

I’m at the Dachis Social Business Summit here in Austin right before SXSW kicks off. Like all conferences they’ve established a hashtag #sbs2010. While trying to follow along with the rest of my attendees, to see who’s here and what’s resonating with them and I got this message

Possibly the most disruptive technology in social media was when Twitter acquired Summize which later became Twitter search and they’re limiting it at probably the biggest geek event of the year, SXSW, the very even that launched  Twitter several years ago. And the SXSW Interactive hasn’t even started yet.

Could you imagine if Bing limited search right now as they’re trying to compete with Google? Twitter is the little train that could and is competing/with partnering against/with, Google, Bing and Facebook.

I couldn’t think of a worse move. AT&T knows SXSW is going to be huge and they’re beefing up coverage just for the event.

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Don’t Overreact to Your Social Media Mistakes

On March 4, 2010, In Comm, By Tac Anderson

I recently wrote about Alex Payne, a developer for Twitter, who posted a tweet that caused a lot of contention among the Twitter developer community. Think Before You Tweet: The Do Not Tweet List.

Alex is not the first person to put his foot in his mouth on Twitter and he certainly won’t be the last. Because Twitter is so public and 140 characters is not enough to provide proper context, this will become the new normal.

Remember, we’re all human here. (unless you’re not for some reason)

Yesterday I read on GigaOm that Alex has decided to quit blogging, partly due to this most recent incident and partly because he had already been thinking about taking a break. I find his reasoning very poignant. (Emphasis is mine)

Lately, I’ve found the cathartic returns from blog-format writing to be diminishing. The ideas I’m trying to express never really get put to rest in my head when I write, now. Instead, they spark whole conversations that I never intended to start in the first place, conversations that leech precious time and energy while contributing precious little back. Negative responses I can slough off, but the sense that I’m not really crystallizing my unset thoughts by writing here is what bothers me.

This is an unfortunate response to a small blow up. It’s easy to overreact when something like this happens. For so many years social media has been a niche activity. No one but a bunch of geeks talking online. But sometime over the last few years social media quit being a back channel. If you’re a decent writer with interesting things to say, like Alex, then more and more people start paying attention. Pretty soon the random thoughts you’ve been writing down take on a life of their own and those thoughts beget conversations all on their own. This can be very intimidating.

Over the years we read about (seemingly) huge blowups that happen to other people and companies and it’s easy to talk about what they should have done differently. And then it happens to you. These fire drills are emotionally consuming and extremely stressful. No one wants to be “that guy.” I know because I’ve been that guy and was even written up for it.

But in the grand scheme of things these blow ups aren’t that big of a deal. They blow over and everyone moves on with things. Why? Because at the heart of things none of us is perfect and we all recognize that it could have been us. If we have learned anything from politicians, it’s that people are willing to forgive.

We all have our own reasons for blogging. Like Alex, I writing is part of my thinking process. The feedback I get from all of you help to formalize my ideas. Blogging is taxing and that may be the larger reason for Alex’s hiatus but it’s connection with this most recent mistake is unfortunate.

Last post I gave you 10 things to avoid tweeting, today I’m going to give you 3 things to do after it happens.

  1. Apologize for the mistake (or at the very least the misunderstanding).
  2. Clarify the statement (or action). Most mistakes are more miscommunication that an actual mistake.
  3. Move on. Don’t dwell on the mistake, instead reengage with the community and get back to having fun.

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Think Before You Tweet: The Do Not Tweet List

On March 2, 2010, In Comm, By Tac Anderson

loose tweets sink fleetsAlternately named “Loose Tweets Sink Fleets.”

To quote my good friend and colleague Jeremy Meyers:

“Twitter is very conducive to posting without thinking.”

There are many instances of company and employee tweets gone wrong. A tweet can be a 140 character time bomb. Time and time again people have said things on Twitter that have blown up in their face.

Most recently Twitter developer Alex Payne posted “If you had some of the nifty site features that we Twitter employees have, you might not want to use a desktop client. (You will soon.)”

While on one level this may seem benign enough. Alex is excited about the product that his company is making. The problem is  that Twitter has grown to the size that it is because of third party developers. Twitter has obviously made a decision to compete more and more with the very developers that helped make them popular. That single tweet tipped their hand and surely caused Twitter a flurry of phone calls, emails and headaches right before their first developer conference.

This is a huge challenge for companies. You want to be open and social but you don’t want to leak information or send mixed messages in the market. What fascinated me the most was the way Twitter responded. They responded like a large company not the social media darling that they are.

MG Siegler has a great post on a reporter/blogger perspective of the leaked Twitter tweet.

So why do Twitter employees (and others) get mad? Because we’re amplifying the statement Payne made which they think he shouldn’t have. This is nothing new, it happens all the time in all forms of media. And companies hate it because they want to be in control of the message. But the fact of the matter is that he made an interesting statement, and people are clearly interested in reading about it, reading thoughts about it, and leaving their own comments about it.

Employees Don’t Be Stupid

This problem isn’t going away. Just like sending an email to the wrong person or replying in the wrong IM window hasn’t gone away, Twitter is just one more channel for miscommunications. The problem is that, unlike IM or email, it’s a very public forum.

Think before you tweet. Anytime you’re going to say something publicly, take just a split second to think about what you’re posting. The below list is meant for your personal account when posting about work related items. This is my first stab at the list so I’d love some feedback.

The Do Not Tweet List

  1. Don’t complain about your customers on Twitter. They are listening.
  2. DM is not IM. It’s not a secure communication channel.
  3. Disclose conflicts of interest: Clients, Competitors, Partners.
  4. Don’t get defensive about negative criticism of your company or products.
  5. Don’t publicize private issues or jeopardize the company’s working relationships.
  6. Unless soliciting community feedback is part of your product development, don’t  tweet about products under development.
  7. Don’t post about company financials before an earnings call. This can get you and your company in trouble with the SEC.
  8. If you have a gripe about a coworker or your boss talk to them about it. Tweeting about it is passive aggressive and makes you and the company look bad.
  9. Don’t spam your personal account with irrelevant work promotions. Promoting work is fine if it’s relevant to your followers.
  10. Don’t think having an anonymous account makes any of this okay.

Companies Focus on Education not Control

Your employees are smart but not perfect. Instead of trying to control employees we need to educate them. Remind them regularly that there are just some things they shouldn’t talk about in any public communications. You can just throw open the doors and expect there to not be any mistakes. Learning has to happen and it happens through training or trial and error.

We have media training for executives before they make public statements why not employees?

What kind of training do you have for your employees around social media?

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How Does Yammer Stay Relevant?

On February 22, 2010, In New, By Tac Anderson

YammerMost people I talk to don’t use Yammer much. The “cool” factor seems to be fading. If it wasn’t for the fact that it was free I wonder how many people would use it at all? As we all know free doesn’t support as business for very long.

Yammer is having a “major launch event” on Thursday 2/25. What will they announce? I don’t know. What I hope they announce?

  • Tools integration for better workflow.
  • Better enterprise pricing.

I like Yammer. I really do. I just hardly ever use it. Here’s a few reasons why I don’t use it:

  • I either have to go to the site or download their own AIR app to use it.
  • I “talk” to most of my coworkers by IM, email and Twitter.

Basically it boils down to workflow. I commented on Twitter last month that I was surprised Yammer didn’t integrate with any of the Twitter apps like TweetDeck and Seesmic. To my surprise @mhat, a “Yammer Generalist” according to his bio, responded to me. He asked what I was hoping for and after a few tweets that was all. We’ll see.

The other complaint I have about Yammer as a corporate employee is their pricing. No not the free part, that’s fine. It’s the $5.00 per person that’s insane. A large company like HP could buy or build a replacement to Yammer cheaper than they could license $5.00 a head. In fact some engineers at HP were building their own version of Yammer that wasn’t as slick (at least not when I saw it a year ago) but it was integrated into the rest of the Intranet so posts showed up in search.This is especially easy for companies to do with open source tools like Status.Net that you could literally host your own internal microblogging service.

Even for a medium sized company like my current employer, Waggener Edstrom, licensing would cost over $4,000 a year ($5 X 800). I’m guessing here but I don’t think we pay 4K a year for the licensing of any single product (excluding bulk licensing like Microsoft Enterprise which covers lots of products and includes support).

I’m also sure they’ll announce a lot of cool tools for better collaboration, knowledge management, etc, etc. But until they solve these two problems I don’t see them being able to continue their early growth.

What would get you to use Yammer more? What would you like to see Yammer announce?

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Corporate Social Media Backlash: The Virtual Firewall

On February 9, 2010, In Biz, By Tac Anderson

In December I predicted that over the next 5 years we would see intranets begin to integrate with social networks. I’ve seen some signs recently that this might take longer than I anticipated (but trust me it will happen).

Tora! Tora! Tora! - BREAK!The intranet is a metaphor for corporate control.

Intranets are secure networks of communication. Employees can safely share information, trusting that it won’t find its way out into untrustworthy hands. With the exception of email sent outside the network almost all communication stays behind the firewall. The firewall works both ways to keep information in and information out. Intranets are siloed and, as they exist today, make it difficult to share information across a company. Just over 10 years ago the Cluetrain Manifesto hypothesized:

the cluetrain manifesto

Corporate firewalls have kept smart employees in and smart markets out. It’s going to cause real pain to tear those walls down. But the result will be a new kind of conversation. And it will be the most exciting conversation business has ever engaged in.

Social media tools have shown an incredible ability to tear down those walls. This has caused a lot of pain and consternation among executives. My last post covered a disturbing email I received from a friend of mine in the financial sector that was being forced to delete their LinkedIn profile because it was considered an individual, professional website.

On the WE Studio D Thinkers and Doers blog I also posted about Forrester forcing all of their employees to shut down their personal blogs if they overlapped with their area of focus at Forrester and would only be allowed to blog about that topic on the forthcoming Forrester blog.

What we are witnessing is the corporate extension of the “firewall” into social media. While this is not an actual firewall it is the way companies are trying to control what would normally happen within or through their firewall.

Shel Holtz has started the Stop Blocking blog to address the problems employees face when their employers flex their firewalls to stop employees from accessing social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. With the ever increasing capabilities to access these sites via mobile phone that just seems ridiculous. You can’t stop my smart phone, even if I am at work.

All of this seems like a sad attempt to stop the inevitable. Why not work with your employees to reach a win-win instead of trying to stifle them? It just doesn’t make sense to me.

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Social Media is Just a Big Game

On February 4, 2010, In New, By Tac Anderson
Standard joystick

Play On

As a proud member of Gen X I have fond memories of my Atari 2600.If you are reading this chances are you had an Atari, Nintendo 64 or Sega Genesis and chances are even greater you have an Xbox, Wii or Sony Play Station in your home right now. In fact to carry this even further, you are also likely to have an iPod or iPhone loaded with several games.

Gaming is a huge industry. But social media can thank much of it’s growth to gaming.

I’m not just talking about all the Farmville, Mafia Wars, sheep throwing, super poking and other plagues that roam Facebook.Social networks are filled with gaming components. The most obvious is Four Square with it’s points, badges and unelected mayors.

LinkedIn was the first time I noticed it with it’s profile status bar. If you remember back to when you first signed up there was a status bar that gave you a percentage of completion and next steps to improve your level of completion.Add a photo, invite friends, fill in job history, etc. The annoying thing was that I knew I was being gamed but I did it anyway.

Games on iPhone

Image by Tac Anderson via Flickr

But there are even less obvious forms of gaming. Why do people care about their Twitter follower count? We don’t really care how many people are following us. It’s nice affirmation and all but really it taps into that deep seeded, primal urge that games satisfies for us.

We watch how many followers we have, we watch haw many RT’s we get and how many replies to questions we ask, just like we watch how many coins we collect or aliens we kill.

Business Need to Play More games

One thing that strikes me as a huge opportunity is to more overtly build gaming qualities into business software.

The biggest problem with CRM software is that sales people don’t enter the needed information in. Taking this thread to the extreme and knowing sales people and their uber competitive nature, what if each lead was a kill and all additional information under that kill determined the value of the kill. You would also need a constant leader board that sales people would check daily (I promise many of them will check it multiple times a day). You could also make a kill list out of your target customers and offer bounties for special targets.

While this is an extreme example that could potentially cause some perception problems, I promise that this would be the most successful CRM system out there.

The Future Will Be One Big Game

With the advent of Augmented Reality we will quickly move from AR games on our phones to AR glasses to everything being one big game.

[Prediction] By 2020 games will be the next social networking. Not games like we think if them today but systems that work off the same gaming theories. There will be gaming communities that dwarf Facebook and challenge Google and Microsoft for time spent, functionality, marketing dollars and developers.

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The Splinternet Fragmentation of the Inbox

On January 31, 2010, In New, By Tac Anderson

Josh Bernoff has been posting lately on the demise of the Golden Age of the Internet and rise of the Splinternet.

The Splinternet means the end of the Web’s golden age

Now with iPhones, Androids, Kindles, Tablets, and TVs connecting to the Web, that’s not true. Your site may not work right on these devices, especially if it includes flash or assumes mouse-based navigation. Apps that work on the iPhone don’t work on the Android. Widgets for FiOS TV don’t work anywhere else.

Meanwhile, more and more of the interesting stuff on the Web is hidden behind a login and password. Take Facebook for example. Not only do its applications not work anywhere else, Google can’t see most of it. And News Corp. and the New York Times are talking about putting more and more content behind a login.

Web marketing has grown since 1995, based on the idea that everything is connected. Click-throughs, ad networks, analytics, search-engine optimization — it all works because the Web is standardized. Google works because the Web is standardized.

Not any more. Each new device has its own ad networks, format, and technology. Each new social site has its login and many hide content from search engines.

Josh also has an updated post declaring proof of the Splinternet. He doesn’t so much offer proof of the Splinternet’s existence but more of a hypothetical index that allows you check your own Web stats for the fragmentation he’s mentioning.

Josh’s index is good if you’re a webmaster or Web marketer with access your analytics. But your average tech geek need to look no further that your iPhone. That very device which has fuled the rise of the Splinternet like no other.

Behold the Splinternet in the wild:

The Splinternet

The Splinternet

News allerts, missed calls, email, And this is just my iPhone 3GS. On my Windows Mobile, HTC Touch Pro2 I have my work email, other voice messages, missed calls and text messages. On my HTC, MyTouch 3G with Google other apps that need updating, the same Twitter, Facebook and Brightkite  messages as well as GTalk IM messages waiting for me.

Each one of those messages sends alerts, notifications to multiple “inboxes” but all of them can only be managed in their proprietary walled garden.

Have you spotted the Splinternet in the wild?

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Search, Discovery and Curation

On January 28, 2010, In New, By Tac Anderson

While @gearheadgal may never speak to me again my post from earlier this week, 3 Reasons Why Social Media is Killing Search, sparked some healthy debate. (BTW debate is a good thing, it’s healthy, respectful and we should all do it more.)

In my post I pointed to some recently reported trends that social media engagement is nearing search levels and given that many people use social networks to “find” recommendations, this will be very disruptive for search.

Google knows this and is responding: “Google Forming Social Web Team”

But Jeremy Meyers, Joe McCarthy and others helped qualify my claims in context of user behavior.

Joe McCarthy had a great response I thought was worth bringing to the surface of people who missed the comment thread.

I like your elevation of “curation”, and agree that social recommendation is an increasingly important component of discovering interesting and useful things online (very much in line with Jeremy Meyers’ distinction between search and discovery).

However, I hope that in the quest for innovation, search does not become overly influenced by social media usage. danah boyd posted an insightful piece a while back about valuing inefficiency and unreliability, in which she emphasized the value conferred by effort. It seems to me that many Twitter users tweet (or retweet) a link to a long article or story without reading it (completely), or tweet a link to a short summary of a longer essay … possibly drawn in by a catchy headline and/or an engaging first paragraph (and no, I won’t say anything more about headlines, given another thread in these comments :) .

My concern is that Twitter and other social media services are promoting a “snack culture”, and without search algorithms that are not [as heavily] influenced by the memes of the moment, our ability to find original sources – or insights and experiences that may not be currently trendy – may suffer.

As a potential analogy, I’m reminded of a study, Voting With Your Feet: An Investigative Study of the Relationship Between Place Visit Behavior and Preference, where Jon Froehlich and his colleagues found that the restaurants people visit most often do not correlate well with the restaurants they actually like or value the most … they are simply most convenient. There’s a place for convenience – online and offline – but I hope search innovations will not sacrifice breadth and depth for radical immediacy.

[Update] Joe left this comment with a link to additional thoughts on the original post:

…the commoditization of Twitter followers, where it provided a missing piece to tie together a few loose ends at the conclusion

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Social Media is not a Telephone or Pants

On January 27, 2010, In Biz, By Tac Anderson

You’ve all the heard the arguments about measuring social media:

How do you measure the ROI of your telephone?

Or my other favorite:

What’s the ROI of putting on your pants in the morning?

Seriously?

Man, this ain’t my social media, this is a cell phone. Duh!

The ROI of putting your pants on:

In all seriousness, having a phone at work and putting on your pants is a cost of business. At one time having phones at everyone’s desk was something that had to be justified. Now having a phone is a cost and managed accordingly. Do you really want social media to be managed by cost and not by return? Guess which gets more budgets?

BTW: Unless you work from home the ROI of putting on your pants should never have been a question.

The greater risk here is that the people who are resistance to measuring social media are well intentioned and for the most part “get” social media. While we’re sitting around debating the merits of measuring social media, marketers and advertisers are calculating the ROI of Facebook fans and followers.

Facebook Develops Conversion Tracking Tool: What’s A Fan Worth?

Boland also served up advice on how to calculate a cost-per-fan metric to determine the campaigns return on investment (ROI). Not only the cost to acquire a fan, but the fan’s worth.

If you walk into a meeting preaching that social media shouldn’t be measured because you decided to put on pants and the other group walks into the meeting showing the ROI of individual Facebook fans and the cost per acquisition, take a wild guess who’s going to get the budget and guess who’s going to loose their pants?

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Is Bitly Bigger than Google?

On January 20, 2010, In New, By Tac Anderson

That’s the question I had to ask after seeing this post by John Borthwick with this chart.

I recently wrote a post on Bitly’s new search feature. It turns out that’s a bigger deal I thought initially.

The chart is about impossible to read but if you look in the upper right hand corner you’ll see where a yellow line intersects a dashed line. That’s Bitly’s decodes (clicks) and traffic data John gave for Google. By the looks of this chart you could get the impression that Bitly is bigger than Google.

That obviously didn’t seem right so I did a little digging. What I present bellow is a series of apples to oranges comparisons and really bad math.

The number for Google must be the traffic for Google.com. I got these numbers which are similar from Compete. (Click for larger image.)146 unique visitor a month.

But we all know that unique visits to Google.com don’t equate to number of searches on all of Google’s properties, which is the real number that matters.

But this number is really interesting:

bit.ly: last week was the largest week ever for clicks on bit.ly links. 564m were clicked on in total. On the Jan 6th there were a record of 98m decodes.    1100 clicks every second.

That was the week of January 11th, the same week that Twitter had it’s highest usage day. So knowing that this was a peak usage number but assuming that Bit.ly will continue to grow we’ll use that number: 98 million decodes (clicks) in one day. That’s 3 billion clicks in one month (again Bit.ly’s not there yet but humor me).

What about Google? The most recent data I could find was from Search Engine Watch from the summer of 2009 (I’m sure there’s better data but again, humor me). This claims that in Aug of 2009 Google had 6.9 Billion searches. Way more than Bit.ly clicks.

But wait. How big is Bit.ly? About 6 people and they’ve only been around a few years. How big is Google? ~20,000 employees and they have about a 12 year head start on Bitly.

Yeah big deal, I know. Let’s get really funny with the math.

That 6.9 Billion number is for all of Google’s properties. What if you separate the second largest search engine? (which Google also owns), YouTube.

Over a year ago YouTube was generating 2.7 Billion searches a month and with YouTube’s explosive growth this last year we’ll conservatively round up to 3 Billion. Subtracting those number you end up with

  • Google – 3.9 Billion
  • YouTube – 3 Billion
  • Bitly – 3 Billion

Not so funny anymore is it? So in one way (yes this is non-statistically accurate and apples to oranges but it’s fun) Bitly is as big as YouTube and almost as big as the rest of Google. This also explains why Bitly launched Bitly.tv and Google and YouTube both launched their own URL shorteners.

But wait, there’s more Bitly only has about 55% market share. That means the total market of clicks from URL shorteners could be nearing 5.5 Billion a month. But then we’d have to compare that to the total search market which is double that.

So no Bitly isn’t bigger than Google and even stretching the number as much as I did, it’s still not even as big but I think it’s a sign of things to come.

All funny number aside I only have one question? Why the hell hasn’t Google or Microsoft bought Bitly yet? Besides the clicks all that data is a gold mine.

Twitter and Facebook aren’t the threat to Google, we are. We would rather share links than search. Social networks are just the pipes we use to share but this puts a lot of power in the hands of the URL shorteners as they are the carriers of that information.

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