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Edgework tools build on understanding

25Jun07

The folks at Satisfaction are putting the final touches on their new app, which might be the first tool built with edgework in mind. Check out this post where Lane explains the thinking behind ‘people-powered customer support’:

If you’ve got a question about a product, a problem with a service, or an idea you want to share with a company, we’re going to give you somewhere to put it, and we’ll make it easy to get the response you need. And if you’re part of a company, an organization, or even an individual who needs a way to interact with your users (customers, participants, members, listeners, viewers, adherents, advocates, followers, whatever) we’re going to give you the best possible way to do that, as well as tools to get real business value out of the exchange.

I’m feeling pretty good about where this is headed, and not just because this team knows them some Web apps. In addition to getting customer experience, widgetized distribution strategies and collaboration, they have some great ideas about community and how to make it go.

I’ve really dug reading Amy Muller’s community how-to postings that will serve as a welcome and user guide to the various Satisfaction start pages. Some samples:

This site isn’t a collection of generic responses, but rather a community that collaborates on answers, solutions and ideas through conversation. Satisfaction is based on a diverse range of perspectives and experience, because there is usually more than one “right” answer.

Make friends. Connect with people around your mutual interests. Be expressive: Talk about what you care about, in a way which reflects who you are.

Would you say it to their face? Criticism and debate are important within a healthy community, and everyone is invited to participate in the conversation. On the other hand, it’s never okay to attack someone personally for speaking their mind. Arguments and verbal abusive are sure-fire ways to kill a conversation.

No hawkers! This is a community not a baseball stadium. It is okay to talk up the products or services you love (or offer), but only if it’s relevant to the conversation.

For me, a large part of community nurturing is setting a clear context for interactions and sticking to them. I really like how these ‘rules’ are more tips for success.

Participation here is a pure expression of interest, not the result of coercion. We’re cheerleaders for any activity that encourages the spirit of fun, though not if hurts other people. Our community is about knocking down barriers to engaging everyone’s passions and interests.

Be playful. Relationships can’t be reduced to cold efficiency. Satisfaction is designed for discovery, direct involvement, and personal recognition.

Be appropriate. Fun in one environment may be crude or offensive in another. Be sensitive to the other users around you, and in general, don’t post sexual or violent material.

Have a laugh. Don’t take yourself too seriously. But please, no blonde jokes. Or any words or images that come at the expense of others. Derogatory comments are neither fun nor funny.

The hard work here also shows the power of great copy. Copy isn’t an afterthought. It’s a core part of the experience and not something you should ‘dummy’ in for spiffing up later. Well done, team Satisfaction. Can’t wait to start watching people play with this app. A little birdy says we might start hearing a peep or a tweet out of this new startup soon.

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Filed under edgework, community, satisfaction, lanebecker, thormuller, amymuller and copyisinterface. |0 Comments

The Identity Springboard

21Jun07

It’s widely recognized that the GOOG built a most geektastic business by sending users away from its site as soon as possible. Of course, what the GOOG was doing was acting like a springboard: zapping you pretty much where you thought you wanted to go. In the by & by, they learned to reap serious rewards from the value they created as everyone’s Web discovery & memory tool.

I want an identity springboard, where I can base my contacts, group them into various kinds of social networks, and so on. What Tim O’Reilly dubbed the Web 2.0 address book. I got a preview of this when Matt let me try some of the new Dopplr contact discovery tools. Dopplr scanned my Twitter contacts and, voila, let me know that I had a few friends on the system I had yet to discover. (I’m assuming it works by walking my Twitter page for hCards?)

I could also have pointed Dopplr to a master XFN page, but I don’t really have one yet. I know LinkedIn marks contacts up with hCards, but I’m not sure how I would have pointed Dopplr to an URL to do that work. Maybe Steve Ganz can tell me. What I did was output my LinkedIn network in VCF and re-import that into Dopplr. Extra step, but, again, more peeps for me. Nice.

I know Jason & co. have written about not opting for hCard as they designed a new Highrise feature. It would be awesome if Highrise could become my identity springboard, allowing me to group contacts by tags and simply importing them into new future apps automagically via hCard. (Yes, I can do the vcf step now, but, c’mon, automagic!) Who is going to reap the benefits of making it simple for everyone to flow contact information in & out of their lives as simply as Google has made finding a relevant site?

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Filed under socialnetwork, twitter, google, linkedin, xfn, identity, hcard, amp, mattbiddulph, highrise and dopplr. |4 Comments

#socialmedia

21Jun07

I started a Jaiku channel (#socialmedia) for us to share links & brief thoughts. I get an increasing number of good links via Twitter, so I thought it might be good to have a collective presence space where we could share and comment on things. Or not. We’ll see.

I also have socialmedia as a twitter account, so maybe I’ll stream our stuff there or use that as an alternative, complement, not sure. Ideas?

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Filed under socialmedia, twitter, amp and jaiku. |0 Comments

Oh, I’m sure you have 27,512 close friends

20Jun07

Stop. the. insanity. The ‘friending’ as marketing thing. You know who you are. I loathe ‘advertising by other means’ schemes, where marketers try to get their turnips into our peanut butter and convince us it’s a winning combination.

(Aside: I *dream* of catching up with the asshole who put ads behind home plate at Wrigley Field when I try to watch the Cubs.)

Now it is awesome (in a Kalmikoff-ian sense) to give your members multiple ways to hear from you in the ways that work best for them. Give ‘em Twitter, Jaiku, faxback, SMS, whatevs. I want to hear new goodness re: microformats, Adaptive Path, 30Boxes, etc. I opted into those.

But, this incessant push to get up in my social networks with your marketing goobly gook, it’s uncool. It takes some of the pleasure away from my morning coffee when I have to sort through a rash of ‘friend’ requests from people who want something from me.

Quite the turnip-y aftertaste that makes me think your brand must be for tools & fools.

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Filed under unmarketing and socialnetworking. |4 Comments

Peep, Peep

20Jun07

A pleasant surprise yesterday: LinkedIn offered up some peep suggestions, that were, on the whole, quite good. Many of these folks I have as part of other social networks, so the app had some pretty good fu working. This is one of the features of my ideal social network, so I was thrilled to see it, and hope they thread it in all contexts where it makes sense. (I will say that the workflow needs scrubbing. I need to be able to add multiple contacts without having to flip back to your suggestions.)

While I’m at it: does anyone else have an approach/avoidance thing with LinkedIn? I find it about as exciting as a stack of business cards. Yet I keep adding people when they request a connection. I’m going through the motions like it’s going to be good for me some day. Like taking vitamins. I suppose that’s my hangup: there is no mission here. Other than, ‘one day it may be great to be connected’, there is no heart to the app. It always feels a little calculating and mercenary. Unlike, say, if I want to hire someone and I blog about it and a bunch of my readers send me notes. In context, we are trying to work together to accomplish something. Maybe I’m missing it, and you’ll set me straight.

Another nice blip on the peep/portable social network front: dopplr is working on letting you supply a url to review all your current connections represented via hCard. Now, it’s an incremental step beyond the “give us all your gmail/yahoo mail/outlook” contacts, but one in the right direction. I do think the reliance on email is a problem. I have this problem on several networks: I’m just not sure which email my friends would use. Their urls are easier to deduce. For instance, I have a half-dozen working email addresses. Why should you have to guess which one I used on a certain service to find me?

Looking forward to the next iteration of OpenID and thinking a lot more about all this.

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Filed under linkedin, openid, xfn, amp, dopplr and friending. |2 Comments

You talkin to me? You talkin to me?

20Jun07

It strikes me that we are at the point in the second act of the Web where things are becoming tedious. Language inexact. People unable to parse innovation from overreach, or, worse, hyperbole. A whole lotta heavy breathing and heavy petting but not enough consummating. The talk has moved from building and connecting to monetizing and M&A.

To wit: community & conversation. Two perfectly functional words neutered by overuse. Worn down to nothing by profligate trading.

Say ‘markets are conversations’ again, motherfucker. I dare ya.

Is it revolutionary when everyone uses the same pickup lines? When I hear someone reify ‘the conversation’ (sic) or ‘the blogosphere’ (sic), or talk about community as though it were a big ol’ shared lump of happiness we are all clinging to like children, I want to reach for a Saz. As Mike notes from recent in-the-trenches experience: it’s not actual conversation we’re catalyzing with these tools.

‘Conversation’ is a metaphor, dig? You have actual conversations, right? With real people, who sometimes laugh, sometimes smirk, sometimes misunderstand what you say, sometimes kiss you, sometimes give you a redbelly in return? Yeah, well blog discourse ain’t that. ‘Markets as conversations’ was a really useful trope, a rejiggering, at a certain point in time when the rhetoric was getting hot as it is today.

This is not about the fact that everyone is suddenly an expert in social media or that every agency suddenly realizes they need to realign to get in on some of this. I’m confident that people will get the social media thinking they deserve.

It’s just that it seems to me that the most clueful thing we could do is to become mindful of our language again. Make it new, as the crazy poet said. Revive cliches, even if we have to destroy them en passant.

I’m just talking here.

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Filed under cluetrain, conversation and hype. |5 Comments

Being in the World

14Jun07

You, dear reader, however you may come to these words, are planted firmly in the world. You may be reclining, perusing your newsreader; hustling to a meeting as you flip through your smartphone feeds; up late too much with the Web, dowsing about for something new to tickle you into a burst of dreaming. Maybe you’re hungry. You are putting off paying bills. Hoping the kids don’t wake just yet. Thinking about the ball game coming up this weekend. Mourning a loved one. Awaiting a pizza.

You are fully of this world, unable to detangle yourself from the zillions of connections that make you distinctly you. Identity is complicated. Embrace it.

This fact makes me chuckle when I read ‘bias alerts’ or disclosures on blog posts. I am all for more information, for the valiant attempt at transparency, for explaining editorial stance so people can make better decisions about where we are coming from and how to evaluate what we write, photograph, video, tag, comment upon, etc. What amuses me is the idea that we can explain our attachments so simply. We are rarely transparent even to ourselves, so how do we assume that a one-line disclosure is somehow a silver bullet cleansing us of problematic POV issues.

It’s a nod to the archaic idea of journalistic detachment, of course. As though the scribes that make up the 4th estate are not themselves hopelessly muddled with humanness. The commitment to professionalism is itself an all-too-human attachment. An allegiance that colors and guides the reporting, editing, merchandising of what counts as news and who qualifies as an expert.

Why do you write about some topic? Because you have some kind of skin in the game. Duh. You carry a torch for the topic. Your friends, lovers, little brother asked you to write about it. You want to make the world a better place. You’re getting paid to do so. You want that little red-haired girl to finally pay attention to you. You’re afraid of dying and being wiped from earthly memory. You have a score to settle. You are bored. You want to advance professionally. You want to make new friends. You want to feel good about yourself.

And on and on till we all fall down. Actions, like identity, are overdetermined. Which is not to say that (a la human spam services) disclosure isn’t necessary, but that we should recognize that our motivations are difficult to fully fathom whether we are rank amateurs or seasoned ‘professionals’. Perhaps every new utterance should simply carry with it this obvious truth: Your Mileage May Vary.

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Filed under disclosure, transparency and professionalism. |6 Comments

Why PR People Catch Flack

12Jun07

Because they write stupid shit like this:

Web 2.0-based applications are being embraced by leading developers because they are far more interactive and responsive than traditional web applications, and can be easily distributed over the Internet and painlessly updated by simply changing the code on the developers’ own servers. The modern web standards also provide secure data access and transactions, like those used with Amazon.com or online banking.

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Filed under publicrelations, pr and seriousbullshit. |4 Comments

And suddenly everything became clear

06Jun07

All manner of goodness out there this week. Por ejemplo:

Deb Schultz’s recent preso on weaving better relationships and more valuable instances of communication.

Leisa Reichelt on ambient intimacy. Her presentation from Reboot.

It’s no secret that I’m a Jeremy Keith fanboy. Sounds like his Reboot talk on soul would make the lit geek in my ver ver happy.

Stowe goes with the flow.

You can sign up for Defrag with the super secret code “Oberkirch11″ (ya know, like Ocean’s 11, but with an Oberkirch mashed in there) and get a $100 off. With which you can buy us bourbon when we next hang out.

Marc Andreessen (who made this wonderous little thing called Mosaic) is blogging. I think he’s saved up ideas since the days of Lynx, as he is blasting out some good stuff: on bubbles, Mac apps, faux 2.0.

MetaFilter mania: get a t-shirt pimping the Blue. zOMG: nerd o rama! A Portland MeFi meetup in a rented out arcade. It’s like Elvis getting his 80s geek on. Takin care of 8 bit.

The Merlin & the OmniGroup boyz will be showing off OmniFocus.

WordCamp (July 21 & 22) & the next TechCrunch festivus.

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Filed under links. |1 Comment

Rebuilding Movable Type

05Jun07

I’ve written before about how I was always baffled about how Movable Type lost its mojo. This once great platform (which single-handedly created the category of professional blogging tools) has, as Jeff Nolan put it, “gotten a little long in the tooth.” Other high-profile users noted that they were glad to see today’s beta as a ’sign of life’. It’s a bad sign that you’re too far between iterations when some of your staunchest advocates have taken to wondering if you’re still alive or not.

That said, I’m eager to unpack and play with the latest MT beta released by Six Apart today. As Matt is fond of saying “blogging is too hard,” and I think a renewed round of innovation from established leaders will be great for users and for those of us who help people learn about blogging and social media. I encourage you to check out Anil’s post outlining the relaunch.

What really appeals to me:

* A focus on redesigning the user experience of creating and managing blogs. I’m really pleased to tell you that Mule Design is working on this, and I’m excited to see how they can improve the admin and management workflow.

* Integration of elements from LiveJournal, TypePad, Vox. This is super smart for 6A, who are clearly in a position to differentiate this platform based on the different use cases from these other services. Community in a box is a big request in new systems, as is better media handling and widget support. Depending on how the platform ends up, MT could be a simpler Drupal, or a DIY Ning. This extension of our tools beyond bloggins really intrigues me, and it’s clear that we need such a thing. (Hey, I know there are a zillion CMS offerings out there. Most of them blow chunks. I’m looking for things that don’t suck as I don’t have a lot of time to spelunk for new tools.)

* The potential for open sourcing. My big complaint earlier was that 6A was better at business development and high-profile distribution deals than it was in developer support for MT. That’s why, I posited, that developer momentum was behind WordPress, and the outcome of that is a rich library of extensions and tweaks for the platform that most end-users find really compelling. Awesome that 6A is going to try to return some of the field excitement by open sourcing the code. I’ll be watching this one closely, as it can prove to be a really smart move.

Open-sourcing the code base, support for static pages, improved performance — these elements are going to bring MT back in line with WordPress and other hot blogging apps. If they can get the user experience right, help us with the explosion of rich media publishing we’re about to experience, and give publishers some community tools, that’s pretty hot.

“It’s not a zero sum game,” a friend reminded me today. I agree completely (though Scott Karp is pitting the top two contenders). As you play with various social tools, you note where they fall down and figure out the uses for which they are particularly suited. 6A has earned a download and trial of their beta. Whether they can recapture the enthusiasm once held for this OG platform, we’ll see. I would like to think that, a la Google Reader, struggling apps can gain new life when given the right kind of TLC.

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Filed under blogging, wordpress, sixapart, opensource, socialnetworking, movabletype and amp. |2 Comments