CrapHammer

iPad - Stemming the Flow of Complaints

2010-01-30T10:25:31-05:00

I'm quite amazed at the whiplash from the tech-heads and geeks around the iPad.

Is the name unfortunate? Yes.

Does it do everything under the sun? Hell no and thank god!

Will it be a game changer? Yes. No question.

But, Sean, "It's just a large iTouch!!!"

I hear this over and over. In fact, I predicted it would be a large iTouch.

So here's what I say back to all the geeks.

"Boo Hoo."

Because what people are really saying when they complain about this is "I wanted something new that was alien and inconceivable."

"I wanted to be surprised more!"

The iPhone was not alien and inconceivable. We all knew it would be a phone and iPod with applications.

What made the iPhone so wonderful was the focus on design and the experience of using it.

I believe and predict that the iPad will be a game changer and here is why.

It is what we all needed and the industry was waiting for.

But no one had ever produced it.

Amazon came close with the Kindle. But it failed to allow for further innovation by third parties out of the box.

Amazon also failed miserably with rolling out their device internationally.

Let's also keep in mind that the publishing industry is in need of some serious innovation here.

The content industry is still reeling from the financial shocks they have had to endure.

And to date there has been no easy way for traditional publishers to reach a global audience while also adding unique value.

With the kindle, every publisher is the same.

This is assuming publishers don't make the same mistake as NBC and publicly state they will never be on iTunes (which NBC then had to take back many years and lots of missed dollars later).

The iPad will see a global increase in purchased consumption of eBooks and rich publishing content.

Will publishers make as much per title as they want? no. But it will drive revenue.

And yet the savviest amongst us are shouting out the perceived faults of this device as loud as they can.

So let's look at these complaints.

One of the biggest complaints is the lack of multi-tasking. You can only run one application at a time.

Geeks are aghast.

"Boo Hoo," is all I can say back.

The average person won't care. Nor will they care that the bevel is "large" or that there is no camera on their media reader.

Now... no flash sucks... but that's not a deal breaker. That's just Apple being stubborn. Again.

Here's the kicker.

The geeks clearly have their pocket protectors in a wad over this. But mark my words, almost all of them will have one of these.

They will all own an iPad.

Or they will go and buy a Sony Reader and we can all sympathize with their sad, poor little ebook content.

So let's assume it's just a fanatical few who are up in arms.

What will people care about?

That's easy. The battery life, the responsiveness of the unit, and the experience of using it. The experience being tied to the content available.

Design is a hard game. It is a game of constant restrictions and constraints.

You can't have everything. You have to make intelligent compromises.

Note: you can have everything with bad design. Tried to use an alarm clock recently with 325 functions but only 3 control buttons? It's three years later and I still can't operate my alarm clock reliably.

Apple made the right choices. 10 hours of batter life together with a form, size and weight that is f'ing amazing.

So I believe quite strongly that the iPad will be a game changer.

I have long stated my belief that piracy will not go away. In fact, it will get worse.

The only solution for the publishing industry is to make their content ubiquitous to the user (digitally) and easy to purchase. Easy, easy, easy!!

I spend quite a bit of money a month through my Apple TV because it's the highest quality HD content and it's one easy click with millions of titles at my fingertips.

But when something isn't there... hello torrent.

Remember this presentation from Sports Illustrated?

We all thought of it as science fiction. Who in their right mind in the publishing industry would pump this kind of money into something this risky? Only a moron looking to do a Kliavkoff. [edit: correction to name made]

Only now, the hardware exists to exactly enable this vision.

The iPad.

Sport Illustrated just has to write an app. No hardware risks. No crazy licensing deals.

Anyone can take their publishing vision and move it onto a platform that will have a global rollout and support.

I would like to applaud Jobs and Apple.

This larger than life iTouch may just change publishing.

Something has to.

Image source: yaunus

Social Media Unplugged: The Framework and Guidelines

2010-01-24T13:58:00-05:00

In this first post in the series, I’m going to focus on the core framework and guidelines that should be put in place for a company or brand to successfully engage in social media.

You don't need to be a social media guru or expert.

You don't have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars.

These don't have to be overly complex efforts or documents. They just need to be appropriate to your organization.

Like most things, it takes a bit of planning, a willingness to learn-fail-adapt, and dedication.

I have whittled down the basic components you should have in place to the following five chunks:

A Strategy
An HR Policy (that addresses social media)
Key Workflows and Personnel
Training Tools (includes Tone and Manner Guidelines)
Monitoring (ad hoc and systematized)

The Strategy

At its most basic level, I'd recommend that the following questions be answered

Who are we? Not to us, but to our customers and stakeholders?
What must we accomplish? What problem are we trying to solve?
Who is our audience and where are they already? What spaces? What groups?
What does our audience need or want? How can we assist them in their spaces? And can this be fulfilled by the "brand" or are individuals needed?
What kind of commitment is needed from our organization?
What spaces are we going to actively commit to for the entire year and moving forward? How many can we realistically maintain a presence in?

Keep it informal. The days of media planning a year in advance are nearing their well-deserved end. Leave some flexibility to adapt your plans based on what is working and what is not.

The hardest part is determining how a brand and organization will behave in social media. From this, the conversation can move to how individuals acting on behalf of the brand and organization must act.

HR Policy

It is becoming more and more important that a company have a policy that specifically addresses social media. The days of simply outlawing it are over. Yet many organizations I meet with still have not addressed the use of social media in their HR policies (aside from outlawing it.)

As Leigh Himel pointed out in a recent engagement, 17% of twitter users have tweeted from the toilet using their phone/device. Your employees are already in these spaces and you need a policy that protects your employees, your brand, and your ability to engage with your audiences moving forward.

Set the context
- Where and when the policy applies
- Define the appropriate macro use of Social Media (outreach, personal growth, leadership, etc.)
Guiding principles
- Define the guiding principles that align with your organizations values
Use common sense
- Give examples of how common sense applies
Define the rules of engagement online that must be followed

I'm working on uploading a presentation that outlines the key questions to ask. In the interim, be sure to check out this site where you can review some of the social media policies in use by other firms: Social Media Governance Policy Database

Key Workflows and Personnel

Whether you are planning to enable your entire organization to engage in social media or a core group of customer evangelists, simplified workflows are needed that help to identify the day to day interactions.

One critical area for any set of workflows is how to escalate issues. This process should allow for at least two levels of escalation - simple assistance requests (second opinion) and what to do with a potential crisis.

I strongly recommend that the goal of any social media workflow should be to empower immediate action by the "people on the ground". Any escalation or logging should occur after the individual has been able to engage with the individual or conversation. This will go an insanely long way when it comes to stopping the echo chamber effect. The days of circling the wagons and waiting 48 hours to respond are over. Unless you enjoy making the front pages of every newspaper in existence for something that could have been easily addressed head on like Motrin and Taxi experienced.

I tend to not get too involved in the crisis escalation processes other than identifying the need for them. Here is a great presentation from Ogilvy on Social Media Escalation.

Ogilvy On: Social Media for Crisis Management

View more presentations from 360digitalinfluence.

While it's important that escalation be thought through and a process put in place, there are other equally pressing issues to ensure are addressed.

Too many firms suffer from dead initiatives online. As such, consider processes that highly incentivize the re-use or leveraging of your core social media spaces. At Twist Image, we've generally done this by helping our clients commit to a set number of spaces and then setup processes that define the need for an exception if a new space is needed or desired for a campaign initiative. This exception must showcase how the new space will be supported for the entire fiscal year and also include a migration plan for when they will no longer be supporting this space.

The people

Identifying the personnel needed to fuel and manage your social media efforts can be quite challenging. Many organizations are already struggling with properly resourcing existing programs let alone a new one of such breadth and scope. Social media requires significant additional effort from a content and interaction perspective alone let alone monitoring and moderation.

Few organizations get approval to hire additional staff for their first forays into these spaces. Many of our clients have had good success dividing up the responsibilities across a team of people that coordinate and share duties across the key spaces. Using the training tools below and tools like HootSuite, it is totally possible to provide a great experience to customers, prospects and fans while also gaining key learnings and insight.

Quick note: I find that it's important that marketing be involved in this effort and that it not be shuffled off to a customer service function. The best teams are formed from a combination of roles and areas from within the organization.

Training Tools

I would simplify this into two parts: core skills and behavioral guardrails.

Core skills: I've found it very useful that a program be put in place to train all staff from executives down to part-time workers (as appropriate) on the use of key websites and software as it relates to social media. Step-by-step training on how to use twitter, Facebook and Google alerts through to using software like TweetDeck to participate in and monitor conversations. No starting knowledge should be needed as the training should bring everyone up to a decent level of competence on a customized list of platforms specific to your social media efforts. Besides, if 12 year olds can do this, we should be able to as well (just maybe not as fluently) ;)
Behavioral guardrails: One of the tools I was able to introduce to Twist Image was what we are calling the Tone and Manner Guidelines. In essence, this is a powerpoint presentation meant to provide the guardrails to an individuals' behavior online. Where the social media policy defines the limits and rules, this presentation provides a bit more guidance on the tone, the type of language to use and even how to respond to specific issues. By building scenarios of actual conversations, we''ve found that we can quickly and effectively convey how to respond to a variety of positive and negative situations. In its simplest form, we show a conversation online and then present what not to say and give guidance on what to say. We've found this to be a phenomenally successful way to quickly escalate people with little or no experience to full fledged social media evangelists acting on behalf of the brand within a very short period of time.

Monitoring

Frankly, you need to be monitoring. End of sentence.

That said, there are two approaches. If you have the resources, I recommend doing both. But if resources are tight, start with ad hoc.

Ad Hoc Monitoring

My holy triad of ad hoc monitoring is a combination of the following three tools

Google alerts
TweetDeck search columns (or HootSuite search columns)
Technorati (unsure if this is still viable - anyone have any suggestions?)

Quarterly Analysis

We've explored a number of tools here at Twist Image since I joined and I have to say there are two leaders at this point in time:

Radian 6: the most powerful and effective way to slice, dice and analyze social media monitoring data but not best if you just want a dashboard "out of the box"
Sysomos: comprehensive and easy to use dashboards combined with the ability to overlay demographic data

I like both of these tools as they both allow us to analyze and dig into the data reported. There are a number of tools that don't allow for proper investigation and analysis (some quite expensive) which I've found quite frustrating and a waste of money.

In my next post (sometime this decade?), I'll explore some of the tools and approaches in this unplugged series.

Big News at Twist Image

2009-11-12T20:35:36-05:00

Big things are afoot at Twist Image. Our 1980's website not included.

I speak not of the cool work we're doing redefining influence or how brands can extend into social media.

And I'm not talking about Twist Image being named one of the top 10 agencies of Canada (though that was cool too.)

Nope.

I'm speaking of the fact that Paul McEnany is leaving the US and coming to Twist.

Hee Haw meets Craphammer meets Blitherings. Good thing we have some Mitch in the mix or we'd be in for some major F bomb trouble. ;)

It's a crazy awesome week. And I am beyond elated and excited to be working with such an amazing and growing team.

Seductive Interactions

2009-10-12T08:06:23-05:00

I recently stumbled across this wonderful presentation from Stephen Anderson titled "Seductive Interactions". Hat tip to Michael

Seductive Interactions (Idea 09 Version)

View more documents from Stephen Anderson.

Slide 81 is a simple yet powerful statement for why design matters in a world of focus groups, usability testing and efficiency over all things human.

This presentation reminds me of the Yahoo Pattern Libraries for Communities. There was a great presentation on game theory some time back and how it applies to building products/communities online but I can't seem to dig it up again.

The Myth of Social Media Monitoring

2009-10-07T10:50:46-05:00

Everyone wants to define how to best measure Social Media these days.

Here's a video on how Digital Royalty says to measure Social Media. (h/t to Gavin)

I actually spewed coffee out of my nose when Spider Man lady got to "Return on Influence".

Here's how Sequentia Environics says to measure Social Media.

You can register for their white paper. But they are wrong too.

Harsh? Maybe. What makes me so certain that they are wrong?

Because they are attempting to answer the wrong question.

I don't think we need to agree on how to measure social media yet. First we need to understand how to find the "signal in the noise". How do we filter out what is of value to an organization? How does an organization engage with its audience and customers? And can this be truly automated into a dashboard?

How does what we find help to transform the business to directly impact product development, revenues or achievement of their mission?

I have a theory, but first I want to pass the microphone to some folks doing some great thinking in this space, the Dachis group.

"Technology can help us listen to everything that's ever been said about ourselves our company, brand etc.—but finding that one key, game changing insight in a sea of infinite chatter and then actually doing something about it is another story."
David Armano

What is worth finding? What are we looking for?

Jevon references a model that defines how the Dachis Group is approaching the problem of social business design.

I really, really like this model. I can see how the four archetypes around the outside are driving their thinking around organizational change in three areas: workforce collaboration, customer participation and partner optimization.

The Role of Immersion

We are working with a number of our clients on monthly monitoring of social media to identify emergent trends, the results of our activities across channels and more. But all of this amounts to no more than another report on the shelf unless we can tie it to real insights that are impacting key individuals within our clients' organizations.

The real power of social media monitoring is not in fancy reports brought down to a series of baseline measures.

Rather, the potential lies in a group of employees connecting into the digital landscape, empowered with a variety of real-time and (amazingly) free tools to monitor and manage conversations. From these individuals comes the real value of social media.

"A large consumer product company found out about a group of people who were brainstorming a way to solve a problem which was related to this company. Because this consumer product company has people working for it who actively participate in networks, and monitor the space, they found out about it. Someone identified this idea as a signal in a sea of noise—there are a lot of people who talk about this company daily, but this was different. The people who independently brainstormed this idea outside of the company's ecosystem are now talking to the people who work for the company about making the idea into a reality. "
David Armano

Enterprises Need to Change not Measure More

Is there some validity to having a system for measuring social media? Yes. The fact that so many research firms are suggesting you can outsource this measurement activity points to the crux of my argument, though.

I have a theory that there is significant overlap between Enterprise 2.0 and Social Media. I don't think this is a big insight and I'm certainly not alone nor the first in this thinking. But to work with this theory, we need to slowly expand our efforts in both spaces to create fundamental change in how a business operates, invents, creates value, services customers, etc.

Today we find firms actively assisting companies with what is just the tip of the iceberg in both the enterprise 2.0 and social media spaces. What is so fascinating is that many folks are seeing these as two unique and disconnected activities.

[Image corrected]

Beneath the waters of our increasingly digital world, a future awaits where enterprise 2.0 and Social Media efforts meet and form the backbone for real innovation, future profits and deeper relationships with customers.

Slicing Radian 6 for Key Properties

2009-10-03T16:00:26-05:00

I'm often asked for a list of key properties or spaces where conversations are occurring. I'm trying to avoid using the word "influencer" here as anyone who reads my blog likely knows my views of such.

But let's face it. A week doesn't go by in our industry that we aren't asked to find "influencers."

Here is a common request.

"Find the mommy bloggers that are best aligned to our brand or a new campaign we are running."

I was recently chatting with the awesome folks from Radian 6 and thought I would run this kind of request past them as I had traditionally wasted a lot of time trying to answer it. I got the typical response. Search for phrases most likely to identify these types of people/sites and then use the tools to narrow down to a set of key places.

Note to anyone trying this at home. It won't work, or at least not well. Which made me realize that I should likely share with the world how I now go about answering these types of requests. (Note: Using Radian 6.)

Let's assume that the brand/campaign is a new type of cell phone.

The Wrong Way

We've been asked to find Mommy Bloggers so the first approach is generally to think of what types of conversations Mommy Bloggers are having that might be relevant to this campaign.

How young is too young to get a cellphone?
Impossible to keep in touch with my kids.
My phone always loses its signal at soccer practice.

Then we start to wheedle down to a list of phrases, includes and excludes that would narrow down to the conversations of interest. This takes quite a bit of time configuring and reconfiguring your search parameters and slicing and dicing the data. And we are faced with an immediate dilemma. How do we specify that the conversation is taking place on a Mommy Blog?

Social Media Monitoring tools (at least the ones I work with) focus on the actual conversations (blog posts, forum entries, comments, tweets) not the source. So we need to come up with phrases that only Mommy Bloggers would say when speaking about things pertinent to our campaign or brand.

Hopefully you are saying to yourself, "What??!!" What would a Mommy Blogger say on her blog that wouldn't also appear on a parenting website? Well, as a Mommy Blog IS a parenting website, the answer is "nothing". So this simple sounding task quickly becomes a prolonged exercise in frustration.

Note that it can be done and you will find results, but it can take you days. And frankly, it's faster (if less comprehensive) to manually visit each of the top Mommy Blogs you know of and just do a search using their sites' search feature for conversations you are fishing for.

A Better Way

When the request (find the mommy bloggers that...) assumes that we are looking for the hottest and most relevant nodes of conversation within a "defined" slice of the Internet, then it is quite straight forward to just limit our listening tools to that slice of the Internet.

For example, we are looking for Mommy Bloggers in the opening objective. So, let's limit our tool to only be sniffing the Mommy Blogs. Simple and straight forward, no? All great ideas are. Or so I tell myself. ;)

In the screenshot below, I'm loading in a list of all the Canadian Mommy Blogs we know about. I'm limiting Radian 6 to look only at the conversations from a defined list of sources that match the keywords we are looking for.

So now I can search for the conversations likely to be of value to our client and not worry about whether the conversation is happening on a mommy blog.

Takeaways

I have spent days configuring the first approach and would consider myself lucky to have 1 mommy blog in my top 10 influencer view.

Or I can spend 30 minutes on my "Better way" approach and find 10 hot mommy blogs of interest immediately in the top 10 influencer view. And even better, I can remove a lot of bias by looking at trending phrases, top conversations, etc. versus just searching for the conversations I want to find.

Photo Credit: hownowdesign