Disruptive Conversations

VIDEO: How to use Google Wave for Collaborative Conference Note-taking

2009-11-06T14:01:32-05:00

Over the past two weeks, I've both witnessed and participated in an incredibly powerful way to use Google Wave. The use case is simply this:

collaboratively taking notes at a conference

I saw this first Oct 28-30 at eComm Europe in Amsterdam. Members of the Google Wave team set up some initial waves and showed "live waving" during the actual event. Others then participated in (everyone at eComm was given a Wave account). I joined in asking some questions and participating in the dialog. Although I wasn't there, I wound up learning a lot of what went on there and now there are some great notes people can reference about the sessions. If you have a Wave account, you can see the eComm waves yourself by going to the search box at the top of the center column (where it usually says "in:Inbox") and entering in:

tag:ecomm with:public

Now you will see all the public waves that were created by multiple people during and after the event.

At VoiceCon and Enterprise 2.0 this week in San Francisco, I and a number of others did our own "live waving" and the process was quite powerful in cases where a number of us were collaborating. You can see the waves in Wave by searching on:

tag:voicecon with:public
tag:e2conf with:public

There weren't as many Wave users at the two conferences, so we didn't have quite as many collaborators in some of the public waves - but look at the ones relating to "Google Wave" to see some strong collaboration.

I actually used ScreenFlow on my Macbook Pro to capture one of the editing sessions, because I think you really need to see that in action to fully appreciate what it can do. I'm hoping to edit that and get it up as a screencast soon.

To show how to use Wave in this manner, I created this Emerging Tech Talk screencast based on the eComm public waves:

The Emerging Tech Talk blog post has a few more details about what I showed in the video.

If you use Google Wave in this fashion, please do leave a note letting people know how to find your waves. As we all explore this early preview of Google Wave, it's great to learn from each other.

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Best Twitter Lists ever.... (from Christopher Penn)

2009-11-01T19:30:54-05:00

I love it when people find the humorous side to new features that are getting over-hyped in the social media space right now... from Mr. Penn comes:

http://twitter.com/cspenn/lists

As he noted in a tweet, you do not want to be on them... :-)

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Which is easier to understand? Google Wave or the Swedish Chef?

2009-10-30T09:21:55-04:00

Heh... you just knew it was only a matter of time before the parody sites came out! Kudos to whomever put together:

http://easiertounderstandthanwave.com/

Very cute.

The reality, too, is that Google Wave is hard to understand until you wrap your brain around the not-overly-intuitive user interface. Once you start to get the interface, though, there are some VERY cool things you can do with it... I've got some screencast ideas I hope to be posting soon...

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Heading out to Enterprise 2.0 conf next week in SF...

2009-10-29T17:21:07-04:00

On Sunday evening I'll be heading out to San Francisco were I'll be speaking at both Enterprise 2.0 and VoiceCon next week at the Moscone center (they are co-resident). As I outline on a page on the Voxeo Talks blog, my talks at Enterprise 2.0 will both be on Tuesday, November 3, 2009. The first is:

11:15 am–12:00 pm – Case Studies In Enterprise Micro-Blogging Micro-blogging is taking hold within the Enterprise. The social aspects of real-time messaging promise to improve productivity, knowledge sharing and community-building. Organizations pursuing “Enterprise Twitter” solutions however face numerous issues: *What is the business case (including metrics and ROI)? *What are the policy, security, compliance, and discovery implications? *Are there best practices to help with employee adoption? *What application scenarios work best? e2 Moderator – Irwin Lazar, Vice President, Communications Research, Nemertes Research
Speaker – Brad Garland, CEO, The Garland Group
Speaker – Dan York, Director of Conversations, Voxeo Corporation
Speaker – Scott Mark, Enterprise Application Architect, Medtronic
Speaker – Wim Hofland, Manager, Inspiration and Innovation, Sogeti Netherlands

It should be an interesting discussion, particularly because my views on "enterprise micro-blogging" have evolved a good bit (and not necessarily in a positive direction) since I wrote my long piece a year ago about Yammer, Present.ly and Laconica.

Next up, and on the same general theme, is a "reactor panel" that is a bit of reprise of a similar panel at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston earlier this year, although with different participants:

4:15 – 5:00 pm – The Future of Social Messaging in the Enterprise The rapid rise of social messaging services such as Twitter creates challenges and opportunities for end-user organizations. How can end-user organizations utilize social messaging to improve external and internal collaboration? What’s the role of social messaging in a unified communications and collaboration architecture and how are UC&C vendors incorporating social messaging into their products? How can organizations embrace social messaging in a way that is consistent with needs for security, governance and compliance? Will the rise of public social messaging services render investments in unified communications moot? Join us for a free-wheeling discussion into the all of these topics and more. e2 Moderator – Irwin Lazar, Vice President, Communications Research, Nemertes Research
Speaker – Akiba Saeedi, Program Director, Unified Communications and Collaboration, IBM Software Group
Speaker – Dan York, Director of Conversations, Voxeo Corporation
Speaker – David Sacks, CEO, Yammer
Speaker – Eugene Lee, CEO, Socialtext
Speaker – Paul Dunay, Global Managing Director of Services and Social Marketing, Avaya Inc.
Speaker – Vivek Khuller, President and CEO, Divitas

Again, it should be an enjoyable session... particularly if we get to have a bit more of a discussion.

Both sessions are "slide-less" in that we as participants are not showing slides... just discussing the topic.

On Thursday morning, Irwin Lazar and I also have a "Deep Dive" on "Web 2.0 in the Enterprise", although interestingly that is going on over on the VoiceCon agenda.

Anyway, if you are out at either Enterprise 2.0 or VoiceCon, do drop me a note and perhaps we can connect somewhere out there. You can expect, of course, that I'll be tweeting from the show on probably both @danyork and @voxeo.

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I'm toying with creating an email newsletter - care to sign up?

2009-10-28T22:40:29-04:00

For some time now, I've been playing with the idea of starting an e-mail newsletter. Several reasons... but primarily because I am curious about using it as an adjunct to all the writing I do online. I write across a good number of sites and yet there are common themes that are woven into all my writing - primarily this one:

to try to tell the story of all the changes that are going on all around us in both the way we communicate and also the tools we use to communicate.

That theme is here on Disruptive Conversations, over on Disruptive Telephony, in Blue Box podcasts, in my Emerging Tech Talk video podcasts and definitely also in what I write on Voxeo's blog site. It's also a theme in some of what I post on Facebook and Twitter, too.

I don't know how often I'll send out the newsletter. Knowing me, I expect it will vary in frequency. Right now I'm thinking it will probably include items such as:

Major pieces I've written or produced somewhere in my network of sites that I think would be interesting to a larger audience.
Updates on upcoming conferences where I'll be speaking and where we might be able to meet.
New projects or initiatives - or other bright, shiny objects I'm chasing.
New tools I think people might find useful.
Random personal updates or other notes.

Again, it's still very much in the formative stages (what kind of information would you like to receive?)

It also, quite frankly, gives me a chance to experiment with iContact, a service I've been wanting to try for a while.

Anyway, if you'd like to join me in my little experiment, you're welcome to do so and I'd be honored to have you along for the ride. The shiny new sign-up form is here:

I'll probably be sending out the first newsletter in the next week or so. Being the security/privacy nut that I am, you can be sure I won't sell your name or do anything like that. That's not my style.

If you do sign up, thanks for doing so.

P.S. And yes, because I despise the link-spam bots out there that clog up systems by filling out forms on sites, I do require you to confirm your email address. I know it's one extra step, but really it's better for all involved...

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Experimenting with Google Wave? Here's a great list of keyboard shortcuts

2009-10-28T06:04:16-04:00

Are you experimenting with Google Wave and wish you could work quicker within the Wave windows? If you are like me and love keyboard shortcuts, I found this site that may be of help to you:

http://spreadgooglewave.com/syndication/google-wave-keyboard-shortcuts

The two shortcuts that save me the most time are:

"Shift+Enter" - ends your editing, the equivalent of pressing the "Done" button with the mouse.
"Ctrl+Space" - marks all blips in a Wave as read (important in a wave like the VUC Wave that has lots of commentary).

What Wave keyboard shortcuts do you find most useful?

P.S. If you are on Wave and want to say hello, I'm at "danyorkLPG@googlewave.com".

P.P.S. No, I don't have any more invites. :-)

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R.I.P. GeoCities...

2009-10-26T14:18:15-04:00

As has been widely reported, Yahoo! is shutting down and deleting all the content from its GeoCities service today. This isn't a surprise, as Yahoo! has been laying the groundwork for the shutdown for some time. And in truth, I'll barely mourn the passing... I haven't intentionally been to a GeoCities-hosted site in years.

But...

..."back in the day", as folks are so fond of saying now, GeoCities certainly was a place where many people got their start with free websites. For those of us online in the 1990's... long before all the zillion sites today where you can go and create your own free site... there was GeoCities.

I had websites running on other servers and never set up my own site on GeoCities, but I certainly knew folks who did and undoubtedly spent time on some sites there. It's amazing on one level that the Yahoo! acquisition was ten years ago... but in recent years the service had definitely been eclipsed and for many of us was more almost a caricature than anything else... (see today's XKCD layout to get a sense of what the site had become like).

Still, it's worth noting the passing, because back in the 1990's, GeoCities certainly did help many people get online. Some articles I noticed today:

Mashable: GeoCities Closes Tomorrow: Goodbye, Old Friend
L.A. Times: GeoCities' time has expired, Yahoo closing the site today
Wikipedia entry on GeoCities

And, as I mentioned earlier, the folks at the XKCD comic changed their layout in tribute:

(P.S. A colleague has pointed out that if you view the source of the XKCD page, it's even funnier...)

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Using TypePad Connect now to let you comment with your accts from Twitter, Facebook, OpenID or more

2009-10-23T10:53:50-04:00

Earlier this week I enabled "TypePad Connect" for this blog and my Disruptive Telephony blog so that you can now sign in when commenting using your "identity" from TypePad, Twitter, Facebook, OpenID, or many others. Nicely, you can also, of course, simply enter in your name, URL, etc. like you always could before on this blog. The difference is that now down above the comment field you should see this:

If you click on the "more..." link, you will be taken to a site to choose the account you want to use:

I'm particularly pleased about the ability to support OpenID, something I've written about both here and over on Disruptive Telephony, although that's not particularly surprising given Six Apart's support for OpenID in the past.

There's a larger story to be written here about TypePad Connect and how it is part of the greater battle going on both with regard to your "identity" across blogs and also where your comments are stored. The Read/Write Web had a great article on the topic a year ago when TypePad Connect first came out. For me, since both this blog and DisTel are already hosted on TypePad, the issue about having your comments reside on TypePad's servers is irrelevant, really, since they already are. Another time, though, I'll write more on the larger story.

In the meantime, feel free to leave comments through being logged into those services (and saving yourself filling out the form).

For those wanting to know more about TypePad Connect, there is a video on the main page and also previous TypePad blog posts in November 2008 and January 2009 that go into more detail.

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Congrats to HubSpot on $16M funding AND launch of "Inbound Marketing" book

2009-10-19T16:50:30-04:00

Congratulations are very definitely in order to the folks over at HubSpot today for two reasons:

They closed a $16 million Series C investment round.
They launched their new book: "Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media and Blogs"

HubSpot has definitely been one of the companies I've been watching in this space. They've provided a great amount of content through their Internet Marketing blog on a wide range of topics. I've also enjoyed some of their "Grader" tools. Plus, on a purely local note, they are an interesting Boston-area company just a couple of hours south of me.

Congrats to Brian Halligan and all the HubSpot team... and best wishes to them as they aim to become "the Salesforce.com of marketing".

P.S. Check out their "Inbound Marketing cartoon eBook".

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Sustaining a launch/campaign - the Attention Wave is just the spark...

2009-10-19T16:09:09-04:00

A few weeks back, Bryan Person replied to my Attention Wave case study with this comment (my emphasis added):

I like the "attention ripples" expression, and it feels like a more sensible way to steadily build awareness and momentum around new products and services. You *can* still drop multiple blog posts, for example, on "launch day," but why not also have an editorial plan to publish content across multiple social channels over several days and weeks?

Absolutely.

The last part is the critical point to me. Packaging your initial content into an "Attention Wave" should just be the spark that ignites your campaign/launch/etc. The goal of that first package of content is to:

tell your story from multiple points-of-view
provide the resources to help others tell your story (ex. provide an embeddable video people can use)
get as much initial visibility as possible

But if there's no plan to continue the content creation, then your nice Attention Wave package of content becomes simply a spark that may light a small fire but soon runs out of fuel.

To Bryan's point, you should have an editorial calendar that continues to build on your launch package and that streams out in the days, weeks and months after your launch. You want to feed fuel to the fire and keep the flames burning.

The Attention Wave is just the spark...

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PodCamp NH coming up on November 7 - 8, 2009 - sign up now!

2009-10-16T16:19:11-04:00

I was delighted to learn recently that PodCamp NH is coming up Saturday and Sunday, November 7 and 8th, 2009, in New Hampton, New Hampshire, near big Lake Winnipesaukee. I've been a huge fan of the PodCamp type of events ever since I attended and spoke at some of the first PodCamp Boston events a few years back... and it's great to see such an event coming to the Granite State. Kudos to Leslie Poston and team for getting it going.

There already are a good number of people indicating that they will attend and the list of sessions looks great so far. (I'm pleased to see that friend Ted Gilchrist is doing a talk on voice mashups!) Following either of those links you can sign up to attend and/or propose a talk - they are also naturally looking for sponsors to help defray the costs.

Sadly, it looks like I'll have to miss this inaugural Podcamp NH. I'll be spending the week prior out in San Francisco speaking at both the VoiceCon and Enterprise 2.0 conferences and then will be heading down to Voxeo's office for the week of November 9th. Since I'd kind of like to see my family in between, well... I'll have to catch the next PodCamp. It's somewhat ironic in that several of the talks I'm giving at both VoiceCon and E2.0, particularly the ~2-hour "Web 2.0 in the enterprise" session I'm doing Wednesday with Irwin Lazar, directly relate to the kinds of things discussed at PodCamp and would be fun to talk about there. Ah, well.... next time.

I look forward to reading about it and I'm definitely glad to see the activity increasing here in the Granite State. Now Podcamp NH just needs a tag line that riffs on our state motto... something like:

Blog Free or Die!

If you are in New Hampshire (or want to travel here), definitely do check out PodCamp NH... attend... present... learn...

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Technorati Tags: podcamp, podcampnh, socialmedia, conferences

What I need is the "Brain-To-Blog" interface!

2009-10-16T15:50:46-04:00

As I see in the Twitter stream, many good friends of mine are attending and speaking at Blog World Expo right now out in Las Vegas. I'm not there, nor was I at last year's BWE, but I was a huge fan of and attendee at the "Podcast and New Media Expos" that proceeded it. There are some REALLY great sessions going on out there right now.

The one thing I don't see being discussed there is this:

I need a Brain -> Blog interface!

I need something that can take all the article ideas in my brain and just mystically make them appear on my various blogs. My problem is not a lack of ideas. No way! I have the opposite problem.

Every day I wake up with my head exploding with stories to be told ... and every night I find myself going to bed with so many of those stories left untold.

I have an article queue miles long... and I find myself thinking through stories at all sorts of times... but finding the time to actually write and post those stories is so incredibly difficult. Between crazy work hours, a family I love to be with (including an extremely cute but demanding 5-month-old) and, well, the need to sleep and eat... the time to convert those articles from thoughts in the brain to words on a blog site seems incredibly hard to get.

I want the interface that's in many cyberpunk/sci-fi stories... where I can just think the text that I want to post and... ta da.. it magically gets created! Sadly, such things are right now only in stories and research labs... but it sure would be nice to have.

Meanwhile, back in the reality of 2009, I guess I'll just have to figure out how to carve out some more time... ;-)

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For Immediate Release episode #490 - co-hosted by yours truly (Dan York)

2009-10-08T19:45:36-04:00

Today I had the fun of filling in for Neville Hobson and joining Shel Holtz as a co-host for For Immediate Release episode #490. Neville was busy in his first week with his new job and so Shel asked me if I was interested in co-hosting. I happened to have a block free in my schedule in the middle of the day so I was glad to join Shel. Long-time readers know that I've been submitting weekly reports into FIR for probably over four years now, so I'm obviously quite familiar with the show, the format, etc.

As you'll hear in the show, Shel and I had quite an enjoyable time covering a wide range of topics about which both of us are passionate. The summary Shel wrote is:

Content summary: Dan York joins Shel as guest co-host while Neville copes with demands during his first week in his new job; our interview with Steve Rubel on lifestreaming and other matters is set for Friday; Dan reports that a lot of good content is coming out of the Inbound Marketing Summit, which is taking place today and Friday; Dan talks about his marketing and communications responsibilities at Voxeo and how he uses the concept he has dubbed “the attention wave”; Sallie Goetsch reports on the death of podcasting; Media Monitoring Minute; News That Fits: the FTC issues rules for affiliate bloggers in the U.S., companies continue to invest in social media but 54% of them block their own employees, a company owns up to unethical behavior, a deep dive into Twitter statistics including the behaviors that promote retweeting; music from Matthew Ebel; and more.

Links to the articles we discussed can be found in the show notes over on The New PR Wiki.

It was quite fun and I thank Shel for asking me. Schedule permitting I'd be glad to do it again sometime.

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Today's launch of Google Wave - some links and initial thoughts

2009-10-01T23:25:13-04:00

Unless you were under a rock, or are not in the tech part of the online world, you knew that yesterday into today was "the big day" when Google Wave launched it's wider public preview. Having had a Wave login since back in July, but not honestly had a whole lot of folks to try it out with, I was pleased to get the invite this morning to join in the public preview. If you are in the world of Wave, I can be found at:

~~danyorkLPG@gmail.com~~ danyorkLPG@googlewave.com

Feel free to invite me to a wave. [UPDATE: It appears that within Wave, you have to use the "@googlewave.com" address.]

LINKS, LINKS AND MORE LINKS...

There were, of course, a zillion stories written over the past couple of days related to Google Wave. Some of the ones I found most useful in understanding the basics:

ReadWriteWeb: 100,000 Google Wave Preview Invites: Everything You Need to Know About Tomorrow's Launch
Lifehacker: Google Wave First Look
Ars TechnicaTurning the tide: a hands-on look at Google's Wave
ReadWriteWeb: Widgets, Robots & Extensions: A Few Things to Try Once You Get Your Google Wave Invite
TechCrunch: Google Wave Starts Rolling, Picks Up Over 100,000 New Riders

Mashable has also had extensive coverage over the past few months, as has RWW in particular.

There were some other posts I found interesting:

LA Times: How Google Wave could transform journalism
Louis Gray: Google Wave Hits Shore. Flash Flood Warning In Effect.
Salesforce.com: Getting in Front of the Wave

The Salesforce.com demo, in particular, was quite compelling and intriguing to see how Google Wave could fit into existing business apps like Salesforce.

With ANY service that was so incredibly hyped as Wave, there was the inevitable backlash... predicted by a TechCrunch article, chronicled by a RWW piece and certainly given the greatest roasting by none other than Robert Scoble himself:

TechCrunch: Google Wave: There Will Be Backlash
ReadWriteWeb: Geeks Try Google Wave, Have Mixed Feelings
Robert Scoble: Google Wave Crashes on Beach of Overhype

Many, many, many more posts out there, naturally, and I'm sure many more will come in the days and weeks ahead as more people try it out. (I would also be remiss if I didn't point out Dion Hinchcliffe's great post from back in May: "The enterprise implications of Google Wave - Definitely worth a read.)

SOME INITIAL THOUGHTS

As I worked with the public preview today, I did have some initial thoughts:

Overall, I definitely LIKE it - Having worked with it for a while, I have to say that the potential for near-real-time collaboration is pretty amazing. It's great to see the ecosystem of applications (gadgets and robots) developing. The preview seems pretty fast and stable. And it's all built on XMPP and other open standards with the promise of a distributed architecture. All in all pretty impressive.
UI takes some getting used to - Having said that, the user interface to Google Wave does take some getting used to. Just the way comments are inserted... it's part IM... part email... part wiki. You might be leaving a comment toward the bottom of a wave when someone else inserts something toward the top. Just takes a bit to understand.
Namespace shared with GMail - This is either a good thing if you have a GMail name you like, or an annoying thing if you were hoping to get a particular name. In my case, I had perhaps naively hoped that maybe I could get "danyork", but since someone else has that for GMail already, I couldn't. So I wound up using my GMail account name. To be honest, it makes sense for Google to do it this way. There will just be namespace collisions for people like me with common names. So it goes.
Yet another place to check for messages - Both Louis Gray and Robert Scoble mentioned this, and I definitely agree... your Google Wave inbox becomes yet another place to check for messages. I already have a work email account, a personal email account (well, several, but all coming into one client), a Skype IM account, a dozen other IM accounts aggregated into Adium... so in addition to checking all of those I need to check my Wave inbox. And because it is web-based I don't have a way in my Mac's Dock area to know there are new messages. Hopefully at some point it will be integrated with GMail or provide some other way to help us with this issue.
Distributed architecture isn't there yet - I realize that this is only a "preview" for 100,000 people, but I'm impatiently interested to see the distributed architecture outlined at Waveprotocol.org. As I recently wrote about at great length, the "Internet Way" is to have distributed, decentralized architectures. Services like email or the web where: 1) anyone can set up their own server; and 2) you don't have to ask anyone for permission to do so. Google Wave holds out the promise of giving us a very rich collaboration infrastructure built on a distributed, decentralized model. I want to get there. Today. :-)

Those were some initial thoughts... I'm sure I'll have more as time goes on and I'll write about them here.

What do you think? If you are in the initial preview pool, what has your experience been?

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Visualizing an "Attention Wave" - What does it look like?

2009-09-29T22:56:34-04:00

What does an "Attention Wave" look like? Building on my last two posts of:

I thought I'd share a quick sketch of one way of visualizing what you are trying to create (click the image for a larger image):

There are undoubtedly other ways you could picture this, but hopefully this provides one view.

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Tomorrow is "Google Wave Day" - some links to learn more...

2009-09-29T20:51:57-04:00

If you're in the tech part of the blogosphere, you are probably aware that tomorrow Google will send out 100,000+ invites to Google Wave. It's a big deal, really, as a larger audience gets a view into what Wave is all about. Thankfully the folks at RWW put together a great post:

100,000 Invites: Everything You Need to Know About Tomorrow's Google Wave Preview Launch

For those wanting the "official" Google perspective, here you go:

Now if only I could remember my %#$#% password to get into my Wave sandbox account, I could find out tomorrow how to get set up in the "real" Google Wave.

I'm looking forward to seeing Wave in action with a larger audience!

Creating an Attention Wave - A Case Study in how multiple corporate blogs can deliver different perspectives

2009-09-24T06:50:02-04:00

What is the value in having multiple corporate blogs? How can they help you tell multiple sides to a story?

When I wrote my original "Creating an Attention Wave" story, I mentioned in the "Package Components" section about creating multiple posts in different corporate blogs to go out as part of the overall "package". Commenter Tamara Gruber liked this emphasis and relayed her own story:

A client of mine just did an announcement through a blog post from the CEO that talked about the new features and business benefits. That was followed on by a post from the CTO that got into the nitty gritty details. All of these pieces help tell the story. We always need to remember to step outside and take an outsiders view and guide them through the news with multiple forms of content to make sure they "get it."

I thought it might be illustrative to provide a specific example of how I and my team used this concept with a recent announcement we made at Voxeo.

THE EXAMPLE

Back in August at the SpeechTEK conference in New York City, we put out this news release on August 25, 2009, announcing the newest version of our software, Prophecy 10:

Voxeo Announces Prophecy 10: The Unlocked Communications™ Platform

We followed that with a series of blog posts and a video podcast across several blogs:

Voxeo Talks (our main corporate blog)
Unlocking Communications with Voxeo’s Prophecy 10
(8/25/09 - re-telling of news release in a more human voice)

Voxeo Developer's Corner (technical topics for developers)
Make your existing VoiceXML (and CCXML and CallXML) apps multi-channel: add SMS and IM today…
(8/25/09 - includes screenshots)

How to: IM and Text/SMS Your VoiceXML Applications!
(8/27/09 - includes screenshots and code samples)

The Tropo Blog (posts about our Tropo.com platform)

Add SMS and IM to any existing Tropo application in Ruby, python, PHP, JavaScript or Groovy… today!
(8/25/09 - brief post with a screenshot)

Messaging with Tropo
(8/27/09 - longer technical post with screenshots and code samples)

IMified Blog (posts about our IMified platform)

SMSify your apps
(8/25/09 - brief post with a screenshot)

VoiceObjects Developer Blog (posts for developers using our VoiceObjects tool)

How to IMify your voice application
(8/25/09 - longer post with step-by-step instructions)

Emerging Tech Talk (video podcast)

Emerging Tech Talk #34 – Jose de Castro about Voxeo’s SpeechTEK booth and the 2,000 node telephony cluster built on netbooks
(8/27/09 - video interview with one of our developers about the demo we had at SpeechTEK)

Altogether we had 5 supporting blog posts on the day of the launch and a total of 7 blog posts and 1 video podcast within 48 hours of the launch.

All of these blog posts, once posted to our blog sites, also were distributed to readers via:

our Twitter stream
our Facebook page
our Friendfeed stream
RSS feeds, both for the individual feeds and an overall "All Voxeo Blogs" feed
email to subscribers to our "All Voxeo Blogs" email list

All of this distribution happened automatically through our platform.

A FEW COMMENTS

As I look down the list of posts, several points pop into my mind:

MULTIPLE AUDIENCES - As you look through the different posts, you can see that they are written to cater to the different users of our various platforms and tools. They get specifically into how the announcement matters to the specific audience.
DIFFERENT DEPTHS - The posts vary in technical detail. Both the Voxeo Talks post and the ETT video focus on the overall message. Some of the other posts touch on the very basics of how someone can get going - and then a few dive into technical details and even include code samples.
VARIED HEADLINES - The headlines... the titles of the posts, vary widely. There is the Voxeo Talks post title that uses the "Unlocked Communications" theme we were announcing in the release. There are longer, more descriptive headlines. There are shorter headlines. You can easily tell which are my titles... they are the longer ones (outside of Voxeo Talks). I tend to write my headlines for Twitter. I literally do copy/paste my title over into Tweetdeck to see: 1) will it fit into 140 characters with enough room for a retweet and for a link; and 2) how does it look in Twitter. The goal is of course to get people to open your link. But I do also like having the shorter titles mixed in there as well. Some of them are short and succinct... I might have changed a couple but overall it's a good mixture.
DEVELOPER-CENTRIC - In looking over the posts in hindsight, outside of the Voxeo Talks post and the ETT video, they are all focused on developers who use our various platforms and tools. While that is great to reach out to folks working on our platforms, developers are only one of our audiences. What's clearly missing as I look at this is anything related to more of a business focus, outside of the VT and ETT posts. The opportunity was here to put up, for instance, a post like "Prophecy 10 Brings SMS and IM To Your Contact Center" or "Want to move your customer interaction beyond voice?"... you get the idea... something that addressed the business impact of the announcement. (Next time...)

There were also different authors of the posts which provided different wording, different writing styles, etc.

THE CAVEAT

So the good news was that we had multiple posts across multiple blogs addressing multiple audiences and using multiple headlines.

Going back to my Attention Wave post, though, for a variety of reasons we didn't package all of this content as a "wave". Even on the first day, the 5 blog posts streamed out over the course of the day, and the other 3 streamed out two days later. Largely the major issue was that we were simultaneously involved in the largest trade show presence we have all year... so our own internal attention wasn't able to focus on preparing the package of content.

Now I don't know that this was necessarily a bad thing. The upside of streaming the content out over the course of several days is that you kept the mention of the announcement flowing out through the distribution channels. There is a case to be made to have an initial wave of posts - and then follow that with subsequent posts to keep the attention. (Wait! Shall I call those "attention ripples"? :-) )

IN THE END

So in the end, what kind of coverage did we get? how effective were the multiple posts, etc.? That will have to be the subject of another post at some point because this one is already way too long...

What I wanted to do here in this post was illustrate how I/we used multiple blogs to tell different sides of the story. I hope this was helpful and if any of you have pointers to other posts where people have similarly outlined how they used multiple blogs to tell multiple sides of a story, please do leave links in the comments. Thanks.

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Technorati Tags: attention, attentionwave, pr, socialmedia, blogging, business

USA Today: 750 photos per second uploaded to Facebook

2009-09-23T08:32:52-04:00

In today's USA Today was a story which was posted online as "Facebook's 'tagging' option is a big hit with photo sharing" ... but I preferred the print headline:

At Facebook... 1 second = 750 photographs

By whatever metric you want to use and whatever headline you like, the number is rather staggering. Consider the larger numbers mentioned in the article:

Some 2 billion photos a month — or nearly 70 million a day — are uploaded to Facebook. By comparison, Yahoo's popular photo site Flickr gets 3 million uploads a day.

Two billion photos a month. Given Facebook's recent news of crossing over 300 million users, that's roughly 7 photos per month from each user. Considering that many of those 300 million users are "casual" users who may only login occasionally - and in some cases very occasionally, it's probably much more likely that a smaller core of people are uploading larger numbers of photos. Again, however you measure, it's an amazing number of photos.

The USA Today article talks about the "tagging" capability within Facebook as driving this growth in photo uploads. That may well be a contributing factor, but for me a large part of why I've uploaded photos to Facebook is:

Simplicity

It's incredibly easy to upload images into Facebook, either through the website or through mobile apps like the iPhone app. Right at the top of your Facebook login screen is this:

Right in my iPhone app is the ability to take a photo and instantly upload it. I've used this on a personal level to upload various photos I've taken directly into my Facebook account. On a business level, I used this a great deal at a recent trade show and uploaded the photos directly to Voxeo's Facebook Page. It's simple and easy. It's also incredibly easy to organize the pictures once they are up in Facebook.

It's also easy to upload pictures and organize them in Flickr, too, but I do admit that I've found myself doing that less and uploading to Facebook more. A large part of that is the new Facebook app on the iPhone which is a great all around app. (And no, I haven't tried out the new Flickr app yet.) I do admit, though, that there is an element of truth to the USA Today piece... part of the allure of uploading to Facebook is the social element and how others can easily see and comment on your photos.

Again, though, amazing stats in terms of numbers of uploads...

Creating an Attention Wave - Building a Package Around Your News Release

2009-09-09T09:23:00-04:00

So you have some news you want to get out there. You are thinking of issuing the standard old news release... Yet in the era of the "real-time web", when new stories are found through services like Twitter, Facebook, and FriendFeed; when the ranks of formal journalists are shrinking and the ranks of online writers are growing - and the pressure to publish is greater than ever; when there are thousands upon thousands of stories coming out each day... in all of that mess...

how do you get people to pay attention to your news?

Today, in late 2009, I've seen many of us in the PR and marketing space sending out more than a news release... creating a "package" of related stories in multiple media. As I've tried to explain this method to other people, I have recently found it useful to talk about this in terms of aiming to create an "Attention Wave". Let me explain - and I'd love to hear your thoughts on whether this framework helps in explaining what it is we aim to do.

THE GOAL

Ultimately, of course, you want customers to read about your news and buy more of your services, products, widgets, etc. or promote your cause, goal, etc. Naturally for them to read about your news, you need to get people to write about your news.

Can you do this with a single news release?

Unless you are Apple announcing their latest sexy gadget - or Google announcing their latest free service, the answer is almost certainly... no. The reality is that journalists, bloggers and everyone else writing online are inundated with a zillion stories every hour of every day. And they are scanning those endless headlines through Twitter, FriendFeed, RSS readers, email inboxes, search results and other aggregation means.

You have one... maybe two seconds to get their attention and have them open your content.

That's it.

Naturally, you need solid headlines that catch their attention and make them want to follow the link to read your content... but that's the subject of another post.

What I am talking about here is assembling a "package" of content centered around your news release that hits the web in one wave... multiple stories, some from you and some from others, cascading through the "real-time web", followed ideally by retweets and other redistribution / re-posting so that journalists and those writing online have multiple opportunities to see your content - and potentially will investigate for no other reason than that they are seeing many mentions of it.

The goal is to lengthen the time of exposure of your story to journalists, bloggers and anyone else writing.

Instead of 1 or 2 seconds while a writer is scanning new headlines, maybe you get 10 or 20 seconds... maybe a couple of minutes as stories appear and are redistributed... maybe more... maybe significantly more.

TODAY'S FUNDAMENTAL DIFFERENCE

Nothing I've said so far is really different from "PR 101". It's always been the goal of PR to earn coverage of your news. We've always done pre-announcement briefings with the goal of getting people to cover you and come out with stories around the time of your news release.

The difference in our new world of social media is this:

The opportunity has never been greater to tell your story in your own words.

I'm talking about more than just the social media release, although that may be one of the communication tools you use in your overall package.

I'm NOT talking about creating a series of Twitter accounts to spam Twitter... or generating bogus stories on bogus web sites linking to your content. Those are games played by people who usually lack a story to tell - and in this world of transparency you will probably be called out on doing that. I'm also NOT talking about getting listed on TechMeme, Digg, or whatever the major news aggregation site may be for your industry - that may be an outcome of your work... but I'm talking about before you get to that.

You. Sitting at your computer. Putting together a package around your news. Aiming to generate a wave of attention focused on your news.

THE MAJOR CAVEAT

First, before I go further, there is of course one major caveat:

YOU MUST HAVE A STORY WORTH TELLING!

No amount of packaging can really help a worthless story. People now have a pretty high B.S.-detector. You might succeed in getting your story a bit more attention - but the backlash might also not be to your liking.

Let's assume you have a decent story to tell...

PACKAGE COMPONENTS

The pieces of your overall "package" will obviously vary according to your industry, your specific announcement, etc., but would typically include items such as:

a formal news release, including components targeted at making it easier for people to tell your story:
- company/organization logos
- pictures of the executives or others quoted in the news release
- pictures of the product, or visually interesting screenshots
- links to a video and other components of your package
a post on your corporate blog (you have one, right?), "humanizing" the more formal language of your news release and explaining the release in a more conversational tone
one or more embeddable videos, posted to your blog site or YouTube channel, providing a video interview, a demonstration, or other content. This could be multiple videos... perhaps one an interview with someone quoted in the news release going into more detail and a second providing more of a demo of the product. They need to have "embed codes" that allow writers to embed the video directly into their blog or news site.
a "deeper dive" post that goes into more detail around whatever was announced. Ideally with some interesting diagrams or other images that could be incorporated into other posts. Potentially, depending upon your industry, some sample apps or source code or items that others can try out.
companion posts on company/employee blogs: if you have other blogs for your company, perhaps targeted at specific audiences, can you plan a post related to your news that is relevant to that audience or vertical? can you ask employees to post on the topic of your news on their own blogs (assuming it is relevant to do so)?
companion posts on external/friendly blogs: do you know of people in the community around your company (you have one, right?) who might be eager to write about your new product or service?
posts on media/blog sites, resulting from pre-announcement briefing of appropriate media outlets.

Note that I am advocating for use of a formal news release. Multiple reasons, including the fact that news releases through wire services reach people who might not otherwise see the news - and also appear in news aggregation sites. They also serve as a formal statement of public record for many companies. The act of creating a news release also ideally has the effect of helping you tune your message and get it down to the essentials. (Or not, given some of the lousy news releases I've seen come through my inbox.)

Keep in mind, too, that my list is just a guideline. Maybe you want to include an audio podcast - or a slide presentation posted to your SlideShare account - or a supporting white paper. Whatever works for you... the point is that you are just creating multiple pieces surrounding and complementing your news release.

THE RATIONALE OF MULTIPLE COMPONENTS

Beyond the obvious effect of having multiple pieces go out at the same time and create the wave of headlines, there are some other reasons for creating the package:

Reaching different subscriber bases - Some people will want to read your news in Twitter. Some will in RSS. Some in email. Some in dedicated sites like YouTube. Some will be interested in a particular aspect of how your news applies. In some cases you might be able to distribute pointers to your news release in all those channels. In some cases you may want to create channel-specific content.
Addressing different learning/consuming styles - Some people want just short, brief summaries. Some people want detailed technical info. Some people will prefer to watch a video or a screencast rather than read an article. You can address these audiences through different pieces. Have the formal news release... then put the concise summary on your corporate blog, or perhaps a "news summary" page. Post a technical deep dive on a developer blog. Put a video up on YouTube. Create a summary post somewhere linking all of this together.
Enabling others to tell your story - You want to make it easy for other people to tell your story to their audiences. If it's a compelling story that people will want to share, make it easy for them to do so. Provide the pictures, the screenshots... make the video embeddable (and please don't make it "auto-play"!)... make this all easy and "self-service" so that people who want to write about your story can do so.

Creating the "package" of pieces lets you do all of this.

THE MULTIPLE HEADLINE EFFECT

An advantage of building a package like this, too, is that you can also try out different headlines in the different components of the package. The main news release can have the more formal headline:

XXXXX ANNOUNCES REVOLUTIONARY PRODUCT YYYYY

The main corporate blog post can say:

Our Product YYYYY cures cancer, solves world hunger and more

while another post on a targeted blog can say:

How Product YYYYY Delivers 6-Month ROI to the Financial Industry

or:

Man, check out how Product YYYYY smokes the competition

You get the idea... multiple headlines, each of which appears then in those various tools and searches monitored by media/bloggers/others. You have a chance to see what will work.

ASSEMBLING THE PACKAGE

Obviously, putting together all the pieces like this can take a good deal of effort... and time. Generally the process will be something like this:

Finalize the news release in advance of the launch date. Depending upon your capacity to produce online content (i.e. how quickly you can do so), you'll need that news release some amount of time in advance... 24 hours? 48 hours? 72 hours? More? You need the news release signed off on for your final messaging - and also to get to those who will prepare companion pieces.
Determine the URL of the news release. If you can know the URL where your news release will be when it goes live, you can pass this along to those writing companion pieces so that they will link back to the release on your site.
Determine the launch time and date. (And remember timezones when relaying the info) This is important for communicating to those who will write supporting pieces. Ideally you would like the various pieces to hit in the same general timeframe. This is also incredibly important with regard to who will see your stories. If you are in the US, do you want to go live in the early morning US Eastern time? (probably) Or for a European audience?
Develop your companion pieces. Some of the companion pieces can be developed in advance and tweaked with final messaging - others may need final messaging before you start them. (For instance, video may involve too much post-production to re-do, and so you may want to wait for final messaging.)
Deliver pre-announcement briefings. To anyone writing companion pieces, internally or externally, as well as to media sites interested in writing about your news.

And so on... most of this at this point is "PR 101" in how you gear up for an announcement.

UNLEASHING THE WAVE

At the designated time and date, ideally your news release goes out over the wire... your own blog posts appear... your video is live on YouTube... and the stories start appearing.

Some of this you can prepare in advance. Most blogging platforms let you schedule posts. Videos can be uploaded to YouTube and set to be private (which then also gives you the URL you can add into the wire service when setting your news release to go). Other content can be ready in offline editors for posting. Regardless, there will be work to do to make it all start flowing.

Once it starts, you need to make sure you have a tweet (or several) going out in Twitter, a message going out on your Facebook fan page, in Friendfeed and any other services you use.

After that, it's engaging in the conversation in the real-time media, responding to comments, retweeting other stories you see appearing, and all the other things we do these days.

MEASURING THE WAVE

It should go without saying that if you are going to put this much work into preparing for a release, you need to understand in advance how you are going to measure the results. What kind of web analytics do you have available to you? Can you include custom (and therefore trackable) URLs in your pieces? Can you use URL shorteners like bit.ly that can track usage?

At a higher level... do you have an idea of what constitutes success?

Entire blogs and blog posts are written on the subject of measurement - be sure you have a plan.

PREPARING FOR PROBLEMS

What happens if someone runs with the story before you are ready? What happens if your video doesn't work? Or your web site goes down? Or one of the companion web sites? All the usual concerns you need to think about...

IN THE END

If you do this right... with a compelling story... an solid "package" of complementary materials... good headlines, etc., the opportunity is there to see this "attention wave" pass through the real-time aspects of the web today and generate some coverage. If it works well, you may indeed see the wave grow for a while.

There are no guarantees, of course. You may do all of this and at the time you go live there is some major disaster... or some celebrity action... (or Apple product release)... or something to divert attention away from you. But your odds of getting attention are way better than when you were thinking of just issuing that one news release.

THOUGHTS?

This way of thinking about what we are aiming to do as an "attention wave" works for me... but I am curious to hear your thoughts, feedback, criticism and opinions.

What do you think of all this? Do you think this is realistic? Unrealistic? A good way to think about the process? Or just the same basic stuff PR has been aiming for but given a slightly different spin? Any pieces I'm missing above?

Have you used a process similar to this in the past? How did it work for you? What problems did you run into?

Have you seen particular companies, organizations or brands that have stood out in your mind for using a process like this? Anyone specific - or any specific announcement - stand out in your mind? Pointers to examples left in the comments would be greatly appreciated.

Any other comments or feedback?

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Re-examining how I use Facebook - and again the blurring of our lives

2009-09-08T08:42:58-04:00

Who do you "friend" on Facebook? And how do you resolve the tension between private and public interaction?

It's funny how synchronicity works some times. Last week I was thinking about writing a post about how my use of Facebook has changed - or perhaps will change... when a note in my Twitter feed pointed me to a post from Michael Hyatt called "Re-Thinking My Facebook Strategy" which hit many of the points I was thinking about writing.

MICHAEL HYATT'S DILEMMA

Hyatt, who is CEO of Thomas Nelson, Inc, hits one of the central dilemmas relating to our online networking - the incredibly loose way in which we use the word "friend". Leaving aside all the English teachers rolling over in their graves at the way we are now using "friend" as a verb (ex. "I wasn't sure if I should friend him."), Hyatt provides a useful taxonomy of the types of people we interact with online:

Family: These are the people who are related by blood or by marriage. I have occasionally been too loose with term, too. I have used it to refer to close personal friends or even the “Thomas Nelson family.” But I don’t think this is accurate or helpful. It creates the illusion of something that is not true. From now on, I am going to use this word as it was intended.

Friends: These are the people I know in real life. They are people I have met face-to-face, enjoy being around, and interact with in real life. (These three elements are key.) Frankly, a few of these relationships started off online through Twitter. Over time, they grew and developed. Regardless, I have a few deep and significant friendships. But if I am honest, I don’t have many. I only have so much time available.

Acquaintances: These are people I have met online or off. I may know their name or even their face. We may even have been friends at some point in the past, but we don’t have an ongoing relationship. We only know one another at a superficial level, and that’s just fine. We just have to be clear that these are not are “friends.”

Fans: These are the people who know my public persona or my work. This is also where people get confused because the relationship is not mutual. For example, I am a fan of Chris Brogan. We have even met once. I know lots of stuff about him, because of his blog and Twitter posts. This creates the illusion of intimacy. If I am not careful, however, I could fool myself into thinking I have a relationship with Chris. I don’t. I’m just one of his many fans.

Hyatt goes on to discuss his decision to only keep as "friends" on Facebook his family and actual "friends". His acquaintances and friends he has moved over to a newly-created Fan Page within Facebook. Through this exercise, he has gone from having 2,200 "friends" on Facebook to down to 100. He notes these lessons:

You have to understand the difference between friends, acquaintances, and fans.

If I try to be everyone’s friend, I will be no one’s friend. I must be deliberate and selective.

I will probably offend some of the people I unfriended. That’s okay. My sanity and real friends are more important than meeting the expectations of fans and acquaintances.

I need to be very careful who I accept as a friend on my profile going forward. Just based on mouse clicks, it’s three times as much work to unfriend someone as friend them.

The comments to both this post and Hyatt's earlier post about his dilemma make for interesting reading. How we relate to each other in online sites like Facebook is in my mind a key part of how we build our online identities as we all live in this increasingly interconnected space. As I wrote about back in January 2009 in a post "The blurring of our lives: Does learning info about co-workers via Facebook improve connections? Or feel creepy?", the different contexts in which we have traditionally interacted with people are all crashing together. The larger ramifications of this on a cultural level are still to be determined.

MY OWN CASE

Now I'm obviously not the CEO of a publishing company and don't have quite the high public profile that Michael Hyatt has. But I do have a public profile... through my various online sites and blogs, my weekly reports into the FIR podcast, my fairly heavy use of Twitter, my very public persona for Voxeo in blogs and Twitter and various other ways that I generate content online. Will all of that online extroversion do come the many Facebook connections (and connection requests) from so many people. Through all of that, I've made some wonderful connections - many of which started online and grew to include face-to-face meetings at various conferences or events. Some of those relationships have remained entirely online but have grown to become what I would consider true friendships.

And yet in other cases I've received connection requests from people who "follow" me in some context... perhaps Twitter... perhaps FIR... perhaps my various blogs... and I haven't really known how to handle them.

Now I've always applied fairly stringent criteria to whom I accept connection/friend requests from on both Facebook and LinkedIn. A number of years ago, I wrote about how "promiscuous linking" weakened the "web of trust" within services like LinkedIn. And I've applied that in LinkedIn very strongly... with perhaps only 1 or 2 exceptions that were accepted in moments of weakness, I know personally and have interacted in some capacity with the 500+ contacts I have in LinkedIn. I don't accept someone's connection request unless I do know them.

On Facebook, it's been similar: I've been fairly stringent about who I accept as a "friend" - although I admit that in the early days I was a bit more open. I joined Facebook several years back shortly after it had been opened up beyond the college/university crowd and there was a good-sized group of us trying to figure out what this Facebook thing was all about - and also how it could or could not be used for business communication. So for a while, I was accepting many friend requests from people I knew only peripherally, many of whom Hyatt would have termed acquaintances at best and perhaps really more "fans". Add to that... all the people I know who are friends, but are friends from different contexts... and it gets interesting.

In the words of Facebook... "It's complicated."

MY CHANGING USAGE OF FACEBOOK

Along the way, I've found that the way I use Facebook has changed somewhat dramatically. In the earlier days, I was exploring it mostly as a business communication tool. My updates... my applications... my notes... all of them were much more business-focused. (And many of my friends probably view my newsfeed today as mainly that... although I can assure them it was more so in the past.)

But somewhere along the way... perhaps sometime after I made my abortive attempt to connect my Twitter firehose directly into my Facebook status updates for a few weeks (resulting example (one of many): "Dan, we are friends, but man, your updates are killing me - you're making up over 90% of my news feed!"), I found that I wanted to use Facebook differently.

I have found that I want to retreat inside the walled garden of Facebook (even while despising walled gardens and fearing for the future of the open Internet)... that I want to share more private information with a smaller group... that I want to share photos, perhaps even of family... that I want to engage in deeper conversations with people I know well - and through that come to know them better.

In part, I'll credit my wife for some of this change. An artist whose eyes routinely glaze over when discussion turns to the online world I live in, she resisted joining Facebook for ages. When she finally did recently, though, she became a very active user... and in watching her interactions I saw more of the possibility for deeper interaction. It's been fascinating, really, to see how she uses it.

THE PUBLIC/PRIVATE DILEMMA

My challenge, of course, is similar to Michael Hyatt's: How do you create a private space in which to have deeper interaction while also simultaneously nourishing and expanding/growing your public persona and public interactions?

Like Hyatt and many of those commenting to his posts, I have a VERY deep and strong aversion to Facebook's terminology of a "Fan Page". I'm NOT a celebrity. I want people to be able to interact with me publicly... yet I don't want them to have to use the bizarre terminology of calling themselves a "fan" of me.

It's the word "fan" that gives me the most trouble.

Being a "fan" has an implied endorsement... a positive feeling. You are a fan of someone or something... you like it... you support it... you endorse it. It makes me uncomfortable.

The "follower" term of Twitter or "subscriber" term of Friendfeed are far less emotionally loaded.

Perhaps if Facebook, in their current lust to become Twitter, could move to talking about "Public Pages" and letting people "subscribe" instead of become a "fan", those of us uncomfortable with the current terms might more readily make use of the function within Facebook.

SO... WHAT TO DO?

I don't know.

I do know that probably in the last year or so, I've become even more stringent in who I accept as a Facebook "friend". My criteria has become:

Do I know this person well?
Do I know them well enough that I am comfortable sharing with them personal information about myself?

If the answer to either is "no", then I either "ignore" the request or, in some cases, just park the request in my "Requests" area of Facebook waiting to make a decision.

This has from time to time put me in the uncomfortable situation where there have been people with whom I have peripherally interacted - and with whom I would perhaps like to interact more with - but with whom I don't yet have that comfort level. For those folks, I've perhaps tried to interact with them more on Twitter, where through @replies you can interact with people very easily without needing an established relationship.

As noted above, I don't like the "Fan Page" idea... and so I still don't know how to interact with those who want to engage with my public persona - and with whom I would definitely like to interact in that persona.

Or is perhaps the whole idea of private versus public interaction one I need to simply discard when it comes to Facebook?

We do, indeed, live in interesting times... and sorting out all these different ways of how we interact with each other in this blurred world will definitely take some time.

What do you do? If you have a public face, how have you separated your private versus public interaction in Facebook? Or have you not?

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USA Today: 750 photos per second uploaded to Facebook