NevilleHobson.com

Software should be smarter

neville@nevillehobson.com (Neville Hobson) — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 13:22:00 +0000

Earlier today, I updated a new program I’m trying out – Seesmic for Windows, which I wrote about last week.

After the installer had updated the app, I launched it but got an alert from Norton Internet Security 2010.

Up popped a security dialog saying “A program is behaving suspiciously on your computer. We recommend that you choose to block and remove it.”

As you can see in the screenshot segment (click it to see full image), it’s the Seesmic app. As I know where the app came from and I did want it to run, I chose to allow it to continue.

I’m pleased the Norton product did this: that’s what it’s there for. It’s one of the tools I use to protect me from bad stuff that might otherwise cause damage or be the means for crooks to take over the computer or steal content.

Yet I wonder whether the conditions that trigger a security alert like this need thinking about some more.

When I reviewed the complete security dialog, I noticed this description that gave a little bit of information on what attracted Norton’s attention to the app and so flag it as a security risk:

These may be typical behaviours of viruses or malware. Yet aren’t they also indicative of legitimate apps that are new and don’t have many people using them yet? Especially preview versions like the current Seesmic for Windows?

I’ve marked the app as ‘friendly’ so hopefully it won’t trigger a security alert when I install the next update.

Yet what else could be done by either the application software publisher or the security software publisher, or both? Such an alert does grab your attention in a heart-stopping kind of way and might be pretty alarming to some people who would likely choose the recommended option and not run the app at all.

Maybe Seesmic should tell Symantec (the publisher of Norton Internet Security) about the new app. The information then finds its way into Symantec’s SONAR system via LiveUpdates for the Norton product and so, when you run an app that has very few users and is very new, as Norton sees it, it doesn’t set off all the alarm bells.

Software should be as smart as that surely? Or is this more about people rather than software? People are definitely smart!

The Hobson and Holtz Report – Podcast #503: November 23, 2009

neville@nevillehobson.com (Neville Hobson) — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 21:50:06 +0000

Content summary: FIR Interview with Tac Anderson posted; the Media Monitoring Minute with CustomScoop; News That Fits: Texas hospital puts social media front and centre in Fort Hood shooting crisis, "Facebook for business" coming soon from Salesforce, Goldman Sachs’ expensive and poorly-thought-out PR initiative, when too much information is bad for the office, the coming together of SEO and PR, what FIR listener @46alpha does with social media in his day job; listener comments discussion; there will be a show on Thanksgiving Day; music from George Thorogood; and more.

Get FIR:

Messages from our sponsors: FIR is brought to you with Lawrence Ragan Communications, serving communicators worldwide for 35 years, www.ragan.com; Save time with the CustomScoop online clipping service: sign up for your free two-week trial, at www.customscoop.com/fir.

For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report, for November 23, 2009: A 64-minute podcast recorded live from Wokingham, Berkshire, England, and Concord, California, USA.

Links for the blogs, individuals, companies and organizations we discussed or mentioned in the show are posted to the FIR Show Links pages at The New PR Wiki. You can contribute – see the show notes home page for info.

FIR #503 show notes at The New PR Wiki

Share your comments or questions about this show, or suggestions for future shows, in the FIR FriendFeed Room. You can also email us at fircomments@gmail.com; call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803 (North America), +44 20 8133 9844 (Europe), or Skype: fircomments; comment at Twitter: twitter.com/FIR, or at Jaiku: fir.jaiku.com. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

Join the FIR Discussion Forum and extend your conversations with the FIR community. You can also join the FIR Facebook Community and become an FIR friend.

To stay informed about occasional FIR events (eg, FIR Live), sign up for FIR Update email news.

So, until Thursday November 26…

(Cross-posted from For Immediate Release, Shel’s and my podcast blog.)

WOMMA’s talkable tweets

neville@nevillehobson.com (Neville Hobson) — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 07:13:00 +0000

A conference report with a difference, created by John Moore – a deck full of comments by participants at the WOMMA 2009 Summit last week on points of interest from their individual perspectives on presentations and keynotes, all told in 140-character bites posted to Twitter.

As John describes them: talkable tweets.

Talkable Tweets from WOMMA's 2009 Summit

View more presentations from Word of Mouth Marketing Association.

John explains:

When you return from a conference chock-full of insights, it’s difficult to share everything you learned. Sure, you can transcribe your notes but your notes are bound to have some holes. You can also pull insights from summaries other attendees have posted on their blogs.

Or … you whittle through the thousands of tweets from attendees to carve out a more complete list of insights. That’s the path I’ve chosen to take after returning from WOMMA’s Creating Talkable Brands conference.

Over 470 attendees shared 3,600+ tweets (.pdf download) with the #WOMMA hashtag during the three-day conference. I’ve whittled down the 3,600+ tweets to a more digestible collection of 165 tweets and compiled them into this SlideShare presentation. Enjoy.

Thanks, John, for a most useful – and entertaining – take on an event.

An outstanding customer service experience

neville@nevillehobson.com (Neville Hobson) — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 12:27:00 +0000

I bought a new pair of shoes last week, a pair of Anatomic Gel slip-ons. The overall process, from first contact with the eventual retailer to delivery, was so outstanding that it’s the type of experience you really want to tell people about.

I’d seen these particular shoes in the Jones the Bootmaker shop in Reading the week before and tried them on. Oh, what comfort! Soft leather and gel in the soles must all combine to provide such exquisite comfort.

They didn’t have my size, though, and said it would take some weeks to order them. And they wanted the money up front. No thanks.

So I turned to the web and discovered lots of links to places selling this particular brand, which are made in Brazil.

I didn’t know nor have any prior experience with any of the places that showed up in the Google search on ‘Anatomic Gel shoes,’ so I clicked on the first link (non-sponsored) which took me to Walker and Gunn’s listing for these shoes. Even better from my point of view: all at sale prices.

I found the pair I wanted – £20 less than at Jones – and decided to order them. What prompted that decision to buy from a company on the web I’d never heard of let alone bought from before?

A number of things, really, including the various brands they sell, a sense that they’ve been around a while, the list of credit cards they accept, things like that. Plus they use UPS to deliver. So a feeling of an established business and worth the perceived risk.

That was late on a Sunday evening. I ordered the shoes and got an email almost immediately acknowledging the order. A good start.

Even better on Monday morning: an email to say they’d shipped the shoes via UPS and included a tracking number at the UPS website in case I wanted to see progress. The email also said the shoes should arrive the next day.

And they did. I savoured the experience in unpacking the box – tell me of anyone who doesn’t savour such an experience! – and the first thing I encountered was a personal letter from Walker and Gunn’s founder.

This impressed me no end. It may well have been a mail merge type of thing with a facsimile signature, not personal at all, but it felt personal.

Combined with all the other elements – email order acknowledgement, notification of delivery, arrival when they said the package would, the care with which the shoes had been packaged – this gave me a distinct feeling of genuine pleasure in doing business with this company.

So if you’re looking for a great pair of very comfortable and nicely-made shoes, there’s a place on the web you can buy them from that I highly recommend – head on over to Walker and Gunn of Northampton.

As for Jones the Bootmaker, sorry, you’re just too slow. And too expensive. Useful as a try-on place, though.

Coincidentally, I came across an interview in yesterday’s Telegraph with Mary Portas – known as Mary Queen of Shops among other things – who reckons we’re turning a corner in customer service where excellent service will return to the High Street.

I was especially intrigued to read her view of what the customer experience could be like in 2020, just ten years away:

[…] There’ll be so many brands we haven’t heard of yet, and names like Marks and Spencer partnering up with big technology brands. There will be an enormous amount of wellness shops, too, as well as clothing shops incorporating both social networking and musical/visual performances into their remit. It’s exciting.

I could also see the web simply being a natural extension of such physical retail experiences, far more than it is today.

Opportunity knocks.

FIR Interview: Tac Anderson, Social Media Director, Waggener Edstrom

neville@nevillehobson.com (Neville Hobson) — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 09:56:00 +0000

Tac Anderson, in his role of Director of Social Media for the PR agency Waggener Edstrom, led an effort to adopt the lifestreaming tool, Posterous, as a communication channel for the launch of Microsoft’s retail stores.

In this FIR Interview, co-host Shel Holtz explores with Tac the uses to which Microsoft is putting Posterous and how the results are being assessed. Tac also talks about Twendz Pro, the new real-time monitoring service launched recently by Waggener Edstrom.

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Download the MP3 file (9.89Mb, 24:34)
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About our Conversation Partner

Tac Anderson is the Director of Social Media at Waggener Edstrom’s Studio D group. Prior to that he worked at Hewlett-Packard where he managed both internal and external social media initiatives. Some of his work was a featured case study in the Harvard Business Review book Groundswell.

Tac has been actively engaged in social media marketing for the last 5 years. He’s a regular public speaker and blogs at www.newcommbiz.com.

Tac has a BA in Communications and an MBA from Boise State University. He currently lives in the Seattle area with his wife and 3 children.

Share your comments or questions about this podcast, or suggestions for future interviews, in the FIR FriendFeed Room. You can also email us at fircomments@gmail.com; call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803 (North America), +44 20 8133 9844 (Europe), or Skype: fircomments; comment at Twitter: twitter.com/FIR or at Jaiku: fir.jaiku.com. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

To receive all For Immediate Release podcasts including the twice-weekly Hobson & Holtz Report, subscribe to the full RSS feed.

This FIR Interview is brought to you with Lawrence Ragan Communications, serving communicators worldwide for 35 years. Information: www.ragan.com.

Podsafe music – On A Podcast Instrumental Mix (MP3, 5Mb) by Cruisebox.

(Cross-posted from For Immediate Release, Shel’s and my podcast blog.)

Marketers ‘destroy customer relationships online’

neville@nevillehobson.com (Neville Hobson) — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 08:04:00 +0000

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the problem with PR email, the results of a survey on people’s attitudes to the email that PR agencies and others send them.

The survey paints a dismal picture of how email is used in the PR business.

Now, here comes an equally bleak picture on what marketers do with email about their brands according to e-Orchard, a survey by London creative agency Stephens Francis Whitson.

Brand Republic reports:

[…] The report claims to have uncovered evidence of brand owners bombarding customers with irrelevant, mistimed and inappropriate emails.

It splits the brands into ’saints’ and ’sinners’, with the likes of Mini, BA and Ocado showing how it should be done.

While economic pressures are driving more brands online, many of the companies in the survey "are sending out blanket email campaigns simply because it is cheap to do so," the report claims.

The e-Orchard survey covers companies operating across a range of sectors such as retail, financial services, FMCG, travel, entertainment and leisure and argues that some brands surveyed showed:

Scant evidence of differentiated communications depending on customer knowledge, behaviour or value

Poor co-ordination of on and offline communications

Dangerously high frequency of highly repetitive, hard sell messages

Brands stuck on transmit: little attempt to engage in any genuine dialogue with customers

Rare examples of genuinely clever, creative, smart brand and commercial thinking

This looks like a worse picture than that suggested by the PR email survey.

Small comfort for anyone.

[Photo by cole007, used under Creative Commons license.]

Related post:

The problem with PR email

The Hobson and Holtz Report – Podcast #502: November 19, 2009

neville@nevillehobson.com (Neville Hobson) — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 07:14:00 +0000

Content summary: Mitch Joel’s book offer; FIR Interview with Tac Anderson coming; update on the FIR Twitter List; FIR #500: more listener predictions; Dan York reports; the Media Monitoring Minute with CustomScoop; News That Fits: Ronna Porter’s example on calling on your online community to verify your social media credentials in a job application, social media is influencing business decisions says new research from SNCR; David Philips reports; listener comments; music from Mario Tomic; and more.

Get FIR:

For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report, for November 19, 2009: A 65-minute podcast recorded live from Concord, California, USA, and Wokingham, Berkshire, England.

FIR #502 show notes at The New PR Wiki

Join the FIR Discussion Forum and extend your conversations with the FIR community. You can also join the FIR Facebook Community and become an FIR friend.

To stay informed about occasional FIR events (eg, FIR Live), sign up for FIR Update email news.

So, until Monday November 23…

(Cross-posted from For Immediate Release, Shel’s and my podcast blog.)

A new Twitter app for Windows users from Seesmic

neville@nevillehobson.com (Neville Hobson) — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 13:02:00 +0000

In my experience, the best way of interacting with your community on Twitter is by using a third-party application rather than via Twitter’s website.

My app of choice on the desktop is TweetDeck, a product I’ve been using since it first appeared last year and which I’ve frequently written about.

I also like Seesmic, an app with many similarities to TweetDeck and which is most often compared with TweetDeck in the various app popularity polls and reviews that appear from time to time.

Both TweetDeck and Seesmic are built on the Adobe AIR developer platform, meaning the apps are multi-platform that can run on Windows, Mac and Linux computers – handy from a developer point of view in particular. Both also offer apps for the iPhone.

Now Seesmic has introduced Seesmic for Windows, an application designed to run on Windows computers, and optimized for Windows 7, says Seesmic CEO Loic Le Meur.

If you’ve been using the existing Seesmic app, you’ll see from the screenshot (click for a full-size view) that the new Seesmic for Windows app is very similar from the look-and-feel point of view.

I’m trying it and like it a lot based only on usage so far today. Things I notice are how quick it is compared to the version that’s built with Adobe AIR, and the small memory footprint: 74Mb of RAM, according to Windows Vista’s Task Manager.

It’s missing quite a few things I’m used to – the right-click menu you get when you click a user’s avatar is lacking some features, for instance – but it is a preview, a beta, so expect some wonkiness in the early versions.

Great to see a development like this which reflects a clear need in the market for a Windows app as Loic says the “vast majority” of Seesmic users are on Windows.

I’ll contribute comment and opinion as I get to know Seesmic for Windows.

A day for social media monitoring

neville@nevillehobson.com (Neville Hobson) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 22:25:00 +0000

Monitoring and ROI are two hot topics when it comes to social media. They’re two of the hottest topics for an event focused on social media, and there is one taking place in London on Tuesday November 17, where I’ll be as a speaker and panel discussion facilitator.

Monitoring Social Media 09 is organized by Luke Brynley-Jones, and features an impressive line up of people and content all focused on discussion and analysis of topics like these:

The ROI of social media monitoring
Innovations in reputation management
Who controls social media data
Free vs paid monitoring services
Automated vs human sentiment detection
How to identify and contact influencers
The future of social media monitoring
Examples & case studies

It’s going to be quite a day. If you can’t be there physically, you can participate via Twitter – tweet your questions and reactions! – via the hashtag #msm09. There’s a also the Twitter List of Speakers you can follow.

If you can be there, well, see you there!

Social media ROI can be entertainment

neville@nevillehobson.com (Neville Hobson) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 19:39:56 +0000

You have to hand it to Socialnomics author Erik Qualman – he knows how to tell a compelling story and sell his message, which obviously promotes his book.

Check out his latest video Social Media ROI. Whatever you think of using the acronym ROI with social media – there is lots of different opinion out there – I think you’d agree that Qualman’s story makes it easier to understand a broad argument that social media means greater “financial efficiency” for many organizations, some of whom he names in the video.

Agree?