Social Signal

Make the most of your conference sponsorship

Rob Cottingham — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 18:59:57 +0000

Hey, you've sponsored a conference – good for you!

Chances are good you wanted to help these folks out, and support some productive conversation, learning and networking. Chances are also pretty good you want to get some benefit out of the sponsorship yourself with goodwill and exposure.

And when they said you'd have an opportunity to speak to the participants, you jumped at it. And you have a great 15-minute pitch carefully crafted by the folks in marketing, including a PowerPoint video that hits all the key selling points.

So why do you have this nagging feeling of impending disaster?

Maybe because you're about to turn that goodwill into impatience, even hostility.

Because those selling points are about to bounce off a wall of indifference and distraction. And because you're about to lose a great opportunity.

But I have two pieces of good news.

The first is, everyone's expecting you to do just that. It's what sponsors usually do at conferences. They deliver a pitch to an audience anxious to get on with the actual business of the conference: people who are painfully aware of the bill for conference fees, hotel, food and travel, not to mention time away from work, and who don't want to waste a minute on someone else's self-serving agenda. And then the sponsor walks offstage to tepid applause, silently wondering if maybe it would have gone over better with more animation in the PowerPoint deck.

So at least you have plenty of company.

And second, it's not too late to turn things around.

From someone who's attended and spoken at a lot of conferences, and who's written those speeches for other people, here are some ways you can do yourself and your audience a lot of good at your next sponsored event:

Lose the sales pitch. Whatever else you do, please don't pitch the audience. If all that means is you throw out the PowerPoint, and all you're left with is a quick "Hi, we here at Social Signal are thrilled to support this conference. I'll be here for the whole thing, and I hope you'll grab me to say hi. Have a great four days!"... well, you're now miles ahead of where you were.
Make it fast. Thank the audience and organizers for the opportunity to support the event, say briefly why it's important to you, add a personal note, and wrap up inside of three minutes. Rehearse it to make sure you're under that limit; if possible, record yourself and then listen to it from the standpoint of an audience member. Does anything sound false, self-serving, trite or dull? Cut it.
Introduce someone else. Instead of delivering the keynote, arrange with the organizers to introduce one of the conference's featured speakers - someone people are really anxious to hear. Keep your introduction short; you can indicate why the speaker's background or subject matter are so interesting to your company in a sentence or two, but the main thing is to get a little credit for helping to make an engaging presentation possible - and that means getting to that presentation quickly. (An added possibility: see if the organizers would be willing to name the keynote after your organization.)
Hyperlink. Prepare a longer message about your organization and why you're participating - on your own web site, or on a site like YouTube. Let your audience know they can see it there if they're interested, and that they can get more information about your products and services there as well. You'll be helping the people who are genuinely curious about you, without alienating the folks who aren't.
Announce something. Give your audience some genuinely exciting news... something that's exciting to them, and not just to your organization. And it should actually be news, not something you've announced already.
Razzle-dazzle 'em. If you can be genuinely entertaining, then go for it. Sometimes it works best to set something up in advance - for instance, by preparing a (genuinely) funny video.
Deliver a public service announcement. Talking about something you and your audience care deeply about, a cause your organization is supporting, can identify vital common ground. Be sure to have a call to action: a way interested audience members can learn more and add their support.
Pull an Oprah. Give your audience members something then and there. Chances are your budget doesn't allow you to give away cars, but that doesn't mean you can't offer something of real value. Have people on hand to hand out copies of a book, announce there are keychain drives with an ebook on them, or put up a claim code onscreen to download something free and valuable.
Deliver the keynote - really, really well. If and only if you have great content to share, then deliver a keynote. Lose every single one of your selling points; instead, deliver high-value information. Tell stories, and make them part of a compelling overarching narrative that speaks to your audience's hopes, dreams, ambitions and passions. Make it the best, most memorable speech of the event... and if you don't think you can clear that bar, then reconsider.

(Now, if you're the kind of discerning person who's reading our blog, chances are good you already know that it's better to engage your audience than to bore them. But maybe there's someone in your organization who hasn't quite figured that out yet... or figured out how to act on it. I'm not saying you should slip this under their door... but I'm not saying you shouldn't.)

When broadband isn't available, loband comes to the rescue

Rob Cottingham — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 23:10:48 +0000

Sometimes the niftiest tools are the ones that have been around for the longest time.

I just came across Aptivate's loband, a wonderfully handy web service that's been around since 2004. Loband lets you see highly-simplified versions of web pages, stripping out the fancy formatting and hefty graphics that can slow down users who don't have broadband Internet connections - mobile users, for instance, or people in developing countries.

Here's how it works:

Users in low-bandwidth areas browse to the small Loband website, and then request the site they want to view. Loband then downloads the site, reduces it in size, and then sends it on to the user. This can significantly speed up the user's browsing experience over a stable, low-bandwidth connection.

Loband requires no software download to function, works on most websites, and is automated and open-source.

Dandy. I've already come across one blog that links to its loband version as a way of offering users a lightweight alternative - very clever.

You won't get pretty graphics with loband... or, really, any graphics. Here's the Social Signal homepage as seen in Firefox:

And here's the same homepage in loband:

That second version may not be pretty, but it'll load a lot faster over a mobile or dial-up connection than our full site would.

I stumbled across loband thanks to a site (Patronus Analytical, which specializes in security for NGOs working in dangerous parts of the world) that's using it to offer readers a low-bandwidth version. Not a bad idea, and one we'll consider here at Social Signal.

In the meantime, feel free to browse us in low-bandwidth mode... and let us know if you find any glitches.

5 ways to think like a Mac user

Alexandra Samuel — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 22:34:13 +0000

This post is the 6th and final post of a series, Getting the most from your new Mac.

You've settled into your new lifestyle; you're moving from Mac newbie to Macompetent. But when you hit the wifi café for an Americano and a little surfing Safari, you feel like all those other Macbook-wielding hipsters can tell you're not quite one of them yet.

That's because there's more to being a Mac user than your choice of computer. Going Mac is an attitude, an aesthetic, possibly even a philosophical position. Here's how to shift your mindset so that you and your operating system become one:

We're back, we're Mac, don't give us flack. This ain't 1998 (and thank god for that). Today's Macs are able to deal with just about any standard PC file format: Word files, Excel files, video files, etc. (Though if you're using Office 2008 on the mac, you may need to retro-format your files so that friends with older version of Office can read your files; just save as .doc or .xls instead of .docx or .xlsx). Don't apologize for your Mac: if they're sending you files you can't read, the overwhelming odds are that they are doing something weird on their end. Unless you're in a field that's using specialty, PC-only software (e.g. for health records), expect equal treatment as a Mac user. Let your colleagues, vendors and employers know it's not acceptable to insist on web sites or services that are Windows- or Explorer-only.
Don't be a Masshole. The flip side of expecting reasonable accommodation is to restrain your own sense of superiority as a Mac user. It's very tempting to look down your nose at Windows users: their ugly machines, their painful crashes, their sad efforts at imitating the Mac interface. Thinking of a Windows user as a Mac user who hasn't yet seen the light may reduce your sense of hostility, but it will only heighten theirs. So try to remember: as much as the Apple lifestyle works for you, there are many people who are genuinely more comfortable and effective as Windows users. (I'm far less convinced by BlackBerry users who insist that a physical keyboard is more important than the downright joyful experience of using an iPhone.)
Explore strange new worlds. If you've been a Windows user, and you have an even moderate level of risk aversion, you've probably been very cautious about downloading and installing new software. As a Mac user, you can be more adventurous: particularly if you've installed anti-virus software (though Mac viruses are rare), you can download software with a high degree of confidence in its safety and easy un-installability. (Uninstalling is almost always a matter of just dragging a file or two to the trash). So try stuff out! You may find new tools to recommend to me (that's what the comments are for.)
Reach out and iTouch someone. Mac users are rabid evangelists -- well, a lot of us are. We love sharing our advice, tips, favorite apps, and beloved Mac sites. Don't be shy about chatting with the Mac user next to you in the café, especially if they've got lots of stickers on their MacBook (a pretty strong geek indicator) or they're cute (it's always fun to talk to cute-looking people in cafés).
Love your computer. The best thing about being a Mac user is that you can stop thinking of your computer as that machine that you do your work on, and actually enjoy spending time online. My own switch back came ten years ago: I woke up one morning, and reflected that while I'd gotten into Internet reseach because I just loved messing around on my computer, I wasn't enjoying my computer time anymore. I went out that very day and bought a G4 Mac, and as soon as I left Windows behind, I loved being on the computer again.

Now that you've Mac-ified your soul as well as your computer, it's time to discover and share your own Mac secrets. Share your favourite tips here or send them to us on Twitter, and let us know if you have any Mac questions we haven't answered.

"Chicks Who Click" this Saturday in Vancouver

Rob Cottingham — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 00:00:45 +0000

Here's an event that looks terrific: a one-day conference in downtown Vancouver for women in social media.

The details:

Chicks Who Click, a conference and networking event for women engaging in social media, is expanding internationally and will host its next conference in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Chicks Who Click is a community of like-minded women using social media to further collaborate, listen, learn and experiment with new media tools that will enhance their careers and personal networks. Conferences have sold out in Kansas City and Boulder, Colo., and are also planned for Dallas, Raleigh, N.C., and San Jose later in 2009.

The one-day conference will take place Saturday, June 26, at Listel Hotel, 1300 Robson Street. In addition, conference registration will also include a Friday night networking session, Chicks Who Mix, at the Alibi Room (157 Alexander Street) and a Saturday cocktail party.

“Chicks Who Click creates an opportunity for women to learn and collaborate in social media whether you’re just getting your toes in the water or run your own startup,” said Denise Smith, Chicks Who Click conference director.

Vancouver’s keynote speaker is Monica Guzman, the Seattle Post Intelligencer’s first online reporter and the main contributor to The Big Blog. In addition to Guzman, Chicks Who Click has 10 speakers including Rebecca Bollwitt, a renowned blogger and co-founder of sixty4media; Megan Cole and Victoria Revay, Co-Founders SPLRG; and Gillian Shaw, a journalist with The Vancouver Sun and Canwest. One of the goals of each of these conferences is to highlight local speakers along with national speakers.

Event sponsors include WalMart, Metzger Associates and Crocs.

The price for the entire conference weekend including all networking events and the Saturday evening cocktail party is $220. Attendees who may need an introduction may attend the 101 track on Friday afternoon for $59. Registration information may be found at http://www.chickswhoclick.net or by calling 720.833.5923.

When it comes to engagement, social media is the art of the possible

Rob Cottingham — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 23:01:44 +0000

I can't believe it!! Your organization isn't on Twitter? You don't have a Facebook page with discussion groups and a wall? You're not on MySpace, Bebo and FriendFeed?! OMFG, that's so weak! What are you thinking?!

Well, maybe you're thinking, "We don't have a large organization, and we have very few resources." Maybe you're thinking, "Some platforms make it easier to manage conversations than others." And maybe you're thinking, "I'm going to put our limited resources and finite attention where they'll do the most good."

You know what? Good for you.

I had a conversation with a friend a few days ago. He works with a public-facing organization that gets plenty of attention, both favourable and overtly hostile - and there are a lot of demands on the time of their tiny staff complement. They want to be sure they can respond to the inquiries they receive. And because they operate in an adversarial arena, their organization has to be constantly on the lookout for inappropriate content that their opponents and media critics would pounce on.

My friend wanted to know why he shouldn't dial back his organization's Facebook presence. It was all his team could do to check their page's last 20 posts for comments; keeping tabs on the hundreds that had preceded it was out of the question. And Facebook does nothing to help: no RSS feeds or notification stream for new comments, no back-end tools for monitoring engagement.

It's a dilemma facing a lot of organizations - government, for-profit and non-profit alike. Participation and conversation are the lifeblood of the social web, but they come at a real cost in terms of time and, often, money. And when a service like Facebook has deficiencies that amplify those costs many times over... well, then comes the time to make some hard choices.

If this sounds familiar, you're probably hearing constantly from people a lot like me who are gobsmacked that you aren't throwing your organization into the latest, coolest online spaces. But while the digerati might roll their eyes, they aren't the ones who have to live with the consequences of your decisions. And one-liners cribbed from The Cluetrain Manifesto aren't much help when you're dealing with a media feeding frenzy or an alienated supporter. ("I'm sorry we missed your anguished comment asking for 'a response, any response,' but what you have to understand is markets are conversations.")

So when you're thinking about where to direct your social media efforts, how do you handle the tension between limited resources and limitless demand for conversation?

Understand the space and what you're trying to accomplish there. I'm convinced the number one reason for organizations that fail in a new space is a lack of clear intention: they didn't know why they had to be on Twitter; they were just told they did. Understanding what you want to achieve - even if it's just to experiment and learn more about the platform and what you can do there - doesn't just help you shape your initiative at the outset; it's the only way of gauging whether you're succeeding.

Inventory the strengths and weaknesses of the platforms you're considering. Get a clear idea of the limits of the social network or web application you're looking at - both from a user's perspective and an administrator's, and looking at both the technology and the community. (For example, you may find that Digg has features you love, but a toxic commenting culture.)

Hang out. Nothing gives you an intuitive appreciation for a new space, online or offline, quite like spending time there. Play anthropologist and observe the rituals, the unspoken rules and the way people participate.

Understand the table stakes. What's the minimum level of engagement required to have a credible presence on that platform? If you aren't able to deliver that over the long haul, you probably want to call things off now until that changes. That said, you can always...

Constrain your presence. Your first foray onto a new social network doesn't have to be your organization's definitive, all-encompassing presence there. Instead, consider creating an outpost with a focused, limited purpose: for example, around a particular event or campaign. If that purpose has a built-in expiry date (say, when an event ends), so much the better; it gives you a graceful exit should you decide this isn't the platform for you. (An added advantage: focus often means a more compelling reason for users to participate.)

Identify the best bang for your buck (or your hour). Get to know the platform well enough to know where you get the highest-value engagement. Is it through comments on your own posts? Intervening in discussion boards on someone else's page? What kind of content attracts the best participation from your community?

Assess your needs realistically. Recognize that reaching out to people and responding to queries takes time. Make sure you have the resources to cover your engagement plans... or scale those plans down accordingly.

Get creative about staffing. You may not have enough time to monitor everything happening on a particular platform... but maybe your supporters can help you out. Consider asking them to help you identify comments that need replies, contributions that deserve to be recognized, offensive content, and content elsewhere on the network you should know about. Be upfront about what you're asking for and why - you don't want to look like you're trying to astroturf - and you may be able to magnify your impact online.

Start small and build out. One thing Facebook gets right is letting you switch engagement features on or off. You can launch a Page with only the Wall enabled, and begin calibrating your ambitions according to the level of conversation that emerges. Then, as time goes on, you can start switching more features on. (Or not.)

Manage expectations. Be upfront with your visitors about your intentions and goals, how you'd like them to participate, and what they can (and can't) expect from you. You might be surprised how willing most people will be to operate within those constraints... and how tolerant they'll be when you have to deal with people who aren't.

Assess how it's working for you. Look at the benefits and costs of your presence. Are you and your audience getting real value from your conversations? Are you freeing up resources you might have had to spend elsewhere (for instance, in customer support)?

Not the place for you? Plant a flag, move on... and monitor. It may well be that you decide right out of the gate that - hot new thing or not - a particular platform isn't a fit for you. Or maybe you've given it a shot, and the value just isn't there. Now may be the time to scale your presence there back to a bare maintenance level.

Wind down most of the conversational features of your profile (don't just shut them off without explanation; if there's been any kind of discussion there, the participants won't be happy) by explaining what you're doing and why. Include your contact information and links to platforms where you're focussing your community efforts. And then continue to provide the baseline level of attention you identified before you launched as the platform's engagement table stakes.

A minimum presence does three things: it ensures your organization's identity isn't being claimed by someone else on that platform; it provides a rallying point for your supporters on that platform to connect with you; and when the need or opportunity for more in-depth engagement arises, you have a great starting point.

Yes, there are people who will still call your presence weak. Let 'em. It's a lot better to keep a modest promise of engagement than to break an ambitious one. The lessons you learn from engaging in a small way will lay the foundation for larger-scale efforts in the future.

And nothing can shut a critic up quite like success.

10 action recommendations based on Industry Canada's Digital Economy conference

Alexandra Samuel — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 20:28:38 +0000

Today's Digital Economy conference has surfaced the hunger for a serious effort at moving Canada back into a leadership position in the global digital economy. As the day has unfolded, many people have noted that we need to meet that hunger with a concrete action plan. Here's my first crack at a set of recommendations, guided by our experience in the emergent field of social media, for both action and further dialogue.

Recommendations for future action:

Marry hardware and software. One of Canada's great success stories, RIM (of Blackberry fame) is here today. Another great success -- Flickr -- is absent. But Flickr shows what Canadians can do when they take the infrastructure of the web (mobile, wireles or wired) and marry it with our traditional strengths in community and content creation. Twinning hardware innovators with software innovators would be a great way to inspire software innovators to develop tools and business models that make the most of next-generation hardware, and vice versa.
Use Crown Corps as poster children. The Canadian government owns a number of corporations that could be used as models for business innovation. While no one could argue that Canada Post, Via Rail or the Atomic Energy Corporation are typical businesses, they face many of the same challenges as the rest of us. Challenging these companies to push the edge of the envelope in the effective and innovative use of ICTs -- and to transparently share their experience -- would make our investment in those companies do double duty.
Focus our attention. One commenter noted that policy efforts should focus on areas with greatest potential policy leverage. I'd note that many traditional areas of effective government intervention -- notably, content and culture -- are now subject to massive policy circumvention. While we can't abandon the culture sector, protecting conventional content production is a tough nut to crack. Tackling IT access and infrastructure - while expensive -- is at least amenable to effective government action.
Expand our definition of innovation. The feds' SRED program came up in the course of today's discussion; it's a great example of how our model (and support for) innovation are based on a relatively orthodox interpretation of tech innovation. Many of the most crucial tech investments involve trying new business models or forms of social interaction, rather than new technologies per se. Providing incentives for businesses to try crowdsourcing, online collaboration and customer engagement will help offset the risk aversion of organizations facing a new set of communications challenges and opportunities.
Tie tech innovation to environmental goals. Online collaboration and telework can help address two of our most pressing economic challenges: the coming skills shortage, and climate change. Incentivizing alternative work arrangements -- and supporting the development of technologies that make them possible -- will help reduce the carbon footprint of business while creating jobs that appeal to a new generation of workers.

Recommendations for future policy discussions:

Balance the question of what government needs to do with a discussion of where businesses can effect change. Many of the issues discussed today are more readily (or at least more likely to be) addressed by IT-savvy businesses taking the initiative to model best practices. Businesses that are innovating -- for example with the use of online collaboration, the investment in IT infrastructure, or the embrace of telework -- need to share their experiences (positive and negative) so that others can learn.
Run a DigitalEconomyCamp. Today's conference included 150 business leaders; 8 hours of their knowledge, brain power and resources would go a long way if invested in a policy sprint and action plan rather than passive listening.
Get digital to do digital. We had a thriving backchannel on Twitter; audience members who participated online were able to engage conversationally as well as benefit from the live presentations. Incorporating online conversation and wiki-based collaboration would facilitate real-time outcomes and broader engagement.
Reach outside the sector. The background paper for today's workshop wisely noted that ICT is a driver of innovation for all Canadian business, not just tech companies. Including non-IT companies -- particularly those who make innovative use of ICTs, including content producers -- would be crucial to uncovering the key success factors for effective IT use.
Reach outside the ministry. When I worked with many Canadian government ministries on the Governance Digital Economy program, there was much hang-wringing over government silos. Ten years later, it's notable that Industry Canada is still tackling the digital economy (at least in this context) on its own; digital economy issues are just as salient to Environment, Revenue and Heritage (to name just three); it would be great to hear what those departments are doing in this space.

What are your thoughts on today's conversation? Leave them in text below, or dive into a wiki version of the Industry Canada background paper.

Five ways a cancelled TV series can keep faith with its audience

Rob Cottingham — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 18:20:44 +0000

A few weeks ago, Alex and I got bad news: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles was being cancelled. And not just cancelled: the production studio isn't even shopping it around. (In Terminator terms, this is like pulling the chip out of the show's skull and incinerating it.)

This leaves us with a cliffhanger ending that will never be resolved. We have no idea whether John Connor will escape from the nightmarish future he jumped to, whether Sarah Connor has terminal cancer, what the hell Cameron is up to, or what Catherine Weaver's master plan is.

The result for T:TSSC's audience is mass frustration... just as it was for viewers of series ranging from Twin Peaks to Soap. And that points to one of the more series weaknesses of the dramatic TV series - one of the longest-lingering artifacts of broadcast-style, one-to-many communications.

No wonder it's so durable: dramatic TV (I'm including sitcoms here as well) is notoriously expensive to produce, raising the barrier to entry sky-high. (Or Skynet-high, ha ha.) It's centrally conceived and created. And so far, alternative models like independently-produced webisodes still don't seem to be near the tipping point that would let them challenge the studios.

But that doesn't mean dramatic TV is invulnerable... or that its hold on its audience is unassailable. Witness the rapid rise of so-called reality TV, with its often-lower production costs.

And nowhere are dramatic TV's deficiencies on more vivid display than when a series is cancelled - something that often happens abruptly. For a series with an ongoing story, it's especially deadly, with those narrative threads severed for good. True, sometimes resolution comes through a subsequent movie... but the economics of TV make that the exception rather than the rule.

Narration, truncation, frustration

For audiences, that can be extremely frustrating. (That frustration formed the basis of at least one episode of an anthology series and a subsequent Futurama parody: aliens who had been receiving TV signals from Earth wanted closure on the series they'd been following.)

And the issue isn't just frustration. It's the feeling of being jerked out of the suspension of disbelief by the reminder that it's just a TV series, contingent on production budgets and ratings. And it's the way the relationship between viewers and producers is poisoned, as we get the all-too-accurate message that it's purely mercantile, and has nothing to do with the stories or characters that have inspired a genuine emotional connection.

That should worry producers, studios and networks. Because each time we're burned, audiences become less and less willing to invest time and attention in a show knowing there's a better-than-average chance that it won't survive to a second season.

The terrain is slowly shifting, but it's the fans who are leading the way. Save-the-show efforts, which started in late 60s with Star Trek, are now enabled, expanded and amplified by the social web. Fan fiction carries on story threads long after creative teams have disbanded (despite the odd heavy-handed cease-and-desist letter wending its way to the writers). And episode archives and show wikis create an often-encyclopedic library of information on a series that allow fans old and new to continue exploring the universe created by the show's producers.

It's time those producers started picking up their end. To their credit, a number of shows have taken tentative steps: enabling fan wikis, creating conversation backchannels during episode airings, and making directors, stars and writers available after or even during broadcast for online chats. (Battlestar Galactica went above and beyond, offering everything from podcast episode commentaries to an eBay-based prop auction.)

But there's still little to reward faithful viewers once a show is cancelled.

Granted, there's every reason for a show's cast and creators to want to move on to the next thing as soon as possible: bills to pay, careers to advance, money to stop spending and a failure to put firmly in the past. But making even a "failed" series satisfying for your fans means they'll be a lot likelier to follow you to that next thing when you find it. And it means you aren't throwing away one of the show's last remaining assets: that long tail of passionate, even consuming interest in your story.

So, for TV producers, here are five ways you can reward your faithful fans... and maybe even get a little more value from your investment:

Satisfy our curiosity. At the very least, find out what our most burning questions are, and answer them. (The UserVoice-style voting that everyone from Dell to President Obama has used to rank community interest in various questions or ideas can come in handy here.) What happens when John realizes that he has to let the human Cameron die so the Terminator Cameron can take her place, go back in time and save his life? Is Special Agent Dale Cooper doomed to be possessed by the evil spirit Bob forever? Did Terri get the bomb off her neck before it was detonated?
Free your unproduced material. Often, a lot of work has gone into an anticipated but unproduced season: season arcs, episode outlines, storyboards, even scripts. How about publishing that on the web, along with some context to frame how things would have played out?
Produce those unproduced episodes... old-school. It costs a lot of money to create an episode of TV, typically hundreds of thousands or even a few million dollars; the bills for those film or video crews, sound stages and post-production services add up quickly. Creating professional-grade audio, by contrast, costs a pittance. For a fraction of the tab for shooting an episode, why not take a leaf from entertainment history - specifically, radio serials? Turn those unaired scripts into podcast episodes - complete with sponsors and ads, if you want. And if you're using the voices of the original cast, you can count on two things: an enthusiastic audience, and a stronger sense of verisimilitude... that we're hearing the actual characters. (Compare that to the experience of the written and graphic novels that sometimes spin off of TV series: they're better than nothing, and sometimes actually good, but rarely do they capture the sense that this is really the same universe as the original series.)
Wrap up narrative threads... new-school. The phenomenon of webisodes - online-only clips, usually short - points to the possibility that a series that's been shot down can still manage a safe landing of sorts. Shoot a few scenes, using whatever sets you have left, that at least hint at how story lines have resolved.
Invite the community in. You probably don't want to ask your fans to decide how characters and story arcs turn out - it doesn't feel authoritative; this is one of the areas where the imprimatur of "official" still has real value. But how about giving your fans an arena for co-creating that doesn't affect the central story line? Provide some assets like background video from key sets, insert shots, sound effects and incidental music; set some (liberal) ground rules around usage; create a space to aggregate their creations; and let your audience keep the universe you've created alive. Need some inspiration? Check out how a few folks managed to get hundreds of people to reenact War of the Worlds on Twitter last Hallowe'en.

Yes, I know: there is a maze of contractual complexity and conflicting business interests to navigate for some of this to happen. But producers can begin anticipating that as they structure their next series, and lay the track for handling - and even thriving through - the eventuality that the first season may also be the last.

Social media questions for Industry Canada's conference on Canada's Digital Economy

Alexandra Samuel — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 14:26:13 +0000

I'm at a Canadian Government's conference in Ottawa today on "Canada's Digital Economy: Moving Forward". Over the course of the day we'll be covering the topics of business innovation, infrastructure, and e-commerce. You can read the background paper online, or watch the live webcast as it unfolds.

There's already a lively Twitter backchannel that seems to include a good number of people in the room as well as folks watching online, and I'll be live tweeting the conference myself. Since the conference seems to consist largely of folks from the "traditional" tech world, I'm curious to see how the panelists and audience engage with the question of how social media changes the challenges and opportunities for Canadian IT.

In its background paper, Industry Canada asked a few social media-related questions, including:

How does Canada address its current skill shortages and spur the development of nw skills, business models, innnovation in global suply chains and other entrepreneurial activities based on the further integration of ICTs, including emerging areas such as Web 2.0?
Should we move traditional broadcasting regulation towards the more open Internet model?
How should we adapt our intellectual property legislation to the Internet?
How can Canada address emerging technologies that may be ill-suited to the conventional consent model for privacy protection?

In addition to these questions -- which I'd love to see both industry and government tackle seriously -- I'd pose a few of my own:

How can the Canadian government adopt social media and online community tools in order to drive innovation and service improvement, and model the adapations that social media demands from traditionally hierarchical and siloed organizations?
If Canada has fallen behind in the first wave of the info. economy (as speakers have suggested so far), can we leapfrog into leadership of the social media economy? What would that entail?
How can user-generated content support the growth of Canadian media and culture, rather than intensifying the pressures on its survival?
How can Canadian business be encouraged and supported in embracing social intelligence -- i.e. using online collaboration and online customer engagement -- to drive business innovation?
What regulatory changes or government programs could support community-based businesses to tap the new generation of ICTs, and especially social media, in order to foster the kind of locally-based economic development that will make our economy and communiteis sustainable in the long run?
How can the government catalyze changes in the rates and structure of the mobile phone industry so that Canadian citizens and businesses don't get left behind in the shift to mobile?
Which ministries, sectors and NGOs need to be at the digital economy table in order to ensure convergence of our economic, cultural and environmental policies -- as needed if we are to use social media and ICT to develop a resilient and sustainable economy?

I hope you'll jump in with comments on this post below, or in the Twitter backchannel.

Five social media lessons for avoiding disaster

Rob Cottingham — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 22:41:45 +0000

I like to think there are lessons to be had from even the oddest event.

Take today's "holy-crap!" story currently making the rounds of the digital watercoolers: that poor guy in Georgia whose house was torn down by mistake. Reports say the demolition crew went to the wrong location, reducing a half-century-old brick house to rubble. There's also been some suggestion that overreliance on GPS coordinates may have played a role in the error.

What can those of us in the online world take away from this event (other than "never, ever leave your house", which is probably wrong) (although come to think of it, many of us seem to abide by that advice)? How can we avoid our own inadvertent piles of smouldering debris? Here's my list of five lessons... some of them, admittedly, a stretch.

Clear communications are critical. We like to pride ourselves on the clear instructions we give to our design and development partners: exactly what workflow we'd like, where a particular hierarchy is important, and where there's space for them to improvise or suggest improvements. Being as clear as possible about the things that matter - and as clear as possible about the boundaries of any wiggle room - has saved us countless headaches, and saved our clients a lot of money.
The longer the workflow, the more likely it is to break down. In this case, the people actually wielding the backhoe were apparently subcontractors to the subcontractor hired by the contractor. Similarly, if you're requiring your community members to jump through multiple hoops - page after page of registration forms, or several copy-this-url-then-paste-it-in-this-box steps - not all of them are going to make it.
What's obvious to you may not be obvious to everyone. I'm not suggesting that you should be pitching your documentation and interface to the kind of people who'd knock down a perfectly good house without double-checking. But bear in mind that, if you've been developing an application or a web site, you've been down in the weeds for a while. Your prospective users haven't. So you may need to guide them a lot more thoroughly than you might think. One way to get a handle on that: usability testing.
Confirmation screens can be life-savers. Would that the bulldozer and backhoe on that Carroll County property had been equipped with "Are you sure you want to knock this house down? y/n" dialog boxes. Before you let your users do something life-alteringly destructive, give them a chance or two to rethink things: "Do you really want to delete all your photos?" "Really remove your profile? You will be unable to restore it if you do." "Are you sure you want to send this sex video to all 12,493 people in your address book?" And use unambiguous explanations on the buttons: "YES, I'm really quite impressive in it." "NO! This was a private, beautiful moment between me and the cast of The West Wing, and I don't want to cheapen it."
People trump technology. It's so tempting to put all your eggs in the tech basket, spending your entire budget on beautiful design and rich features. But a community relies on talented, dedicated animators. So just as relying unquestionably on GPS coordinators may have steered the contractors in Georgia wrong (the news reports are unclear at the moment), relying on technology alone to get your community off the ground won't do you much good, either. In each case, what you need are good, smart people... with solid, sound judgement.

By the way, if you're still worried that your house could be vulnerable to misdirected sledgehammers - or if you'd just like a handy reminder that crap happens - here's the PDF for our "Please don't demolish my house" sticker. It'll look great just above your "Firefighters, please save my Drobo" sticker.

Censorship isn't the only problem with China's new Internet blocking software

Rob Cottingham — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 06:43:51 +0000

There's chilling Internet news out of China. And as bad as it seems at first glance for human rights and privacy advocates, there could be something more disturbing in the wings.

The Chinese government has announced that, starting in July, it will require all computers sold in China to come with Internet blocking software. The goal, authorities say, is to protect children from pornography.

Given that the software is being created and sold by a company with ties to China's security apparatus, and that China hasn't hesitated in the past to block access to web sites critical of its record on democracy and human rights, the government's critics are understandably skeptical. Software that blocks access to pornography can easily be configured to block access to, say, Amnesty International.

So speculation is rampant that the software, dubbed Green Dam Youth Escort, will be used for censorship or surveillance -- if not immediately, then whenever China's next human rights crisis arises. And while its makers say parents will be able to deactivate Green Dam at will, the government could well be tempted to make using the software mandatory... or at least hard to deactivate, and less than forthright about what content it's blocking and what information it's collecting.

None of that is good news. But consider this.

Any blocking software needs to update itself from time to time: at the very least to freshen its database of forbidden content, and more than likely to fix bugs, add features and improve performance. (Most anti-virus software does this.)

If all the software does is to refresh the list of banned sites, that limits the potential for abuse. But if the software is loading new executable code onto the computer, suddenly there's the potential for something a lot bigger.

Say you're a high-ranking official in the Chinese military. And let's say you have some responsibility for the state's capacity to wage so-called cyber warfare: digital assaults on an enemy's technological infrastructure.

You're idly surfing the web on your home computer late one night, when it starts to automatically download an update. And it occurs to you that, somewhere out there, a single central point is making the decision about what goes into that update.

It strikes you: there's a single backdoor into more that 40 million Chinese computers, capable of installing... well, nearly anything you want.

What if you used that backdoor, not just to update blocking software, but to create something else?

Say, the biggest botnet in history?

A botnet is a network of dozens, hundreds or thousands of computers, all running a particular piece of software that allows them to operate in concert, autonomously. In its most benign form, a botnet is just distributed computing, done with the full knowledge and permission of the computers' owners. If you've ever installed the SETI@home screensaver, you were part of such a botnet -- in this case, helping to sift through radio telescope data to find any sign of intelligent life on other worlds.

But the term is more commonly used to describe a nastier kind of network, where the software is spread by stealth, especially through viruses (the recent Conficker outbreak created a massive botnet). And as you might imagine, that kind of network is used for more malicious ends: sending spam, for instance, or launching huge attacks on other networks.

The larger the botnet, the more devastating those attacks can be. And they can bring down more than just web sites. Conceivably, everything from hospitals to electrical power grids could be targets. That, at least, is the premise behind warnings of cyber warfare.

Now, those warnings are often overblown. And while China has been accused of conducting cyber-warfare -- including incursions into Pentagon systems -- proving the involvement of the government rather than nationalist zealots is difficult at best.

Still, a botnet 40 million strong (plus the installed base already in place in Chinese schools and other institutions) at the beck and call of the military is potentially a formidable weapon. Even if the Chinese government has no intention today of using Green Dam for anything other than blocking pornography, the temptation to repurpose it for military purposes may prove to be overwhelming.

In the past, Western governments have either stood by or even encouraged efforts by activists to help people in China circumvent domestic online surveillance and censorship. One project, Peekabooty, even used distributed computing - a benign botnet - to create a network of outside proxy servers that would allow web surfers living under repressive regimes to access forbidden content freely and privately. (Alex discusses Peekabooty in more detail in her dissertation. Psiphon, a project of the Citizen Lab, carries on Peekabooty's legacy.)

But a botnet within China might be able to use such a network to disguise its own activity, making it harder for targets to defend themselves from attack. Governments that would normally look kindly on a Peekabooty-style initiative now might even look on it as a digital fifth column, and an unacceptable security vulnerability.

You'll notice a lot of mights and coulds in what I'm saying; it would be speculative even if I'd looked at the code behind Green Dam, which I haven't (I'm not holding my breath for the Chinese government to make the code available). And I don't want to feed either the cyber-warfare hype machine or the anti-China sentiment being pushed by self-interested parties.

My point is this: we're excited by the potential of networked conversation and collaboration. It has tremendous potential when control is in the hands of many. But there's a real danger when centralized control intersects with networked power. And those of us who see the positive power and transformative potential of the web need to pay attention to that danger.

Both because we may not like the way governments respond to it (or exploit it), and because we might have solutions of our own to offer. Anyone for a cyber-peace movement?

6 ways to customize your Mac's Finder and user experience

Alexandra Samuel — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 04:24:44 +0000

This post is part 5 of a series, Getting the most from your new Mac.

You've fallen in love; you never knew it could be like this. When you compare the object of your affection to your ex, you can't believe what you once settled for.

But like any lover, you can't help but noticing one or two things that could be just a tiny bit better. Maybe your beloved even has a couple of quirks that are downright annoying. And isn't it your job -- the job of any admirer -- to bring out the best in your darling?

Happily, it's easier to tweak your Mac than to upgrade your boyfriend or girlfriend. Here are some adjustments that any new Mac user should undertake, or at least consider, until your computer is exactly right for you.

Customize your dock. That row of icons at the bottom (or if you've gotten fancy, at the side) needn't contain the apps that Apple, in its infinite wisdom, stuck there. If there are apps you're not using, drag them out and poof! they're gone. Not gone gone -- they're still in your Applications folder. But the dock shortcut is outta there; now you can add the applications that you really use without ending up with an insanely cluttered dock. (A dock full of Apple's default icons is a sure sign of a Mac newbie.) Just drag an app's icon in there, or ctrl-click on the icon of any active application (all active apps show up in the dock) and select "keep in dock". You can also resize your dock by hovering over the dotted line that divides your apps from your folders. Speaking of folders, here's a neat trick: putting your applications folder in the dock (just drag and drop); clicking that folder pops up a spring-loaded list of applications you can launch from there. And if you want to find new apps to try out, try looking over the shoulder of any Mac user; if you see unfamiliar icons in their dock, ask them what the app is and what they use it for.
Go Places. Your Finder windows and open or save dialogue boxes will show you a left-hand column with all the drives currently mounted on your computer, plus your favorite places (typically, your home directory, documents folder, pictures folder, etc). Just like the dock, this list of Places can be customized. If there are folders you don't use often, drag their folders out of this list; they'll disappear from the list but stay on your computer. Then drag any folder you use frequently onto the list of places (taking care not to drag it directly onto another icon; if you do that, the folder will be placed inside the folder you've just dragged it onto). Your frequently-used folder will now appear in your list of places, and be readily accessible from any open or save dialog or from any Finder window.
Be controlling. If you're missing your right mouse button, let me introduce you to the control key. Holding ctrl while clicking your mouse button acts just like a right-click on a Windows machine; it gives you a menu with lots of additional options for whatever you're clicking on.
Take the shortcut. Learning keyboard shortcuts will make you a much more efficent Mac-er. One of my favorites: holding the Command key (the one with the apple on it) while clicking a link in Firefox or Safari, to open that link in a new tab. If you want to get really hardcore, or you just really hate your mouse, try Quicksilver, an application that lets you do just about anything you can imagine via keyboard, and then some.
Get smart. You can create smart folders or groups in the Finder, Mail, Address Book and iTunes, which essentially create virtual folders based on rules. For example, I've got a smart folder I created in the Finder, called "presentations"; it contains all the files on my computer that are either PowerPoint or Keynote files. The original files stay with the projects they're related to, but I've got a single place to look for all presentation files whenever I need to create a new presentation that draws on my previous work.
Just say no. There are some really hot-looking Apple doodads you may want to live without. I leave my screen saver turned off, because it annoys me to have my windows disappear; I only rarely use my Dashboard (which provides access to a range of small utility applications), and I personally find Exposé (which lets you get a bird's-eye view of all your open windows) to be dizzying, probably because I have so many open windows that it looks like this:

Make your Mac yours, and you'll find that your passion for the platform will deepen into lasting commitment.

Which Finder and system tweaks have made you love your Mac more than ever?

Tony nominee [title of show] is a case study in social media creativity

Alexandra Samuel — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 07:31:04 +0000

We can either follow our instinct
Or take advice from every joker
We can either be distinct, or wind up merely mediocre
I’d rather be nine people’s favorite thing
Than a hundred people’s ninth favorite thing.

For the past year, those words have been a mantra at Social Signal. When we tackle a new social media project, we're always balancing the size of the audience we'd like to reach (you know, a few hundred million or so) with the desire to engage meaningful participation. And meaningful engagement is most likely when you focus on becoming nine people's favorite thing.

The line comes from [title of show], up for Best Book at tonight's Tony Awards. We were lucky to catch [title of show] a couple of weeks after it opened on Broadway last August. The show had us in stitches, but as we listened to the cast album repeatedly over subsequent months, it was the show's deeper insights into the nature and experience of creativity that stuck with us.

[title of show] has reached me in a way that only a handful of shows, novels or movies ever have: it's wormed its way into my mind and heart and become part of who I am and how I see the world. If the show succeeded in making itself my favorite thing, it's no coincidence that its creative voice comes from a team with a deep appreciation and talent for my own creative medium: social media.

TOS co-creator Jeff Bowen had a successful Internet marketing business long before TOS hit Broadway, and the TOS site, YouTube presence and MySpace and Facebook pages show what social media can do for both a brand and a creative voice. Drawing on both the show's lyrics and its skilled use of social media, I'll show how you can tap the power of social media for both expressive and marketing power.

You are not your blog

I’m standing here, just left of center and something ain’t clear:
When did I sign on the line of this decree?
Stuck in a show where I am playing me.

[title of show] is a musical about two guys writing a musical; composer-lyricist Jeff is played by real-life TOS composer-lyricist Jeff Bowen, librettist Hunter is played by librettist Hunter Bell, and actress-buddies Heidi and Susan are played by actress-buddies Heidi Blickenstaff and Susan Blackwell. The TOS cast share more than names with their characters; the line between person and persona is blurred. And yet there is a distinction, just as there is a distinction between the persona of a blogger and the person who blogs. As reported in the New York Times last year,

Berresse...keeps the lines between his actors and the characters from blurring by using a simple device. Hunter Bell the actor is simply Hunter. Hunter Bell the character is Bunny Hunter — the profile of a bunny being what you get when you take two fingers from each hand, representing quotation marks, and put them on top of your head. It has been helpful. “Sometimes I’d say, ‘I would not necessarily make that choice, but I understand that for the 90-minute structure, Bunny Heidi is going to make that choice,’ ” Ms. Blickenstaff said.

Remembering that people who attack -- or praise -- your blog posts are attacking your blogging persona, and not you personally, will go a long way to preserving your sanity online.

You are your audience

Nothing guarantees it will stand out, and its future is unknown...
But we can’t do it all alone.
- Untitled Opening Number

If you want your brand, product or campaign to stand out, don't try to do it alone: invite your customers or audience to be part of what you're creating. [title of show] baked audience participation into its marketing with a blog inviting audience comments and highlighting fan videos; fans responded in droves. It created badges and buttons for fans to put on their own sites, extending the TOS marketing reach. The day the Tony nominations came out, I was far from the first commenter on the New York Times' site to decry the single nomination TOS received -- build loyal and engaged fans, and they'll let the world know how many awards you really deserve. And TOS created a dynamite widget for the likes of me to spread across the web.

You can't take attention for granted

HUNTER: I don’t want this to be just sketches and novelty songs linked together. I want there to be substance, not just fluff, not that there’s anything wrong with fluff. But I wanna strive for something that makes people really pay attention, you know what I mean?
SUSAN: Huh… I totally stopped listening.

No matter how much you pour into your blogging, twittering, flickring or other social media efforts, and no matter how great its value, you're doing a dance with an audience that -- like Susan -- may or may not be paying attention. The art of social media lies in finding ways to get and keep attention, and the TOS use of social media is a great case study in how valuable that attention can be. When the show lay dormant after a couple of years of working the off-Broadway circuit, the creators launched a "[title of show] show" on YouTube, with episodes imagining the show's longed-for move to Broadway. The episodes caught producers' attention, and the show did indeed get its Broadway run.

Your heart is at least as important as your brain

I aimed for the sky, a nine-year-old can see so far
I'll conquer the world and be a star, I'll do it all by the time I'm ten.
I would know that confidence, if I knew a way back to then.

Social media is at its most compelling when it's playful and authentic: when you're speaking from your nine-year heart, with the benefit of your thirtysomething (or twentysomething, or fiftysomething) brain. There's a lot of online chatter about social media smarts, but at least as many social media successes have emerged from passionate expression; from people who've found their way back to then. The TOS site is a great example of what happens when brains and heart meet: the site has a polished design with an easy-to-navigate interface, and both the site and blog overflow with the playfulness, irreverence, profanity and humor of the show itself:

Do you guys know that when we were dreaming of the dreamiest place for [title of show], we all had the Vineyard at the top of all our dream lists? We never thought we would actually get to do our play there... And then we squeezed our little golden pony, and it pooped out our dreamiest wish. That golden pony is awesome. You have to get one.
- Heidi, on the TOS blog

Your voice is worth sharing

You have a story to tell, a novel you keep in a drawer.
You have a painting to paint, but you're lazy like an old French whore
You have a movie to make, Shrinky Dinks you can bake, but you best grab a stake, because
In sweep the vampires, in creep the vampires, knee deep in vampires,
Filling you with doubt, insecurity, ‘bout what your art should be
In sweep the vampires
Die vampire die!

At its best, social media provides a channel for self-expression in all its forms: text, image, audio, video, image. But the advent of the Internet doesn't make the challenges of artistic expression go away; online authors can be as scared, as blocked, and as neurotic as any offline artist. Killing the vampires that keep you from expressing online -- the vampires that say, as the show puts it, "you cannot sing good enough to be in a musical. Or they might say: Ooh, your song’s derivative, to keep that song from you."

Don't let fears about the quality or originality of your work keep you from finding your voice online, whether its expressed through a Flickr photo collection, a real-time blogging memoir, or a group of Sims singing someone else's song:

We'll be rooting for Hunter and the rest of the TOS team during tonight's Tony webcast (sadly, the Best Book award has been cut from the CBS broadcast). Whether or not [title of show] wins, the mere fact of its nomination speaks volumes not only about the brilliance of the show, but the power of its web-enabled audience engagement. Meanwhile, we're unilaterally awarding TOS one more well-deserved Tony: for social media that reminds us what creativity is all about.

12 questions for meaningful online conversations

Alexandra Samuel — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 06:19:05 +0000

When companies adopt social media, they get more than just the marketing juice they're typically seeking: they're inviting in a Trojan Horse full of questions about their offering, their approach, and even their fundamental value proposition. My recent blog post for Harvard Business Online looks at how companies can best engage the Trojan Horse of social media, and it's drawn some insightful comments. Here's a sampling:

Samuel cites the cases of several companies...[who] wound up having to retire from the social media playing field. [T]hat it is because the companies went in with the wrong attitude. They weren't really looking for a dialogue. They thought they could control the conversation. It doesn't always work that way.
- Les Blatt
As social media is enjoying the spoils of a bubble, more people are focused on the promise than the reality. Perhaps this is why many organizations choose to build online communities where the communication is more collaborative.
- Vanessa DiMauro
[When companies get negative comments, they need to:] 1) learn from them: what is the collective voice telling us and how can we use it to further the customer experience and 2) answer the comments right away, offer respect to the writers and think from THEIR perspective when addressing the issue. Result? Happy Greeks, happy Trojans, and a Trojan Horse that can win the Kentucky Derby!
- Loraine Antrim
[T]his all does have to do with company culture and marketing directors who only think about advertising and not more holistically about the company brand. This trend is not going away. Social media will look different years from now as traditional media and marketing theory morph to meet the desires of the consumer.
- Rick Hardy
It is arrogant to think that social media is either a gift or a threat to your agenda. It is neither. It is a mirror. And it sometimes reflects things that you don't want to see. So rather than blaming the mirror for revealing ugly things, let's look at the truth of what it reveals.
- Melanie McBride

Social media is a powerful catalyst for reflection and change within organizations. But the Trojan Horse goes anywhere social media goes: your home, your favorite bar, your state legislature.

Conversation is the engine of change; online conversation simply makes that change possible on a scale the world’s never known – or needed more. It's not just marketing sites or business intranets that build relationships of trust; it's the fan sites that foster cross-cultural connections, the photo-sharing sites that unlock the creativity and innovation of closet photographers, and yes, it's the big picture, Save The World commmunities.

Whether a conversation is built around world or work, relationships or individuals, its success depends on three kinds of participation. Someone has to conceive of the conversation: to define the purpose (however vague) of this new conversational arena, and the audiences (however varied) that will be engaged. Someone has to convene the conversation: to invite people to participate, and to help build momentum as the conversation unfolds. Most crucially, someone has to contribute: to write the blog posts, post the photos, ask the questions, upload the video, or whatever the content is that will make up the substance of the conversation.

Conceiving, convening, contributing: fulfilling any of these roles effectively involves connecting tangibly and meaningfully with other people. We suspect that the key to harnessing the power of online conversation lies in playing each role, in every conversation, with careful attention to the work of connecting with the other person (or people) involved. But the surest path to that connection depends on what role you’re playing, and what kind of conversation you’re having. The moderator of an environmental campaign site has a very different job from an employee posting a note on a corporate intranet.

My post about businesses encountering the Trojan Horse of social media focused on one particular domain (work) and one particular kind of role: that of online convenor. When companies jump into social media, they're typically asking one particular kind of question: What conversations do we need to have with our team, customers or supporters?

We've mapped out the questions that encompass the broader impact of social media in catalyzing change -- not just at work, but at the individual, family and even global level. And we've broken these into the questions that should be asked by people who play different roles in the conversation:

Leaders and marketers and communciators conceive online conversations. They do the work of envisioning, designing and building a conversation venue, group or space.
Community managers convene online conversations by animating, facilitating, moderating or gardening.
Community members participate in an online conversation by posting text, images, video or audio.

I've added links to blog posts on our site that speak to the questions for each domain, and each role.

Twelve questions for meaningful online conversations

	Conceive When you create an conversation, ask...	Manage When you animate a conversation, ask...	Contribute When you participate, ask...
World e.g. ChangeEverything, Care2 If you are engaging in a conversation with a social or environmental purpose you need to ask….	What issues can we help address?	Who needs to talk together in order to address this issue?	What does the world need to hear from me?
Work e.g. Dell IdeaStorm, Share Your Story If you are engaging in a conversation to support your organization’s mission you need to ask….	What conversations do we need to have with our team, customers or supporters?	Who needs to talk in order to solve this problem or take our organization to the next level?	What else can I bring to my team or work?
Family and friends e.g. Kinzin, Facebook groups, fan sites If you are engaging in a conversation to make new friends or bring your family or friends closer together you need to ask…	Which groups of people could benefit from closer connections?	Which of my friends or family could benefit from deepening relationships with one another?	What do I have to offer to the people I love?
Self e.g. delicious, 1000 Uses If you are engaging in a conversation in order to exchange information or resources, you need to ask….	What kinds of support do people need to achieve their goals?	Who has the information or resources we need to complete this picture?	What information or resources do I have that could help other people?

Download this table as a much prettier PDF.

How have you been challenged by the Trojan Horse of social media -- at work, in the world, at home or personally? How are you managing the changes it brings? Leave your comments here, or back on the Harvard site.

Getting to know a tool before pigeonholing it

Rob Cottingham — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 06:08:40 +0000

A few days ago I got a super-special birthday present (xoxo, Alex!): a new 12" Cintiq, Wacom's combination graphic tablet and display.

I don't doubt that it's going to revolutionize the way that I draw Noise to Signal. It integrates the retouching phase and does away with that whole scanning phase, not to mention the chasing-the-three-year-old-who-grabbed-the-pen-and-ink phase and the scrubbing-the-ink-off-the-three-year-old phase.

But it's not exactly portable. The tablet comes with an external power supply, a converter box and a slew of cables - and now, for the sake of everyone's sanity, its own carrying case (h/t Kate Trgovac).

My intention was to park it somewhere instead of hauling it from place to place, but Alex had wise advice: take it around with me, use it in several circumstances and see how it could be useful. Because while I think right now that I know how I'll use it, I actually don't.

This is a tool with unknown possibilities. Maybe it'll turn out to be great for taking notes, for mocking up ideas or for sketchblogging. Maybe I'll cartoon with it, but it will change the way I do that in some way.

Most really powerful tools are the same way. That's especially true for the tools of the social web: even the oldest ones are still new by most standards, and it seems every week brings another innovative way of applying them.

A way for geeks to log their daily web surfing highlights becomes a way for someone to share their cancer battle with a circle of loved ones; a way to keep tabs on blog updates becomes the engine behind podcasting; a way to share videos of cute animal tricks becomes a tremendously effective political communications vehicle affecting the outcome of a presidential election.

Which is a good cautionary note for any of us working in the field. It's tempting to pigeonhole tools: Twitter works for this, Facebook is for that, mobile is for the other.

But if you can count on one thing in Web 2.0, it's that no category is permanent. Somewhere out there, someone who hasn't pigeonholed those tools is going to find an amazing new use for them, a way to reach people in a way they haven't been reached before.

Hey - why shouldn't that person be you?

Cintiq photo: Tobias Rütten. Used under a Creative Commons license.

4 Mac applications that make you more productive

Alexandra Samuel — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 04:32:21 +0000

This post is part 4 of a series, Coming out as a Mac user.

Switching platforms is disorienting, at least until you get up and running with the core software that gives you all the tools you had on your old machine. But you didn't switch to a Mac just so you could do the same old stuff. You switched because you wanted to rock the house, set the world on fire, and bravely go where no Windows machine has gone before. Here are four Mac-only apps that should fill your heart with joy at your newfound powers.

Find your files. Default Folder X ensures you're never more than a click or two away from the folder you want to save a file to, or find a file in -- even folders that aren't in your list of Places.. It adds contextual menus to any "Save" or "Open" dialogue boxes, in any program, so that you can immediately access any folders that you've recently used, or are currently open in the Finder. I find that 95% of the time, the folder I want to save a document to is in one of those two lists. You can see Default Folder X's additional icons in the right-hand side of this screenshot:
Type less. TextExpander lets you create text shortcuts -- or "snippets" -- for any text you type frequently, like your address or the date, or for images you use frequently, like your logo or headshot. I use the key combination "ddt" to enter the date; anytime I save a file, I start by typing "ddt", which inserts the date in the form 2009-05-23 at the beginning of every file name. That means I can sort files by name in order to see them in chronological order by date of creation, (you can do the same thing by adding "View by date created" to your Finder's default columns -- under View/Show Options in your Finder's menu bar -- but I like to see date last modified, too, and that gets to be a lot of columns in the Finder.) Enter "%Y-%m-%d" as a snippet in TextExpander, and choose your own keystroke combo (like "ddt") to get automatic dates in the form year-month-day.
Say click. If you're enjoying the helpful illustrations in this post, you can thank Skitch: a really kick-ass screen capture utility with an online component. Install Skitch on your machine to do quick screenshots that you can crop, resize or annotate; then use the "save" button to add that screenshot to a permanent archive, or "webpost" to put it on a website -- so that you can easily embed images in your blog posts.
Collaborate in Mac time. If you like Google Docs or wikis as a way of collaborating with your colleagues to write documents, try doing it in real time. SubEthaEdit is a plain text editor that runs on your Mac -- and lets you collaboratively write and edit in real time if you have a colleague who's running SubEthaEdit too. Rob and I use SubEthaEdit to take notes together during meetings, or to live blog conference events (I transcribe, Rob cleans up as we go so it's ready to post right away.) If you're away from the wifi cloud (and still breathing), you can create your own computer-to-computer network by clicking on the Airport status icon in your menu bar; invite your fellow SubEthaEditors to join the private network you've created. Like this:

Keep your SubEthaEdit disk image on your computer so that you can get your colleagues up and running with SubEthaEdit if you want to take notes together; you can transfer it to them using a keychain drive, or by dragging-and-dropping into their public dropbox once you're connected to the same network. (Just use shift-apple-K in the Finder to bring up a list of computers in your local network).

Which apps make you happy to be a Mac user?

Photos from NetSquared Year Four

Rob Cottingham — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 18:47:36 +0000

We had a great two days at Net2 this year. There's always a feeling of homecoming when Social Signallers arrive at the Cisco conference centre in San Jose: the Net2 online community was one of our very first projects, and its extraordinary success is a tribute both to its participants and to the visionaries at Techsoup Global.

For folks who weren't able to make it this year, or who are thinking of coming next year, here's a little taste of what went on:

A number of other folks took great shots as well; check them out here!

18 tools for effective social media participation on blogs and beyond

Alexandra Samuel — Sun, 31 May 2009 06:37:14 +0000

What are the essential tools for blogging and online conversation in 2009? Social Signal friend and advisor Leda Dederich recently asked me for an update to the post I wrote on this topic four years ago. Happily, SoSi staffer Karen Fung recently wrote an excellent post that ran through the specific tools I reviewed in 2005. But I thought I'd step back and offer an answer to the underlying question: what tools do I need to participate effectively in the thriving world of social media?

Do you need a blog?

Four years ago, blogging was the premiere way to publish content or engage in online conversation. Today, there are many easy and lightweight ways to express yourself online and converse with old or new friends. While a blog is still a terrific way to have a more informal organizational voice, or to create your own niche site on the web, you may find it easier or more rewarding to engage through some other established channel. Here are some options to consider:

Facebook Post frequent status updates and notes on Facebook, and voilá, you have something not-un-bloglike. It's free, it takes no configuration or setup work, and your friends are much more likely to stop by and see what you've written. The downside: Facebook makes some pretty interesting claims on your posts, and you can't do much to customize how it works.
Twitter If you're primarily interested in sharing news or engaging in online conversation, Twitter may be easier, more effective and more fun than blogging. You can post really quickly and frequently (how long does it take to write a 140-character message?) and you can reach specific people (via mentions or direct messages). The downside: You can't write the next New Yorker-worthy essay in 140 characters, and even if you do, your friends may or may not see it given how quickly Twitter conversation unfolds.
Niche communities Instead of posting all your thoughts in one place, why not post them in the context where they're most relevant? Join a handful of online communities or social networks that correspond to your various professional and personal interests, and you can enjoy all the benefits of personal expression -- in exactly the context where they'll find interested readers. You might blog about your family life on CafeMom, share your political rants on DailyKos, and write about your business adventures on the Intuit business community site. The downside: Your online relationships will be very role-based; people will likely know you with your mom hat on, or your activist hat on, but not both. If you want to write about topics that cross over your various roles -- or don't fit into any of them -- you don't have a home for it. My solution to these problems is to treat alexandrasamuel.com as an aggregator for my posts on a variety of sites; that way I have both niche conversations and a one-stop, anything-goes presence.
LinkedIn Answering questions on LinkedIn isn't the same as blogging, but it is a great way of establishing your topic-specific expertise in front of a large and relevant audience. I monitor LinkedIn questions in my fields of expertise using iGoogle (see below) so that I can answer questions while they're fresh -- which means my answers are higher up and get seen by more people. Then I post my LinkedIn answers back to the Social Signal blog using old-fashioned cut and paste.
Flickr, YouTube, 12seconds et al. Not everyone expresses themselves best in words. Maybe you're more of a talker, or a photographer, or a video person. Create an account on a multimedia site, and post your outpourings there.

So, you still want to blog: platforms

Tumblr Four years ago I recommended Blogger as my newbie option and WordPress as my choice for more advanced bloggers. Today, I recommend Tumblr as a great blog for folks who want something easy-to-use, especially if they plan on uploading lots of photo or images (Tumblr has great upload tools, and is very user-friendly). I used Tumblr to set up a simple personal blog for family posts.
WordPress is still my choice for higher-end blogs, but now even a newbie can use it: WordPress.com offers turn-key blogs and make it easy to get up and running and do a decent amount of customization, even if your tech skills are very basic. Better yet, if you think your blog could grow over time, you have the option of moving your hosted WordPress.com blog to another webhost where you'll have more control over your configuration. From there, WordPress can support you in expanding from a basic blog to something a little more nuanced, or even let you grow into a fairly complex and elaborate website by using WordPress as a content management system. I use WordPress, hosted on DreamHost, for alexandrasamuel.com.
Drupal My 2005 post pre-dated our immersion into Drupal, a content-management system that includes a powerful blogging platform and many interesting ways of aggregating and republishing RSS feeds. Within a year, we created several Drupal sites: telecentre.org (now on Ning), NetSquared and our own Social Signal site. Today, many of the blogs I contribute to are on Drupal -- not only ours, but those of ChangeEverything, NetSquared, and happyfrog. I wouldn't recommend Drupal as a platform if all you want to do is set up a blog (though there are many pure-blog sites that run on Drupal), but if you're creating a more extensive presence in which blogging is a key part -- or if you want to create a blog with multiple contributors -- Drupal is a great choice.

Tools for bloggers

Amazon associates program If your blog includes references, reviews or recommendations for books, music, electronics or just about any other kind of product, Amazon's associates program gives you a potential revenue stream. Set up an associate ID and use it to generate links to the items you discuss in your blog; if people click through and buy them, you get a small kick-back. I've yet to make a penny off the program -- after years of linking, I've only had a few click-throughs -- but I like the option of creating links that show the products I'm referring to in my blog.
iStockphoto Many of the images you see on Social Signal began life on iStockphoto, a low-cost source of online images. Sure, you could snag images for free on Google Image seach, but when you do, you stand a good chance of infringing on somebody's copyright. Buy your snaps on iStockphoto, where $1 gets you a good-enough-for-the-web photo, and you know that your photo is cleared for online use.
Skitch If you blog, you likely include images or screenshots in your posts on a semi-regular basis. Skitch is my tool of choice for getting those online; it lets you do quick screen grabs (including grabs of images you've downloaded or created) and then upload them to a web server that makes it easy to drop them into a blog post. Mac users only, I'm afraid.
Zemanta Another friend to the frequent blogger is Zemanta, which you can install on your blog or run as a Firefox extension. It uses your draft post to generate suggested links, automatically hyperlink relevant keywords (if you choose) and insert links to related material into the bottom of your post. If you hook it up to your Amazon associates account it will also turn relevant product mentions into Amazon links with your associate ID.
Evernote Writing for multiple blogs or networks means keeping a running list of potential blog posts, notes, and drafts. For a long time my prospective posts lived in VoodooPad; now I keep them in Evernote, where they're accessible via web and on my iPhone.

Blog reading and aggregation

Many of the tools I recommended in 2005 were focused on tracking the fast-growing world of blogs. Today, less of my attention is focused on reading individual blogs, and more of it goes to specific social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

RSS I'm still a huge fan of RSS, but I hardly ever use it to read blogs. Now that so many web sites publish RSS feeds -- everything from blogs to news sites to task managers -- RSS has become less about news and more about getting the information I want, where I want it. And where do I want it?....
iGoogle My personalized Google homepage -- a.k.a. iGoogle -- has replaced Bloglines and Google Reader in my affections. Yes, I still maintain a Google Reader account (I imported my Bloglines feeds into Google eons ago) but once I subscribed to a few hundred feeds, I found the mountain of unread posts of Google Reader to be so daunting that I stopped visiting. Instead, I set up an iGoogle homepage that is my browser's default page -- that means that whenever I launch a new browser window, I see the latest posts on my iGoogle page. It's titles only, but it's enough to keep me up-to-date on top news stories, and about anything that gets posted online about me, Rob, or Social Signal. I'll post a more detailed look at my iGoogle setup soon.
Google Blog Search Until recently, Technorati was still my tool of choice for searching blogs and social networks, and subscribing to search-based RSS feeds. But Technorati has missed a lot of what I'm looking for, so I've switched to Google's Blog Search instead. I also recommend the RSS feeds in Google news for tracking mentions in print or broadcast media.
Twitter These days, at least 75% of my blog-reading is driven by links I stumble across on Twitter. The people I follow offer a consistently interesting and relevant selection of links -- far more than I have time to read. Twitter is also a great source of inspiration for blog posts I write myself, whether it's a matter of responding to an interesting Twitter thread, or expanding on one of my own Tweets. You can find more tips on specific Twitter tools here.
delicious Even in the era of Twitter, delicious remains a key part of my online experience. It's still my tool of choice for storing anything I might want to refer to again, and with its now-large user base, it's often my next stop when a Google search yields a sea of meaningless results. Search the words "social media marketing" in Google, and you get a mix of Wikipedia entries and SEO-engineered hits; look up social+media+marketing on delicious, and you see only the links that someone actually found worthwhile.

Then and now

It's not a coincidence that my 2005 post was tool-focused. Them were the early days of social media -- in fact the phrase had yet to be coined! -- and finding useful, user-friendly tools was key to engaging in the still-new world of online conversation.

I still love testing and reviewing social media tools, and I'm not above the occasional impassioned debate over the relative merits of different blogging platforms. But 2009 offers many more tools, most of them far more user-friendly than what was around four years ago. It's no longer about finding tools that let you engage online; it's about making choices that let you engage meaningfully.

And meaningful engagement gets harder -- and easier -- all the time. Harder in that the volume of conversation, and increasing expectations of connectivity, places more and more demand on our time and attention. Harder in that a world of 500+ buddy lists muddies our thinking about what friendship means, and which relationships are important. Harder because as we post more and more often, our posts contribute less and less -- unless we take the time to think about what we're saying, who we're saying it to, and why we're saying it.

That's the part that tools can make easier, if we use them thoughtfully and with care. No wonder this post refers to almost twice as many tools as I recommended four years ago; it takes a more powerful toolbox to keep my time and attention focused and organized. But each and every one of the tools I've mentioned has helped me spend my time online in a more deliberate and effective way, for the purpose that matters most to me: connecting with real people.

5 ways to protect your Mac's looks and performance

Alexandra Samuel — Sun, 31 May 2009 04:13:05 +0000

This is part 3 in a series, Coming out as a Mac user.

Like any passionate affair, your romance with a new Mac can fizzle when you discover the limitations of your beloved. Your new Mac is much less likely to drive you crazy than that old machine running Windows Vista, but it's not without the occasional quirk. Here are five highly recommended investments that will help protect you from software frustrations or hardware failures:

Buy the extended AppleCare. It'll cost you a couple of hundred dollars to extend your AppleCare from 1 year to 3 years. Do it now! You can wait until your first year is almost up, but there's little financial advantage to doing so, and you run the risk of forgetting. And I'm almost tempted to tell you that if you don't need that AppleCare over the course of those two additional years, I'll refund your purchase. Because the sad truth is, your computer is likely to have the occasional problem; I'm on my seventh Mac, and I can't think of one that hasn't needed at least one major hardware repair. (This is especially true of laptops.) AppleCare is a fantastic warranty program: you can take your computer into any authorized Apple repair shop, and they'll fix it up free of charge. If you have persistent problems, you can talk to Apple itself, and I've found them to be exceptionally helpful. Please, get the AppleCare now.
Cultivate outer beauty. Your new computer isn't just pretty on the inside: it's pretty on the outside too. So keep it that way, with one of the sexy cases that are available for Macs (thanks to the fact that, unlike PCs, there are only so many Mac shapes you need to make cases for.) We like the Speck cases, available in a range of sizes and colours (though some have reported scratches from the case itself); the Marware Silicone Protection Pack for Macbook Pro 15-inch Aluminum Unibody - Silver; and the Pimp My Laptop customized stickers to cover the front of your screen. Get your protective gear as soon as you get your Mac so you can keep it in virgin condition.
Buy the Missing Manual. David Pogue is not only a musical theater composer, he's a technology columnist; his New York Times articles often have great Mac tips, and his Missing Manual series for the Macs are the best books for Apple users. Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Leopard Edition walks you through the process of starting your life anew after the bad dream that was Windows. Once you're ensconced, it's worth investing in Mac OS X Leopard: The Missing Manual(and consider upgrading to the latest version of both OS and book whenever the next one comes out). Office 2008 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual is a good purchase, too.
Subscribe to MacFixIt. If you're trying to figure out whether you're the only person who gets that weird error when you run the Installer, MacFixIt will likely have the answer. Pay for the premium version so you can search Forums according to the type of issue and/or hardware you have.
Add more RAM and get a new battery. If you're having trouble with your Mac, these are good places to start. More RAM is almost always a good thing. And if your MacBook is more than six months old and has crappy battery life, get a new battery; it's not cheap, but it will make you much happier. You'll likely need to replace your battery every 12-18 months but don't wait if it's driving you nuts.

Mac newbies, what other forms of protection are you considering? Mac veterans, what other forms of protection would you recommend?

Engagement planning worksheets to engage your users and move them to action

Alexandra Samuel — Thu, 28 May 2009 00:24:11 +0000

How can you use the web to engage your members, supporters or the public, and move them towards a specific action?

That's a common question from nonprofits who are diving into social media. Whether you're looking for your online visitors to contribute photos, forward your issue alerts, make a donation, or contact policy-makers, social media can be a powerful way of engaging your audience and driving them towards action.

But it's often hard for nonprofits to figure out how they can engage people effectively online. It's hard enough to get visitors to your site or social media presence, let alone drive them effectively towards action. In our session at NetSquared today, we used Social Actions as a case study in engaging online community participation, and shared two strategy tools that can help you make your nonprofit site more engaging. Today, we're releasing those tools to the nonprofit community under a Creative Commons attribution/noncommercial license.

User profiles
"Nonprofits", "seniors" or "businesses" don't visit your web site, log into your online community or post photos; individual people do. Sarah, the communications director of that nonprofit across town, logs into your web site. Kim, a grandmother living in Oregon, posts photos of the pothole in front of her house. Luisa, who owns a small deli, leaves a comment on your blog post. When you're trying to reach or engage an audience, you need to think in terms of the individual users who will be using your site, and look at your online presence from their perspective.

Our user profile worksheet helps you get to know your target users. Download the worksheet, and complete at least one worksheet for each type of user you want to engage in your site. We find that getting inside the head of a typical user can help you identify the best ways of bringing them to your social media presence, and the content, tools or relationships you can offer to get them engaged.

Engagement planning worksheet
Engagement is a process, not a destination. It's helpful to think of a ladder of engagement that begins with your target audience finding your organization or site, and then moves them to a higher level of interest until they are ready to act.

Our engagement planning worksheet helps you identify the steps that move your target audience from casual site visit to active participation. Complete a worksheet for each of the users you've profiled in the user profile worksheets. Each "rung" on the ladder should specify 1-3 content features, tools or activities that will appeal to the user you're targeting.

Together, the user profile exercise and engagement planning worksheet help you see your social media presence from your users' perspective. By offering the content, tools or relationships that your audience members care about, you can move them towards the actions and results you need.

Need help? Let us help you find your engagement opportunities.

The Social Signal team can help you identify the social media approach or features that will engage your users and move them up the ladder of engagement. Complete a user profile worksheet and an engagement planning worksheet for up to three different user types, and send them to us for review. We will:

review your web site or social media presence to assess your online message and focus
analyze your worksheets to understand your audiences and target actions
schedule a call or video meeting to review your engagement planning worksheets and discuss the steps you have envisioned for moving your users to action
deliver a memo summarizing the 3-5 social media promotions, tools or content features that will be most effective at moving your target audiences from interest to action

For NetSquared community members only, our engagement opportunity finder package is $500 when you book online (value: $1,000). Contact us to schedule a call to review your completed worksheets.

The 9 software choices every Mac user needs to make

Alexandra Samuel — Sat, 23 May 2009 18:56:32 +0000

This is part 2 in a series, Coming out as a Mac user.

As you embark on your new Mac lifestyle, you'll be faced with choices that challenge you to think about who you really are, and what's really important to you. Are you an iconoclast, a design freak, a fashionista who does everything with style and flair? Or are you a conciliator, a mediator, the kind to bring people together and bridge between worlds?

Choosing the right applications for your Mac often feels like a choice between these two different identities: the choice between a shiny, stylin' Mac-specific app, and an often less-shiny, cross-platform-compatible alternative.

But you don't have to choose between personal style and social substance. You can the coolest kid on the block and play well with others, as long as you've got your Mac kitted out with the right tools for every job. Here are my recommendations on the key software choices for every Mac user:

Safari or Firefox? Both. Use Firefox for any browsing you might to want to organize, track, or enter data into: there are more add-ons for Firefox, so things like adding bookmarks to delicious are much easier in Firefox. But with all those add-ons (and frankly, without 'em) Firefox is a memory-hogging beast: if your Mac slows down, or craps out, try quitting Firefox, and you'll often find that your problems will clear right up. So Safari is my choice for any quick Google searches or browsing that I don't plan on tracking, and in fact, if you specifically don't want to track your surfing (for example, while enjoying the latest clothing-free video offerings) you can turn on "private browsing" and Safari will keep your session off-the-record. And do use delicious to store bookmarks, rather than storing them in your browser: that way they'll be accessible from Safari, Firefox, and even from a PC if you need to use one.
iWork or Microsoft Office? Ideally, both. iWork's apps are great for specific things: Keynote makes super sexy presentations, Pages is great as a lightweight layout/desktop publishing app, and Numbers...well, I can't imagine why I'd use this over Excel but I'm sure that someone will now tell me. But for day-to-day document creation, and especially, document sharing, you might as well stick with Word and Excel. You're going to have lots of new stuff to learn on your Mac, so you might as well stick with these old workhorses and have your word processor and spreadsheet editor feel familiar. Plus, if you are doing any kind of collaboration with your friends from Before The Switch, those PC users are going to send you Office files that you'll find easiest to work with in Office. Just to be sure to go with Office 2008 as opposed to an earlier version -- it was a nice upgrade.
MobileMe or Google Calendar? Both. MobileMe isn't cheap -- $109 per year -- and lots of techies will point out that you can do just about everything it offers for free by using other services. Sure you can. But for $109, spare yourself the headache, and ensure your calendar, address book etc. are backed up and accessible via web browser (useful if you're on another computer). If you're an iPhone user, this is a must: MobileMe does an amazing, seamless, effortless job of keeping your iPhone and Mac synced in real-time, without any cables or manual backups. But MobileMe is very much a single-user tool: it doesn't offer much in the way of collaboration for teams. So if you need to share calendars with your colleagues, use Google Apps, and use BusySync and MobileMe to keep your Google Calendar perpetually synced to your computer and your iPhone.
Apple apps or Entourage? Apple apps. If you've been an Outlook user, it'll seem natural to go with Entourage, Microsoft's Outlook knockoff for Mac users. RESIST! There are some things to like about Entourage, like the one-stop-shopping for calendar, contact and mail info, but that's also what you need to be wary of: Entourage stores them all in one big database, so if one part goes down or gets corrupted (typically, your mail) then the whole thing is wrecked. That's the stick....but there's also a big carrot: the glory of Apple's own free, built-in Mail, Address Book and iCal applications. These are so core to the Mac system that you'll find benefits cropping up all over the place once you start using the native applications. Names typed in Address Book-enabled apps turn into easy links to that person's contact info; your iPhone and your computer can stay constantly and effortlessly in sync thanks to MobileMe; e-mailed invitations convert to calendar events (I know, just like Entourage), and there is full, seamless integration between contact info, emails and calendars.
If you really really want that all-in-one feel for your mail, address book and calendar, you can use a wrap-'em-up application like CRM4Mac; and if you've already made the (wrong) decision, you can get help switching away from Entourage. A final tip: if you ever need more help or tips for the Apple personal info management apps, you'll find that googling "Address Book" gets you exactly nowhere....or rather, everywhere, since you'll be swamped with results. Google for "mail.app", "AddressBook.app" and "mail.app" to find resources specific to the Apple applications.
Preview or Acrobat? Preview is all you need to view a PDF, and it also provides all the support you need to create PDFs of most documents (by choosing "Print" and then working from the PDF drop-down in the bottom left of your print dialog box). The only reason to use Adobe Acrobat is to create complex or advanced PDFs like forms that people can fill out within the PDF itself.
Nambu or TweetDeck? If you're a Twitter user, you'll want a client to use on your Mac. People with multiple Twitter accounts will want to use Nambu, or possibly Seesmic Desktop (Nambu is prettier, but more crashy.) People with a single Twitter account can use TweetDeck, which is pretty and not crashy. Both Nambu and TweetDeck can be even more life-changingly awesome if you follow my recommendations for grouping your Twitter follows.
VooDooPad or EverNote? Right now, you probably take notes in a variety of applications: Word, TextEdit, even -- god forbid -- paper. As a result, it's a pain to find your notes, let alone have them all open when and where you need them. Please, please, please: switch to a dedicated note-taking program that keeps all your notes in one place and lets you organize them by keywords or categories. It will rock your world and change your life; just see my blog posts on VoodooPad and EverNote. Which brings me to my painful recommendation. VoodooPad represents everything I love about Mac applications and Mac developers: it's pretty, it runs fast, it's intuitive, it integrates with all the native Apple apps, and it has the most wonderfully responsive and helpful developer (I taxed Gus with many questions and suggestions, all addressed quickly and effectively). But VoodooPad is very much a local, single-user app; about a year ago, I switched to the cross-platform, web-enabled Evernote, which lets me access and edit my notes via web browser, too. Read my ecstatic reviews of both EverNote and VoodooPad to see which one is right for you.
Backup or Dropbox? Definitely, absolutely, positively both. Backup is MobileMe's service for backing up key files; it's not big or fast enough to replace regular backups to a local drive (using Apple's awesome Time Machine), but it's the easiest way to automate regular backups of key files (like your Documents folder). Dropbox is your answer for sharing files with a team, or keeping your files accessible across computers; just install Dropbox on your Mac, and any file or folder you put there will be backed up to a web server. You can choose to share some or all of your Dropbox folders with colleagues, and you'll probably want to spend the $99/year to get the large-scale capacity that allows you to store virtually all your files online. In fact, I'd recommend putting your Dropbox folder at the top level of your user directory (the folder that holds your documents, pictures, music folders etc.) and then stick all those folders inside DropBox so they stay synced and backed up.
iChat or Skype? Again, both. I use iChat as my primary chat tool for working with our team (we connect via AIM accounts, but iChat also works with your MobileMe ID); it's fast, it's got a lovely interface, and it uses Bonjour, Apple's local networking protocol, so I can stay connected to people in my office without being online with the whole world. But Skype is now the virtually universal platform for connecting via audio or video with clients and colleagues; I'm far more likely to schedule a Skype call than an iChat session, and when I'm on Skype for a call or meeting, I often use its chat function to share files or URLs while we talk.

I know, I know: I've promised to help you choose between software tools, but I'm mostly recommending that you choose "all of the above". But that's what's beautiful about the Mac: the consistency of the user experience across applications makes it relatively easy and intuitive to use a new tool, so you might as well use the best tool for every job. In many cases, that means using one software tool when you're flying solo (MobileMe, Keynote, Safari, Backup) and another tool when you want to tap the power of cross-platform collaboration through the social web (Google calendar, DropBox, Firefox, Skype).

What other software choices are you struggling with as a new Mac user? What software choices would experienced Mac users recommend? Let me know in comments below.

Getting the most from your new Mac

Alexandra Samuel — Sat, 23 May 2009 18:10:04 +0000

Rob and I have each been responsible for a few switch-hitters in our time, and we know it's not easy leaving the comfortable majority to be part of what is all-too-often seen as an "alternative lifestyle". You've been part of the 90% majority; now you're the one-in-ten.

We've spent many hours helping friends through the personal and professional implications of crossing over to the other side, and we've learned about how to make the switch a bit easier. In fact, we've found that for those who embrace their new identity, the switch is a process of discovery and celebration.

No, this isn't the post about our new logo: it's my guide to switching to the Mac. Over the next week, I'll walk you through the five steps to becoming a happy and fulfilled Mac user after years in the PC closet. Here's what I'll cover:

Have it both ways: Yes, you're a now a Mac user, but you want to hedge your bets: maybe you wonder about switching back, or maybe you're not yet ready to let your PC friends know about your new lifestyle. Welcome to the wonderful world of cross-platform apps: applications you can use on your Mac, but let you keep your choice of platform as open -- or private -- as you want. For each of the key applications you'll need as a Mac user, I'll help you choose between the Mac-native option and the cross-platform alternative. Read it now >>
Use protection: Among consenting adults, there's nothing more beautiful than the embrace of a Macintosh. But like any major choice, it carries risks. I'll cover the ins- and outs of responsible Mac use, from the importance of keeping your hardware under wraps to the best sources of knowledge about safe play. Read it now >>
Enjoy the perks: Don't settle for equality: embrace the ways in which Mac users have it better than their PC-loving friends. I'll tell you about four Mac-only apps that will make you more effective than ever. Read it now >>
Be yourself: While Mac users are a loving community, no two Mac users are alike. Going Mac isn't about running the same OS your friends use, and there's no playbook that tells you the right way to be a Mac user. You need to put your own stamp on that Mac; I'll walk you through options for customizing your system and using the Finder in your own special way. Read it now >>
Celebrate Mac pride: Being a Mac user is about much more than the computer you use. You'll know your switch is complete when Mac attitude pervades not only your files, but your heart. I'll share my tips for getting in a Mac state of mind. Read it now >>

Work your way through these stages, and I hope you'll find plenty of joy in your new Mac lifestyle. To Rob Mickey, Sandi Millman, and all the other recent switchers in our life: welcome to the team.

Doors are finally opening to public data

Rob Cottingham — Fri, 22 May 2009 22:58:06 +0000

Yesterday was a big day for anyone who cares about opening up government, especially when it comes to publicly-owned data.

The Obama administration launched data.gov, making taxpayer-funded data available in machine-readable form to the public. While the service currently offers only a limited number of feeds, the plan is to have it grow dramatically in the coming weeks and years. The result will likely be an explosion of mashups, visualizations and innovative ways to analyze and cross-reference the huge stores of data currently in government hands.

It's one of the first steps in Obama's Open Government Initiative, geared to creating "an unprecedented level of openness in government" through transparency, participation and collaboration.

But that wasn't the only big leap forward in public data openness. Here in Vancouver, city council passed a resolution calling on it to open up its data, adopt open standards and give open-source software the same consideration it gives to proprietary software.

It's the brainchild of David Eaves, a good friend (I say that by way of both disclosure and enthusiastic personal endorsement) and a thoughtful proponent of open data. And as he points out, it vaults Vancouver into the forefront of what some call the open movement. (He also notes that, for those skeptical of the interest out there in more openness, the past week's flurry of media coverage provides a welcome rebuttal.)

Why is this a big deal? And why should anyone care?

Well, one reason is a principle: that data is ours. We paid for it, and there's something incongruous about the fact that so much of it is under digital lock and key.

Another reason: as long as we can't get at the raw data, then we're at the mercy of those who interpret it for us - and no matter how much good faith they bring to that task, they and their employers have their own agendas: some ideological, some bureaucratic, some partisan. We have no way of doublechecking their results, methodology or framing. And we have no say in what questions they're investigating in the first place. Without open data, we don't have the transparency that a democracy demands to allow us to make meaningful, informed choices.

And the third reason: free access to data means more and better ways to use it, interpret it and add value to it. That's one of the beauties of what we used to call Web 2.0: open data and open standards combine with easy-to-use tools, dramatically broadening the community of people who can dream up cool new applications with publicly-available data.

This isn't just about coders, although there are no doubt plenty of them ready and eager to dive in as soon as the first dataset goes live. (For one thing, "programming" is increasingly accessible to non-coders, thanks to visual tools like Yahoo! Pipes. For another, the results can be fantastically useful.) This is about all of us.

Because those applications, here and in the U.S., are going to do everything from finding new, engaging ways to present dry but important information... to surfacing surprising results that challenge conventional wisdom (and, perhaps, government claims)... to enabling commercially-viable products and services (some based on that open data, others informed by it), generating jobs and economic growth.

Given all of that, it's fitting that I spent yesterday in Calgary, talking to some of the folks there who have made the city one of the most interesting Canadian innovators in engaging its citizens through social media. Their YouTube channel, Facebook page on youth programs and city core revitalization blog are all well worth checking out. The initiative that struck me the most, though, was the city's actively conversational Twitter feed, with swift, useful and personable responses to comments and questions from everyday people. It's a neighbourhood bulletin board crossed with ComcastCares.

Here's the text of yesterday's Vancouver motion, presented by Councillor Andrea Reimer and seconded by Councillor Geoff Meggs (both also friends):

WHEREAS the City of Vancouver is committed to bringing the community into City Hall by engaging citizens, and soliciting their ideas, input and creative energy;

WHEREAS municipalities across Canada have an opportunity to dramatically lower their costs by collectively sharing and supporting software they use and create;

WHEREAS the total value of public data is maximized when provided for free or where necessary only a minimal cost of distribution;

WHEREAS when data is shared freely, citizens are enabled to use and re-purpose it to help create a more economically vibrant and environmentally sustainable city;

WHEREAS Vancouver needs to look for opportunities for creating economic activity and partnership with the creative tech sector;

WHEREAS the adoption of open standards improves transparency, access to city information by citizens and businesses and improved coordination and efficiencies across municipal boundaries and with federal and provincial partners;

WHEREAS the Integrated Cadastral Information Society (ICIS) is a not-for-profit society created as a partnership between local government, provincial government and major utility companies in British Columbia to share and integrate spatial data to which 88% of BC local governments are members but Vancouver is not;

WHEREAS digital innovation can enhance citizen communications, support the brand of the city as creative and innovative, improve service delivery, support citizens to self-organize and solve their own problems, and create a stronger sense of civic engagement, community, and pride;

WHEREAS the City of Vancouver has incredible resources of data and information, and has recently been recognized as one of the Best City Archives in the World by a noted scholar in an important journal.

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED THAT the City of Vancouver endorses the principles of:

Open and Accessible Data - the City of Vancouver will freely share with citizens, businesses and other jurisdictions the greatest amount of data possible while respecting privacy and security concerns;

Open Standards - the City of Vancouver will move as quickly as possible to adopt prevailing open standards for data, documents, maps, and other formats of media;

Open Source Software - the City of Vancouver, when replacing existing software or considering new applications, will place open source software on an equal footing with commercial systems during procurement cycles; and

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED THAT in pursuit of open data the City of Vancouver will:

Identify immediate opportunities to distribute more of its data;

Index, publish and syndicate its data to the internet using prevailing open standards, interfaces and formats;

Develop appropriate agreements to share its data with the Integrated Cadastral Information Society (ICIS) and encourage the ICIS to in turn share its data with the public at large

Develop a plan to digitize and freely distribute suitable archival data to the public;

Ensure that data supplied to the City by third parties (developers, contractors, consultants) are unlicensed, in a prevailing open standard format, and not copyrighted except if otherwise prevented by legal considerations;

License any software applications developed by the City of Vancouver such that they may be used by other municipalities, businesses, and the public without restriction.

BE IT FINALLY RESOLVED THAT the City Manager be tasked with developing an action plan for implementation of the above.

When and how to communicate online

Alexandra Samuel — Fri, 22 May 2009 05:21:20 +0000

Don't e-mail what you can blog. Don't blog what you can tweet. Don't tweet what you can DM. Don't DM what you wouldn't publish.

Or so I twittered this afternoon. It turns out that the flip side of this social media hierarchy (which I hereby dub "smierarchy") is, "don't tweet what you need a blog post to explain". And as it turns out, it does take a blog post to explain this one. So here's the explanatory blog post:

Don't e-mail what you can blog. E-mail is a closed medium. When you send an e-mail, you're only sending it to a handful of people (we'll leave the discussion of accidental mass-e-mails for another day). If you're e-mailing something that's useful or amusing, and not confidential or sensitive, then why not blog it? Several of my favourite blog posts began life as e-mails. When I find that I'm e-mailing multiple people with the same tips (for example, on getting into grad school, setting up personal information management on the Mac, or dining out in Vancouver), I turn it into a blog post. If someone asks me for thoughts on a particular topic or issue, that can turn into a blog post, too -- for example, on the thoughtful use of Twitter.

Don't blog what you can tweet. Twitter is a fantastic outlet for information, insights and reflections that are small enough -- or better, yet, concise enough -- to fit in 140 characters. So if you can fit into a tweet (or two), skip the long, meandering blog post and just tweet it.

Don't tweet what you can DM. There's a reason Twitter changed "replies" to "mentions". If you want to convey info that has no interest, or even amusement value, to anyone other than the recipient, then send it as a private IM or direct message on Twitter.

Don't DM what you wouldn't publish. This isn't part of the smierarchy; it's just good sense. If you're not -- on some level -- prepared to see something disseminated publicly, don't put it in any electronic form. When you send a message to someone, it's not in your control. You can't preclude the possibility of misunderstanding, accidental forwarding, or deliberate recirculation. So while there are lots of circumstances in which it's useful to conduct private business electronically -- via chat or e-mail -- you should distinguish between what's private and what's confidential. Anything that would be really compromising or disastrous to see disclosed shouldn't travel electronically.

That explains the don'ts -- but I'm sick of don'ts. So let me also take this opportunity to offer a couple of positive alternatives, inspired by the Zimbabwean proverb: "If you can talk you can sing. If you can walk you can dance".

On the smierarchy:

If you can e-mail you can blog. If you can blog you can tweet.

On public versus private communications:

If it's personal, say it personally. If it's private, say it privately.

David Plouffe on how technology+people helped elect Obama

Rob Cottingham — Mon, 11 May 2009 19:16:08 +0000

This morning at Convergence 09, Barack Obama's campaign manager David Plouffe took the stage. His message: technology helped connect people in a way that's never happened before, to elect a candidate who might never have been able to win before.

Here are my notes from the session.

10 ways to maximize your blog's ROI: Part 10, giving your online conversations a home base

Rob Cottingham — Thu, 07 May 2009 05:07:20 +0000

Visiting someone else's place is great. You eat their food, drink their imbibables, and meet their guests.

But eventually to host a gathering at your own place takes hold. You want to choose the hors d'oeuvres, cue up the playlist and invite your own friends -- in your own home.

It's no different with blogging. True, your organization can go quite a ways in engaging the online world by commenting on third-party blogs. But if you want to be serious about joining the conversation, you'll want a place of your own: an online home for the conversations you want to have.

And while you have no more control over where those conversations ultimately lead and what other conversations may start than you do when you're hosting a party, you're the one who sets the agenda. And it's your voice that sets the tone and pace for your audience.

The conversations here are branded indelibly as yours - for better or for worse. It means you have to be involved, steering the conversation back on track if it heads off-topic or into anti-social territory. But it also means you become known as a place to go, maybe the place to go, to talk about the values and issues that lie at the heart of your brand's values and your organization's mission. Call it thought leadership, public relations or civic participation - those conversations have real value to your organization.

Your blog houses those conversations. And here's how to make the value of your house (ahem) appreciate:

Set the table. When the first visitors arrive at your blog, they should find a healthy supply of blog posts all ready for them. So when you launch, make sure you have at least five posts already published... and make them your best work.
Be involved. A good host doesn't just set out the crackers and spray-on cheese and then sit back; they interact with their guests, asking how they're doing, making introductions, freshening drinks. Your job is to keep the conversation well-stocked with compelling blog posts and engaging responses to comments.
Keep it lively. Freshen people's virtual drinks with a regular schedule of posting to your blog. There's no law that says exactly how often you need to post... but if you want to be part of the conversation, the more recent your last contribution, the better.
Aggregate. If you're commenting on behalf of your organization on other blogs, consider using a tool like Disqus or BackType to list those comments on your own blog as well. Other tools will let you include everything from your latest Twitter contributions and your most recent Flickr photographs to your Facebook status updates, Digg submissions and YouTube videos. Including this content gives users a window on your broader online presence, and increases the impact of your off-site activities.
Join conversations on related blogs. A comment on another blog with a link back to your own site drives traffic, but more to the point, it encourages participants to read and engage with your blog. (Of course, your interventions on those other blogs shouldn't be spam-like "come read my blog post!" comments; add real value to the conversation. As a rule, the link to your own site should come in a distant second in prominence to your contribution to that blog's dialogue.)
Consider joining a blog aggregator. For pretty much any topic, there's at least one popular site that aggregates related blog posts, offering one-stop reading (and often rating, ranking and featuring) of posts from dozens or even hundreds of blogs. Those sites can give you a big boost in visibility, and bring even more people to your party... as well as exposing you to the writers of other blogs, and vice versa.
Make it easy to find your blog. People can't come to your party if they can't find your home. Link prominently to your blog from your organization's primary web presence, if possible in the main navigation, and where appropriate from other web sites (e.g. a Facebook page) as well. Make sure your blog's URL is simple and easy to remember – http://organizationname.org/blog or http://blog.organizationname.org, rather than some alphanumeric soup, like http://organizationname.org/pages/n/public/content.asp?category=300475629&page=461394&type=581&whatthehellwasthedevelopersmoking=420.
Promote your blog. What's a party without invitations? Drop bloggers in your field a note to let them know about your blog, and invite them to give their feedback. Talk up your blog at real-world events; add a link in your email subject line. Consider making a modest investment in online ads like Google AdWords and see how that works for you. Do what you can to let potential readers know about your blog, and why they'll find it interesting.

You'll know you're building equity in your online home when:

You develop a cadre of regulars: positive contributors who comment regularly on your blog, link to you from theirs, and add to the conversation.
You and your colleagues start finding useful information by searching your own blog archives.
Your blog becomes a significant source of traffic to your organization's primary web presence, and not just the other way around.
Your organization recognizes your blog as an effective way to spark and respond to online conversations about subjects that matter to your organization.

5 time-wasting Internet rules that you should think about breaking

Alexandra Samuel — Thu, 07 May 2009 04:28:57 +0000

Internet sages are full of rules about stupid things you should never do. But like most recommendations delivered as inviolable laws, the cardinal Don'ts of life online mostly distract you from Do's that would be more rewarding. Here are some don'ts I believe in breaking, and some dos you can undertake once you've let go of these time- and worry-wasters.

1. "Don't forget to back up!"

The single most useful thing I learned from my dissertation research was from a hacker who said, "if you don't have your data in two places, you don't have your data." Amen! But screw backups. Yes, you heard me right. Backups are like...oh, gosh, I'd name something I'm supposed to do everyday and don't, but it would gross some of you out and make others of you ask, "am I really supposed to do that every day?"

Welcome to the 23rd-century internet (it's arrived a few years ahead of schedule). If you're using the web apps that you should be using to work in a smart, socially-enabled kinda way, the data you care about is already backed up. Between my Gmail archive (which contains all the attachments of anything I've ever thought useful enough to send someone), DropBox (which contains all the files useful enough to share with my team), MobileMe (all the contact and calendar data relevant enough to need on my iPhone), delicious (bookmarks), Flickr (photos) and Harvest (timesheets and invoices), Evernote (personal notes), I'd be hard-pressed to think of five files I care about but don't have somewhere on the cloud.

Do spend the time and money you'd use for backups to get set up with cloud-based web services that will not only save (yeah, I mean back up) your data, but make it more useful in the process.

2. "Don't buy the extended warranty!"

No, there's no extended warranty on the Internet. (But wouldn't it be great if there were? Just imagine: "Twitter's having problems right now. But thanks to your extended warranty, our passenger pigeons will deliver that message for you!")

But you can buy the extended warranty for all the hardware doo-dads you use to access the Internet: your computer, your router, your phone, that not-yet-FDA-approved neural implant. Any web site will tell you that you're a sap for buying the warranty -- don't you know that's how the big box electronics stores make all their money? -- but sometimes being a sap is the path of least resistance. Yes, you could send your router to the manufacturer when it craps out after its first month, but it's so much easier to drop back into Gigantic Electronics, hand them your dead router, and walk out with a new one.

Do spend your time researching your purchases before hand, in the hopes that your extended warranty will prove unnecessary.

3. "Don't use the same password on multiple sites!"

OMG!! I must be crazy!! Well, how crazy do you get when you're trying to remember which g**d*** username and password you used on the site you're trying to log into?

The twin angels of Internet security and privacy will tell you to use a different password on every site, generated by a random algorithm, and whatever you do, don't ever write your password down. There's a name for those who can successfully implement that approach: supercomputers.

For those mortals who can barely remember our own phone numbers, let alone our passwords, something simpler is in order. I am awsamuel everywhere: this not only helps me remember my username when I visit a site, but it gives me a consistent identity online. (If you'd rather have anonymity in some circumstances, you may want a second username that you use for off-the-record sites.) Then I have four passwords: my I-so-don't-care-about-this password (I'm almost prepared to include it in this post), my all-purpose password (for sites with no associated payment mechanisms, but where I post content and don't want others to abuse my name), my high-security password (for servers, sites where I've given credit card info, and my own blogs), and my bank password. I change my all-purpose password about once a year.

Do write down hints about which passwords you've used on which sites. If I'm not sure whether I'll remember whether I've used my all-purpose password or my high-security password, I create a contact record in my address book and note which password I've used for that site. I don't write the password down, just a prompt that tells me which type of password I've used -- enough to remind me, but not enough for anyone else to understand.

4. "Don't store your main credit card number on e-commerce sites!"

This is a twofer: not only are you violating the law that Thou Shalt Have A Separate Low-limit Credit Card For Thy Online Purchases, but you are also violating the law that Thou Shalt Never Store Your Credit Card Number Online.

Storing your number will actually save you money. If you're like me, you'll otherwise get around the inconvenience of having to get out your credit card for each online purchase by memorizing your credit card number. If you've done this, you may want to consider getting a new credit card (really). Knowing your credit card number by heart is a dangerous thing: it makes you prep to every ginzu knife commercial, every "let's just order our dinner while we're on the way home" --- every opportunity to buy something now, today, this minute, before you even have to spend forty-five seconds getting your wallet and credit card out of your purse or jacket.

Using your real credit card saves you money too. If you use a credit card that earns points or rewards, you'll get those points for your online purchases (a benefit you're unlikely to get if you're using a low-limit card as a secondary account for online purchases). And you're unlikely to forget about that second credit card, racking up interest charges when you miss a payment.

This tip doesn't apply to every site: if this is your first purchase at Andy's Widgets 'n Things, you might want to use PayPal, or another disposable payment mechanism (like a pre-paid Visa gift card) But there are some sites you use regularly, and advisedly -- in my case, Amazon, TicketMaster and iTunes. (OK, maybe not advisedly...but regularly.). It's a pain to dig out my credit info each time....and I use them frequently enough that digging out the credit card is recipe for credit card memorization. So for sites like these -- sites with a huge number of customers and a reputation that assures you that your credit card statement is unlikely to include a surprise charge of $892 for porn and sex toys -- go ahead and store your number. It'll make your life easier, you'll earn points on purchases, and you're less likely to experience credit card theft on a mainstream online site than in some restaurant where a waiter can write down your number for later use.

Do worry about that waiter with the $10,000 Rolex.

5. "Don't pay for stuff you can get for free!"

The web is full of fantastic free content, available both legally and illegally. Bittorrent will get you the music and video you want, a decent google search will find you great tech support, and almost any kind of software you need is available in an open source, install-your-own version. And since you have a limitless amount of time and a finite amount of money, it's a great idea to get everything you need for free.

What's that you say? Your time is finite too? Possibly even more limited than your money? Great news: let me introduce you to a little something we call the credit card. Yes, those bastards at [insert name of video site here] are selling you what you could get for free, those idiots at [insert name of tech help site here] are selling you info you could find yourself, and those schmucks at [insert name of on-demand software company here] are charging you money for software that isn't even half as good as what you could put together yourself. But one day you will be dead, and meanwhile there are only so many hours you want to spend searching for that video file or how-to tip, or installing and configuring your own software.

Spend the money: iTunes or Amazon will get you that video or song right now, MacFixit will give you that tech answer in two minutes, and software services like Harvest, ManyMoon and Batchbook (love you guys!)

I know you know how to do it yourself. So what?

Do spend your time and tech smarts in more useful ways to have more impact -- and make more cash to cover those online content bills.

* * *

I realize I'm taking my online life in my hands with these recommendations; that there are those who will see this as a giant "hack me" sign. But I also see too many people who are daunted by all the rules -- all the endless don'ts -- that make life online harder than it needs to be. Best practices need to presented as just that: best practices, recommendations, words from the wise.

When we load Internet users with iron laws -- with don'ts -- they all-too-often hear just one: don't trust the Internet.

And I'm more interested in conveying a do: do embrace the potential of life online.

What online don'ts have you disregarded? What online do's have you embraced? Let us know in comments below, or via Twitter.

Book Rob for your next event

Rob Cottingham — Tue, 05 May 2009 03:44:44 +0000

Book Rob for your next conference or convention! "Teh Funny" offers a unique combination of laughs, inspiration and insight - a completely new kind of keynote. See these highlights, or catch the complete version here.

To ask about bringing Rob to your event, drop us a line at Social Signal or fill out this form:

10 ways to maximize your blog's ROI: Part 9, Embracing openness

Rob Cottingham — Fri, 01 May 2009 00:23:13 +0000

There's a convergence going on: some big social and business trends that have one thing in common - the word open.

Whether it's open-source software, or enormous information repositories that are open to be accessed and sometimes even edited by anyone, or the growing requirements for transparency on the part of organizations and governments, your customers, supporters and audience are expecting you to be open to them.

Not just in the sense of open-minded... or having a contact form on your web site. But open in the sense that they know what you're doing, how it affects them, and why. That your organization's leadership is available and accountable. That they can engage with you and your brand as peers.

Books like Wikinomics and Tactical Transparency explain not only the forces driving the trend toward openness, but the real value that businesses and other organizations can gain when they let in some sunshine. Freeing some of your intellectual property, for instance, can allow your users to run with it - sometimes as brand ambassadors, other times as analysts who generate new and unexpected insights for you. And opening up internally, by creating a place for conversation that cuts across departmental walls, can give your organization new opportunities to collaborate.

Even the more intimidating aspects of openness, like the increased accountability it imposes, can be positive when it keeps organizations true to their mission and their brand values - and aligned with the communities they serve.

There's more - a lot more - to openness than blogging, of course. But a blog can be the way your organization opens the windows a crack, sniffs the air outside and decides whether to go further.

Here's how to start opening up:

Nobody's expecting you to run naked through the digital streets - and certainly not right off the bat. Get buy-in from your organization, start small, and open up gradually... validating what you've done at every step.
Your first step can be a modest one: bringing in a manager as a guest blogger, for example, available to respond to reader comments and questions about their area of responsibility. A successful outing there can lead to more ambitious efforts later on.
Focus your efforts on relevant openness - things that actually matter to your readers. And aim at first for the areas with the least controversy and risk, while you build up your organization's comfort level (and your own knowledge of your community of readers and commenters.)
Openness is as much about getting to know people as it is about hard facts and controversial issues. Introduce your readers to the behind-the-scenes folks who make things happen. If those people are willing, give your readers access to them with a Q & A or live chat on your blog.
Let your readers in on what goes on backstage. Take them through the process of making that hot new product you're selling, or walk them through the processing of a donation all the way to where it makes a difference out in the world.
Share your challenges. Is the economic downturn causing breaks or bottlenecks in your supply chain that are causing delivery delays? Has heightened interest in your organization meant a slow web server or site outages? Be the first to tell that story to your readers, before they hear it from others or experience it themselves; they'll appreciate the candor, and respond well to your lack of defensiveness.
Anticipate the risks of openness: backlash, criticism and tough questions. Plan in advance for how you can deal with them, so a brief spark doesn't have the time to flare into something more destructive.
"Open" doesn't mean "floodgates". You probably have reams of data you could share on your blog, from the cafeteria's daily specials to the new guidelines for office allocation. Be judicious, and choose the information that will mean the most to the people you want to reach.
If you have an especially thorny problem, consider throwing it open to your readers. Be very clear about the kind of help you'd like, so you can focus their contributions and ideas where they'll actually be useful.
When the time comes to make a decision that affects your readers, use your blog as consult them
See if you can make your organization's logo and wordmark available for reuse (perhaps under a Creative Commons license), and post them to your blog. Invite your readers to use them, even to remix them, when they're talking about your organization. Do the same with photos of your organization's leadership, audio and video clips of products or services in action, and other digital assets that your readers can run with.
Do at least as much listening as talking, and build the reflex of responding with access. If you're seeing a lot of blog chatter or reading a lot of comments about a particular issue, find ways to open up around it - by exposing some of your internal conversations about the issue, for example, or inviting a conversation between your readers and some of your organization's key people.
Look for ways to bring people inside - not just virtually, but in the physical world. Hold a real-world meetup in your offices, for example, or a townhall with your organization's key leaders. And complete the circle by linking it back to the online world - for instance, via a Twitter feed or liveblog of the conversation.

You'll know that openness is starting to pay off when:

Your research and monitoring show an increase in public perception and description of your organization as open, accessible and accountable.
Ideas from your blog's readers start getting discussed in your organization, and taken seriously.
Your organization steps back from the brink of a bad decision because of concern over how it will be received in the community. And your organization takes a courageous good decision for exactly the same reason.
Internal collaboration starts to cut across silos, as the culture of openness soaks in.
People in your organization start to approach you with things they'd like to ask or share with your readers.

Winner in our Twitter contest gets her Flip HD

Rob Cottingham — Fri, 01 May 2009 00:12:32 +0000

Turns out it really is better to give than receive! We just handed Julie Ovenell-Carter, a.k.a. @sfuwoodwards, her brand new Flip MinoHD video camera, her prize in Social Signal's first Twitter contest.

First a word about the Flip: We're in love with these little beasts. The quality is great, the cameras are tiny, and they put affordable video into the hands of lots more people than ever before... while making it easier than ever to share with the world. What's not to love - especially since they take the creative self-expression one step further, letting you customize your Flip with your own design?

We asked Julie if she'd mind if we slapped our logo on there, and she very kindly agreed, and we think it looks chic as all hell.

And second, a word about the Julie and the SFU/Woodward's project.

The Woodward's development is a fantastically innovative housing, business, social and cultural development in the heart of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, built on the site of a former department store. And a big part of it will be the relocated Simon Fraser University School for the Contemporary Arts.

That relocation is documented on the SFU Woodwards blog... but because you want the very latest updates, and enjoy one of Twitter's more engaging and lively voices, you'll want to check out the project's Twitter feed... the one that Julie writes.

(Did we mention she's an award-winning writer? She's an award-winning writer. Crikey.)

We couldn't be happier that this particular Flip is going to go to work recording one of the most important, ground-breaking initiatives in the history of Canadian urban development. But we also hope Julie (who's also a travel blogger) gets to have some fun with it, too!

Congratulations, Julie, and thanks to everyone who entered!

12 kid-friendly iPhone apps for toddlers and young kids

Alexandra Samuel — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 02:48:11 +0000

You may think of your iPhone as a communications device, a productivity tool, an iPod or even a babe magnet. But if that's all an iPhone is to you, you're missing its most extraordinary power: the ability to keep a preschooler silent and occupied for the length of time it takes a grown-up to eat a meal in a restaurant with actual tablecloths.

We discovered the awesome child-pacifying powers of our iPhones last summer, while on a leadership retreat at the Hollyhock Centre. Hollyhock is almost the last place on earth you want to be outed as an over-technologized parent, but we decided we'd rather be the freaks whose kids can't be separated from the small screen, than the freaks whose kids are incredibly noisy and disrupt everybody's dinner (though there were some nights when we got to be both).

At first, we treated the iPhones as very tiny TV screens, capable of amusing our kids with downloaded Diego and Dora episodes. But within a few weeks of his second birthday, our little guy had already mastered the art of unlocking a sleeping iPhone, navigating to the iPod player, and getting Diego up and running. From this we inferred that the kids might be up for something more interactive, and tried out a variety of educational -- and not so educational -- games over the following months.

The opportunity to download a new iPhone app is now the second-most-requested privilege in our house: ahead of junk food, but still behind the lure of a new arts & crafts project. (Phew!) Saturday is "you get to buy a new app from the iTunes store" day, and our elder kid now has her sights set on an iPhone (or iPod touch) of her own.

Here are some of the apps that have been consistent hits in our house. I'd love to hear about other iPhone apps that appeal to the 3-5 set.

Fairies Fly: If you're the kind of parent who refuses to take your kid to Disney movies on principle, this is not the application for you. If, on the other hand, you are a five-year-old girl, you will think that steering Tinkerbell and other Disney fairies through trees, clouds and insects is pretty much the best thing that has ever happened in the entire history of the world.
Zippo Lighter: On the one hand, it seems like an extraordinarily poor idea to encourage a small kid to play with fire. On the other hand, it seems to have completed displaced the fascination with REAL matches and lighters that I associate with small children.
The Wheels on the Bus: This interactive version of the kids' song is genuinely awesome; your kid can sing along in English, French, Spanish or several other languages, or record his own voice and listen to himself sing. No downsides except for the remarkable ethnic homogeneity of the bus riders & townspeople, which I can excuse on the grounds that this version seems to be set in a small French village (why, I couldn't tell you.)
Cylon Detector: If you're geeky enough to think that an iPhone is an appropriate kid toy, you probably share our eagerness to induct your children into sci-fi geekdom as early as possible. The Battlestar Galactica Cylon Detector lets you or your kid snap a photo, and then find out whether the subject is a Cylon. Our kids love the composited photos of themselves and their friends in BSG garb; we love them getting groovy with Captain Adama et al.
Subway Shuffle Lite: Move the obstacles so the train can move from one station to the other. A very simple logic game that can be modestly challenging for adults, and is a good brain-builder for kids who fight it engaging.
Tappy Tunes: Unless you're ready to start nagging your kids about piano practice, Tappy Tunes is the easiest way to get them playing music that sounds like, well, music. The kids tap the screen, and it plays the notes of a song, in order; your kid basically controls the pace, but not the tune.
Ocarina: An iPhone version of the wind instrument: blow into your iPhone's mike while you tap the appropriate spots on the screen, and you can play your iPhone ocarina like a real instrument. The kids love the challenge of modulating their breath and coordinating with the taps on screen.
Scoops: Tilt the iPhone to slide your ice cream cone back and forth across the screen, catching more ice scream scoops and avoiding the tomatoes and onions. Simple, quiet and enjoyable.
Balloonimals: Blow into the mike to inflate a balloon, then shake the phone to make a balloon animal. The resulting 3-D animals each perform a few different motions depending on where you tap. It's all in the execution, here; nice images and animations make for a great experience.
Bugdom: Help your bug navigate through a garden, zapping bees and catching butterflies.
Toddler Teasers: Basic toddler challenges, like shape and colour identification. The instructions are spoken out loud, instead of written, which is something more kid-oriented games should think of!
Peekaboo Barn: Guess which animal you're hearing through the barn doors before the barn opens. It's the adorable illustrations that make this game so charming; our toddler was delighted each time a new animal was revealed.

Last but most essential: the Clarifi case, useful for sharpening your iPhone's camera so you can take great shots of your kids. And even more useful when those tiny, techie fingers let your $299 iPhone drop on the restaurant floor.