I have been through a wide range of emotion related to my Flip Mino HD video camera over the past month. Initially, I was excited about the low cost - mine was $179 after a $20 instant rebate from Costco. The package contained a small tripod and carrying pouch, but did not include the wall charger. The form factor is brilliant; it allows me to carry a 720p HD video camera in my pocket. The camera weighs very little and I forget it’s in my pocket after the first few minutes.

My first videos were beautiful and the overall experience with the Flip was exactly what I had hoped it would be. I recorded about 25 minutes of video at a pool party and BBQ at a gorgeous house on the water in Ft. Lauderdale. The quality of the video was impressive, especially when viewed on my 52″ LCD TV. I was able to overlook the absence of in-camera image stabilization, and the lack of an optical zoom simply wasn’t a problem. Everything worked exactly as I had hoped.

Flash forward about 2 weeks. I took my Flip to San Francisco to document Cisco Live 2009, with plans to video blog during the event. I intended to shoot videos during each of my sessions and share them with the world. I created a WordPress blog at contactcenterenterprise.com, got my company to endorse the creation and use of a corporate Twitter account (our first corporate foray into both blogging and social media), set up an internal SharePoint site for the bits that I couldn’t post publicly, and set off for SF with high hopes. In the process I created a YouTube account, a private FlipShare channel, linked the contactcenterenterprise blog to Twitter via TwitterFeed.com, found the right hashtag for the event (#clsf), and engaged in “the conversation” on Twitter in the run-up to the event. I read everything I could about social media, video blogging and Twitter for corporate marketing. I followed the big names in social media, engaged in their conversations, and was even asked to guest blog for workshifting.com in the process. Everything went to plan. I had built my personal Twitter following to more than 100 and our corporate following to 80 by the time Cisco Live began. In the process, I encouraged many of my coworkers to join Twitter and generated enthusiasm about how we can collectively use social media in ways that are meaningful. And so begins the lesson:

Lesson 1: Battery life and memory capacity can make or break your entire effort. Save some for the juicy parts.

Day 1 of the conference for me was a Sunday. I got to the session early, secured a good seat and set up my laptop, Flip Mino HD, iPhone 3GS, and various accessories in preparation for the session. The session was about 2 hours long, with a reception afterward. I completely discharged the Flip’s 60 minute battery and filled its internal memory during the main session. Approximately halfway through the session I copied the video off the Flip to my laptop, and connected the camera to recharged via USB while I shot the second half of the session on the iPhone 3GS (which I kept connected to the USB throughout the session).

I was still new at using the Flip and didn’t have a sense for how closely the battery life and the memory capacity are linked. If you record enough video to fill the memory, the battery is almost certainly going to be dead (assuming you started with a fully charged battery). Recharging is slow over USB.

Lesson 2: Inexpensive video cameras, dark rooms and stage lighting are not friends.

My video from the session on day 1 is pretty bad. There weren’t any tables in the room, so I had to hold the camera just above eye level in order to shoot the video. After 60 minutes holding your arm(s) in the air, the camera no longer feels so light that you forget about it. Additionally, the lighting situation was unexpected. The stage where the presenters stood had full stage lighting and the rest of the room was dark. Neither camera could deal with this situation effectively and the faces of the presenters are essentially white blobs in the resulting video. There were two large screens that were used to present the slides and demos during the session, and neither camera could transition from the bright screen to the activity on stage and back without issues.

Lesson 3: Have a backup plan.

I was happy about the results of my Day 1 experience with the camera and looked forward to a great week of learning, blogging, tweeting, and connecting with other professionals in my field. I woke up on the morning of Day 2, created my first video blog entry and headed off to the day’s sessions. At some point during the first session, I completely drained the battery on the Flip. Just as I had on Day 1, I connected it to my laptop, copied the videos to my HDD, and allowed the camera to charge while I finished the session with the iPhone. This is when something went wrong. After a few minutes of charging, the Flip displayed a thermometer on screen and indicated that it was “too hot.” A quick check of the support site on the internet suggested that I allow the camera to cool before continued use. I disconnected the camera and used the iPhone throughout the second session.

When I returned to my hotel room later that evening, I connected the Flip to my computer to offload my recordings, update the blog and post videos to YouTube. Upon connecting the camera, I received a “USB Device not recognized” message from Windows XP. I searched the ‘net and found instructions to reset the camera, which I then followed. Unfortunately, the instructions indicated that the camera should charge overnight and may need 2-3 days before it could be used again. This presented a problem. I had big plans for the camera that week, and this meant my dreams of an HD record of every session were rapidly fading. I went to bed that evening dejected, but prepared to suffer through the conference relying on my iPhone.

Lesson 4: 60 minutes of record time isn’t nearly enough if you don’t have WiFi or 3G built in.

Day 3 at Cisco Live 2009 included a keynote address from John Chambers, CEO of Cisco. I spent the entire morning attempting to get my Flip Mino HD working again, with no luck. I performed resets. I tried every USB port on my laptop. I tried a powered USB hub. I even bought an official Flip USB travel charger from the Cisco Store at the conference. Nothing would work, and the Flip remained in my hotel room on the charger while I attended my sessions all day.

The iPhone’s storage capacity (mine is a 32GB model) is amazing, and I never even came close to filling it. In fact, I have not deleted any of the videos on the phone and I still have more than 10GB of free space - even though I have nearly 15GB of music and videos purchased from iTunes on the device. The video quality of the phone is mediocre, is not HD, and has the same issues with low light situations as the Flip. Once you set the point of focus, you cannot adjust it without stopping the recording. It also appears that the white balance is set when you press record, so transitions from projected images on a large screen to a live speaker are pretty bad. On the other hand, the audio quality of the recordings is superior to the Flip. It is much easier to hear the speaker on the iPhone videos than the Flip videos, in my opinion. On the negative side, I had no way to mount the iPhone on a tripod, so I shot much less video than I would have with the Flip on its included mini-tripod. I couldn’t type notes, tweet and hold the camera at the same time, so my Day 3 videos are less complete, my notes have gaps, and my tweet volume is somewhat reduced. On the plus side, I was able to upload video immediately from the iPhone, so my John Chambers video was live while Mr. Chambers was still speaking. This video has the most hits of any video that I shot at the conference.

I was unable to get the Flip to work for the remainder of the trip.

Lesson 5: Cut your losses.

After I returned from Cisco Live, I played around with the Flip a bit more. Miraculously it accepted a charge and my laptop would recognize it again. I off-loaded my videos and fully charged the battery. My fiancee and I arranged to meet our real estate agent to look at three houses over the weekend and I grabbed the Flip to shoot some HD video of the poperties.

I managed to get a complete video tour of both House #1 and House #2 on the Flip before it ran out of memory and battery. I also recorded “reaction videos” as we left the houses, so that we could reflect on what we saw after we were safely out of earshot of the homeowners and their agents. I did the same with House #3, but I used the iPhone to record the video.

The plan was to upload the video to YouTube and mark it private. This is when I figured out that the built-in upload feature for YouTube in the iPhone won’t let you mark videos as Public or Private at upload time. So, I waited until we got home to upload along with the video from the Flip, so that my parents who live out of town could share in our home shopping experience.

The Flip failed, again. I am still unable to copy the videos and although I have a slim hope that I’ll get lucky and recover them in a few days, indications so far are not good. My parents loved the video from the iPhone at House #3 and are anxiously awaiting video from the other two homes for comparison.

A support ticket to the folks at theFlip.com yielded a response that mirrors what I already found online, and ignores the fact that I detailed the steps I had taken already in the case submission. I have not completed their “post-support satisfaction survey” and will withhold my comments until I find out if I can recover my house videos. Here is an excerpt from their emailed response to my support case:

We suggest trying to reset your camcorder, and then attempt to charge it again. To reset, simply take a pin and insert it into the reset hole within the camera’s tripod mount, wait five seconds before powering on, and then power on without touching any of the buttons on the back of the camcorder for an additional five seconds.

This should complete the reset process.

I had already done this, but I tried it again, per the instructions.

Next, please connect the USB arm to a high-powered USB port on your computer, and ensure your computer is powered on. You may see no activity on the camcorder - neither lights nor indication that the camcorder is charging - for the first 30 minutes. Once the initial 30 minutes has concluded, you should see some indication that the camcorder is charging and be able to power the camcorder on. Continue charging for the full amount of time (we suggest three hours) to ensure that the battery is completely charged before recording again.

I had done this too, but again I followed instructions.

If after 30 minutes, you continue to see no activity from the camcorder, please leave it connected to your computer overnight, but ensure that the computer does not hibernate nor power off during the entire period of time the camcorder is connected.

Still no luck. I have been through the process several times now.

I am hoping that I will be able to RMA the Flip for a replacement. At this point I am outside the window to return it to the store for a refund. I may see if American Express will refund my money under their buyer protection program.

As I reflect on this experience, several things come to mind.

1. I let a failure in my selected technologies derailed my efforts. I should have shifted gears and relied on tweeting and blogging of the content rather than video to communicate my message. I allowed the failed camera and my frustration to distract me.
2. Live-blogging and live-tweeting are a team sport.  In the future, I will bring three things to a conference when I plan to record complete session videos and tweet or blog in-session. A high-quality video camera, a tripod and a friend. You need all three to be effective.
3. I’ll test my technology under conditions similar to those I intend to be under when it’s crunch time. My 25 minutes of 2 minute videos at the BBQ, on a sunny day, in full natural lighting didn’t reveal the weaknesses of the Flip or allow me to properly evaluate its utility for video blogging a conference.
4. Your selection of theme in WordPress is critical. Some themes simply do not lend themselves to rapid-fire blogging with attached video and image files.
5. Don’t count on WiFi at a conference. I had heard horror stories about WiFi at other conferences, but I incorrectly assumed that this was ineptitude on the part of the conference organizers. As it turns out, supplying WiFi to 7K-10K power users in a venue is hard, even for Cisco.
6. Don’t count on 3G either. There were several times when I simply couldn’t get a signal or my iPhone was running on the AT&T EDGE network. Again, supplying broadband internet connection speeds to a highly concentrated cluster of users hasn’t reached maturity - even in downtown San Francisco at a Cisco convention about networking and collaboration.

I hope that these lessons help you if/when you embark on similar endeavors.

UPDATE 8/4/2009: After nearly two weeks of sitting untouched with a dead battery, I was able to charge and recover video from my Flip Mino HD.

I’ll be off momentarily to a local Internet cafe, Starbucks or FedEx office to finish some high priority tasks which require Internet connectivity.

Please check it out at contactcenterenterprise.com.

I’m really proud of this post, because it is my first guest blog post on another site. Thanks to Justin Levy and the workshifting.com team for the opportunity.

This is not a situation that I have had to deal with extensively in the past, with only 2-3 days without a network connection in the past 5 years (barring hurricanes where there was no power for multiple days). That’s a pretty good track record and a testament to the general reliability of the cable service in my neighborhood. I am also quite meticulous about having every piece of electronic equipment in my home on either a UPS or a quality surge protector. That includes all of the networking gear, so that I don’t lose network connectivity if the power goes out briefly. In South Florida, a good rain storm will cause brown-outs and brief power outages, and I hear the alarms on my various UPS’s go off about 3 times a week.

What was interesting about this experience (besides scouring Google Maps on my iPhone for a Fedex Office or Starbucks location with Wi-Fi nearby) is that I actually had an opportunity to test out Comcast’s customer service and tech support for myself, after reading about their recent surge in CSAT scores and focus on Twitter as a service channel.

I began by calling their main toll-free number and waiting in queue for an agent. This took about 15 minutes, including the wait time and the discussion of the reason for my call. I was told that a tech would come to my house between 11am and 2pm. Surprisingly, they had someone available to come to my house on the same day my issue was reported, and within a 4-6 hour timeframe. This was actually good news as far as I was concerned, since I had expected to wait until later in the week for the service call. Then, to my further surprise, the Comcast tech showed up earlier than they said on the phone. He spent 30 minutes testing my cable and talking about my problem, and then said that the cable signal was fine and that he couldn’t do anything more to help me.

This is when I turned to @ComcastCares on Twitter. I have read so much about the Twitter presence for Comcast and it seemed a perfect opportunity to try it out for myself. My first message was just an open musing that was not a direct message to Comcast, or a reply to them. I just posted my thoughts to my Twitter stream to see what would happen.

Oh @comcastcares, what happened to my high spd internet?dslreports says upload is 24Kb today. Can’t work. Called cust svc. Please DM me.

My mere mention of Comcast via Twitter was answered almost immediately with what seemed like a generic response:

ComcastBill @andymahaney can i help?

What followed was a series of Tweets giving further information, followed by a request from @ComcastBill for some information via direct message to confirm my identity. Ultimately, Bill recommended that I replace my existing Linksys cable gateway with cable modem and he recommended a couple of brands. I took a trip to CompUSA, bought the modem, set it up, and my problems seemed to be resolved.

This “resolution” was only temporary. Within a few hours my service was down again and remained down until after 1am on Thursday, May 28th.

I resumed Twittering to @ComcastBill and @ComcastBonnie about my dilemma. Neither of them would confirm any specific problems in my area. They even shrugged off my repeated tweets about the multitude of Comcast-branded vehicles roaming my neighborhood. It was apparent to me that other people were having problems too. Maybe they can’t see that sort of thing easily or perhaps it’s policy to only reveal the scope of an outage after a certain number of people report issues. Maybe they just didn’t want to speculate. I can’t say.

I doubt that my cable modem had anything to do with this issue, but I am not planning to return the new modem because I have been gradually replacing the various components of my home network over the past few months, upgrading all my routers and switches to gigabit devices.

Where does that leave me with Comcast? Let’s review:

1. For whatever reason, my service was down for 2+ days. Can’t say if it was weather or Comcast to blame. I’ll assume the weather is the culprit. Since this is Florida and hurricanes are on the menu, Comcast should have their infrastructure designed to handle some rain. -1 point
2. I waited on the phone for a total of about 40 minutes over 2 days. Not the end of the world, but not good either.  -1 point
3. Comcast sent a tech to my house on the same day I reported an issue. He showed up early (wow!), took his time, was very nice and knowledgable. I was really impressed. +1 point
4. Comcast was highly responsive through Twitter. They seem to “get” this channel and I appreciate that they were able to provide me with some assistance.  +1 point
5. I am now finding out that the help I got from Comcast via Twitter and via phone was really not terribly helpful and it likely had nothing to do with what eventually solved my problem. It also cost me $50 for a cable modem I didn’t absolutely need.  -1 point

So there you have it. 2 of a possible 5 points. I think Comcast did a great job offering options for customer service. Their customer service was “worthless but very pleasant”. The interactions on Twitter clearly show that Comcast is committed to social media in a way that most companies still have not pondered and only a handful have mastered. Comcast seems to have mastered the channel, but they need to work on resolving the problem more quickly and accurately on the first try - or at least be better at recognizing a cluster of reported issues and linking them together to form a more comprehensive picture of the outage. First interaction resolution (rather than first call resolution) is equally important, regardless of the interaction channel.

Now this, ladies and gentlemen, is a step in the right direction for the enterprise adoption of social media. Web 2.0 companies like RightNow and Salesforce that are already experts in cloud-based computing and CRM have found a way to use social media to enhance their existing offerings in a way that is both meaningful and quantifiable for companies. I have not seen a demonstration of this technology yet, but the article mentions that several of the oft-referenced Twitter-darlings, like Comcast and Dell are already using the technology. From the article:

Here’s how it works: You set RightNow Cloud Monitor to search for key words, in 33 languages, in Twitter and YouTube, such as, “XYZ Corp.,” “phone,” “junk,” “crap,” “mad,” “angry,” and the ever-popular “sucks.” After retrieving the tweets or videos, an XYZ customer agent can respond to the individual or create an incident report and put it into the RightNow workflow (RightNow, by the way, is offered in the software-as-a-service model.) Then a statistically based natural-language processing system applies a scale for how positive or negative the emotion is in each incident, which lets XYZ rank the priority in which it deals with each incident.

RightNow is planning future support for Facebook and LinkedIn, and is looking at how it can apply the service even more broadly, such as chat rooms. RightNow CEO Greg Gianforte tells me that some customers have been using the product for nine months, and it’s ready for use by the company’s full customer base.

Meanwhile, Salesforce.com will offer a similar application for its CRM service this summer that monitors Twitter. Comcast, Cable, Dell, and European telecom company Orange are among the customers that have signed up for it.

The integration of Twitter in a meaningful way with Salesforce.com is of particular interest to me, because the computer telephony integration (CTI) products for Cisco’s Unified Contact Center Enterprise (UCCE) have a Salesforce.com CRM connector. This means that when Salesforce begins offering the service later this summer, existing contact centers running UCCE can begin to leverage Twitter (and hopefully other social media) without having to develop their Twitter strategy from scratch. They can simply manage and track the Twitter cloud as an extension of the Salesforce CRM product. The extent to which the Twitter integration is able to be leveraged by customer service agents using the CRM connector and how it will impact contact center reporting is my first and most pressing question.

This is a HUGE first step, and I look forward to learning more about the offerings from both RightNow and Salesforce.

One additional comment on this passage from the article:

So let’s get back to the aforementioned creepy aspect of all this. If a company contacted me on Twitter following a post, I think, initially, I might be taken back a bit. But really, this is in no way a violation of privacy. When you tweet, you’re tweeting to anyone and everyone. That’s the nature of Twitter. There is no privacy there. Same with YouTube. You don’t get to choose who responds to what you have to tell the world.

I find this particularly interesting because it so directly contradicts the expectations and disappointment expressed by Catherine Ventura from The Huffington Post, in an article that I commented on recently. On one hand we have a blogger for The Huffington Post getting, well, huffy about not getting a response to her Twitter post about a “horror story” with AT&T. On the other hand we have a blogger from InformationWeek discussing how scary it would be to have her Tweets tracked and analyzed by large corporations with whom she does business - but ultimately she admits that the prospect seems inevitable if you use a social media service.

Two very different views of the same subject. I think it illustrates an even larger challenge that is yet to come for enterprises hoping to leverage social media. How much is “too much”when it comes to monitoring and tracking your clients and customers?

I am a Sr. Principal at eLoyalty (a Cisco Partner). The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily represent eLoyalty’s positions, strategies or opinions.

I think this article’s title is dead on, at least for now, about the ROI that one might expect from Twitter in the enterprise. From the article:

In the question and answer period, after Tim O’Reilly and Sarah Milstein delivered their tips, one of the questions was: “How do you quantify the benefit of Twitter to a CFO?”

O’Reilly’s response: “I wouldn’t bother.”

As I have mentioned in previous posts on this blog and on my Twitter feed, the metrics and tools of measurement for customer service (or any enterprise interaction) via Twitter still remain to be seen. These tools, methods and metrics may be under development in some code bunker somewhere or secured within the walls of a Fortune 500 company with time and money to invest in such matters. They certainly have not become mainstream.  To put it in terms of a familiar meme:

1. Get Twitter account
2. Hire social media guru
3. Monitor Twitter 24/7 for company name
4. Respond to every mention
5. ?
6. Profit

Do you see the problem here? I do.

Public companies have a responsibility to their shareholders to perform due dilligence before they make decisions which might materially impact the financial performance of the company, and thus the investors’ chances of deriving a return. In order to complete this due dilligence, these companies need solid financial data upon which they can calculate return on investment (ROI). The marketing department may see Twitter and other social media as exciting new viral marketing channels to reach out to a specific target market that includes connected individuals, but to quote the article (and almost every other article and blog post on the subject):

Don’t just blast out press releases and promotions. If everything you send tries to sell something, you’ll be ignored.

Okay. So maybe one-to-many marketing in the traditional sense doesn’t work on Twitter. So what does? From the article:

1. Create more value than you capture. This is not about what you can pull out of a stream of ideas, but what you can put in
2. Amplify others. This is not about you. It’s about the best ideas – and bringing them to the surface, for those who care about the subject.
3. Pass it along. Act as a curator of what’s important, funnel the best links and messages from people “who have something to say” to your followers. And you’ll probably get more followers. Because you’re a Tweet stream editor, now.

Now wait - this is all starting to sound very altruistic; like maybe we should break out in a chorus of “Kumbaya.” These suggestions, while appropriate for the casual user of Twitter who is hoping to increase their status amongst their peers, seems to be directly at odds with the primary goal of most for-profit corporations. What American, capitalist, profit-driven corporation can find more than passing PR value in adhering to this advice?

I put some faith in Tim O’Reilly’s experience in these matters - but I agree with the implication in the article that the only real ROI from Twitter right now is for the social media gurus that are touting their wares. In fact, the article mentions that a major theme of the O’Reilly Publishing presentation was about a new book on the subject. So in essence, O’Reilly is saying that there is no ROI from Twitter for now, but you can capitalize on the hype if you just buy my book on the subject. This seems a strikingly familiar dynamic. O’Reilly stands to collect significant ROI from their book on the subject of Twitter, without ever really giving away the secret sauce that companies need to turn Twitter into a profitable venture for traditional industry.

In these economic times where budgets are stretched thin, employees are subjected to rounds after round of layoffs that raise the blood pressure, and millions of people are losing their homes, a service like Twitter truly has some appeal. I think that the place for Twitter in our hearts and minds is already solidified. Twitter is a great equalizer, allowing people to be involved in the news, their community (online or physical) and connect with celebrities and causes in new and exciting ways. Twitter has already sparked conversation about opening a new channel for customer service and customer interaction in general - and this is good news for an industry like mine which needs an infusion of “Web 2.0″ to jump start the next set of waves in the contact center - following up on the previous sets, like CRM, CTI, Virtualization, and more recently Unified Communications (UC).

I’m looking forward to being part of the solution. I am actively encouraging my peers and my managers to embrace Twitter and find new ways to utilize it for business. The response has been very positive, and I feel like many of the benefits of Twitter for a highly distributed workforce are real - considering that capital costs of using Twitter so far have been $0. When you use Twitter on a daily basis, you begin to see its utility very quickly. I think that many of the blog posts and articles out there are incorrectly hanging the word value on Twitter at this point. I hope to explore the utility of Twitter and begin to formulate ways to create value for business from Twitter over the coming months. Look for more on this topic in future blog posts.

I am a Sr. Principal at eLoyalty (a Cisco Partner). The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily represent eLoyalty’s positions, strategies or opinions.

One of the last barriers to enterprise Unified Communications (UC) appears to finally be coming down. Sprint has announced that they will support presence status for mobile phones on the Sprint wireless network. Sprint Mobile Integration will allow companies to extend their Cisco Unified Communications Manager or Avaya Communication Manager out to enterprise mobile users with support for presence. From the article:

Sprint is touting the service’s ability to avoid desk phone deployment for highly mobile workers, who can use their mobiles and stay on-net; Dan Jacobson told me an enterprise could even consider the Mobile Integration service as a way to avoid deploying a PBX or any other premises system at small offices–you just give everyone a mobile and they hang off the Sprint network that’s tied to the main enterprise system.

This has two significant effects from my point of view.

1. This represents a huge potential shift in the designs for branch PBX deployments for large distributed enterprise PBX systems. Currently these branch deployments require locally based routers (voice gateways) in case the WAN fails and someone needs to place an emergency call, as well as adequate WAN bandwidth to support the voice calls that will terminate to or be generated from each branch location. There is a potential savings in hardware (phones, routers, switches, etc.) and deployment time for large branch deployments.
2. This capability may the first part of the “missing link” that enterprises are waiting to see in the UC market. There is so much talk of “federation” and platform integrations, as well as B2B presence sharing. With the increase in mobile users, work-at-home users and outsource relationships it will be critical that carriers step in to fill the gap between enterprises.

The next major step will be to support additional presence states, beyond just “Available” and “On The Phone” at the carrier level, and across carriers. Imagine if you never had to dial someone again, just to hear a voicemail message and wait for them to call you back. Comprehensive, universal presence would allow you to see when people in your contact list are available, busy or out of range and plan your contact with them accordingly.

Skype does this today, and is one of the fastest growing telephony services in the world - all on the carrier’s own networks. It only makes sense for Sprint and others to offer the same flexibility to their customers. It will be interesting to see if the other carriers offer competing products and whether Sprint will secure new business as a result of this offering.

A question to my readers: Will presence be the death of voicemail? I’ll have to cover that in a future blog post. Feel free to comment.