Have you heard of Fitbit? It’s one of the up-and-comers in the fitness-meets-physical-computing world. If you want to learn more, give a quick look at my ThingsAmongMany post on Fitbit and their competitor, GoWear Fit. This post isn’t about the devices themselves, but rather the social media experience/mistake that they’re demonstrative of.

Fitbit has been “in production” and available for pre-order for months now - they originally stated a target launch date of Dec. ‘08 (I ordered mine in mid-January). They’re now predicting a launch in “late spring or early summer”, much to the chagrin of those who have pre-ordered. They’ve done a decent job of keeping buyers looped into the production process on their blog which has featured in-depth progress posts at a rate of around one per month.

So what’s my complaint? Simple: we want more. A monthly update with the information offered in their blog posts is fantastic. But how about a quick sentence more often about the state of the state? Twitter is the perfect outlet for this kind of communication, and it seems that this fact hasn’t gone entirely unnoticed by Fitbit. They’ve already created an account @Fitbit_Inc that has 350+ followers - not bad for a company that hasn’t even launched its product. BUT they’ve only updated the account twice, the first of which appeared in November and stated

We’ll be making more frequent updates on the Fitbit here

Well…where are said updates? The only follow-up came six weeks later and then silence. The silence speaks volumes, and it’s begun to create some backlash (something a new brand can hardly afford). And, worse-yet, it’s given me (and other Fitbit_Inc followers) the opportunity to stumble onto two viable competitors who’s products are already available for purchase: GoWear Fit originally came to my attention because they followed me on Twitter (though it appears they’ve either given up or there’s something wrong with their account since it’s now empty). Bodybugg is another version that uses the same hardware, but runs a proprietary software.

In my research for this post, I also came across James Park’s Twitter account. James is apparently the CEO of Fitbit and has recently offered some responses to Fitbit-related tweets. BUT he hasn’t told anyone about those updates! There are 350 people follwing @Fitbit_Inc who are anxiously waiting for news (myself included), and here James is offering it only to people who he happens to find talking about the product. Get out there and connect the two accounts James! Give the people what they very clearly want, and in return they’ll be that much more interested in spreading the word about your product.

The point? This is pretty basic as far as social media involvement goes. Smaller brands have much to benefit by getting involved directly with their fans/consumers - conversely, frustration mounts quickly when those brands ignore their customers. A six month delay after I’ve already payed for a product is almost inexcusable…almost. With something truly unique like the Fitbit (there are some distinct differences that separate it from the GoWear Fit and Bodybugg), people are willing to go out on a limb and put up with more. But there is a limit to that willingness. It seems like Fitbit is on the brink of stepping over that limit.

Two days ago, I placed an order for a new Direct Wire Power Kit (about 1/2 way down the page) to replace the one that came with my unit. I had installed that one in a previous vehicle and, at $13 for the kit, it’s easier to simply leave it in place and buy a new one than it is to remove all the necessary panels to retrieve the kit. The online purchase experience was satisfactory, though the lack of any confirmation email was a little annoying.

I didn’t think any more of it until the call I just received from their customer service department. They needed a “little more information” in order to process my order, which was odd since their purchase form didn’t ask for any information that I opted not to give them. The woman wanted the serial number from my Valentine. I asked why she needed it and tried to explain that I didn’t have the unit handy to retrieve the number, to which she replied that it was for fraud protection for the customer in case the Valentine were stolen.

Now, I understand that radar detectors are an oft-stolen item and I respect their interest in trying to protect the consumer. But the fact of the matter is that once the thing is stolen, that person can buy whatever they want to go with the unit. They’ll HAVE the serial number right there in front of them in order to verify it. So, in reality, their “fraud protection” program has done absolutely nothing for me, the customer, other than make my legitimate purchase more difficult.

Granted, the woman on the other end of the phone was very insistant that I couldn’t possibly place an order without giving her the serial number, and that this was in my best interest. No matter how much I tried to explain that my Valentine was not easily accessible and that I had purposely created this situation to make my life easier when I went to install it, she wouldn’t budge (and became increasingly rude to boot).

This is incredibly frustrating! Companies, I implore you. If you’re going to put policies in place that benefit your customer, make sure they actually benefit your customer. I run into this type of issue all the time, and frankly it’s getting old. If you’d take ten minutes to think through your policies and approach them from the customer’s point of view, you’d save both you and I a lot of headache. What you fail to realize is that this is just as much a part of the “user experience” of your brand as visiting your website or calling you directly.

Valentine, you wouldn’t have to call to ask for more information that you could have just as easily asked for when I placed the order, and I wouldn’t have to get angry at your utter incompetence in understanding my situation. And as for your “privacy policy”? Well, you screwed that one up:

The Conversation Prism is a pretty sweet looking poster that would be right at home in any agency setting (or at least any agency that has an eye on social media). It’s probably one of the most comprehensive, carefully thought out visualizations of the social media landscape I’ve seen to date. Want to know more? Check out the site or give a shout out to the creators, Brian Solis and Jesse Thomas.

Back in August 2005 I received a rather cryptic email that was just intriguing enough to get me to respond. After a couple of cloak & dagger style exchanges, it turned out the person on the other end was from a little recruiting shop in Atlanta called TalentZoo, which also happened to run a successful site for advertising people. They wanted to start a new blog and were interested in having me join up for the cause. Being a young, ambitious ad guy, I readily did so (for free). Not long after, Beyond Madison Avenue was born.

It started off with just a few people, of which Mack Collier quickly emerged as the impromptu leader. Over the course of the next year, we gained a few new faces - Paul McEnany, Jayne Karalow, and  Sean Howard to name a few - and lost a few of the old ones. Eventually, Mack slipped away to focus on The Viral Garden - an effort for which he’s become quite well known. I was asked to fill his shoes in an editorial position. Over the course of the following year (our second), we gained a significant number of readers. We settled solidly into the top 70 of AdAge’s Power 150 listing (which by then was more than 400 blogs long). We beat out Wired, Seth Godin, and Logic + Emotion in Jaffe’s Most Valuable Blog competition. Not a bad year all in all.

From the beginning, TalentZoo’s involvement was limited to hosting and some banner space; we were otherwise left to our own devices. Unfortunately, our growing success was met with new rules and less control, both of which ultimately served to drive the core team of writers on to other ventures. Despite having left things a little rough - there was some disagreement around the logic behind our decisions to move on - I appreciated the experience and relationships that I was taking away from my time with BMA. Until recently…

On one of my recent return trips - I do reference my previous posts occasionally - I noticed that the author’s name had been changed on one of my posts. Curious, I looked up another. Same thing. It quickly became evident that the terms of my departure were worse than I had realized.

More than two years of my postings have now been attributed to other authors…

Primarily someone writing as “IsabellaSingerLo”. As far as I can tell, my name was simply changed in the database since I don’t see any posts by this author that I didn’t write. I had originally intended to list out the links in this post, but there’s just too many. Instead, you can find most of the altered posts archived here.

The situation begs an interestings question: I wrote those posts specifically for BMA, but I wrote them. Can it be considered plagarism? How much of that content is mine (or at least partly mine)? This is, of course, disappointing to say the least. Something just rubs me the wrong way about losing attribution for all of the thoughts and discussions that made up my education in blogging.

After doing just, that, I ended up talking about it with Deb Morrison, one of my former UT professors (who now heads things up out in Oregon). Turns out, she’s working on a project about the creative process of young creative professionals. As part of that project, she asked me to draw out my creative process, a task that sounds relatively simple but inevitably isn’t…

The result was actually two drawings, one from a company perspective - a “how do we work” evaluation - and another from a personal perspective - a “how do I work” evaluation. While not necessarily all-encompassing (these were done quickly), it was an interesting experiment to try to put into words and images a process that happens almost without thought. Here’s the original photo as well as the resulting process charts:

I’m really interested though, how does YOUR process differ? What steps would you change?

Unless I’ve booked a trip through you or there’s an emergency with an upcoming interaction that I’ve previously planned with you, DON’T CALL ME. RoadRunner Sports, this means YOU!

I was really excited when I placed the order for two pair of running shoes at half of retail price (as advertised on your website). I was really bummed when you informed me that, despite being listed as available on your site in two different colors, you didn’t actually have either available to send me to fulfill my order. I was annoyed when you believed that this failed attempt at service entitled you to email me on a regular basis.

But now? Now I’m MAD. You’ve called me - without my permission - on multiple occasions to play a recording. When I tried to reach a real person through that recording to take my number off your calling list, I couldn’t. So consider yourselves blacklisted in my book. I will never place another order with you again. Period.

But you know what’s worse (for you, that is)? I’m gonna tell everyone I know not to order from you either. This is not ok. This is not customer service. This is not excusable in the slightest. In short…

DON’T CALL ME.

If you’re into it, please feel free to tweet/retweet the list and gimme a follow/shout @AmongMany. I’ve also cross-posted on ThingsAmongMany.

Ad Networks

I have personally used any of the ad networks, but from going through each one, I was most drawn to Be A Magpie:

Be A Magpie - Our customers sign up and create campaigns which consist of magpie-tweets (i.e. ads). Twitterers allow us to post magpie tweets among their tweets and for them to get paid for it.

Badges & Widgets

Many of the badge and widget generators feel pretty old-skool. I think the most interesting of the bunch is Twitter Ribbon since it’s a bit of a different take on the usual badge:

Twitter Ribbon - Create a corner ribbon ad for your twitter page

Diet & Exercise

I’ve played with FoodFeed a bit, but it’s more of a toy than a true tracking system. I haven’t used TweetWhatYouEat. Honestly, if you’re looking for something in this category, check out the Lose It! iPhone app. Beyond that, TweetWhatYouEat seems to offer an actual calorie tracker…

TweetWhatYouEat - Food Diary & calorie tracker

Entertainment

This is a pretty diverse category, but my voyeuristic side has to admit, TwittyPop is one of the few on this list that I’ve bothered to visit more than once. Word around our office is that @arielwaldman deserves to be WAY higher on this list, so git votin’!

TwittyPop - Lists the hottest Tweeps

Groups

What better way to find new tweeps to follow than getting on board with the #followfriday trend? The Follow Friday Statistics site shows who’s on top of #followfriday reccomendations (ie. these tweeps are probably worth takin’ a look at!).

Follow Friday Statistics - Another #FollowFriday directory

Follower Management

There are a TON of follower management tools out there, and many are useful beyond my choice here. But Twitter Karma is one that I keep coming back to. It’s easy to use, it shows when my friends and followers last tweeted, and allows me to bulk unfollow tweeps who I’m a little tired of.

Twitter Karma - bulk management of followers and those you follow

Ranking Systems

Of all the ranking systems out there, Twitter Grader is the one that I put the most stock in. It seems to have a strong following (pardon the pun) amongst tweeps and offers a lot of functionality (recommends new tweeps, shows people geographically, etc.).

Twitter Grader - one of the better ranking systems out there; also offers people you should follow

Location-based Services

Most of the location-oriented services I’ve listed are just Twitter/map mashups. Twellowhood, however, adds location-based searching to find new tweeps to follow. A pretty cool way to see people in your area and get into local discussions.

Twellowhood - find people to follow by geography

Personal Finance

I’m not much a fan of the notion of tweeting my expenditures. I suppose you could create an extra, private account specifically for that purpose if you’re into it. But if you do want to get into the financial game via Twitter, have a look at StockTwits. A pretty robust site where there’s a ton of discussion about the market…

StockTwits - sharing stock/finance info via Twitter

Productivity & Sharing

After looking through all of these tools, the one that I’m most looking forward to checking out is TweetBurner. This URL shortening service offers a little added value by offering clickthrough tracking on the URL’s that you share via their service. Now you can keep track of exactly how many tweeps are checking out your links!

TweetBurner - clickthrough tracking for your Twitter URL’s

Posting Tools

Another powerful tool for link sharing, Twittertise also measures click-throughs of the URL’s that you share. But to build on TweetBurner’s functionality, Twittertise also allows you to schedule tweets for future posting. Try to ignore the sorta corny logo - they’re obviously shooting for an ad market, but I think this tool could prove useful for a much wider audience.

Twittertise - Allows advanced scheduling of Tweets. Also measures click-through rate of included URL’s!

Photo Tools

We all know TwitPic, so I’m not even gonna go there. Instead, check out Portwiture. While not a replacement for TwitPic, it does an interesting job of associating your latest tweet with relevant photos from Flickr. More of an entertainment/art project than a “tool” per se, but…

Portwiture - Grabs flickr photos that are relevant to your latest tweet

Search Tools

While everyone’s buzzing about the changes to the built-in search funtion, but I’m pretty psyched on Monitter lately. Search for a relevant term and Monitter will return an embeddable Twitter stream of search results that looks like this:

Monitter - an embeddable search return form (the only embeddable one I’ve noticed)

Topic Trends

There’s a pile of apps all designed to capture the latest trending topics on Twitter. Most seem on par with one another, but Twitterfall is the one that seems to be getting a lot of chatter lately…

Twitterfall - waterfall-like view of latest Twitter trends

Statistics

Twitalyzer is the most interesting of the stats packages in my eyes. Instead of just listing your frequency of tweets, etc., Twitalyzer characterizes your “Influence, Signal, Generosity, Velocity, & Clout”.

Twitalyzer - interesting stats package that’s social media oriented

I’m not gonna characterize the variety of Twitter Clients available. Everyone seems to have their own preference as to which is best, based on their OS, phone, etc. So have at it on that arguement!