::HorsePigCow:: marketing uncommon

This Week’s Links on Ma.gnolia

miss rogue — Sun, 11 May 2008 06:59:11 +0000

Some stuff I’m reading this week…

Ladies Who Launch: Network for Women Entrepreneurs, Business Magazine, & More

Very cool community for women entrepreneurs. They even have an incubator. Noice.

Why not make a Change? » Blog Archive » Twitter as Customer Relations?

So I figured, that if people voiced out against some of the things these companies were doing with their updates, and how their sites were working, as long as these companies actually listen and use the influence that many of these big time bloggers have, they could make incredible progress.

Jeffio - The Whuffie Index

The idea that one’s Social Whuffie is always changing got me thinking about how Alexa ranks the most popular sites based on traffic. This is totally ridiculous, but what if one’s Whuffie was also indexed?

Just for fun, I spent a few minutes and mocked up what an index might look like. I based this off of the Victoria Start-up Index (notice YikeSite and Apricado by the way).

Twitter Spewage among Dave Winer’s contacts

This is hilarious Dave. Love it.

Sensory Overload: Social Capital ~ my only high yield investment

Over the past few years I’ve learned the hard way about the need to bank my bliss ~ my attempts at sustaining a safe reserve in my emotional savings and loan association. Unfortunately, deposits into my financial institutions have not been nearly as strong. So, in recent months, for many reasons (not the least of which was Tax Day), I have been trying to master my money issues. Let me tell you, with personal finances, ignorance is not bliss ~ and it’s uncomfortable admitting it to anyone, anywhere ~ much less here.

It’s a Wonderful Life and the Value of Social Capital ∞ Get Rich Slowly

People often complain about good ol’ boy networks, those loose groups of old-timers that seem to control everything. At their worst, such informal associations can foster unhealthy prejudices and favoritism. But I think there’s more to them than that. At their best, these networks allow men and women to build mutual goodwill through the exchange of services and ideas in a community. They foster social capital.

Pistachio Consulting Inc. » Who is @Pistachio, Really?

Laura’s landing page when you click to go to her website from Twitter is really brilliant. I’m inspired by this and will definitely be creating one myself!

From Where I Sit: 12 Reasons to Start Twittering

Governing: Wikis/May 2008 (transitcamp)

The opportunity was called Transit Camp — a two-day conference, held in Palo Alto in February, to pull together ideas about how to fix what was broken in inter-county, inter-city transit. Transit enthusiasts got about 100 people from the public and private sectors to show up to brainstorm. The focus was on finding a user-friendly way for riders to navigate between and among two dozen transit systems.

Getting Satisfaction | GarrettDimon.com

It’s not forum software. It’s better. It’s designed from the ground up to be more inviting and less technical than what we traditionally associate with the word “forum”. If you take a quick spin through the site, it’s easy to see, but it wasn’t until after I started using it myself and had a brief chat with Lane Becker, one of several people behind the interface, that I began to realize just how impressive their vision is.

Go Big Always - We need a social software inbox

It should not only cut the rapids back to a quality stream but help me channel my attention so it’s applied where it counts. It understands and shares which people and topics I’m most connected to.

The Raleigh Connoisseur

Good example of a local blog that curates really useful information for the residents of Raleigh.

BlueNC | The people’s think tank

Local political blog

Tacoma catches on early to co-working trend | TheNewsTribune.com | Tacoma, WA

Across the country, with the definition of work evolving into networks of individuals whose business involves traveling light with a cell phone and laptop computer, co-working spaces have cropped up in dozens of U.S. cities including Seattle, Los Angeles, Houston, Atlanta, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Berkeley, Calif.

View all my bookmarks on Ma.gnolia

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The Whuffie Factor: Threadless Interview

miss rogue — Tue, 06 May 2008 14:32:24 +0000

I had the chance to sit down with the awesome people at Threadless in December in a very snowy Chicago. They are so brilliant. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

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Red Monk and the Women’s Tee Dilemma

miss rogue — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 06:43:10 +0000

RedMonk likes to think its pretty cool company, with plenty of smart women in its community. So when it was planning for RedMonk’s unconference this year May 5th at The Moscone Center in San Francisco, it wanted to make sure it had t-shirts specially made for women.

T-shirt driven development is very important in community building. The t-shirts are pretty cool, and RedMonk had 25 printed for women. But then the company realized maybe its not so cool and inclusive after all.

What if only guys showed up? The unconference will be a little dorky, with a fair amount of developer and open source and scripting language stuff going on. But there will also be some conversation about social media in general and Twitter in particular. Because it’s an unconference the community will decide the subjects but you can bet the twitter for community building discussion (already pitched by Ian Skerrett of the Eclipse Foundation) will be a good one.

There are plenty of super smart women in community building, scripting languages, social media and RedMonk would like to improve the balance of its community. They’ve asked me to put in a good word for them, so here it is! I will, unfortunately, be out of town, but if you are in SF, enjoy! Link to more information

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Interview: Zappos.com’s Tony Hsieh and Rachael Brown

miss rogue — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 06:30:42 +0000

I heart Zappos.com muchly and Rachael and Tony made me heart it even more. I really enjoyed talking with them about the core values that makes Zappos rock so much.

(p.s. Sorry Rachael for my misspelling in the video. I’ll get Alyssa to fix it asap!)

Oh…and btw…I finished my book. Yay me!

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This Week’s Links on Ma.gnolia

miss rogue — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 06:59:15 +0000

Some stuff I’m reading this week…

Navajo Dolphin Necklace

hahahahahahahaha - Kind of an ‘in’ joke with me and my gals, but the basic premise is that we call white people who tweet Navajo proverbs and other similarly non-reflective stuff ‘Navajo Dolphins’. Kind of like BoBos (Bourgeoisie Bohemians), but younger and less affluent.

Women speakers at Web 2.0 expo SF?

Interesting is that of those 20 women, at least 10 still need to submit their bio (10 days before the actual conference), while of the male speakers about 99% have their bio submitted. Come on women, write down your achievements, or if you are to shy, hire a personal branding agency.

Geek Speak Women | find technical women to speak

Many organisers of technical conferences, meetups, and dinners want to have more gender-balance in their lineups, but they don’t know where to find technical women speakers.

Enter geekspeakr.com, a simple directory and connections system to help technical women speakers and event organisers to find each other.

moonrise / how do you feel?

I totally heart this concept. It’s very early in it’s evolution, but inspired, I’m told, by ‘wefeelfine.org’ (another amazing site). Basically, when you feel something, you just type it in, associate a photo, video or quote with it and post it. I like that it could track your moods over time and I can see great potential for that.

Hero Workshop - Programs For Schools, Girl Scouts, Youth Groups, and Summer Camps

Inspired by Dr. Z’s ‘Creating Better Barrels’, the Hero Workshop is a cool approach to helping kids finding the hero inside themselves.

Tracking for missrogue: by zappos.com

Way cool. The amazing web team at Zappos.com is having a load of fun with Twitter and are using my account as an experiment to set up tracking for businesses. Nice idea!

Docteur Vanina Delobelle: in Pinko Marketing!

Wow. Cool. Vanina Delobelle got a Ph.D. after doing her thesis on Pinko Marketing! For those of you who don’t know, I nailed a thesis down in 2005 and coined the ‘new marketing’ Pinko Marketing (because the new marketer was a Community Sympathizer…get it? heh): http://www.pinkomarketing.com

Urban Tribes the Blog: How To Build a Grotto

Humans are social creatures. While freelancers seldom miss the constraints of office life — the unnecessary meetings, the petty politics, the wretched busywork — they often long for the companionship that traditional offices provide. When you’re all alone in a home office day after day, you can spend whole afternoons staring into refrigerators or examining suspicious skin discolorations. Isolation breeds inertia, and some freelancers experience a sudden loss of creativity or productivity, as if their abilities were somehow tied to the social expectations of working with a team. By joining forces with several like-minded independent professionals to get a shared office space, you can create a sense of camaraderie without compromising the goals or vision of your own work. It’s actually much simpler to do than you might think.

An intervew with Tara Hunt - LaunchPad Coworking Blog

The LaunchPad team met Tara ‘missrogue’ Hunt, at the SXSWi meetups and core conversations. Tara, Co-founder of Citizen Space in San Francisco, had a lot to say about coworking at the meetings. I caught up with her via email recently to ask her to share some more of her thoughts on coworking.

saul follow-up and facts « Nine Inch Nails - nin.com Blog Archive

is it good news that less than one in five feel it was worth $5? I’m not sure what I was expecting but that percentage - primarily from fans - seems disheartening.

Ikea train in Japan

Awesome. Had this idea for BART in the Bay Area. Forwarded this to Lynton J to see what he says. Hopefully we can do this around TransitCampBayArea2?

TypePad - Features - Blogit

Blog It is a free Facebook application which focuses on making it easier for you to create content no matter the blogging platform you use.

Office Space 2.0: Business Without Cubes - Profy.Com

If nothing else, the social web has made it easier than ever before to change how you work. For businesses and people seeking a more personal work flow, they can find it via Web 2.0 tools and other unique ideas born out of the Internet melting pot. From Google Docs, online document sharing and virtual assistants to telecommuting, mobile offices and coworking, there are hundreds of ways to customize your productivity.

A Place for the Home Based - Entrepreneur.com

Socializing with fellow workers and conducting business in a professional environment are just some of the things office employees take for granted until they’re lost. That’s why Hunt, Chang and many others are creating co-working spaces, an emerging trend that gives solo-preneurs a professional and social environment in which to work.

Flickr Code

Awesome new developer site for Flickr.

brightkite.com

Location-based social networking

Discover who visits your favorite places. Join the community in real time.

Yay! More tools for stalking!

Achenblog FAQ - Achenblog Boodlefacts

From my chapter on Embracing the Chaos. The fan wiki for The Washington Post’s first blogger, Joel Achenbach.

Achenblog Boodlefacts - Achenblog FAQ

Akoha - Play it Forward

Covered in Chapter 6: Finding Your Higher Purpose

Come Play it Forward @ Akoha

twitter.zappos.com

So first of all, what is Twitter? The best analogy I can think of is that it’s like CB radio, but for text messaging. You basically answer the question “What are you doing right now?” at different times throughout the day, and the messages that you send have to be short — 140 characters or less.

Rad Campaign | Leveraging the Real Power of Social Networking

In the past year many non-profits have latched onto online social networking as the hip new tool to magically promote their campaigns, recruit new supporters and raise loads of money online without costing a dime. Yes, Web 2.0 can be a powerful organizing tool for non-profits but there is no magic involved and it’s not free. It takes organizational commitment, creativity and significant staff resources to see a healthy return on investment over time.

Go Big Always - Why hasn’t Google built a Twitter search?

A good overview of Twitter apps to give a whirl.

The music industry | From major to minor | Economist.com

Last year was terrible for the recorded-music majors. The next few years are likely to be even worse

A brave new world: the music biz at the dawn of 2008: Page 1

Given the years of declining revenues at the major labels and the constant stream of stories in the mainstream press about music’s decline, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the music industry’s pallbearers are already lined up and waiting in the hallway. But music isn’t on its deathbed yet; in fact, people are listening to more artists than ever before, on more white earbuds than ever before, in more places than ever before. They’re just not paying as much.

Gotham Gazette - The Wonkster » Blog Archive » Working From Home? Get Out Once and a While…

This project, called New Work City, aims to open its doors by June and is still looking for interested coworkers. The space is offering four membership types, ranging from full-time, where $500 gets a coworker a private desk with high speed internet and other benefits, to $20 daily drop-ins. As of the latest count, 55 people have filled out membership applications.

iPhone Video Recorder

Someone is going to have to sit down with me on how to jailbreak my phone so that I can get this. Yay! Video for my iPhone!

Craigslist | Honouring nerd values | Economist.com

For Mr Newmark, the thing to understand is really quite simple. He is a nerd, he is proud to say, and thus exhibits “the same dysfunction as my nerd brethren”. Ultimately, this comes down to steadfastly following “nerd values: once you make enough money, it’s time to improve the world”. His home town loves and honours him for it.

The Secrets of Intangible Wealth - WSJ.com

…once the value of all (wealth) are added up, the economists found something big was still missing: the vast majority of world’s wealth! If one simply adds up the current value of a country’s natural resources and produced, or built, capital, there’s no way that can account for that country’s level of income.

The rest is the result of “intangible” factors — such as the trust among people in a society, an efficient judicial system, clear property rights and effective government. All this intangible capital also boosts the productivity of labor and results in higher total wealth. In fact, the World Bank finds, “Human capital and the value of institutions (as measured by rule of law) constitute the largest share of wealth in virtually all countries.”

View all my bookmarks on Ma.gnolia

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Tweeting for Companies 101

miss rogue — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 00:58:48 +0000

Why Twitter?

Twitter can be an amazingly powerful platform for connecting to your community as well as driving traffic to the various properties you want people to go. Having an event? Tweet it out! Launched a new bag? Tweet it out!

The key to Twitter is the level of listening you do as well as talking. It is definitely supposed to be an interactive program. And, in fact, this is where you build the majority of your Whuffie (aka social capital). The more you interact on Twitter, the more people will interact with you, which attracts others to you as well.

One of my favorite quotes about the benefits of Twitter is from Tony Hsieh at Zappos:

You send an SMS text message to Twitter with your note, and your message will be automatically broadcast (like CB radio) to whoever is choosing to follow you (your friends). If people don’t care what you’re doing, they won’t follow you, so don’t worry about sending out trivial messages.

At first, it will seem really weird and unnatural for you to do this, but just trust me on this one. You will find that it’s actually a really good way to stay in touch with all your friends and know what’s going on in their lives.

…I was flying in to the Vegas airport, and I twittered “Just landed in Vegas airport.” I would have never texted anyone that message, but in the Twitter culture, that’s exactly what you’re supposed to do. It just so happened that someone on my Twitter network was about to fly out of Vegas, so we met up at the airport bar and had a drink. I would have never known otherwise that this person was at the airport, nor would I have ever sent him a text message or called him that I had just landed.

Source

I love that story because it is exactly what Twitter does for us all of the time: it accelerates serendipity.

What are Some Good Examples of Corporate Tweeters?

What kinds of interactions are beneficial? Well, take two very popular Tweeters: Zappos and JetBlue. Here are a few examples:

@ZAPPOS:

Some photos of our company picnic are up now at: http://blogs.zappos.com - I think we had 1000 people show up!

I want to meet more customers. On Monday, I will select a random @zappos follower for free trip for 2 to Vegas for office tour & lunch w/ me

At Vegas airport now, waiting a couple of hours until my flight to San Jose, CA.

@wisekaren I’m wearing Donald Pliner shoes to the wedding.

Finished photo shoot w/ Forbes. 4 hours & they choose 1 photo. Behind the scenes: http://www.facebook.com/pag…

@bryanbartlett now says he can’t make it. Anyone else want 1 ticket to van halen at 830 tonight at mandalay in Vegas?

Just landed in Vegas. Got lots of twitters about our new beta site http://zeta.zappos.com Thx for all the feedback, keep it coming!

—–

@JETBLUE:

@laughingsquid Thanks! Just wait until our new terminal at JFK opens! http://t508.com/ (Hope you had a great time in NYC)

@BookingBuddy We’re happy to support Runner’s World, but don’t worry, you can still channel surf and eat blue chips if you want!

Two days left to win two trips on JetBlue to “The Simpsons Movie” premiere in LA. Enter now! http://tinyurl.com/2×6ql3

The term ‘Interwebular Chronicle’ makes me laugh.

View this month’s selection of first-run movies from Fox InFlight Premium Entertainment: http://tinyurl.com/2o8q46

To all of our Twitter friends: enjoy your weekend!

As you can see from these selections, both companies are really great at balancing promotional tweets (”View this month’s selection of first-run movies from Fox InFlight Premium Entertainment” and “Got lots of twitters about our new beta site http://zeta.zappos.com”) with personal tweets (”The term ‘Interwebular Chronicle makes me laugh.” and “At Vegas airport now, waiting a couple of hourse until my flight to San Jose, CA.”) with conversational tweets (”@laughingsquid Thanks! Just wait until our new terminal at JFK opens!” and “@wisekaren I’m wearing Donald Pliner shoes to the wedding”). They also have fun contests (”I want to meet more customers. On Monday, I will select a random @zappos follower for free trip for 2 to Vegas” and “Two days left to win two trip on JetBlue to “The Simpsons Movie” premiere in LA.”) to help increase their follower numbers and keep people reading.

Stuff to Tweet About

There are no rules about what you should tweet out, here are a few suggestions for you. It is important that you balance the ‘outbound’ with the ‘inbound’. In otherwords, the announcements with the conversations:

Personal thoughts and reflections that suit your brand - this helps people feel more trust towards you and your brand and strikes up conversations
Events (both your own and other events your audience may find interesting) - this makes things interesting and, perhaps, gives you a way to meet your followers
Contests (”The first three people who answer this trivia question get….”) - they drive more followers and interest in what you tweet
Replies (@twittername) - this comes from listening to your followers (you have to follow back to see their tweets). The more personal the reply, the higher the impact.
Direct replies (d twittername) - this isn’t in the public timeline, but it helps build deeper bonds to talk directly to someone like this. This is helpful to answer people when it is a private matter or when you want to show concern (i.e. someone reports an accident, etc.)
New blog posts - you should keep these to one per day at the very most and you should also promote other people’s blog posts that are of interest
Announcements - if it is interesting, tweet it
OH’s (overheard) - someone say something in the office or when you are out and about that cracks you up? Type OH: “well, if you don’t mind, im trying to work on my love life” or something else funny (sometimes used to offset potentially racy comments…if you didn’t say it, but are just REPEATING IT, then it’s okay)
Rickrolls or other fun internet games - this shows you are a bunch of fun and has people trying to do the same for you. Spreading as many internet memes as possible is good.
Lyrics and quotes - especially fun are the lyrics: ♪Never give the game away | Try to keep me entertained, baby | Don’t make it too easy | Leave something for me and my imagination♪ as the musical notes make for lots of questions
Links to media you create - video is fun, podcasts, perhaps interviews that are posted online about you, etc.
Shout outs - @twittername rocks! Thanks for the great link: http://insertlink.com These make people feel great, too.

Tweets that make people laugh are awesome, but tweets that make people think are even better.

How to Tweet Without Losing Your Soul

So, before you even ask. Yes. Twitter takes time. It takes a bunch of attention and love and care. There ARE ways to minimize the work and keep up to date, though:

Run a twitter client on your desktop and connect it to Growl. For desktop clients see: http://twitter.pbwiki.com/Apps My favorites are: Twhirl, Snitter and Twitterific
Take twitter on the road! If you have an iPhone there are great sites like Pockettweets or the twitter mobile site. You can also just send your text messages to 40404. That’s pretty simple. Check out the apps page again for more options on other phones like Blackberries.
Keep a good track of who is talking about you, so you can reply back! With Tweetscan you can track all sorts of keywords there as well as watch who is replying to you (there is also a tab on the main website for your replies). You can always plug the results into your RSS feeds…
Put a twitter widget on your blog!
Hook it up to your Facebook page! Only update your status in one place at a time and have it show in multiple places! Details here: http://explore.twitter.com/

There is also a great listing of fun apps to use with Twitter here. Watch out, though. It’s totally addictive!

How to Talk Twitter

There is a glossary of terms over here where you will find that MOST terms used on Twitter start, not surprisingly, with ‘Tw’. Like tweet, meaning one post on twitter, and TweetUp, which is a Twitter Meetup. But the basic terms you need to know are the commands to put in front of what you are saying. Like:

D twittername - direct message (not public, goes right to the Tweeter in question)
@twittername - public reply
Follow twittername - start following someone
Leave twittername - stop following someone
on - turns your notifications on (on your phone or however you are receiving tweets)
off - turns notifications off
help - accesses the other commands as you may need them

there is more here: http://twitter.com/help/lingo

There are also some things that have come out of the community like:

hashtags or # - put a hashtag in front of a ‘tag’ for easier tracking (i.e. This speaker is really nailing it. I think her slides are brilliant! #web2expo). This is really useful for conferences, events and specific topics of interest. You can read a little more about the history here You can track hashtags at Twemes.

A Couple of Extra Things

Before I wrap this up, there are a few other ‘Tweet like a pro’ ideas:

Shorten your URLs at Tweetburner where you can also track stats on these links!
The mother of all places to find everything awesome Twitter is: http://twitter.pbwiki.com/
Want to set up a ‘group’ tweet? This is way cool: Grouptweet (have multiple employees send messages to d companyname with a message that you can aggregate at @companyname)
Give people beer for good deeds with Foamee

Now you are ready to tweet like a pro!

Twitter 101 PDF for download - specifically prepared for Timbuk2

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The Whuffie Factor Interviews: Timbuk2

miss rogue — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 20:03:25 +0000

I sat down with Patti and Perry of Timbuk2 to ask them about their views on customer service, quality and community. Their answers are pretty cool.

Bonus link: If you think this is cool, check out the amazing video on the Timbuk2 Artist Workshop series by Jennifer Myronuk and Paige Bierma.

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Scott Kveton interviews Me on Identity

miss rogue — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 16:48:05 +0000

Thanks to Scott Kveton, of Vidoop, who stopped me at BarCampAustinIII, to talk about OpenID and other identity related matters.

It’s been a while since I’ve talked about identity online (although get me going with a few beer offline!). I think the only other recent discussions I’ve had around identity is on the Citizen Garden podcast in early January.

What’s important here is that identity, in general, is pretty complicated and it’s interesting, to me, what people are talking about regarding technical solutions. I don’t think complexity is the answer, either, though. I don’t think reputation and identity should be tightly bound, although, I do think my whuffie (which includes reputation) has a great deal to do with why my identity is important. But that’s a discussion for another day.

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Interview with Nate Ritter: San Diego Fires and Twitter

miss rogue — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 00:57:06 +0000

During the San Diego Fires in the fall of 2007, Nate Ritter, all around nice guy and twitterer took it upon himself to start becoming the aggregator of all pertinent news via his twitter account. The result? Nate became a public hero and is now reaping the benefits from his good deeds by speaking all over the place on how to use Twitter for public good. His story will appear as a case study in The Whuffie Factor.

My camera work sucked big time during the first part of the interview, but what Nate has to say is excellent anyway. Embedded video below (sorry again for those in feed readers)

Thanks Nate!

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Women 2.0 Business Plan Competition

miss rogue — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 00:00:09 +0000

I heart what Women 2.0 are doing with their programs to encourage women with startup ideas. If you are a woman with an idea for a startup, DO THIS. Even if you are a team that includes 1/2 women, DO THIS.

[copied and pasted press release...I don't usually do this, but this is well worth it]

Submit one of the following to get the chance to win attractive prizes including cash, meeting with angel investor of Flickr, del.icio.us, and 23andMe, Esther Dyson and free PR, legal consultation.

1) Submit a business executive summary and a 2 min video pitch online.

2) Doodle your brilliant idea on a napkin! Flaunt your artistic skills and business idea on a napkin no larger than 7×7 inches. Napkins will be exhibited at the Women 2.0 conference.

Send your napkins to 63 Bovet Road, #519, San Mateo, CA 94402.

Non-US applications may digitally scan both sides of their paper napkin with doodles and email a PDF to: women2.0@gmail.com

Deadline: April 15th, 2008 11:59 PM (EST)
Application should include: business executive summary (online), video pitch (online) and napkin (mailed or emailed)

More info
Info about Judges

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Brunch at Triptych [Flickr]

miss_rogue — Mon, 27 Mar 2006 01:29:42 -0600

miss_rogue posted a photo:

Brunch at Triptych

miss_rogue — Mon, 27 Mar 2006 01:28:53 -0600

miss_rogue posted a photo: