Looxii, the blog

Looxii likes: Walken Memes

radam — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 17:54:06 +0000

We’ve been tracking Christopher Walken after catching his interpretation of Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face.” Ooo. Ooo. Ooo. Most Walken mentions were inexorably linked with said performance over the past weekend.

Unfortunately we had to move Looxii corporate HQ over the weekend, so we aren’t able to deliver a lovely, formal report, but we’re making available to you, dear Looxii blog reader, 3,571 Christopher Walken mentions (CSV) to do with as you please.

sweet DIY Walken mask from Flickr user 404 Not Found.

Customer Service and the Startup

daniel — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 18:34:52 +0000

At Looxii the office dogs nearly out number the human employees, but until they learn how to blog or master accounting basics we’re stuck doing it all. It’s the nature of the startup, we have a colorful variety of tasks to attend to everyday.

Flexibility and Inter-Department Communication

While this environment requires each employee to perform multiple duties, it also gives us the advantage of quick, flexible product development that is directly influenced by customer service. While creating the next product update, or pushing out bug fixes we can immediately take into account user issues and needs. Although your business may not have a similar startup environment, good communication enables flexibility and better customer service. This may seem like standard operating procedure for many businesses, but often getting information to the correct department, and getting that department to take action on it, can be costly in both time and resources.

Startup Tools for Customer Service

Another benefit to having fewer employees is that we can easily agree upon which software tools work for us without making a major overhaul to the operations of the company. Skype is one of the most useful tools as it gives us a great free video conference tool and allows us to provide screen shares for product demos.

More of our in-house favorites include Google docs, which allows us to cooperatively edit everything from letters to spreadsheets, and Google calendar, which easily syncs to our android powered phones (no offense to iPhone fanboys and fangirls).

For task management and to-do lists we like to use Basecamp. While these tools also have a wider office application beyond customer service, they allow us to streamline our productivity more effectively than many of the enterprise level solutions we’ve used in our previous employment lives.

Customer Response

Our position as a startup is unique. In contrast to bigger more established businesses, we respond directly to every customer request or phone call to personally ensure that they are satisfied with their Looxii experience. As our customer base grows, we’ve identified exceptional, personable customer service as a core part of our company’s culture.

In the end it’s all about the customer. They’re the ones that keep the lights on and keep us from eating dog food (literally – I’m not talking about the cliché). What positives/negatives stick out in your past customer service experiences? Conversely, if you’re a biz, what tools help you deliver kick-ass customer service?

New feature: OR keywords

radam — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 18:29:42 +0000

Semantic searches can get a little tricky. We misspell things (we’re not perfect!), we create nicknames and abbreviations, we have rhetorical devices like metonymy and metaphor… why should we be constrained to just one keyword? What if you want to search for your brand’s mentions and your brand’s twitter handle?

Introducing (the implementation of) OR. Now you can search for multiple terms that relate to your keyword search. Just separate your keywords by or and all of the search results will live in the same place. Simple.

Serious Drop-Hoff

radam — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 15:34:01 +0000

Last week we brought you coverage, of sorts, of David Hasselhoff’s roast. It was a momentous occasion, garnering over 25,000 mentions on August 15th and 16th. Hoff mentions have returned to pre-roast numbers just one week after the event (please see graph below – Hasselhoff/The Hoff mentions, 8/13-8/23).

What’s a Hoff to do? Would mentions be higher if there was a Hoff-brand social media campaign in place? How would you make the most of a major event with social media? Imagine how many t-shirts and DVDs could be sold in the wake of such buzz!

Should Pulte keep tabs on their brand?

radam — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 16:27:19 +0000

I made this pointed tweet this morning. Well, it wasn’t really pointed, just an observation: I’ve witnessed a lot of construction in my neighborhood with no increase in actual neighbors. It’s weird.

Moments later I was retweeted by @PEretired. One click later I was on PEretired’s blog, which comprehensively documents flaws (some minor, some very serious) in Pulte construction.

I immediately created a Looxii keyword search for “Pulte.” The majority of search results were innocuous real estate listings or bland corporate propaganda. There were some interesting gems though, including my tweet and PEretired’s RT.

I found More Jobs Americans Won’t Do?, a video recorded on a Pulte construction site that features strong anti-immigration rhetoric and has been shared 5 times on Facebook. There were also several mentions of Pulte’s million-dollar settlement related to shady marketing practices during the housing boom. And there was one lonely tweet about Pulte’s green building practices, which was actually a “Screw BP!” tweet. Tobacco companies may have better brand reps than BP right now.

Pulte’s official presence in these social media conversations is notably absent. Ultimately I’m left to assume Pulte is unaware of their role in the Arizona immigration debate and they’re not doing anything to address perceptions of shady marketing dealings and shoddy construction practices. Does this matter? Would Pulte benefit (i.e. grow as a business) from getting involved or at least being aware? This is where one tweet can take you.

Looxii Reports: Sunday Showdown, Bacon V. The Hoff

radam — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 18:17:58 +0000

Looxii Reports are a regular feature that investigate Social Media Analytics anomalies, oddities or general points of interest. Suggestions for topics are welcome, just submit them to adam[at]looxii.comThis past Sunday was big for both Bacon and David Hasselhoff, one was fried repeatedly, the other roasted publicly. Is there any real value in pitting my favorite magical food against my favorite magical actor? Yes, well, maybe. Regardless, here is your Social Media Showdown: Bacon v. the Hoff for August 15, 2010.

Methodology
Searching for “Bacon” I excluded the terms “Francis” and “Kevin” to cut down on non-food related mentions. For David Hasselhoff I combined the results for searches on “Hasselhoff” and “the Hoff.”

Conculsion
Bacon wins for sheer volume and total number of mentions. Regardless, it must be said that in a world where both Bacon and the Hoff exist, we’re all winners.

Social Media Showdown, 8/15: Bacon vs. the Hoff (PDF)

Bacon photo taken from Flickr user Yogma, The Hoff photo from Flickr user Hot Rod Homepage

Social Media Snake Oil

daniel — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 18:19:46 +0000

Note: the views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Looxii the company.

Working in the field of social media has taught me many valuable lessons, but it has been hard to ignore the sheer number of experts and robots that automatically follow me on Twitter any time I mention the term “social media.” In fact social media posts about social media have become the meta-discourse of the modern age. The buzz around social media started slowly and picked up steam as different services (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, et al) made headlines over the last decade or so. This increase in chatter culminated when marketers and corporations got into the mix, creating an environment like that of the SEO field, with experts who tout their page rank skills at every introduction.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t real experts and that many of the people that you meet working in the field are not legitimate, rather there are good approaches and bad approaches. Take for example the organization/individual that serves as a social media consultant. As more businesses test the waters of social media, consultants can be great resources for educating staff members on social media best practices or running, conceiving and quantifying entire social media campaigns.

What they shouldn’t do is provide a cloaked service to you or your business. Transparency is important throughout the process, and gives you and your organization the ability to learn from their methods. Often, it merely takes participation in social networks and a bit of learning some good approaches to social media to get started.

Social media marketing is actually quite different from SEO, because your target is not a search bot, but living humans. So in this sense, getting involved in social media does not require advanced computer skills. Take, for instance, the fact that Facebook’s biggest growing population is in the 55+ age range. What is required is dedication to similar best practices that have been prevalent in good business communication for ages.

What are the best approaches?

There are many good approaches to properly presenting your organization or brand online in the midst of so much chatter, but it always helps to start with the core of any form of social group, be it online or off. A good social media brand presence will entertain, foster a community, and be honest.

A Google search for “social media honesty” returns many cases where being dishonest diminished the public opinion of a company and their firm. The same search also furnishes many authors that provide sound social media advice.

This evidence is largely anecdotal, but it makes sense to assume that providing information that helps educate your followers is a good thing and, in contrast, spinning stories, products, or services into something they are not is a bad thing. This can also apply to social media experts and their messages, be wary of those that make simplistic claims (e.g. “social media is easy,” “it’s hot right now, you should be doing it,” etc).

The idea of building a community and entertaining are tied closely together in all social media approaches. This is actually evident in the history of entertaining commercials. People don’t want to subscribe to or befriend a series of advertisements. The chronological and streaming nature of social media gives you the opportunity to intersperse your promotion with entertaining, informative, or useful information. Promoting others ahead of yourself, if you appreciate what they are doing, is extremely useful. Social media guru Chris Brogan states in his article 25 Ways to Build Your Community, “Promote other people’s work 12 times as much as you promote your own.” If you interact as a member of a community rather than act as an advertiser, people will trust you and your brand more.

This isn’t to say that these are these are the only lessons necessary for success in social media, rather this is a starting point. There are scores of people poised to take advantage of others who see social media as daunting or intimidating. Just the same, there are experts out there who have honed their skills to help others implement and adhere to social media best practices.

photo credit: aussiegall

Looxii likes Cow Clicker

radam — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 14:54:15 +0000

There are several familiar sounds that echo every morning in the Looxii office: the gurgle of the coffee pot, the peppy melodies of Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, and, most recently, the din of moos.

We are officially addicted to Cow Clicker, GaTech professor Ian Bogost‘s meta-discourse on social games. We’re not exactly rejoicing, as Bogost himself concedes that Cow Clicker is an artifact indicative of our times, a “mundane, outward obsession whose worst trick is to disguise itself as fruitfulness.” Should I lament wanting to upgrade to a “Bling Cow” or “Bacon Cow?” Or should I just rest content in the knowledge that I am now aware of the system that manipulates me? Click away my friends, but ruminate as you do so.

We’ve also been tracking “Cow Clicker” with Looxii and as you can see the buzz is pretty big (741 total mentions), peaking with 103 mentions on Twitter on July 27th. Seeing as it’s an academic work note that it’s off the hook on blogs (referenced in 195 blog posts between July 20th and 10:30am, August 12th) the discourse is on! The following chart shows a breakdown of mentions of “Cow Clicker” by source from 7/20 to 10:30am 8/11…

Looxii Reports: The Week in Social Media for Pauly Shore

radam — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 15:52:49 +0000

Looxii Reports are a regular feature that investigate Social Media Analytics anomalies, oddities or general points of interest. Suggestions for topics are welcome, just submit them to adam[at]looxii.com.
Call it coding burnout prevention or middle school nostalgia, but we’ve been using Looxii all summer to track Pauly Shore, the once written off (and sometimes currently written off) ’90s pop icon. The results have been intriguing. We picked a week at random, July 26th to August 1st, and put together a 1-page report that includes sentiment analysis and notable trends we identified (e.g. the bizarro Pauly Shore – Jersey Shore “The Situation” conflation).While the occasional remarks of “what ever happened to Pauly Shore?” or “(insert something difficult/impossible/improbable here) is like searching for meaning in a Pauly Shore movie” (a pop-culture metaphor first introduced in the 1995 film Clueless) still appear with some regularity, the results revealed a savvy marketing machine leveraging social media to revive and support a renaissance of the Pauly Shore brand. It’s not the second-coming, just the second-coming of Pauly Shore.Shore promotes live appearances, comedy tours, new films, t-shirt sales (the Pauly Store) and much more with a twitter account that boasts 12,000+ followers and an official site that features tons of easily transmittable, original content (some of it lol-worthy I might note). From June 1st to present there have been over 10,000 mentions of “Pauly Shore” within social media (this includes Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and YouTube), averaging about 140 mentions a day. Spikes in mentions occur around comedy tour dates, airings of Son In Law on CMT or anytime handfuls of social media users have jury duty.What Pauly Shore provides, in addition to raunchy stand up and ’90s flashbacks, is a noteworthy case study in building, maintaining and growing an effective social media presence. Carrot Top, please take note.

The Week in Social Media for Pauly Shore

Raw Data: “Pauly Shore” mentions, July 26 – August 1 2010

Looxii likes Jamie Brightmore’s Dribbble infographics

radam — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 15:28:07 +0000

Check out Jamie Brightmore’s masterful, pretty, HTML5 Dribbble Interactive Infographic. It works best in Safari 5 or the nightly Chrome builds. It’s still purdy lookin’ in other browsers, just not as interactive.