Posts Tagged ‘Social Media’

All posts tagged Social Media.

An Intervention

Posted: by carlacthompson on November 19th, 2009 | 2 Comments »

Categorized: Carla Thompson, Social Media

I feel I should start this post by getting one thing straight – Louis Gray is one of the nicest people you will ever meet. He’s super smart, genuine, thoughtful, and honest. He’s a rare tech pundit who isn’t all about ego and self-aggrandizing. We all love Louis, right? Right.

However.

This post yesterday is about 10,000 kinds of wrong.  Now don’t yell at me – we all love Louis, remember? But that doesn’t mean we’re required to accept this level of hyperbole. Facebook didn’t fail your family, Louis. You have about five trillion friends on there, making it quite easy for updates from family members to get lost in the shuffle. I get it, really I do. You wanted the site to be smart and know which people are important to you. But it can’t do that yet. Oh it very likely will in a couple of years, once somebody figures out what to do with all this personal data with which we’ve flooded the Intertubes. In the meantime, you’re going to have to choose human interaction instead.

And that’s really my central point: all this technology that we spend 80 hours a week with, that has become our go-to activity during downtime, that is the hub of an ever-more-frantic daily existence – all these tools and services are not the endpoint. Or at least they shouldn’t be. All these gizmos and software should be improving our actual real worlds, not creating entirely separate ones in the clouds.

I’m really not one to talk. I check TweetDeck at stoplights. I talk to friends more on Facebook than on the phone. I’ve caught myself enjoying a good book or movie and immediately wondering how best to share it online. And when you work in emerging tech, you’ve got a ready-made excuse. “This is my job! I have to tweet!” In actuality, it’s damn addictive and can easily overtake real-world existence.

With other addictions, you know you’ve hit rock-bottom when you forsake all other aspects of your life in search of the high. In technology, I’d say it’s when you blame a social networking site for not telling you you’ve become an uncle. Step away from the computer, Louis. Go outside and read a book under a tree. Or, better yet, go see your sister and the new baby. It will all be here when you get back.

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Bang the Drum: Social Media As Analytics

Posted: by chrisshipley on November 11th, 2009 | 3 Comments »

Categorized: Chris Shipley, Observations, Social Media

Earlier this year, at a TIEcon panel on the business of social media, I spoke about social media as an analytics machine.  Millions upon millions of people announcing what they had done, what they are doing, what they plan to do.  The Social Web is an observation tower for human behavior.

The highest tower among many is Twitter, yet when I asked Twitter’s VP of Business Operations Santosh Jayaram how many developers were working on analytics he mumbled, “We have a couple of guys looking at it.”  No doubt, Twitter has its hands full just keeping the lights on, but folks – analytics is the value of Twitter.

I’ve beaten this drum in dozens of conversations throughout the summer yet the focus always comes back to things like social graphs and crowd marketing.

Then, today, a guy with a bigger drum made a bang at Defrag. Eric Marcoullier, CEO of Gnip, Inc., has a booming voice and a big personality, and his brief talk this morning — ‘The business world doesn’t give a shit about your lifestream app” — resonated throughout the room.  Fundamentally, Eric argued, social media (for business) needs to “make the leap from marketing to business intelligence.”

Exactly.

Business is beginning to pay a lot more attention to Twitter and other social media as a megaphone and a listening post, and that’s a start.  We now have ample examples of small businesses announcing that the donuts are fresh from the oven and large companies responding to disgruntled customers to convince businesses of any size that there is something to this social media thing.

Typically and perhaps understandably, these now-enlightened companies gravitate toward selling and marketing.  Yet they are missing the big opportunity of social media by not taking the further step to understand the meaning behind the collective voice.

These organizations need a new set of tools and new approaches to data to gain that insight.  Fellow Defrag attendee  Nathan Gilliatt, whose practice is focused on working with corporate clients to bring them meaning to social data, described this as the need to break down the “measurement silos” to blend social media into business intelligence.

Indeed, social analytics brings a deeper understanding to customer engagement. It allows organizations to create the right product, drive the right relationships, structure a more responsive organization, and – yes – market and sell.

Most importantly, as Eric put it this morning, it allows business to “move beyond data and seek meaning.”

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The Vortex: Back from the Dead

Posted: by carlacthompson on July 24th, 2009 | 2 Comments »

Categorized: Carla Thompson, Week in Review

We’re back by popular demand – or at least a few random asides from people I pass on the street. It seems some of you genuinely missed the weekly snark-fest that is The Vortex, in which we take a moment to poke some fun at the Egotocracy. And once I started compiling items earlier in the week, I just couldn’t stop. This may be slightly longer than usual; there’s just so much to choose from! Let’s get to it, shall we?

News from the Social Media Vortex

-The big kerfuffle of the past two weeks has been King Arrington vs Twitter. Citing the entire history of the news industry as precedent, he decided that publishing confidential company documents sent to him by a hacker in need of a hobby qualified as sound journalism. Twitter has not ruled out the possibility of lawsuits. I think the best assessment of the situation came from a journalist friend who said, “Lovely how journalism has progressed from The Pentagon Papers to this…” Indeed.

-In other Twitter news, the company found a fan in Martha Stewart this week and a critic in David Letterman. Calling Facebook “dippy,” (my new favorite word), Stewart lauded the ease of using Twitter, though also strangely labeled it the ‘Wal-Mart of the Internet.’ (Is Twitter now hawking mass-produced crap made by Malaysian children?) Meanwhile, Letterman rebuffed Kevin Spacey’s attempt to lure him to the service, calling it a waste of time.  They’re both right.

-Social-networks-in-a-box site Ning reminded us that the tech bubble never truly dies, raising a $15 million funding round on a valuation of $750 million. In April, the company said its users had created over one million social networks, with only 200,000 of those still active. I’m no math whiz, but that sounds like a user retention rate of just 20%. How does that translate to a valuation higher than the GDP of, well, any country in the world? Just asking.

Apps on the Radar

-Mashable has a great piece on impressive implementations of Facebook Connect.

-Parents will appreciate Have2P, for those times when the young ‘uns just can’t wait, and Balloonimals, an ingenious little app that lets your kid blow up a virtual balloon and shake the iPhone to create an animal.

-Gamers need to check out Triazzle and Peggle, both of which are quickly addictive.

-And stoners should know about Cannabis, a recently approved iPhone app that will locate legal purveyors of medical marijuana. Not that I know anything about that.

Tweet of the Week

-This one was just too easy. In the category of Scarily Immersed in Social Media, we salute Mark Rizzn Hopkins for the following: “Ever wanted to micro-podcast to your FriendFeed? Try FriendBoo! http://riz.gd/bt2qn4“  Um, no Mark. No I have not.

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A Tale of Two Communities

Posted: by carlacthompson on December 5th, 2008 | 3 Comments »

Categorized: Carla Thompson, Social Media, Web 2.0

If you’ve checked out my FriendFeed stream in the last few weeks, you may have noticed the emergence of a glaring theme in my online activity. Its name is Facebook and it has commandeered my life.  There are pages upon pages of Facebook status updates in my FriendFeed and not much else. (Excepting the glut of old YouTube favorites that just popped up yesterday. That’s an odd bug.) Though I can’t pinpoint precisely when this shift occurred – some time over the last month my time on FriendFeed has dwindled to zero while Facebook has become an always-open tab – I can tell you precisely why. My friends are on Facebook.  My real-world, send-Christmas-cards friends. For the most part, they’re people with which I share history. I want to see pictures of their kids and reminisce over embarrassing high school pictures. While it can be fun to argue politics with strangers on FriendFeed, at the end of the day it’s simply more fulfilling to connect further with people I’m personally invested in. And I’m reasonably sure I’m not alone in this sentiment, particularly among mass consumers.

What’s more interesting, though, is that no one on FriendFeed comments or likes my Facebook entries. They sit forlornly on the FriendFeed page, a sure sign that my attention and energies have moved elsewhere. It’s like a tacit acknowledgment among FriendFeed users that Facebook is an entirely separate world unto itself. Or perhaps my status updates are just boring.  The point is that these two worlds, so similar in so many ways, seem to be at war with each other. To FriendFeeders, Facebook is a sheep-filled home of tech noobs and FriendFeed is, well, no one on Facebook seems to understand the point of FriendFeed. Read the rest of this entry »

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Finding Them Where They Live

Posted: by carlacthompson on October 8th, 2008 | No Comments »

Categorized: Carla Thompson, Observations, Social Media, Web 2.0

The worst part of not being a full-time blogger, i.e., other work precludes me from jumping on every story, is that you curse a lot. As in, “dammit, I was going to say that.” That happened to me this morning when I read this post by Rob Diana. He was building off a post by Chris Brogan that does an excellent job of examining real-world consumers and what technology means to them. Both posts echo Guidewire Group’s sentiment that the current financial crisis should be a call for the tech world to focus attention on the masses.

Rob’s post, though, takes it one step further to just where I wanted to go. The tech world has at its fingertips a ready-made, gargantuan network of users who have dipped their toe into the social media universe and are primed for more – Facebook. Tech insiders regularly deride Facebook and, at times on Twitter and FriendFeed, there seems to be a game of who can hate Facebook more. We could certainly spend an entire post talking about Facebook’s flaws. But the fact remains that the people who are on it are, for the most part, not involved in the blogosphere. Those are precisely the people entrepreneurs need to reach and, for the moment, they’re lying fallow, playing Scrabble and throwing things at each other. Read the rest of this entry »

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Choose Your Words Carefully

Posted: by chrisshipley on June 23rd, 2008 | No Comments »

Categorized: Chris Shipley, Observations, Social Media

Those who know me at all well know that I love words. I delight in a beautiful turn of phrase. I am amused by oxymoronic combinations (“Live Chickens Fresh Killed” remains a favorite storefront sign from my days in Somerville, Mass.) And I can get agitated when words are misused, and worse, abused for the sake of drama.

It was amid that agitation last week that I began a post challenging bloggers to avoid ill-advised use of language.

An excerpt from the offending post: Read the rest of this entry »

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Slouching Toward a Civil Discourse

Posted: by chrisshipley on March 20th, 2008 | No Comments »

Categorized: Chris Shipley, Observations, Social Media

The blogospheric (I’m not sure that’s a word, but I like the sound of it) introspection that emerged from Mike Arrington’s post yesterday’s post is undoubtedly a good thing. The much-valued “conversation” of social media has become downright anti-social and if the civility of discourse continues on its decline, we bloggers will destroy the art form.

As Carla pointed out in her post, Robert Scoble’s mini-manifesto this morning called for a civil community to reclaim the values of early blogging. It’s high time. Buried deep in the post was this hidden gem:

Building a new thing is more noble than tearing something down.

Now some might misinterpret the message in all this conversation to be a return to the admonition of Moms everywhere: If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything. I think to take that up as a banner would be as artificial as the manufactured mud slinging that too often happens on blogs now. Instead, heed my crusty grandfather’s advice: Keep a civil tongue in your head (words usually followed by a swift blow to the back of it).

But even that misses a larger point. Read the rest of this entry »

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Over Paying Bloggers for "Free" Content

Posted: by chrisshipley on March 19th, 2008 | 7 Comments »

Categorized: Carla Thompson, Chris Shipley, Observations, Social Media, Web 2.0

On most days, Carla and I debate our analysis in private, Skyping with one another until our fingers burn. And this day started just the same. She’d been mulling over the value of reasoned analysis as subject matter for blogs. Then, a TechCrunch post about (I think) why investment in blog media companies will never pay out described the blogging as some sort of word-based Fight Club, and that tipped Carla to action.

Her post today asks, essentially, whether thoughtful analysis has any place in the blogosphere. She quoted one colleague who effectively said that if one writes a solid analysis, then what’s there to say in the comments. The subtext: fire off an ill-conceived “rant” and we can really sink our teeth into that. Read the rest of this entry »

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Is Thoughtful Analysis Dead?

Posted: by carlacthompson on March 19th, 2008 | No Comments »

Categorized: Carla Thompson, Observations, Social Media

Mike Arrington’s post on TechCrunch this morning about bloggers and the capital around them was uncanny, as I spent yesterday pondering the ins and outs of blogging in the current climate. A bit of a ramble and frankly, lacking introspection, his post was nonetheless an interesting perspective on the blogging market and its potential future. It’s prompted me to lay bare some concerns and questions I’ve had of late.

The Guidewire is a relative newcomer to the blogosphere. Not counting personal blogs and the weekly posts on DEMO.com, Chris and I haven’t contributed much to the blog conversation. To be honest, our initial stab at a Guidewire Group blog collapsed under its own weight. We approached it with too heavy an editing hand, too complicated an interface, too… much thought, if that’s possible. We’re industry analysts by nature and trade, a profession that doesn’t lend itself to off-the-cuff musings and breaking news. We spend weeks, sometimes months, weighing market trends and startup viability and only then do we craft our analysis aimed toward Guidewire Group’s primary audience of VCs and C-level execs in technology firms. As we delve deeper into directing some of those thoughts into a blog, though, I increasingly struggle with how to build and maintain an online presence by producing interesting, mindful content that people want to read without turning into a ranting egomaniac. It’s right there in About The Guidewire:

Our goal… is to add to the conversation, not echo it. We hope that when we do wade in on an issue, we can offer a different perspective, one that’s missing from the discussion.

Easier said than done. All the well-intentioned, reasoned thought in the world isn’t worth much when people don’t see it. I think Chris best summed up our abrupt education in blogosphere politics when she said recently, “I’ve become a link whore.” Read the rest of this entry »

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Becoming the Story: A Cautionary Tale

Posted: by chrisshipley on March 11th, 2008 | 3 Comments »

Categorized: Chris Shipley, Observations

Earlier today, my business partner Mike Sigal and I had a robust discussion about Carla’s post on the Sarah Lacy kerfuffle at SXSW on Sunday. Neither defending nor attacking Lacy, Mike asked whether The Guidewire did a service to the community by entering the debate. “How,” he asked, “are we additive to the debate?”

It’s a fair question and I do think Carla made a key point:

It seems that the audience was misread at several junctures. In the end though, the only question that needs to be answered is whether Lacy did her job as a reporter and interviewer.

Whether you like or dislike Lacy’s style, whether you appreciate her body of work, whether you were in the room or not, one thing has become clear: Lacy became the story.

In fact, I’ve been hard pressed to find much coverage at all of comments made by Mark Zuckerberg during the hour-long keynote Q&A, so I went to YouTube to find video of the interview. Lacy talked about her visit to facebook, her previous discussions with Zuckerberg, her forthcoming book, her interview techniques, her indignation. . . herself.

In short, Lacy made the interview as much about her as it was about Zuckerberg. That, my friends, is an amateur mistake that a journalist of her position should not make.

But, oddly, it’s almost understandable. Read the rest of this entry »

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