Friday, June 27, 2008

Will Twitter Survive?

I would like to open by saying I certainly hope so. I have found it a valuable tool for me to network with other social media and interactive marketing professionals. However, again today, its performance was extremely poor and it appeared to shutdown during the middle of the day -- UGH!!! Not much else to say but that if things do not improve, the future does not look bright for this rising star.

Thursday, June 26, 2008

Social Media in Plain English


A very good explanation of social media. I like the CommonCraft approach to explaining complex concepts like social media in easy-to-understand, short videos. This one is very nice and more can be found on YouTube or at their website.

Twitter, friendfeed and Digg

I wish Twitter had higher performance and uptime. It is often sluggish and even Twhirl has to stopping accessing it for 5 minutes, or longer, at a time to allow it to catch up. I continue to find incredible people and publishers to follow including: Leo Laporte, John C. Dvorak, PC Magazine, New York Times, etc.... So, I am finding more value in the service every day. I just hope they can make it work better and figure out a way to make money on it, because without revenue, investment will eventually dwindle.

I have been using friendfeed a lot more lately. I finally figured out the value and have been linking my favorite services to my friendfeed profile. Like NetVibes is for my blog and publisher feeds, I like the way friendfeed has become an aggregation point for my favorite social media feeds. It also performs very well.

Finally, I have been using Digg more and more. I am finding some great articles on the internet and when I am reading some of my favorite magazines and news sources. I like that I can keep track of these articles on Digg, see what others are finding valuable or interesting, and go back to find articles I want to forward to others.

University of Georgia CONNECT Conference

I have been asked to speak at the University of Georgia CONNECT Public Relations and Social Media Conference September 20, 2008. I have Paull Young of Converseon to thank for connecting me with Karen Russell at the University of Georgia. As much as I enjoy speaking on interactive marketing and social media, I really enjoy hearing what others are doing. What has worked well for them, what they experimented with, and, of course, what to avoid. I am also looking forward to engaging with both the professors and students. New insights and new learnings are always welcome.

Tuesday, June 3, 2008

Sam Decker - BazaarVoice - Customer Oxygen

This is a right-to-the-point discussion on the impact of customer reviews and ratings to the operations of a company. Once customer reviews and ratings are occuring the culture of the company will begin to change and eventually feed off of those insights down to the operational level.