Tech Hermit

Rafflecopter Giveaway

2012-01-09T20:27:00.000-08:00

Simultaneous Posting to Multiple Blogs

2010-07-18T21:22:00.001-07:00

There are several applications that would make this a necessary thing to do.
I am testing out ScribeFire, a Mozilla Firefox plugin, for this particular attempt.
I am posting this to both TechHermit and to my experimental blog, but just hitting the publish button one time.
It seems like a very intuitive tool, even as I am adding hyperlinks, the tools recognizes what is in the clipboard and is ready to paste it right away.
I'll add a picture to see how it appears in both blogs, it is a slick add in feature that gives four upload options.

And here is how it will handle embed video from youtube.

Pomplamoose - If You Think You Need Some Lovin

OK, hitting publish now.
So it's not a true simultaneous posting, you do have the option of keeping the information and re-posting it to the second (or third) location right away.

For a free tool, pretty slick. Another reason to switch to Firefox as well.

Look What Blogger Did!

2010-07-13T08:29:00.001-07:00

I probably missed it when it happened, but I love the changes that blogger has made to their design and template layout.

There are a few more options and a much easier drag and drop layout. Blogger just made it a little easier to have a variety of professional looks for your $0 budget blog.

Facebook Changes...Again.

2010-04-21T07:53:00.000-07:00

Facebook made some changes yesterday to the way pages work. They introduced "community pages" and changed some terms that you might need to change on your website as well. If your website says, "Become a Fan on Facebook" you might see how things go over the next couple of weeks and be prepared to change it to a term that matches facebook's nomenclature. You can see below that they have changed it to "like" instead.

Here is the faq section from facebook's home page on these two topics.
You can see the entire Help Center on Facebook Pages if the following doesn't provide your answer.

Community Pages
What are Community Pages?
Community Pages are a new type of Page that enable you to see what peo...
Community Pages are a new type of Page that enable you to see what people are saying about the things that matter to you, and discover the friends and people who share these connections with you. They are similar to any other Page to which you can connect, although they won’t generate stories in your News Feed, and won’t be maintained by a single author. Where available, they also show Wikipedia content for the relevant topic, which Facebook has licensed under the creative commons license.

We think your experience on Facebook will improve as your profile is turned into a living map of all the connections that matter to you, instead of a static list of your interests.
http://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=17110
How are Community Pages different from official Pages or Facebook Groups?
Community Pages are built around topics, causes or experiences. Offici...
Community Pages are built around topics, causes or experiences. Official Pages are maintained by authorized representatives of a business, brand, celebrity, or organization, and they can create and share content about the entities that they represent. Community Pages, on the other hand, won’t generate stories in your News Feed, and won’t be maintained by a single author.

While Groups allow you to communicate directly with other people on Facebook about a specific subject, Community Pages simply enable you to learn more about and see what others are saying about additional topics that interest you.
http://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=17111
Can I edit the content on a Community Page?
No. When available, we update the information and profile picture base...
No. When available, we update the information and profile picture based on the article for that topic in Wikipedia. At this time, there is no way for people who choose to connect with a Community Page to add their own pictures or edit the information.
http://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=17112
How can I tell the difference between official Pages and Community Pages?
Community Pages have slightly different content than official Pages. W...
Community Pages have slightly different content than official Pages. When available, they display a primary picture straight from the Wikipedia page of that topic, along with an info section also from Wikipedia. Related posts from other people on Facebook will also be displayed in real time.

However, since Community Pages are another type of Page, we don't differentiate between them when listed on your profile or in search results.
http://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=17113
What if there isn’t a Wikipedia article for a Community Page topic?
Community Pages are meant to be the best collection of shared knowledg...
Community Pages are meant to be the best collection of shared knowledge on topics that interest you. Where available, they show Wikipedia content for the relevant topic, which Facebook has licensed under the creative commons license.

If we can’t find the right article from Wikipedia, we might be asking for help from the community. You may see messaging on these Community Pages inviting you to make these Pages more useful and interesting by signing up to contribute in the future or by suggesting a Wikipedia article.
http://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=17138
"Liking" a Page
Why did "Become a Fan" change to "Like"?
To improve your experience and promote consistency across the site, we...
To improve your experience and promote consistency across the site, we've changed the language for Pages from "Fan" to "Like." We believe this change offers you a more light-weight and standard way to connect with people, things and topics in which you are interested.
http://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=17167
What does it mean to "Like" a Page?
When you click "Like" on a Page, you are making a connection to that P...
When you click "Like" on a Page, you are making a connection to that Page. The Page will be displayed in your profile, and in turn, you will be displayed on the Page as a person who likes that Page. The Page will also be able to post content into your News Feed.
http://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=17115
Can I still "Like" a News Feed story about my friends Liking Pages?
No. When you see a Feed story about a friend Liking a Page, there will...
No. When you see a Feed story about a friend Liking a Page, there will be no feedback links below that story. However, if you hover over the Page name, you will see a small preview of the Page and the number of other people who have also Liked that Page. You can then Like that Page to add it to your profile, or you can click through to the Page itself.
http://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=17116
Is there a difference between "Liking" an item a friend posts and "Liking" a Page?
Yes. Liking a Page means you are connecting to that Page. When you con...
Yes. Liking a Page means you are connecting to that Page. When you connect to a Page, it will appear in your profile and you will appear on the Page as a person who likes that Page. The Page will also be able to post content into your News Feed.

On the other hand, when you click "Like" on a piece of content that a friend posts, you are simply letting your friend know that you like it without leaving a comment.
http://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=17168

How Social Engagement is Changing

2010-04-14T10:49:00.000-07:00

I love a good visual...

Social Media Strategic Planning

2010-03-04T19:13:00.000-08:00

My previous post on Social Media Strategic Planning received a few off and online requests for the use of the tactical matrix.

For your convenience, I uploaded the matrix, in this presentation form, to slideshare. You can download the presentation from there and feel free to re-use and re-purpose it. I'd love to know how you might adapt it and use it in a way that fits your purposes, so please keep me informed.

The Most Practical Social Media Presentation You'll Find For Free!

View more presentations from mikeyames.

I found inspiration in the ongoing work of Beth Kanter, the consistent use of matrix grids by Jeremiah Owyang, and a conversation with my friend, Lance Bauslaugh.

The Matrix - Social Media Planning Tool

2010-02-12T13:41:00.000-08:00

I have been presented with a couple of opportunities to use a planning matrix or two in the last several weeks. I was glad to see the way the Jeremiah Owyang has been using them over at his blog the in last dozen posts. We have recently been challenged with our thinking at Pursuant with a fundraising matrix that has been very helpful in our strategic planning with clients. They keep popping up.

So this frame of thinking caused me to construct the following matrix specifically geared to guide the planning of a basic social media work flow. There are plenty of comments and critiques you might make to it. I'd love to hear them.

So, based on this empty shell of a matrix, I have filled it in with sample recommendations we might make to a typical small to mid-size non profit client.
You can see the fictional parameters and constraints I have inserted. You can also see that there is an assumption that this hypothetical organization would have already jumped into facebook, twitter, blogging and youtube, without taking time to think through strategy or audience or resources. (sound familiar?)

So this might be you or your organization...

This leads us to having the freedom of turning this matrix on it's side to discover a daily task list for a single person to accomplish a cross platform engagement strategy in about 30 minutes per day. Here is what that might look like...

There is plenty to comment and critique here.
Please resist a critique of the tactics that are listed in the grid. I would much rather hear your comments on the planning tool itself.

Facebook Horribly Messes with Non Profits Use of Their Site.

2010-02-09T21:07:00.000-08:00

This is an excellent post you will find on the NonProfit Tech 2.0 Blog.

I encourage you to keep an eye on the results of this test throughout next week. This could be a real disappointment for nonprofits, even those that have employed an excellent engagement strategy might find themselves severely limited in their ability to engage or communicate.

An Experiment with Facebook Advertising for Nonprofit Organizations
2010 February 9
tags: Facebook, ROI (Return on Investment)
by nonprofitorgs

The Facebook of February 2010 is quite different from the Facebook of 2009 especially when it comes to Facebook Fan Pages. If you haven’t yet noticed, three very important changes have been made that significantly effect your organization’s Facebook community:

1) Status Updates are no longer guaranteed to get exposure in the News Feed.

There is a mysterious Facebook algorithm at play here and I just don’t know what it is, but I do know that with the launch of new Facebook design in early February 2010 the vast majority of Status Updates from Pages that I am a fan of are not showing up in the primary News Feed > Top News. More are seemingly showing up in the News Feed > Most Recent view, but definitely not all. I knew this change was coming and I had read that Status Updates that receive a lot of comments and thumbs up would at the very least show up in the News Feed > Most Recent, but that’s just not happening. I have always believed and voiced that 90% of the power of a Facebook Page is in the Status Updates, so having them not show up in News Feeds is a problem.

2) It is no longer obvious that fans have new Updates.

I can’t remember exactly when this change was made, but it was at least 6 months ago. When fans logged into Facebook in the upper right of their “Home” view they used to see alerts of “New Updates!”. Now the only way fans know if they have new Updates is if they go to their Inbox > Updates or if they click “Messages” on the left of the Home view (the later was just added February 2010). Coincidently, once this change was made, activity on the Nonprofit Organizations Facebook Page declined. I no longer saw surges in traffic (via Insights) on days that I sent Updates.

As of February 2 Updates had been relegated the realm of “Out of Sight, Out of Mind”. On that day I polled fans asking if they read Updates anymore, and the overwhelming response was no. BUT now that Facebook has added the “Messages” function in the upper left of the Home view, perhaps the usefulness of Updates with rise again? I’ll send an Update next week and let you know. :)

3) The Pages Filter on the Home view has been removed and replaced with Ads and Pages.

The new Facebook of February 2010 no longer has a “Pages” filter in the upper left of the Home view. It used to be a feed of Status Updates from Pages you were a fan of. It’s gone. Now if you click “More” just below this space a new “Ads and Pages” hub appears. You do not see Status Updates, but rather the Ads and Pages you are an admin for. Useful for Nonprofit Admins who manage many Pages and people who buy and manage Facebook ads, but there’s no way around it… less exposure of Status Updates on the Home view is just not good for most nonprofits.

Thus, a $50 experiment with Facebook Advertsing for Nonprofit Organizations.

Facebook is entering an era of profitability. They have built the largest online community the world has ever known over the last 5 years and now they are positioned to make some serious cash. You can’t blame them for it. It couldn’t be free forever. That’s business. But nonprofits have sent out millions of e-mails and Tweets over the last few years asking supporters to “Become a fan!” thus helping Facebook become the powerhouse that it is today. So, there is a reciprocal relationship here, or at least there should be (I think).

I have read rumors that purchasing advertising will help your nonprofit get more action in the News Feeds. That seems fair. I am willing to pay $50 or $100 in advertising to get increased exposure in the feeds, but not necessarily to secure more fans. If those new fans can’t see my Status Updates, well then quite honestly, what’s the point?
So, I have just purchased a Facebook Ad to promote the Nonprofit Organizations Facebook Page that is to run Monday, February 15th through Friday, February 19th. Together, we will watch to see if it increases my fan base and/or Status Update activity in the News Feeds. Below you can see the steps I took to create and pay for an ad:

1) Step 1 :: Design Your Ad

Step 2 :: Target Your Ad

My ad will target people:

* who live in the United States
* between the ages of 30 and 40 inclusive
* who graduated from college
* who are single, in a relationship, engaged or married
* who speak English (US)

Facebook let me know there are 6,892,600 people that fit that description.

Step 3 :: Campaigns and Pricing

I chose to max my ad at $10 a day. For that price I could get up 17 clicks a day, or 36,000 impressions a day. The later sounded much more impressive so I went with Pay for Impressions. The ad will run for 5 days maxing at $50 starting next Monday, February 15.

Step 4 :: Review and Pay for Ad

Step 5 :: Ads and Pages Admin

As mentioned above, there is a new “Ads and Pages” option on the left side of your Home view under “More.” When the ad goes live next Monday I’ll start seeing some activity and be sure to share screenshots with you the following week. But again, this experiment is not about how many new fans an ad can generate for the Nonprofit Organizations Facebook Page, but rather if it helps the Status Updates of the NPO Page get more News Feed action. I hope so!

I love a good presentation...

2009-12-10T18:00:00.000-08:00

Great looking visual aid, Great information on charitable giving in the US.

budget planner – Mint.com

Twitter says "Don't Tweet About It"

2009-10-29T08:26:00.000-07:00

I think twitter is using reverse Jedi on me. I have been reading about the new "lists" feature that twitter been working on. Presumably it is the functionality that many have been already using in web applications like tweetdeck and seesmic.
So I was surprised to see this splash banner come up on an account I help facilitate.
I will run to try out the feature now. I just thought it was funny how twitter announced this private rollout.

If you can't read it in the picture, the text says, "Lists are timelines you build yourself, consisting of friends, family, co-workers, sports teams, you name it. You're part of a small group receiving this feature, so don't tweet about it yet!"

They so want me to tweet about it, right?

Community Hunger Day - Tell Us How it is Going!

2009-10-22T14:38:00.000-07:00

So many of our friends have chosen to participate with us on Community Hunger Day. I will give a tally of the total impact, number of participants and amount of donations in the coming days.
For now, I wanted to give us a public space to share some thoughts on how things went for you throughout the day. Please leave a comment and share some thoughts on the day.

I have several hours left before the day is over. I am sure I will notice my own hunger as the day turns into evening and I don't have work to distract me from my stomach. What are your thoughts?

Community Hunger Day is Oct 22

2009-09-29T17:35:00.001-07:00

Our family story was featured in this video, check it out!

Video in Your Print Magazine

2009-08-21T06:19:00.000-07:00

This is a bit awkward, at this stage, but I am sure this is the first of many integrated media campaigns that make unexpected combinations. Eventually it won't be unexpected.

I predict that this ad will be talked about as the first...then you won't see any copycats for more than a year. Then print media will continue to decline and suffer. Then, a few years from now, you will see versions of this everywhere. Not quite the promise of video paper that Popular Science has been showing us for years, but the technology is getting cheaper and better.

University President's Online Persona

2009-08-11T17:15:00.000-07:00

I had a representative of a university president's office ask me about getting their president up on twitter. I thought I would share part of our exchange. The short research that I did might help you in a similar decision.

My initial response...

I would be remiss if I didn’t ask a couple of questions.

Is the president wanting to partially participate in a profile that is also being updated by others?
Is [president] already the kind of person who creates content on a regular basis?
Aside from simply being an active participant on twitter, does [president] have any specific objectives he’d like to see met as a result of his participation? (I can suggest a few)

Based on the answers to these questions, I would suggest a specific approach to managing his profile.

After another exchange that clarified the questions I asked, I provided the following overview of other university presidents that are using the tool and how they are using it.

http://twitter.com/asupresoffice -Arizona State is clear that this is the “Office of the President” President Michael Crow has a personal profile here http://twitter.com/michaelcrow. The office of president profile has largely turned into a newsfeed. This could be a way we would choose to approach, and then push [president] to do his own tweeting while at high profile events through the same channel. The disadvantage of this approach is that it is a bit contrived, stiff, and the opposite of what regular twitter users would expect from someone seriously interested in using the tool.
This is something we could do for you with a little training and consult. We could set it up and turn it over. Someone in the president’s office is best suited to manage the feed on an ongoing basis. It would be difficult for us to manage this type of feed for you on an ongoing basis, but it is (remotely) possible.

https://twitter.com/presidentgee - Ohio State University, obviously more personal than ASU, but guarded and not engaging. You’ll see he never @replies or Retweets or asks questions or engages in the conversation that is available. It could easily be Gordon Gee’s personal assistant transcribing an event off of his calendar. It is Less newsy, more personal, not interactive (which is the point of twitter [but not if the user isn’t willing to embrace the tool and be transparent])
Other similar examples… http://twitter.com/kstate_pres
We could assist in setup, launch, and a bit more extensive training and consult to both [president] and an assistant of his. It would be very difficult for us to manage this kind of feed on your behalf and we would not recommend ghost writing.

http://twitter.com/johnmaeda - Rhode Island School of Design, President Maeda is extremely engaging, uses the tool well. Intentionally follows others and has a huge following because of his obvious transparency and willing to use twitter as it was intended. Notice all the Retweets and questions and @replies. This user has actual clout and influence in the tool. He likely never has anyone else share his feed. He has completely embraced it as part of his daily rhythm.
Other similar examples… http://twitter.com/AJUpresident
… http://twitter.com/DavidSDockery - President of Union University in Jackson, TN
We could assist in setup and launch and provide exhaustive training and consult in explaining philosophy and practices behind becoming this kind of user. We could NOT operate this kind of feed on an ongoing basis.

Let me know what you think?
Do you know of any other school presidents who are doing a good job tweeting?

Alumni Association Twitter Use - Baseline Comparisons

2009-08-03T14:04:00.000-07:00

What kind of influence score should the typical alumni association reach for? At this point, in this data that we have collected, we have only established a baseline of comparison that allows the different association feeds to look at each other. But as an overall average, should we compare ourselves to something else?

Here is a quick comparison of scores taken and averaged from a dozen random real people (not internet marketers or spammers or profession social media types). The commonality between this average person and the alumni associations we have looked at is that they have the same number of average followers.

You'll notice that the average user who has 560 followers has more than three times the influence and eight times the clout as the average alumni association feed. So my question to you, because I don't think this is the best comparison, is who should alumni associations compare themselves with? If we are going to establish a baseline of comparison to determine that our logistic performance in the tool is better than average or desperately in need of improvement - who should we compare ourselves to?

Brand names?
Membership associations?
Central communication feeds for the schools?
Small Companies with a similar sized customer base?

Sound off in the comments...what do you think should be the comparison that makes the best sense?

Little Funny

2009-07-29T14:32:00.000-07:00

Found by way of my friend, Jeremy Gregg, over at FundVisor.

Alumni Associations Twitter Usage Report

2009-07-28T22:20:00.000-07:00

Don't let the fact that I am not able to offer you a fully functioning version of this data with an attached, preloaded pivot table stop you. I would love to put a call out there for someone to do their magic with this data and give it back to us. I ventured into this project with a few basic questions I wanted to answer. I collected the data and set about to answer those questions. There is, without a doubt, a hundred other questions and answers that one could derive from this data, so have at it.

If you plan to do your own analysis and discover some answers to your own questions, you should know a few basics about the tool I used to collect this data. Twitalyzer is a website that runs the numbers you see represented in the data. Twitalyzer takes a snapshot of the past seven days of your use of twitter and runs the algorithm to arrive at a score in 5 different categories, influence, signal, generosity, velocity and clout.

A couple other things you should know...If you haven’t used twitter in the past seven days, it doesn’t matter how much influence or clout you had, Twitalyzer will give a zero return on data. This does NOT mean that your influence scores will reset, start over from zero, and need to build up again. Part of the Twitalyzer algorithm accounts for the number of followers you have, and previous profile scores that have been analyzed in the past. It is important to understand how some profiles might go from an influence score of 2.4 to zero and back to 2.2. The “no data” score is not technically a score of zero, even though it might seem that way in how you choose to present data. Twitalyzer basically answers the question, “what is your influence in twitter in the last seven days.” Where one can easily make the case that a profile that hasn’t been updated for the past week still retains some influence (based upon user accessibility to previous updates), Twitalyzer only shows trends limited to the previous tabulations that have been run on a given user name. In the basic report page, an ongoing tabulation of the scores is only presented in terms of averages… and not trends. If you would like to see the information presented in a line graph, over time, Twitalyzer will give you a look at that information in a couple of fun ways here.

Based upon this information, it seems inappropriate to present these numbers in a line graph, over time.

This raw Twitalyzer data should be seen as a snapshot average, tabulated five times, between the dates of May 27th and June 22nd , 2009.

If any one data collection time returned “no data” that time was not counted as a zero in the average, instead it was not included in the average.

So, lets get into the questions and answers about Alumni Associations.

I took time to select the top 40 twitter profiles (based on number of followers) by searching for user bios or user names that contained the words "alumni association." the remaining group of alumni association feeds came from a sampling of feeds that were interesting to me for one reason or another. For instance, the two profiles at the bottom of the list were selected because they were started within a couple of days of when my data collection began.

What does the average alumni association feed look like?
After collecting data over the course of a month, what was the aggregate growth seen in each time period?
The typical twitter profile for alumni associations started off with 454 followers and following 303 twitter users. Those numbers grew. By the end of the month, the typical alumni association profile was following 356 users while being followed by 559.

Lets average all the scores together for all 49 profiles that were traced over the course of the month.

The fact that alumni associations have an average influence score 0.4 give us plenty of comparisons to make among the ones that were analyzed. Should alumni associations be happy to be above average? Do their twitter feeds rank low in comparison to other similar industries? More on that later.
For now, here is several quick looks at how individual profiles compare.

If you have been reading these posts from the beginning, you have heard me make the case that judging a profile based on the number of followers is a horrible way to measure success. It is still a statistic that most would be interested in. Here are a couple of ways to look at that statistic. There are a couple of ways to determine how engaging an alumni association is being with this social web tool. One quick way I did this was to look back through three pages of updates for each feed and see if they had a tendency to @reply any of their followers with conversation. If there were none, it is easy to conclude that a feed was dedicated to one-way communication. Those profiles that choose to engage with @replies saw slightly higher growth in followers than those who did not. While I personally hold to the insight that it is better to have 50 responsive followers than 1000 that ignore you, this data comparison can help one make several observations.

There also seems to be a relationship between high clout/influence scores with those profiles who make a practice of following a high percentage of users that are following them. This is seen, in twitter, as a more generous and engaging way to act as a user.

The question becomes, to the alumni association, if the simple act of following back the real people who are following your feed is worth the little bit of extra time it takes to do this. The influence scores say yes.

You can see that the majority of alumni associations fail to take time to enact a follow strategy that leads out and initiates a relationship with another user by following first. Those that do, and follow at least 90% of their following, have more than three times the influence and clout of those that follow fewer than 50%.

While I have several other observations to make about this data. This might be enough to get our conversation started for now. What do you think? Feel free to pull down the spreadsheet and run your own numbers? What does it tell us? What recommendations can we make?
More to come...

All For Good is All Good.

2009-06-23T09:32:00.000-07:00

Non Profits have just been given a gem of a tool to publicize their volunteer opportunities. All for Good is a collaborative effort that has given you access to some of the most talented software engineers in the world. The video below and then the remainder of the videos on youtube will be a great overview and explanation.

It's a search engine for volunteer opportunities near you.
Very cool. Check it out.

This has come from out of a cohort of volunteer effort among the Craigslist Foundation, Google, and Jonathan Greenblatt from UCLA. There is tons of potential here.

Alumni Associations = Twitter FAIL -- Part 3

2009-06-16T14:32:00.000-07:00

Yes, I am sticking with the flaming title for this series of posts. I do recognize that it is very unscientific of me to publish the hypothesis prior to the findings or even the research being collected. But this is a study that is remaining open for criticism and some midstream corrections. It also seems like it would increase the readership of the series. (My alternate title is something to do with making millions in fundraising dollars per month from the comfort of your own home!)

I am in the midst of collecting my fourth data set over the course of the last four weeks. There are some trends that are beginning to show themselves. It is interesting to watch the percentage growth of those twitter feeds that started with the most followers. It looks as if it will show that once a twitter profile reaches a certain level, it will continue to have steady growth no matter how the Alumni Association chooses to manage their outbound communication. This will be an interesting point to consider and, if true, can have several recommendations that emerge from it.

I am most interested in influence and engagement. Unless it is simply a branding exercise on the part of the alumni association, there is no reason to have a profile on twitter if you are not going to consider how much clout or influence the communication has. For example, would you rather have 2,000 follower who ignore your information or 150 followers where 50 will always reply back or retweet you?

This is the question the Katie Johnson considered as she began to manage the twitter presence of Cal State, Fresno. Katie is a numbers person, perhaps a statistician at heart. She was asking the ROI question from the very beginning of their feed. She also asked the questions early, of what kind of news and information their alumni might want to hear from them, and employed the answers she received directly to her outbound information.

SIDE NOTE --- I think it's great that she took the time to consider these important questions. I also think alumni associations everywhere should consider whether their twitter profile should be managed as a news distribution channel at all. In some cases, depending on the objectives and strategy, considering twitter use might not result in the question, "what kind of news do you want from us" but rather "how can we show our alumni our loyalty" or "what needs to our alumni have that we can meet." Those kind of questions and answers might result in the revelation that twitter is not the social web application you should be using.

Katie's orientation toward metrics caused her to use and track her tiny urls every time she sent out a news update. She has been tracking every outbound tweet, that has a link with it, for the past several months. There is quite a bit of information that can be reported on from this data. Here are a couple of basics.

Average click through rate when an update has a link - 4.2%
Highest click through rate of any update - 25%
Highest unique number of clicks on any one update - 52 (with 390 followers at the time)
Typical Time of Day for highest open rates - 2:30PM Pacific
Typical content source for highest open rates - YouTube and FresnoStateNews.com

This is one universities feed. I could only dream of being able to access analysis from all of the alumni associations I am observing. (If everyone were like Katie!) But it is an interesting analysis I recommend any mature feed employing. You can get these kind of clickthru rates using HootSuite or thru the new StumbleUpon tool that is in beta. Some of you might have additional tools that can give you similar statistics.

So leave a comment and lets talk about it. What should we compare our clickthru rates to in order to show we are doing well? Should they be better than email open rates or clickthru rates? Should this be a discussion about updates mimicking email subject lines with the tiny url mimicking the clickthru? I prefer this to be a discussion about engagement, but those numbers are not ready to be published yet.

Alumni Association Research

2009-06-14T21:40:00.000-07:00

The followup post is coming, I promise.
I have had a few people asking.
I am still in the data collection process on what will be a fuller report on the state of typical alumni association use of twitter.

In the mean time, I have a couple of other data sets that have been sent my way that will make for a nice little post. This is not it.

I don't imagine anyone is sitting there hitting the refresh button while staring at my my blog, but you should expect to see something in the next couple of days. I apologize if I am adjusting your expectations.

Alumni Associations = Twitter FAIL -- Part2

2009-06-05T20:42:00.000-07:00

I have received some wonderful interaction (both online and off) from part one of this series and this research. This interaction has led to some adjustments I am considering and I'd like to hear what you think about some of these ideas.

Don't just lurk, feel free to chime in on the comments, I'm happy to hear ideas from friends I haven't met yet. One of those friends is Katie, who chimed in on the comments of the previous post. I even got to spend some time on the phone with Katie today. We had a good, invigorating conversation...I love when online introductions turn into offline interaction. (go to a tweetup some time, you'll really like it)

Anyway, a few things that have hit me as we are half way through this experimental analysis...

#1 - I HAVE BEEN HARSH

I need to come out and admit this right away. The title and opening paragraphs of my initial post on this topic were intentionally over the top.
It was my intent to pull readers, especially alumni association officers, all the way into the research. It is not my intention to publish a scathing diatribe about collective ignorance. I pledge to leave this kind of tactic in post one, and intentionally become affirming and offer help in the remaining posts on this topic. If the use of this tactic lured you in to reading, I'm happy for that. However, I don't want you to hide this report or it's findings from your VP or director because it felt like I had an agenda to make you look ignorant.

That being said, I am going to allow the numbers to be what they are, even if that means they are brutal.

There are a handful of Associations in the data that are doing remarkable with their feeds. Only a portion of this partial study has been published. I chose not to make any commentary on any individual feed, but there are some conclusions you can start to draw from looking at this limited data set.

#2 - BUILD A BETTER BASELINE

Baker alludes to this in his comment on the first posting. I had an offline conversation with him that expounded this idea. I initially chose to show a glimpse of two twitter power users, Beth Kanter and Chris Brogan, in the partial findings. I wanted to give a view of how their scores are coming out, not because I intended a comparison to show that Alumni Associations were awful. Instead, I wanted to give context to the scores generated by the twitter analytic tool I used. I would love to compare the AA feeds to the average or aggregate twitter user, but I don't know where to find a tool that can give those numbers. I could find or choose several random twitter users to establish this baseline, but I believe it might be more appropriate to compare AA analysis to a brand name or business organization. I think this point should be open for discussion. I'll be happy to take suggestions of who or how to establish an appropriate comparative baseline in the comments of this post.

#3 - ESTABLISH A CONTROL GROUP

This idea came from the conversation I had with Katie. Her concern was that AA behavior and tweet habits might be affected based on the partial release of the findings. Feed managers like her will react to this release by awareness that I'm watching. This would result in skewed results for the second half of the data.

Scientifically, this is true.

Practically, I @replied to about 35 of the AA profiles that I was examining with a link to the blog post. I have heard from 6. I think a control group might naturally emerge from among those who hardly read their @replies.

Katie's suggestion also means recruiting a few feeds that were not in the study to take us up on the findings and recommendations we make once the study is over. Let's see if our recommendations are effective. That turns this into a much project for me. (A second project, in fact)

Either way, I'd love your thoughts on this point that Katie brings up.

#4 - WHY TWITTER?

Bill asked me this in an offline conversation. I think the foundation of this question is wondering if I am suggesting that twitter is the thing Alumni Associations should be involved with.

No.

I like the idea of doing a similar analysis of facebook and Linkedin. Katie pointed me to Alumni Futures. This is written by Cal Tech's, Andy Shaindlin. His colleague, Elizabeth Allen, has written in several places about Linkedin best practices. Facebook recommendations are all over the place. I guess I just needed to start some place with twitter. I do think that objectives and strategy are important. I think those should be determined before AA's dive into any one of these technologies.

#5 - YOUR METRICS ARE INTERESTING, BUT DON'T REPRESENT OUR STRATEGY

I have heard several variations of this comment, and I think it is fair to bring up. I used some language in the opening paragraphs of the first post that would lead some to believe that I think a certain way about most of the AA twitter profiles that have been opened. That they are being managed without thought or examination of objectives or strategy. Though that may be the case for many of these feeds, I don't think it's true of all of them. Some of this analysis will come out in the final report and recommendations I'll put together.

That being said, I do believe there is well-intentioned, but faulty, strategy that exists among these feeds. I would like to refrain from talking about this too much prior to the data being collected completely. I am eager to engage in this as a constructive conversation. I think I have some practical suggestions that Alumni Associations can apply that will create both efficiency in the amount of time they spend while increase the engagement level of their alum followers.

If you have any metrics that measure effectiveness of your twitter strategy that are not represented in the tools I selected, I would love to know either the metric you want counted or a tool I might use to capture those numbers.

#6 - WHAT IS THE PLAN?

My plan is to collect data three more times over the next two weeks. This will give us a look at the numbers over a month-long period of time. I plan to invite suggestions into the process along the way so the results are both beneficial and encouraging to the Alumni Association community. Feel free to leave your suggestions.

Alumni Associations = Twitter FAIL

2009-06-03T22:24:00.000-07:00

“You are not doing it right.”
This is a bold statement that might be better suited for a manifesto. The statement is directed at alumni associations who are (for the most part) failing to use twitter the way they should.

You are showing up to a cocktail party with a megaphone.

On twitter, your alums think of you as the obnoxious guy who is unaware of himself and unable to carry on a normal, human conversation. Do you know this guy? The one who only talks about himself…incessantly, completely oblivious to the nonverbal cues he is being sent that clearly communicate he should be quiet, ask a question, or take a breath? Yeah…that guy… is you (on twitter), and I have the numbers to prove it.

Identification

Finding your twitter feeds wasn’t that difficult. Most of you have the word “alumni” in your profile name. A few of your colleges and universities may have a consolidated feed that is named for your school and not for the association. Feeds that are managed by your central communication departments have the advantage of being unified and clear in the distribution of status updates, but the gigantic disadvantages of needing to crowd out the human voice that might come through a twitter feed compounded with inability of the alumni association to have a voice.

For instance, take a look at the feed of the University of Southern California. USC’s feed, at http://twitter.com/SCTrojans follows nobody, engages none, is primarily filled with automated feeds surrounding their sports teams, and boasts one of the largest followings among universities using twitter. Their contrast is Marquette University, http://twitter.com/MarquetteU . MU maintains a very engaging feed, has an even larger following than USC, but has little room or time to focus on alumni association goals.

Translation – twitter feeds controlled by your school’s marketing have large followings and don’t have time for the alumni association.

Therefore, I have ignored the feeds that are named for your college and university, and have focused this analysis on those feeds that have been named specifically for the alumni association. You won’t be able to blame central communication for this one!

The Obvious Numbers

What you will see here is sampling of 50 alumni associations and the brief analysis I found using free tools, easily available, on the web. The top 40 were intentionally chosen for analysis based on the size of their followings. Ashton Kutcher has taught us all (unfortunately) that the size of your following is what is most important. [You’ll see that the analysis of this report runs counter to that notion, but I went ahead and selected and organized these twitter feeds based upon this misunderstood metric] The last several entries were chosen as a cohort that was intentionally chosen for being low in followers and brand new to twitter. It sounded interesting to have input from this representation.

I'll arrange the first look at these based on the way that a casual twitter user might measure influence and clout - based on followers alone. These numbers were recorded as of May 27, 2009.

Don't let the follower metric fool you. What does it mean to have 1873 followers?
Is that follower number a metric that really matters?
What was the reason you opened up your alumni association twitter feed to begin with?
Was this a series of questions you even asked yourself prior to jumping into twitter?

The Not-So-Obvious Numbers

If we take a quick look at the way that these alumni associations engage their followers, we can come a little closer to the value of having over 1,000 followers. By looking at the feeds themselves, we can get a sense of what strategy is being used to increase followers as well as the approach that is being utilized in the day-to-day use of twitter.

* A twitter feed can be used as purely one-way communication and can also be used to speak with and republish others content.
* A twitter user that engages in conversation can be easily spotted by the number of @ replies found in their feed.
* A twitter user that intentionally republished others content can be easily spotted by the "RTs" that lead their updates.
* A twitter profile that asks questions is intentionally engaging followers and eliciting @replies.

An organizations tendency to follow or refollw people also says a lot about the way they have chosen to use twitter. Most of the time, those that just deliver content (and don't engage their followers by asking questions, engaging in conversation or refollowing them) expose themselves as users who are only using this social web platform as a distribution channel (while ignoring the social components).

Here is the same sampling and a look at how these organizations strategically use their feed.

The Numbers You Should Be Looking At...

Which would you rather have... 1000 followers who don't pay attention to you or 40 followers who are actively listening and participating with you?
What is 10,000 followers worth if you are causing your feed to be lost in the twitter noise?
To take a quick look at how engaged these feed's followings are, I took a quick look at their last several days of tweets. By doing a simple search of the twitter profile name you can count how often the feed name is mentioned by other twitter users in the past few days. This is a broad representation to how often people are retweeting, replying, or answering questions the alumni association is asking. This chart also gives you a general idea of the frequency of the outgoing updates by each of these feeds.

Do you see what these numbers are saying? Chris Brogan's twitter name is mentioned 100 times in the past 3 hours and 92 of those mentions are other people talking about, replying to, or retweeting what he has said. That is influence!

Speaking of Influence...

Influence is the real value of any social network. Your follower number is a deceiving metric, especially if you have inadvertently trained your followship to turn a blind eye to your updates. I suppose you could be satisfied with the idea that your alumni network is among the early adopters of this growing social network. As a branding exercise, this may cause you to not care about your influence in the conversation. As long as your profile isn't embarrassing you, maybe you couldn't care whether yor alums are actually listening. But if you do care, this last set of numbers will have some significance and education in themselves for you. This is a snapshot of the recent activity your profile was engaged with in the end of May. based upon the tweets of the previous seven days in combination with a whole host of metrics, these are the scores given to your twitter profiles by a great little tool found at www.twitalyzer.com.

I don't see any reports that show what the average Clout or Influence score is across all twitter users, but from a brief twitalyzer search of a handful of my active twitter friends and a few brands, it seems that a clout score of over 2% is above average and an influence score over 1% is perhaps a bit above average. Either way, you can compare yourself among others in your field to see where you fit in while comparing yourself to other alumni associations that are using twitter. I am not suggesting you should tweet like Chris Brogan does, but I do think there is a lot more value in these number than simply measuring success by your growing followers.
Here is a quick word about the scores you see and how the are mined. These are lifted directly from Twitalyzer's explanation.

Clout -
Clout is often thought of as "special advantage, pull, or influence" in the real world, as in "the senator's nephew has a lot of clout with his uncle." In our usage, clout is the likelihood that other people will reference you in Twitter, as in "gee that @Mashable sure does drive a lot of traffic!" The more people who reference you, the higher your clout.
Our definition of clout is simply the number of references to you divided by the total number of possible references (as governed by the Twitter Search APIs).

Velocity -
Your velocity is simply the rate at which you contribute to Twitter. Since the Twitter Search APIs limit us to 1,500 records, at least for the time being, you are judged against a theoretical maximum of 1,500 updates per week.
This is not to say that you should attempt to write 1,500 updates every week, especially if you don't have very much to say and would end up telling your followers about your cats, lint, or your feelings about your mother. But the reality of the situation is that the most influential people in Twitter are, by and large, writing a lot which helps increase the awareness of their personal brand, the likelihood that they will be referenced, and the likelihood that they will be retweeted by others.
Conversely, Twittering a lot about nothing will increase your velocity but decrease your signal-to-noise ratio. And while the latter is not directly factored into the influence calculation at Twitalyzer, in our experience if you start to ramble about nothing you will lose followers very, very quickly.

Generosity -
We believe that Twitter is a lot like life, only in fewer characters, and that being generous with others is extremely admirable. In Twitter, we think of generosity as one's willingness to pass along ideas and call attention to those ideas we think are great. Our measure of generosity is one's propensity to "retweet" someone else, thusly creating awareness of their work and ideas among your own followers. Specifically, our measure of generosity is based on the ratio of retweets you pass along to all updates you publish. Simple, huh?
This leads to the obvious (yet cynical) conclusion that "if you want to game the Twitalyzer's influence calculation, all you have to do is retweet other people a lot." Yes, yes that will work. And if we are able to get more people to share information in Twitter just to eke a few more points out of their influence score, well, then we believe we have done good work.
Incidentally, if you retweet more frequently, you'll also increase your signal-to-noise ratio as well. Sweet, huh?

Signal to Noise Percentage -
One of the great things about Twitter is that you can say anything you want (in 140 characters or less.) Some people choose to pass along information, others choose to share anecdotes, and still others talk about their cats. The Twitalyzer has observed that people tend to gravitate towards strangers who are passing along information. Our signal-to-noise ratio is a measure of the tendency for people to pass information, as opposed to anecdote.

By our definition, "signal" will be counted for any update that includes at least one of the following elements:

* References to other people (defined by the use of "@" followed by text)
* Links to URLs you can visit (defined by the use of "http://" followed by text)
* Hashtags you can explore and participate with (defined by the use of "#" followed by text)
* Retweets of other people, passing along information (defined by the use of "rt", "r/t/", "retweet" or "via")

If you take the sum of these four elements and divide that by the number of updates published, you get the "signal to noise" ratio. For example, if you published four updates and two of them contained links, your signal-to-noise ratio would be 50% (2 updates with signal / 4 total updates).

Influence -
As Twitter becomes increasingly important to online communication, the creators of the Twitalyzer believe that the need to measure the impact of our efforts in Twitter will increase a commensurate amount. While some believe that "popularity" is an appropriate measure of success, we disagree, eschewing this easily gamed metric in favor of something more robust, more fair, and more difficult to cheat.
The Twitalyzer solution is our measure of "influence in Twitter" calculated based on:

* Your relative reach in Twitter, measured by the number of followers you have
* Your relative authority, measured by the number of times you are "retweeted"
* Your relative generosity, measured by the number of times you "retweet" others
* Your relative clout, measured by the number of times you are referenced by others
* Your relative velocity, measured by the number of updates you publish over a seven day period.
Each of these measures are weighted but otherwise the calculation is incredibly simple. We believe that what you get is a measure of success in Twitter that can be applied in a variety of ways. We know this measure is not perfect but, well, we're not perfect and we don't believe in holding software to a higher standard that we ourselves live up to.

What do the Real Numbers teach us?

They teach us what we suspected from the beginning. Don't make too much of the following. Your influence is a much better indicator of effectiveness and usefulness. Your questions of whether you whould change your approach or turn this into a place for fundraising appeals is a question for your original objectives in particpating. Perhaps you are satisfied with the knowledge that your update habits are teaching your alums to ignore your messaging, as long as you have an active feed.

I am going to monitor these feeds (a total of 50) over the next several weeks and report on progressing numbers. I'm interested to compare tactics with growth rates and report on other observations that will come with time based analysis. Stay tuned!
When I have done a snapshot of the data over several weeks, I'll give you a look at all the numbers and all the feeds.

Fail Whale image via http://www.dache.ch

Selling Twitter to my Mom

2009-05-19T19:40:00.000-07:00

Mom,

I jumped on twitter a few months ago. I told you about it at the time, but you noticed it before I even brought it up. You saw it because of the increased number of status updates and weird characters that were showing up in the "Michael is..." box at the top of my facebook profile. I thought I'd write a few thoughts out to help you for if and/or when you decide to try twitter out.

Selling the benefits...
Staying connected with the grand kids was the top benefit we talked about. You liked the idea of having your 4 kids and 8 grand kids sending out status updates from their cellphones so you could have a feed of what was going on while you were in San Francisco and the rest of us were spread out across the country.

I should correct a couple of things about this "benefit." When your grand kids get old enough to use their phones and tweet their status out, twitter could be long gone. That seems incredible, seeing that your grand kids are just a few of years away from all having their own phone. Things change so fast in digital media these days, you might prefer to wait to see how they are communicating and adopt that tool, instead of adopting a platform that they may not be interested in.

That being said, you should jump into twitter just to explore and keep your digital communication muscles nimble. If there is one thing that distances you from most in your generation, it is that you are willing to try and learn new things all the time. Your abandoned myspace page is proof that you are exercised in trying these experiments. Keeping up with you grandkids and great-grandkids will be easy for you.

Introducing the tool
Twitter is not a logical progression from facebook. When you set up your profile it will be an easy process. Using the tool for the first time will be a little awkward. I went back into my settings and preferences a dozen times in the first couple of weeks of using twitter until I got the service working for me just the way I wanted. You will find yourself using it differently than I use it, and it takes active use to really figure out those preferences.

Following on twitter is not like friending on Facebook.
Some people will follow you because they want you to follow them back. You don't have to, and it's not expected. You should think of twitter as two two services. Ask yourself two different questions, and feel free to leave them independent of each other.
1. Twitter lets others follow you. If it freaks you out that strangers will be following your status updates that are meant for only family, you have the freedom to block others from seeing your updates. It's not rude. There might be a pressure in facebook to accept everybody's friend requests, it is not necessarily that way for twitter.
2. Twitter lets you follow others. Follow those you are interested in. Don't feel the pressure to follow people just because they are following you. This is not like facebook where a friendship is accepted and then both of you can see each others full profile. If you don't want you cell phone cluttered with text messages from people you don't care to follow, you don't have to. You might want to follow a celebrity or two, but once you are following more than about 20 people or so it gets you into a different frame of reference to interact with all those messages.

Status Updates are not your email inbox.
You don't have to read them all. Nobody does. Feel free to skim or even ignore the ones that come across your feed. If, after a few weeks, you seem to be not as interested in following a particular tweeter, unfollowing is something you can do. Twitter etiquette allows you to be in charge of both your followers and your following.

Twitter from your phone.
Text messaging is not difficult to pick up. Most kids learn to type blind on a phone keypad within a couple of months. It is odd, that the most advanced communication device is something we have chosen to type on, but it is actually much more convenient than I expected.

Twitter from your laptop.
There are lots of free apps you can download so you can manage twitter from your computer desktop. Most avid users of twitter have three or four ways that they access the twitter network. You will choose your favorites over time. I would recommend you look into TweetDeck for you desktop, tweetie for a smart phone, and you will do straight text messages to the phone number 40404 when using your traditional cell phone.

While I have written this in a personal and affirming way. If you are just wanting a straight up tutorial on what twitter is and how to use it. You can check a couple videos out here and here.

Hope this helps you as you consider diving in. Thanks for letting me use you as an object of this write up. I hope it will be a help for others as well as you. Don't feel any extra pressure to open a twitter profile just because you are the object of a blog post.

Love you,
mikey

I'm a Jerk, No It's My Personality, My Personality is a Jerk?

2009-05-07T13:41:00.000-07:00

From the time I first started sharing my reflections here, on the use of emerging technology, I have been aware of my potential in becoming what I despise. As I start recognizing behavior in myself that I have already characterized as "bad," I can either stop that behavior or I can analyze it to the point of justifying it.

I don't want to do either. It's possible for me to treat myself in an experimental way that I can make impartial judgments and observations about how I'm handling it. Morgan Spurlock did it effectively in Supersize Me. A.J. Jacobs has done it several times, most notably in The Year of Living Biblically.

However, watching and reading these works will give you a glimpse into the personal lives of these folks and make you realize that these guys drove their wives crazy. They can't help but drag their friends and family with them into the experiments. They must.
They are incorporating these experiments into their entire life.

So...I think I am starting to frustrate my wife, and I think it's because I am doing a poor job of showing her what's really going on with what has been defined (by this blog) as "experiments and observations." I will try to explain the difference between my personality and what seems like jerky behavior. Maybe we can lure Jennifer out of the lurk to leave a comment. Maybe it will be a comment that doesn't feel like a punch in the throat.

Ladies and Gentlemen, presenting the Social Technographics Ladder. Don't check out because of the name! You can find yourself

This handy reference was put together by the smart people over at Forrester Research. It was heavily referenced in Josh Bernoff's and Charlene Li's Groundswell. I highly recommend reading both the book and the blog if you are excited about this kind of thing.

Take a look at this ladder. This is an interesting analysis of the kinds of people who are online. It seems these classifications are largely tied to how a person's personality and temperament is wired and the resulting behavior that emerges when you put that individual on the interwebs. Perhaps a case can be made for someone moving up the ladder based on their experience with the web, but I believe a person remains stuck on a rung that is informed by who they are in "the real world."

I have realized myself as a Creator. It is largely tied to the kind of behavior I exhibit in offline arenas. My online behavior has been a progress up the ladder. I moved from being and Inactive to being a Spectator and then a Joiner. I have never been an online Collector or Critic and have landed myself squarely as a Creator. You can take this quiz as a help to identify your own spot on the ladder.

I have embraced this label. My personality typically doesn't embrace labels, but my online behavior has born out that I am securely on this rung of ladder.

Move this conversation into the realm of social web and the emerging technology I am experimenting with...
I send a twitter update while I am out with my wife.
A friend chimes in to scold me.
My wife is sly in her agreement with scolding friend.
I feel like I deserve a punch in the throat.

But hold on a second.

Am I rudely texting while while ignoring an active conversation in front of me? No. Jennifer is elbowing me in the ribs for creating and sharing while we were at This American Life.
Am I answering email because I can't stop working? No.
Or am I simply continuing to be a Creator as applied to the social media space?
Am I justifying bad behavior? Or am I embracing who I am in this larger, digital conversation?

If Jennifer remains who she is, she will be a Spectator and not post a comment.
Perhaps will can draw a few Spectators and Joiners out to comment on these thoughts. Perhaps some of them will be thankful to finally identify themselves as something and realize they don't need to feel like they need to be a Critic or a Creator to be an appropriate online participant.

I think this is why so many blogs fail. Too many Critics trying to exhibit Creator behavior?
This is why twitter has exploded. It is an easy tool for Joiners to act like they are Creators.

So who are you on the ladder?
Do you buy into this?
Am I just making excuses for being a jerk?

Campaign to Ban "Online Gifts"

2009-05-01T12:14:00.000-07:00

This study has been stuck in my craw for weeks now. Not only does this write up not point to or give us access to the data, but the analysis seems to generalize all activity that happens online to fall under the general category of "Online Fundraising." The term seems to be used interchangeably with "Online Gifts" throughout the piece. No other communication channel has this misunderstanding. I think it is a problem.
I heard it first through Allison Fine and her blog, but I don't think it's original with her. It seems the the idea of the internet was original sold to development officers as a walk up ATM. Insert "Donate Button" here. We are still trying to live that down.
As we try to live it down, I suggest a move toward a small terminology change. There is a difference between Online Gifts, Online Giving and Online Fundraising. Please tell me what you think. Can we make movement towards this fundamental understanding?

Online Giving is NOT Online Fundraising

View more presentations from mikeyames.

Frost/Nixon Review

2009-04-28T21:16:00.000-07:00

I wouldn't normally care to write a review of any movie, but an interesting thing has been happening to me since I started to both blog and microblog. I have a strong compulsion to share and review and rank just about every new or unique experience I find myself in.

My wife went out with her friends. I just put the kids to bed. I had two movie options from a free month of Blockbuster's answer to NetFlix. I checked in on twitter and facebook real quick and posed a quick question and asked for my friends to decide which movie. I got 8 responses on twitter and 7 on facebook. Frost/Nixon won with the immediate responses. Andy Stuart, Matthew Slay, and Jason Mitchell came in with late votes for Milk, making the overall race much closer. But the responding crowd had spoken! Joshua Quiring asked for a review so I am compelled to oblige as thanks for his part in the conversation.

Frost/Nixon was great.
Moving, emotional, full of soul and questions, human.
Great piece of casting, especially in the role of Nixon. Frank Langella made me forget that I wasn't watching Nixon himself.

I was born the same year Nixon resigned, so I don't have any personal recollection of watergate, the impending impeachment, or the press coverage following the resignation. This one one of those portrayals that makes you want to go read some history about the subject matter. Here is the youtube clip you want to see after watching the movie.

What I love about the story that was portrayed in this film was that Nixon struggled, and hid, and dodged his own soul, and finally found redemption in the truth. What a great theme.
The stuff of many great stories.

Unfortunately, the satisfaction you get as a viewer of this story didn't actually happened that way for Nixon. The text that scrolls the screen at the end of the movie gives you a hint of what the truth was. If Nixon did find personal redemption, he never let that be seen in the public eye. He avoided the general dignitary public appearances of all other expresidents. I wonder if he was as forthcoming in the actual interview, he may have found the kind of redemption he brushed in the movie portrayal.

Either way, the movie is well worth your time.
And for those of you who voted Milk (most of which were friends from San Francisco that I grew up with) I will definitely make time to watch it as well.

My New Favorite Podcast of all Time (for now)

2009-04-27T19:12:00.000-07:00

As a rule, I don't choose favorites.
I avoid them.
I hide from them on purpose.
Every once in a while, they find me.

In the world of podcast listening pleasures, I have several weekly regulars.
Sound of Young America. - love
This American Life. - double love
Radio Lab. - quad love
All three of these are easily searchable and accessible by itunes.

My new favorite podcast found me over the weekend. I've been hiding under my three regulars.

People who care...I introduce to you...The Age of Persuasion. Terry O'Reilly is seasoned ad man and a professor of his profession. He cut his teeth on writing radio spots and he knows the ins and outs and history of his business. For three seasons now he has been taking his classroom to the public through the Canadian Broadcast Company's microphone (Canada's sister to America's NPR).

I went looking for it on itunes and it is not there. Tech Hermit got stretched for a digital scavenger hunt. Never fear, you can find an optional feed (that opens in itunes) right here. When the prompt comes up asking what you want to open the feed with, choose itunes (or whatever you use) and begin adopting this as your own new favorite.

In this day and age, we are all marketing experts. Some are more expert-er than others, Jason Mitchell, Kerri Urbanski and Bev Hutney, so settle down. We see enough images a day to be keenly aware of what is effective and what is not. I think this is one reason that hooked so many of us into Mad Men. (you know you love it) So listen to Terry's radio class and become a little more of an expert. It will give us some credibility as we are shooting our mouths off.

One final quote for Bob Roman and the rest of the Citgo Syndicate. Terry O'Reilly loves the godfather of ad men David Ogilvy. Check out what this bastion of modern advertising said in his 1963 autobiography.

I have a passion for landscape, and I have never seen one improved by a billboard. Where every prospect pleases, man is at his vilest when he erects a billboard. When I retire from Madison Avenue, I am going to start a secret society of masked vigilantes who will travel around the world on silent motor bikes, chopping down posters at the dark of the moon. How many juries will convict us when we are caught in these acts of beneficent citizenship?

iPhone(mullinex), meet Age of Persuasion.
Age of Persuasion meet the six people who read my blog.

Newspapers are Ineffective: A Response to the Washington Post Facebook Cause Article

2009-04-23T14:40:00.000-07:00

The Washington Post article, To Nonprofits Seeking Cash, Facebook App Isn't So Green, published online Wednesday, April 22 by Washington Post Staff Writers, Kim Hart and Megan Greenwell.

I wrote a response and had conversation emerge from it. I felt my own sense of correction in the way I responded from folks like...
a kind email exchange from Amy Sample Ward
a fantastic post by Allison Fine
from my post
fromLateef and others on twitter and blogs all over the web.

I told Amy I'd have to apologize to the Cause App by redeeming my criticism of it. I begrudgingly thanked Amy for the extra work she assigned me. (that I didn't need!) Grrr...thanks again, Amy.

In my attempt to gather some research for my revision/apology, I decided to reach out to the writers of the original Washington Post story. There is no place to leave comments on articles anywhere on the Washington Post's site (not even a newsvine seed link) so I clicked on the link that let me send them an email. I wrote...

Kim/Megan,

On twitter and in the blog world that deals with development and social media, you guys are getting hammered on a couple of points.

1. Old information rehashed. Nothing new here, what prompted you re stirring this year old conversation?

2. You focused on wrong stats. Network for good only works with a 8000 causes that have used causes to also ask for donations. 242,000 causes aren't asking for money, aren't registered with network for good in order to ask for money. You evaluation is off because you confuse causes with intentional fundraising.

3. You blanket sweep the word "ineffective" with donations being your only metric. The development cycle measures effectiveness in very different ways. Some causes are about advocacy, not donations. Some cause are about both, but don't use the cause app to ask for money.

Either way, you are getting dismissed.
If you are having trouble finding where the conversation is dismissing you, let me know, I'll steer you to the most influential of the bloggers who are leading the charge against your analysis.

Michael

An hour later, I got a response...

Hi Michael,

We're well aware of the blog chatter out there. We stand by the reporting, obviously, and dispute the alleged factual inaccuracies. While it's true that only 8,000 nonprofts with Causes pages have signed up with Network for Good, it is incorrect to say that those are the only ones who can raise money through the site -- just by having a Causes page, a nonprofit can receive donations through Network for Good without signing up or doing anything special While not all of those nonprofits got into Causes with the goal of raising money (a point we made in the article, quoting the Nature Conservancy), those who DO hope to fundraise through the application have not raised much -- thus our point that it's ineffective as a fundraising mechanism. That doesn't mean it's a worthless operation, just that it hasn't shown a ton of progress on the fundraising part of its mission.

As for the point about it being old news, I don't think that's true except among a small number of social media types. I know similar topics have been undertaken on a number of nonprofit/social media blogs for as long as Causes has existed (we quoted the author of one of those blog posts), but the vast majority of our readers don't follow those blogs, and we thought it was important to bring an analysis to the general readership. Others are free to disagree on that point, but that was my perspective when I decided to crunch some of those numbers.

I hope this is a useful explanation, and I'll say the same thing to anyone who contacts me. We're not in the business of responding to criticism on blogs, but if people are interested enough to contact me directly I am more than willing to have a conversation with them. So thanks for writing!

I put this here to publish their answers, but I'd like to say more about what's going on from a macro level. No wonder newspapers are dying! The discussion is the story! How can they not participate in this!

I wrote back...

Really, you don’t respond or interact with the subsequent conversation that happens around your articles?

Is that an organizational standard or do some journalists make a practice of participating in the ongoing discussion?

I only point this out to you because I suspected you would have answers to the three main points that are being thrown around.
The points you make to me are great, but I don’t think I am a big enough fan of yours to advocate or defend you (not naturally, I might now)
If you knew this is the standard answer you would give. Wouldn’t you want it to be voiced in the place that the conversation is taking place?

Thanks for your time,

mikeyames

No response yet...email is slow...they may have realized that I blog and decided to no longer respond to me?!? :)

So, feel free to keep the discussion going.
What do you think about their response?
And, on an entirely different point, what do you think of their standard operating procedures regarding blogs?

UPDATE:
Megan, From the Post, wrote me back Monday afternoon.
She has written an exhaustive response to Allison Fine that I hope she chooses to share. In her response to me, she notes that...

...there is no Post policy against reporters participating on blogs.
...she has a few reasons, she explains to Allison, as to why she doesn't typically practice it.
...she is up for changing her mind.

Either way, I admit that I took this conversation off topic. I do think there is more to discuss on the initial issue that was brought up by the Post. We ought to continue to draw out that discussion, even if it is drawn from email, and leave the other points to a different discussion thread.

Additional insight on Facebook causes and the Post's perspective from Lauren Miller, Beth Kanter, and Lateef.

Washington Post Rehashes Year-Old Facebook Fundraising News

2009-04-22T11:06:00.000-07:00

Facebook Cause app is not getting any love from the Washington Post. The article, dated this morning, makes the same points that have been made for more than a year by social web consultants who know their business. I put together a short slideshow on it myself, just last week, after writing this blog post the previous week.

The Post is quoted...

Trouble is, there is no new information in terms of strategy and understanding the way the medium is working. A little bit of new information came out of the interview.
He said Causes raises almost $40,000 a day across its groups, up from $3,000 a day a year ago. "The biggest successes have been tiny nonprofits who don't have the name recognition of the big guys."

But in the majority of cases, that theory hasn't translated into significant dollars. Fewer than 50 of the 179,000 groups on Causes have raised $10,000, and just two -- the Nature Conservancy and Students for a Free Tibet -- have cracked the $100,000 mark.

This is great information, however, there is some buzz around the stats not being completely acurate. I would love to know if there is a public report out there that gives us access to the raw numbers related to this topic. It sounds like Allison Fine might have something for us later in the day. Either way, at the end of the day, those numbers are nothing new.

UPDATE...
Allison Fine put together a great response on her blog. here's an excerpt that will make you want to go read the rest...

There are around 250 thousand causes on the Causes platform. A cause does not have to be associated with a specific nonprofit, and most of these, over 200,00 aren’t. That leaves about 46,000 nonprofits that are connected to a cause. But, of these only 8,000 are using Network for Good, meaning they’ve created an official profile, can use their npo dashboard, and can raise money. Therefore in trying to determine the average size of donations, it is more accurate to use the 8,000 active fundraising efforts for nonprofits rather than the 176,000 used in the Post article. When the universe of causes that includes the Green on Sundays groups is included in the overall cause number, divided by the total amount of dollars given resulting in an itty bitty average gift. This is enormously skewed by the number of inactive causes on FB or the number of causes who never intended to raise money using Causes. So, according to Network for Good’s data, 8,000 causes have actively raised money using Causes for a total of $7.5 million — or an average total of donations to each cause of over $930.

Comments coming out of twitter around this discussion include...

@tactphil...maybe fundraising isn't the point?
@SMacLaughlin...Facebook Causes isn't raising a lot. Really? Duh. Social networking is friend raising not fundraising.
@weinrichc...My $.02: this enhances not replaces other efforts
@iChrisJones...Facebook app does not replace hard work, direct mail., etc... in fundraising(washpost)
@kanter...they just rehashed all the stuff that was written about this last year
@Afine...I'll be using the N4G stats in my blog piece and you'll be able to see them there.
@jeffshuck...(in response to facebook being best used for awareness building)Yes! Agree on both points! My main contention is that too often "awareness" is used after the fact to justify poor fundraising.

The point is, fundraising is hard work. Every aspect of the development cycle is hard work. Technology can build in some efficiencies, but beware building in too many. Automating your communication and solicitation strategy, and giving it over to the cause app (or any automated application)is counter productive to your cultivation and affinity building. In the case of facebook causes, it just comes across (and is ignored)like spam.

Twitter Fundraising Strategy for Sunny

2009-04-20T06:55:00.001-07:00

Commenter, Sunny, wrote the following comment in the Comprehensive Facebook Fundraising Post a couple of days ago. I though I'd reply to all...

Sunny 2 days ago

Brilliant Mike!! You have inspired us to 'borrow' your approach and aim for $100 000 for our favorite charity: abundantwater.org

Strictly speaking we're entering Hugh Jackman's competition: http://twitter.com/RealHughJackman/status/15198...

We will get a thousand people, around the World, to pledge pictures of themselves holding a banner.

Any chance you could cast an eye over our 'strategy'?

Keep up the inspiration

Sunny...
Hugh Jackman, has limited his announcement to a single update. I have seen no other explanation or expansion on the rules other than the one tweet...

--- "I will donate 100K to one individual's favorite non profit organization.Of course,you must convince me why by using 140 characters or less."

Part of me wants to dive into figuring out what Jackman's judging criteria might be. It looks like we won't get that from him through Twitter.

It looks like you have chosen to get as much attention as you can by challenging 1000 people to pledge a picture.
My guess is that Jackman won't recognize that as a group effort unless the text of the tweet is also the same tweet, written the same way. Part of what I'm guessing is that he won't be clicking on a ton of links as he reviews all the different pitches that he has to sort through. Plus - you could make the case that it is a waste of some of your 140 characters to include a tiny url. The one rule "140 characters or less" might be violated by including a link!?

The picture holding a banner idea is great, but, I think that you might get more attention (in Jackman's feed) by having everyone change their profile picture for you, instead of including a link in your tweet. This way, you also avoid the possibility that a link is something he ignores.

-Suggest common wording in the actual @reply you ask people to send to Jackman
-Suggest commonalities in the way the banner is made. 3x5 card with bright red marker.
- Provide a suggested picture (if people don't want to make their own banner) so your respondents want to just use a picture that you provide.
-Your request, to the people who might take you up on this, needs to be simple enough to consume and understand in 140 characters. But also be easily found in a place where the strategy, case statement and inspiration can be consumed in a long form (blog post)
- Make the strategy easily forwardable, part of your 1000 will come from people who you will never meet.
- Try to get the charity involved (even in a small way) for them to show legitimacy to your campaign.

Facebook Fundraising Tips...the visual version

2009-04-17T20:16:00.000-07:00

A couple of posts back I posted some tips and best practices for facebook fundraising. I figure that part of the population would prefer a visual presentation of that information. This slideshare is the result. Feel free to download, remix and use in whatever way it might benefit you.

How facebook is both horrible and ninja for fundraising

View more presentations from mikeyames.

Does anyone know the standards that facebook operates by to suspend or expel a user's profile?

One Man (Ashton Kutcher) takes on The Man (CNN) and is winning!

2009-04-15T20:53:00.000-07:00

If you are not familiar with the twitter race to one million followers between Ashton Kutcher and CNN, you can get caught up by watching this, this and this.

I don't know why I am in to watching this unfold, but I am. It's emerging technology showing itself (in an odd analogy) of like the anti-John Henry story. One man is beating the steam drill juggernaut that is CNN. The representation of Ashton Kutcher (John Henry) taking on the new (old)establishment (broadcast media). About there the analogy breaks down, but it can be fleshed out better than that if I spent time with it.

For now I just want to show you something.
I'm sitting here hitting refresh on my browser on both the CNN Breaking News twitter profile and the Ashton Kutcher profile.

I started this little experiment and CNN had 953,969 followers while Kutcher had 931,056.
I hit refresh periodically over the next several minutes. Sometimes it was 30 seconds later, sometimes it was a couple of minutes later. The refresh rates were being tracked in a parallel way.

Ashton - moves from 931,056 followers to 931,079 thats +23 followers
in that same time
CNN - moves from 953,969 followers to 953,982 thats +13 followers

periodically over the next several minutes
Ashton - 931,079 - 931,130 +51 followers from previous benchmark (ffpb)
CNN - 953,982 - 954,006 +24 followers from previous benchmark (ffpb)

Ashton - 931,130 - 931,199 that is +69 ffpb
CNN - 954,006 - 954,029 that is +23 ffpb

Ashton - 931,199 - 931,399 that is +200 ffpb
CNN - 954,029 - 954,124 that is +95 ffpb

Ashton - 931,399 - 931,589 that is +190 ffpb
CNN - 954,124 - 954,206 that is +82 ffpb

Ashton - 931,589 - 931,860 that is +271 ffpb
CNN - 954,206 - 954,276 that is +70 ffpb

Ashton - 931,860 - 932,060 that is +200 ffpb
CNN - 954,276 - 954,375 that is +99 ffpb

Do you see the trend? Ashton is adopting followers at a rate more than twice that of CNN. With the gap between where they are and 1,000,000, Ashton will surpass and win this little race.

The overall lesson...
In the social media arena, authenticity will beat out press releases every time. If Ashton starts to use his twitter feed as a press release, he will get dropped by many of those followers. Keep it real, Ashton, and people will continue to follow. CNN can't keep it real.

Hey, Non Profit Organizations, keep it real in the way you use your feed. Cultivate your following audience. Don't press release or solicit them. Until you recognize that "donor loyalty" is about you being loyal to the donor, you won't use social media in it's most effective way.

UPDATE:
Interesting news, CNN recently acquired the news feed hosted at twitter.com/cnnbrk from James Cox. James is a random dude from San Francisco who has nurtured the account on his own for the past couple of years. Read the Silicon Alley Insider news story here. Turns out, the race is exposed as John Henry vs. Jon Henri.
It will be an interesting footnote in the overall story.
Now that CNN is operating the account, it is now officially your old steam drill.

UPDATE:
LA Times broke this story this morning. Turns out that although CNN didn't "own" the feed. They had contracted with James Cox to maintain it for them since mid 2007. In that sense, one man vs. THE MAN is back on!

Tech Hermit is Getting an iphone

2009-04-11T19:15:00.000-07:00

This is not something to be excited about, not necessarily.
I am joining the ranks of millions of others.
I know I am late to the game, but hey, it's OK for a hermit.
I am nervous. I really don't want this thing to own me. (I'll keep you posted)

So I think I have a learning curve, but I fiddled around with several of my friends iphones and I am most excited about exploring the app store. Would you mind telling me your favorite free app and your favorite paid app?

Comprehensive Facebook Fundraising Tips Almost Anyone Can Do

2009-04-06T20:16:00.000-07:00

I conducted a little experiment last October that was combined with a passion and fund raising cause that I was challenged with. I obviously set the goals on my experiment too low, as you will read.

Community Hunger Day is a yearly event, started by Central Dallas Ministries to raise awareness about the hunger problem in Dallas and raise funds for their food pantry. On a day in October, each year, CDM challenges people to go without food for a day and donate the money they would have spent on food to their food pantry. CDM, in coordination with several partnering food programs, can feed a family of four, for an entire week, for $28.

CDM, three weeks prior to Community Hunger Day, sent me an invitation to become a fundraiser for this day. I said, "yes," and pledged a goal of $1000 dollars. The experiment part came in when I decided I was going to focus my efforts using only the profile page that I set up on the Community Hunger Day website and facebook. No email channel, no face to face asks, no telephone calls...just facebook and a link to a secure, online donation page. I wish I could should you the microsite and profile page I set up for myself on the site, but the site is under construction and redesign in anticipation for the 2009 day in October

Here is the appeal I crafted.

If you are a professional fundraiser, try these numbers on for size.

List size - 334
Historic Open rate - unknown
Average Donor Profile - Nondonor
Gift rate - 19.5%
Total Gifts - 65
Total Donations - $1850
Average Gift - $28.46 (right at the requested appeal)

Here's the thing, Non Profit officer, what if you could get 100 of me to do the following simple things. That's nothing to sneeze at. That best way for you to leverage facebook could be to AVOID THE CAUSE APP! If you are active on facebook, you know how many causes and invitations you ignore on a weekly basis. It has become spammy. By the way, you, non profit, cannot leverage facebook. You may only leverage the relationships you have, that is (almost) all that matters in the world of social media.

The following things I did while avoiding the spam channels that most facebook users ignore.

1. Create a video appeal that addresses your facebook network specifically. Use the voice that your facebook friends know. Don't "put on" a fundraiser voice. Be yourself, that's who people will give to.

2. Group your list of friends into groups that facebook calls "friend lists." This might take you a little while, but it will help you manage your follow up much better. So do it prior to uploading your video message. If you have over 300 friends, it might feel difficult to sort through the list.
- Export your friend list with this handy app so you can use excel easily group them into commonalities
- group them into friend lists where those friends know each other. When comments start to spread about your asset, it is easier for community to be built in that comment thread when the commenters already know each other.
- friend lists can only contain 20 people, so you might be titling these lists things like "workfriends1", "workfriends2", "collegebuds1", "randomfacebookies1", "highschool1", etc.
- it is OK to leave some space to grow in each friend group, but keep track in your CSV export who is in what group. Facebook doesn't help you manage your group size at all.

3. Upload your video multiple times. You are able to tag as many as 50 of your friends in each video. You can't tag a video asset with a friend list (that would be great!) but you do want to follow the pattern that you set when you established your friend lists and group the 50 that you tag in any video with the same groups of people who know each other. Tagging your friends in the video not only causes the video to appear in their own notifications, but also sends it to the feeds of all their friends.

4. Place a link to your giving page in both the description of the video and in the first comment under the video. The URL in the comment will be hyperlinked text. The URL in the description will not be hyperlinked text, unfortunately. This is an important part of the donor funnel. If your non profit you are raising money for doesn't have a precise giving form or donor destination, consider opening yourself up a chipin widget or something like it. Community Hunger Day had a very slick, custom sponsorship microsite that was built for them by Pursuant.

5. Cultivate others comments by replying to and engaging with each comment.

6. Do a daily, stewardship, thank you and update. Here is what ours looked like.

These thank you videos should be tagged with the donors names. I had one friend who told me that he gave just so he could hear my kids say his name.

7. Half way through your campaign, and just before the end of your campaign, craft messages (video or note) that gives an update of progress. These updates should be created, uploaded and then "shared" with your friends. You don't need to upload multiple updates as you did with your initial video. Instead, you can send the one asset out using this share button several times. You friends lists show up as you begin typing them into the sent line of the share function. Facebook currently has a limit of sharing an asset with 25 friends at a time. This asset will show up in your friends inboxes instead of their notifications.

8. If you are an active facebook user, I am confident that these tips will help you reach your fundraising goals. If you are a passive facebook user I would recommend you spend three months commenting on friends photos, commenting on friends videos, uploading your own quality photos and videos, involving yourself in conversation around your friends notes and status updates. Without effectively developed relationships on the site, it will not be a quality channel for you to make a solicitation. If you are a non user of facebook...that is a discussion for another post.

Disclaimer -- Having used this precise method several times, I have never run into facebook suspending my account. I know of others who have deviated from this distribution plan and have been temporarily suspended. I don't know what triggers a suspension. Anyone who does know the current, specific triggers for suspension, I'd love to know.

Open Letter to Lance Armstrong and LIVESTRONG

2009-04-05T14:10:00.001-07:00

As I was preparing a presentation on the use of social media by non profit fundraising, a case study developed in my head that was mostly prediction and prescription (so, not technically a case study).
I pulled out the slides that addressed the case study and turned it into an open letter to the foundation. Whether they consume the message or not doesn't matter. They are a progressive non profit that is obviously considering these ideas. I'm eager to see how it will actually work, once they decide to do it.

How I Hope the Lance Armstrong Foundation Will Raise Money Using Twitter

View more presentations from mikeyames.

By the way, LIVESTRONG, when a techhermit like me gets on twitter, you know the noise and spam is coming. I would do something sooner than latter. Twitter has a few advantages over email for people who really care about Lance's tweets, but for those who don't follow him intensely, the noise is getting louder on twitter by the day.

I only follow 100 or so, and I'm thinking about eliminating the noise. But that's because I'm a tech hermit and I'm protecting my throat.

Simple Social Media Tactic

2009-03-30T10:27:00.000-07:00

As I tap into why I find social media so addictive to my own personality, I find that I'm distracting myself with "why" I am so drawn to spaces instead of "how" to best use them. So I should just be honest about the "why" - get it out of the way, and then focus more on the how. So here's why...I desperately want people to like me. I am one of those people who will work tirelessly for the promise of a compliment.

Now that that's over, here is a tactical "how" that you can use, created because of my desperate desire for thank yous and kind words.

I created content a little while ago. It was a helpful schematic for me as I was exploring a new tool, Ping.fm. The tool is relatively new to the technology/social media scene, so there are several who are being newly introduced to Ping.fm every day. After I created it, I wanted to share it with others, get their feedback, and bask in some thank yous.

Every few days I'll hang out on a twitter search feed for ping.fm and anytime any random person asks a question that seems like my schematic can help with, I send them a link to it. It is so addictive. You should try it. It is a great way to move your business or non profit organization from listening to the online conversation to participating in it.

By the way, this post is going out to yammer (through ping) for the first time. The schematic will need an update. By the way, do you use ping? What's your use of it look like?

Technology Etiquette and Very Cute Kids

2009-03-26T19:02:00.000-07:00

As a follow up to emerging etiquette clashing with technology, here is net etiquette being taught to elementary aged kids in Korea.

This blows away our American PSA, cyberbullying campaigns. These kids will be singing this little tune to each other for the rest of their lives.

So, will you dive in as an early adopter so you can participate in forming the continually-forming, emerging etiquette? Or will you be a curmudgeon who watches it happen from the sidelines while bemoaning the good old days? Remember now, with rapidly changing technology, the good old days was 2006!

Company Man

2009-03-26T09:50:00.000-07:00

Here is part of what has been keeping me very occupied over the last several months.

Matt Frazier, CEO Pursuant, Introduces Mikey Ames and Social Media Basic Services from Mikey Ames on Vimeo.

This Vimeo Channel has videos that answer several questions I have been getting recently from clients.

Twitter Smackdown

2009-03-24T14:55:00.000-07:00

Some blogger, speech writer, conference speaker, etc. named David Murray writes this post about his ongoing, well known hate-affair with Twitter.

The post is a mere sentence.

The video he links to is a four minute interview from a PR guy who is highly influential in his own PR circles. The PR guy thinks that Twitter is the best thing ever invented.

The comments that follow are voyeurly hilarious.

People love twitter and people love to hate twitter. I think most of the argument stems from a collision of competing and emerging etiquettes. The etiquette of a world without text messaging vs. society with a text catalyst like twitter in the mix.

Being the kind of guy who has always tried to make peace, I have empathy for both points of view. I am frustrated with the person who cuts me out of a face to face conversation to answer and reply to a text message. I am just as frustrated with people who refuse to find the redemptive qualities of very cool technologies because they are good at tearing things apart.

I don't think there is any escaping the fact that "rude" is constantly in flux. If you are going to embrace new media, you must accept the fact that you are not able to simply learn the graphical interface without also dealing with the social implications of the technology becoming mainstream. 100 years ago, you could go from decade to decade and see very little shift in the way technology questioned the opinion of Emily Post. Today, even the wiki version of Emily Post's blog would have a difficult time keeping up with the rewrites.

Society's need for increased immediacy is killing the newspaper business, our eating habit's, as well as our etiquette. But hasn't the destruction and rebuilding of etiquette been happening throughout history? Isn't it simply happening at a much more rapid pace today?

So come out of your caves and make your arguments for the way we should act toward each other! But don't blame twitter. There is much more at work, changing our society, than this latest fad.

Twitter Satire - funny video

2009-03-21T20:18:00.000-07:00

This explains a lot about my desire to stay a tech hermit.

On the other hand.
It's easy to rip something apart.
"Sarcasm" is from the Latin word sarcasma, means to tear the flesh.
I don't really believe that most people shoot to the twittershpere and become as dopey as all the cloud people. I believe most people are trying to find practical ways to redeem technology without being owned by it.

Very funny!

I created my own TokBox Contest and won!!!

2009-03-18T18:58:00.000-07:00

I have known about tokbox for a while now. You really should check them out. My friend, Bob, turned me on to tokbox back in the early days. Back when I had a cell phone, but was refusing to turn it on unless I had an outbound call to make.

Anyway, I lost track of the company and the service until I saw they integrated their service into facebook chat. Very cool. I can set up my account, but the friends I invite into a video chat (through email or facebook) don't need to have their own account in order for us to have a webcam chat. They just click on the url I send them and all of a sudden, Booyah!, they are in the browser based video chat. Just download the plugin and you are set for a one-click invitation to video chat with your facebook friends.

My mom was here for a visit and I was getting her set up with the facebook plugin. I remembered that the tokbox facebook fanpage had a little tutorial on getting the install, so I headed there.

Upon arrival, I noticed that tokbox had 999 fans. Now, I don't typically "do" facebook groups or causes or fanpages. It has to be a very unique set of circumstance that has me actually join any of these facebook distractions. In this case, I thought it would be a funny joke to claim to be the 1000 fan, and write on the wall in celbration of my awesomeness.
So I did...

A day or so later I receive a message in my inbox from Damon Billian. Check this out...

I created my own fake contest inside the facebook fanpage, and tokbox honored my stupidity! When it comes to making loyal fans, this little process has worked on me. I have been at dozens of conferences, behind a vendor table, giving away all kinds of things in drawings. I have even won a few contests like that too. However, I am much more of an energized fan when a company reaches out to me, as an individual, like this, than if I had entered and won some drawing they hosted. This is bomb diggity.

I really liked the service, but now I like the company.
I like Damon.
I like Micky O'Brien and Ron Hose.
I like that I can reach out to them instantly.

I started chatting this experience up in and around the office. Then Lance says to me, "Did you get that message from Damon?"

"You know Damon?"

"Yeah" says Lance. "Frazier and I were on a video chat that we made public the other day. Damon popped in to say hi and see what we were chatting about."

"You know MY Damon!?"

Anyway, so many lessons for social media marketing. So many things that make this aspect of technology very redeemable. I will probably not IM chat with a facebook friend except on very rare occasions, but I am in for a surprise video chat with you anytime.

Thanks Damon. Thanks tokbox. 1000th fan! Woohoo!!

Social Media Schematic or How I Use Ping.fm

2009-03-12T09:02:00.000-07:00

When I first jumped into the exploration of ping.fm I thought that it had one application for me. I had just figured out how to use twitter as a hub, and now ping was trying to throw off my groove. I quickly concluded in a previous review, that the only reason I might use ping is if I wanted to get a quick webcam video out to my networks. Seesmic works with ping in that way in a very easy flow.

Then I added the synergy of twitter feed and my opinion has drastically changed. With these two tools working together, Ping works as a hub that I don't have to visit. It works as a background resyndicator of my content. Here's how I use the tools to sync together...
If you are going to try this out, and you don't already have profiles on some of these services, I would recommend starting with getting yourself an openID. An openID will be something that twitterfeed asks and directs you to early on in the sign up process. So, while you are at twitterfeed, you will choose to pull/push your twitter and your blog feeds. The rest of your profiles will be tied in when you open up your ping.fm account.

If you are just going to simply test this work flow, and you don't have any existing accounts, start by opening a quick email account with gmail. Don't use your productivity email account to simply test these services out. You don't want to accidentally take a potentially usable user name off the table just because you are playing around with the technology.

ALSO - THIS IS NOT A STRATEGIC RECOMMENDATION!
There can be all kinds of reasons not to follow this schematic. Most of those reasons have to do with a series of strategic questions you should ask yourself about why you are participating in these spaces to begin with. Your strategy should inform your schematic.

And, by the way, feel free to use the image however you want. I haven't dug deep into Beth Kanter's advice about the Creative Commons License yet, so the image isn't labeled properly, but feel free to take and use. I hope you can show me your own schematic work flow.

Ping.fm review revision - Got a pencil?

2009-03-05T22:42:00.001-08:00

I think I need to draw a diagram for myself, but I think I found a way to use Ping.fm for more than just seesmic.com.

The schematic includes twitterfeed pushing my blogger posts to both twitter and to ping. In turn, facebook brings it in from twitter with the status update and a link. The feed to ping pushes it out to all my other spots, and you never have to use ping except for the setup.

I need to draw a diagram.

Ping.fm Review - One-Stop Posting Shop?

2009-03-05T20:49:00.000-08:00

So, you might be able to tell that I chose to do some experimenting with ping.fm. It is billed as a web app that will tie all your social media tools together so that you can use update status, post a blog, or microblog in one place and have it syndicated all over.

I appreciate the development effort. It was pretty user friendly to both explore and to understand the basic functionality. The advanced functions just made me want to go back into my cave. There are some ways to preference how each of your social media spaces are updated based on the way you send out a status update.

I can't find any real compelling reason to use it as my hub to send status out, maybe I just don't get it. If I use it as my hub, I can't see the emerging conversation that happens outside of it. There are enough ways to create a full circle with the popular tools out there without thinking of ping.fm as the main hub.

There is one reason i can see using it. Ping.fm introduced me to seesmic.com. It is a service where you can do a quick webcam video and it integrates on the fly with ping and turns it into a short url. Again, I can't see the responding conversation if I stay inside ping, but it is a very cool way to get a quick vid out.

I guess ping.fm was created with the idea that people want to get their updates out, and don't care as much for the conversation that happens after. For that reason, it's more compelling for businesses who are using social media as a broadcast channel (which is the wrong reason to use it) instead of the indivdual who is particpating in a conversation.

2009-03-05T20:13:00.001-08:00

Ping from phone

2009-03-05T20:01:00.001-08:00

will ping.fm syndicate this email for me?

2009-03-05T19:45:00.001-08:00

ping.fm tests http://ping.fm/XDjqj

Dear Twestival...I owe you an apology

2009-03-03T14:15:00.000-08:00

My friend, Bob, first alerted me to Twestival and the local Dallas event that was being organized, just about two weeks prior to the date of the scheduled event.

In that time, Lauren Vargas answered the call that was publicized by London resident and events-minded entrepreneur, Amanda Rose. Hundreds of other volunteers answered the call to organize local events in over 200 cities around the world. The London group of twitters who organized a tweet up with a fund raising recipient (charity : Water) last year, shared their learning experience and merely announced that the event was "going global" when 50 cities had local volunteers sign on.

It was exciting to watch, and by the time I decided to observe the Dallas event as closely as I could, there were only 10 days remaining before the planned event. Several volunteer chair positions had been created and filled by people like Lauren who were simply looking for ways to share what expertise they might be able to lend. This is where I first failed you, Dallas Twestival, and I am sorry. I should have been looking for a way to share the professional knowledge and expertise that I had.

This is the essence of what I am learning about social media. What makes it really sing is the recognition of it as an emerging, open-source conversation. The most transparent, authentic voices participating in the conversation are generally the most appreciated voices...just like any conversation.

This is the professional strategy information that I wish I had humbly offered up to you, Dallas Twestival. It is late, I know, but I offer these bits of strategy in hopes that I might be a better participant the next time we meet. Perhaps

1. Order the schedule of events in a way to make a direct appeal for gifts. Many people who attend a fund raising event simply need to be asked to give. Most attenders are prepared to be challenged to give over and above the ticket paid for admission.

2. Tipjoy was a great tool we could have used, while at the event, to secure additional gifts and pledges. A group-led event of being guided through the donation process (tipjoy or whatever) would have possibly garnered attention and small donations from passer-bys.

3. When I saw the big screen at the event, I thought for sure we would use it to watch the #dallastwestival or #twestival feeds. It would have bee a clever way to corporately watch the community interact with those who weren't able to be with us in the flesh.

4. Use the event to coordinate a strategic appeal that leverages the networks of our assembled twitterati. Many people will give when they hear a specific, impassioned appeal from a friend. If we took a few minutes to do our own little twitter bomb on our own networks, guided by the emcee, it would be both a fun group activity and a great way to get a few additional gifts.

The fantastic event that was had all around the world raised a bunch of money for a great cause. My reflection on how it went is not a critique on the amazing efforts by people who stepped up and shared their expertise properly. This is simply me, ripping myself for not authentically bringing my best effort to the Twestival table. It is also my commitment to share all of my goodies the next time around.

Sorry, Twestival, I treated you too much like an interesting case study to observe instead of engaging what you really are.

The ironic admission is not lost on me -- Tech Hermit ought to come out of his observatory cave more often.

[Punching myself in the throat as gently and firmly as possible]

Teaching Me to Type

2009-02-23T05:00:00.000-08:00

My mom taught me to type. It was an elective she taught and I chose to take when I was in junior high school. She taught me and a dozen others to type on those old typewriters that forced you to place lots of pressure on one key, a single, skinny arm would fly up out of the guts of the machine and slap a letter on to your paper. It was manual. You had to replace the ribbon that would get eaten up by the slapping, but you didn't have to turn it on or plug it in. It was an amazing little machine. We cursed how difficult it was to use.

I got up to 35 or 40 words per minute when I was in my prime. Now that I am using my phone to text, I am back down to under four.

It is funny that we would take the most technologically advanced piece of communication the world has ever seen...and TYPE on it! I really am struggling to figure it out.

Then I am sitting in this large meeting on Thursday and I receive a text. I dart my eyes back and forth to ensure I can respond discreetly.
I can.
I do.
I push send.
I feel like James Bond.

Is this why texting is so popular? We can pat ourselves on the back for multitasking? There are probably some other reasons it appeals to my base, but I still feel sneaky and dishonest by texting in a meeting. I am still very leery of what this will do to me.

Anyway, thanks Mom, your skill is still helping me today. But I am in need of a teacher for an even smaller, non-qwerty keyboard. Any 13 year old girls out there develop a curriculum yet?

My Attempt to inspire Fundraising on Facebook

2009-02-16T21:58:00.000-08:00

Well, I should relay the story of last October's facebook fund raising escapade at some point. This is my way of saying thank you to my donors and trying to inspire more generosity from their own passion for justice.

Fundraising and Twitter - rabbit trail off the Dallas Twestival

2009-02-16T14:19:00.000-08:00

Here is an article from the Chronicle of Philanthropy that asks the wrong question.

Hildy Gottlieb urges readers not to succumb to the “sirens song” of social media, which lures charities with the promise of raising money fast—and on the cheap.

I don't know why the conversation of fund raising and social media continues to exist at this level. Sound fund raising principles have continued to be developed over history. Stick with the sound principles, and strategize with how technology might apply with some of the steps and not others.

Acquisition, Cultivation, Solicitation and Stewardship -- which of these steps can best utilize social media?

If you answered Solicitation you are wrong.
If you answered, Solicitation in small amounts, you are still wrong.
Social Media platforms are not naturally conducive for fund raising.

Social media is synonymous with "conversation"
Lets all say it out loud, together...
Social media is synonymous with "conversation"

Cultivation is the step that most naturally utilizes social media. But cultivation has an end goal of solicitation. If your entire conversation is bent towards, "Eventually, I am going to ask you for money." Few people will want to engage in your conversation. Your conversation won't sound genuine.

Do you have permission to solicit your social media audience? Certainly, but if you turn your cultivation into solicitation, you could kill it in a matter of weeks. Use social media as a platform to develop advocates. Advocates can message their own audience on your behalf for small donations. Let them be the solicitors for you, and you won't have to kill the conversation.

Prerequisites for succeess...
1. Willingness to change the way you communicate. (2-way, not 1-way)
2. Willingness to change the way you control conversations. (let go)
3. Willingness to embrace technology in ways that make sense to your strategy. (twitter contains potential tactics, it is not a strategy)

Dallas Twestival

2009-02-13T21:14:00.000-08:00

Quick Report.
I'll do a detailed report this weekend.

Track the overall donations as they continue to come in from around the world.

A Big Day for the Tech Hermit!

2009-02-11T20:30:00.000-08:00

After years of resisting a cell phone...
After 18 months of having a cell...
After two months of having a twitter account...

I am going to take the plunge.
[Hold you breath]

I am going to enable my phone to send and receive text messages.

"whoa, there big fella. Running out of the cave a little quick aren't we?"

Yes, I know it feels that way, but I have good reason.
I am heading down to take part in the tweet up for Dallas Twestival tomorrow evening. Part of the festivities may include a group led activity of sending out various messages. I have operated on Twitter for the last several weeks using just my desktop computer. In order to fully participate in tomorrow night, I am probably going to go freestyle on the twitter.

I am nervous.

My plan is to turn it off immediately after the event.
I am definitely not letting feeds go to my phone. I would never turn it off!

So, aside from reporting on the Dallas Twestival event, I'll also post a little reflection of what my first texts are going to be like.
Let's hope the hermit can socialize properly with all the extra pressure.

Twitter and Fundraising - 1 day 'til Dallas Twestival

2009-02-11T19:37:00.000-08:00

Listening in on the final conference call to organize tomorrow nights local version of twestival, I find myself hearing the same kind of last minute details that would be talked about whether the event took a year to plan. Of course, all over the world, it has been put together by volunteers in about two weeks time.

I am typing this with tweetdeck open on my desktop and a search feed set to the term "twestival." The tweet signal is going off every 30 seconds or so with an average of 5 updates containing the word each time. It is amazing. The planning progress that I have been reporting on for Dallas in the last week has been replicated in hundreds of cities, each with their own grass roots volunteerism.

4 cities in Africa
26 cities in Asia Pacific
54 cities in Europe
7 cities in the Middle East
75 cities in North America
20 cities in South America
2 virtual twestivals (in Moderne Island and Second Life)

Each has a organically designated volunteer coordinator(s) and an active plan to get together in the name of Charity: Water.

Press coverage has been expectantly minimal. If you listen to the most recent Dallas twestival conference call you will hear of some press coverage that has been negative from news outlets that "just don't get it." The NY times did post a brief write up today that obviously had a day or so of research behind it.

I'd like to lift this quote from the NY Times piece and make an observation for nonprofits.

Ms. Rose said that the Twitter community is particularly adept at mobilizing Internet activity into real-world action because the undercurrent of social currency is strong within the service’s ever-expanding community.

If your NPO ever wants to come close to having social media have an impact on your development or fund raising efforts, you must trust the adeptness of the community's social currency.

Speaking of currency, you can monitor the growing fund raising mark through the tipjoy home page. The day of twestivities has already started in some parts of the world.

Twitter and Fundraising - 2 days 'til Dallas Twestival

2009-02-10T11:43:00.000-08:00

Here is the ongoing report of the worldwide Twestival 2009 coming together in Dallas.

If you listened to the conference call that I linked you to yesterday, you heard the reference to other metro areas organizing their own events. Los Angeles is one local event that is coming together with the help of some high profile web celebrities. ijustine put together this video to promote the worlwide and the local LA event.

If you look around at some of these other local tweet ups that are coming together, you'll realize that many of them have set local goals. I have read in several places that the worldwide goal is $500,000. Los Angeles alone has a goal of $250,000. London launched a little music station for all the bands that will be performing called twestival.fm which has it's own $20,000 goal. It will be an interesting number to track and count and see grow. Because it's fundrasing organized from the bottom up, I don't know that there is a central thermometer that we can watch the funds associated with twestival be accurately counted.

Here is the main lesson your organization can learn from Charity: Water and they way they are interacting as recipients of the twitter communities generosity and efforts.

They have let go of their need to control it.
They are not running around enforcing branding standards or editorial platforms.
Charity: Water, I suspect, is just barely riding the wave that will flood over them come Thursday...and they are letting it happen.
Most nonprofits probably aren't engaged in this grass roots conversation enough for it to happen to them. And most would accidentally kill it by trying to control it (if it ever started to happen to them)

If the development cycle for you is...

Acquisition, Cultivation, Solicitation, and Stewardship.

You must have a good Acquisition and Cultivation strategy in order to get close to a good Solicitation strategy. If you are going to engage in social media conversations as part of your Cultivation tactics, you will kill the conversation by turning it into a Solicitation tactic. You will kill it fast.

Charity: Water controls it's Solicitation tactics and strategy. Here is an example of Cultivation naturally bubbling up into it's own kind of Solicitation. Charity: Water is an example to us all by just letting it happen.

Twitter and Fundraising - 3 days 'til Dallas Twestival

2009-02-09T21:09:00.000-08:00

Late last week I sat in on a public conference call for Dallas Twestival, the local version of ground swell volunteerism for Twestival 2009.

Lauren Vargas, local volunteer coordinator for the Dallas event led the call. I asked her in a tweet earlier in the day if it would be barging in for me to be a fly on the wall for the call. She tweeted me right back and assured that it wouldn't be barging at all.

I just love the transparency that shows up when sprinting to organize something within a couple of weeks. As I sat and listened to the stage of planning this group of volunteers was at, it was exciting to hear the excitement and nerves of an event that had a lot of work to do, but was obviously coming together nicely. Different people had stepped up to take on various aspects of the planning. You could hear that there was a level of expertise in various professions that was being tapped into to cover the details of the event. I missed the Sunday evening planning call, but if you'd like to hear the evolution of the event coming together, the Monday evening planning call was recorded and is available here under "clip one".

The group has been doing a good job of using twitter and a wiki site to communicate calls, announcements, and ongoing needs. There is still time for you to step up and figure out how you can fit in to the volunteer coordination.

A couple of observations at this point in the process...

1. These people are great and they mostly seemed to find each other through twitter, with no prior affinity to the charity.

2. Grass roots planning is exciting. It is great to watch a group sprint to finish without any time to get territorial or political.

3. Transparency is so refreshing. It is a great reflection of social media at it's best.

When this make news the morning after, just be aware that this "grass roots effort" had some active blades of grass who do a lot of work for the rest of the lawn. The world wide community was ripe to do something, ANYTHING productive with the community energy. Tapping into that community would demand that you participate in
the conversation. Until your organization is authentically willing to participate in the emerging conversation, social media will continue to be a foreign language for you to interpret in vain.

Twitter and Fundraising

2009-02-06T11:06:00.001-08:00

The company I work for has decided to sponsor the upcoming twestival that is being organized by volunteers in Dallas. The event is, at it's core, a fundraiser for charity: water which is doing all kinds of good work across the globe to provide clean drinking water to the billions that don't have it.

I am interested in it for a couple of different reasons.

As you read about how it is being organized you can see that it is a very grassroots event that is simultaneously taking place in various city centers across the globe. It is mostly PR professionals and friends in London who are behind the initial push when, in September 2008, this group of Twitterers decided to organize an event where the local Twitter community could socialize offline; meet the faces behind the avatars, enjoy some entertainment, have a few drinks and tie this in with a food drive and fundraising effort for a local homeless charity. Simply, a tweet up with a common goal of social action.

This same group who experienced the success of last September has now seen participation sprout up from city centers all over the world for this upcoming event.

Here is my prediction. The day after this event, press releases everywhere will shock the fundraising world with the headline... Charity:Water Raise 750K in One Day Using Twitter

These London PR pros who volunteered their efforts (@amanda, @tommalcolm, @renate and @timhoang @brightonecomms)to begin with with (rightly) get all kinds of credit.
Nonprofit everywhere will start to look at taking twitter very seriously, but will be so transfixed by the headline that they will be at a loss to recognize how it was accomplished.

If you work for a non profit and your reading this, know that it takes a lot of work.
Know that exposing your organization to social media will mean fundamental changes to the culture of your organization in order to be effective. Know that, there are resources available to help you get started, but twitter is not a magic bullet. Fund raising strategy hasn't fundamentally changed...
Acquire, Cultivate, Solicit, Steward
You can't jump in to social media and expect to quickly move to Solicitation.
You need months of cultivation using social media tools, NOT USING THEM AS A DISTRIBUTION CHANNEL FOR YOUR PRESS RELEASES!

I am going to report on the progress of the Dallas Twestival event and keep give an update of the ongoing observations can make.

By the way, Beth Kanter has a great write up on the origins of twestival.

DISQUS explored

2009-02-04T12:31:00.000-08:00

I've read some good things about how DISQUS works.

Experiencing it myself for the first time with this post.
I'll track the overall experience and give an update once I have had time to digest it.

A single place to monitor and traffic and syndicate all the discussions that surrounds my online activity seems promising and efficient.

UPDATE - two days later.

I didn't really expect that comments and subscribers would explode now that I'm using the service. But some of the hype surrounding it did leave me with that impression. Did I believe the hype? maybe. What else would a hopeful hermit do?

Until this content is well worth reading and has a reason to have a following, I wouldn't really expect the benefits of this kind of service to be noticed. I'll give another report once a reach a notable number of subscribers. For now I would say the sign up experience was smooth and intuitive. I knew going in what the service was about, but if i had stumbled upon it, I might not be completely clear what the benefits would be to someone fresh to the content production business.

in Beta

2009-02-04T11:39:00.000-08:00

Accepting the Beta label for myself has been satisfying. It fits with my personality and temperament anyway.

I felt, at one time, that college graduation would somehow signify my full featured launch. Like several failed product roll-outs we have all seen, I now realize that graduation should have been viewed as a soft launch, barely alpha version. But I was so bold, I was determined to defend my alpha version as if it was the full featured version of myself.

Staying in Beta release mode is quite liberating. If the label is used as an excuse to bumble along and barely improve or change, I suppose that could be just as frustrating as a premature public launch. Being in Beta allows me the freedom of all kinds of exploration and change. I know that half the world would look at things the other way around...but I don't mind the ambiguity. This is how a tech hermit like me can work for a technology company.

Twitter Cage Match: Cardinals v Steelers

2009-02-03T10:17:00.000-08:00

This has nothing to do with the responsiveness of corporations to social media.
It is simply a very fun way to engage and see the twittersphere.

You'll notice the overall numbers represented in this are pretty small, but it has a good sampling. Even if the entire twitterverse were represented, you would probably see the same effect.

I highly recommend choosing "player's names" and clicking play to see the progression. It is funny to watch Fitzgerald go crazy in the 4th quarter.

Play with this tool here.

This is the part of technology that is really enjoyable for me. Making observations about human behavior and aggregating data in real time to see the pulse of pop culture is very interesting. Digg has out with a few tools like this over the past few years that are just as engaging. Better than mindless screensavers.

It's funny that it feels like I can be one step removed from the technology when I'm making grand observations like this. I guess I don't mind being owned by my fascination with emerging technology as long as I have the freedom to withdraw from it without violating some new code of ethics.

Corporate Twitter Cage Match: DishNetwork v Direct TV

2009-02-02T10:10:00.000-08:00

My last little experiment put Lowes head to head with HomeDeopt. You can read that here.

So I wanted to expand the research information and put Dish Network and DirectTV head to head in their twitter response time. I sent out this tweet.

You can see I stepped up the challenge by not putting the @ symbol in front of the name. They would have to monitor and respond to their search feeds to even know I asked them a question.

30 hours later, no response.
I followed up with this tweet...

Now my question will be more obvious and easier to be on their radar.

40 minutes later DirecTV hits me back with this little number.

DishNetwork has yet to respond. I'm sure I am lost to them in the twitter toilet, even though I'm just a few scrolls down the page if they were to search their own profile. At some point, I am going to need to be an angry consumer and put somebody through the ringer in order for this to be a serious rating system.

Dish, unfortunately, seems to be using this primarily as a way to get press releases and announcements out. They do seem to be engaging with the little twits, but not very often. Directv has far fewer broadcast announcements, and it shows that their approach to this is for listening and responding instead of broadcasting.

Unscientifically, I have engaged with 4 corporate entities.
100% have twitter profiles.
50% interacted with me on a direct question.
0% punched me in the throat
results have a +/-margin of 50%

Facebook and Fundraising

2009-01-31T17:40:00.000-08:00

I have mentioned I work for a technology company. It is actually an agency that assists nonprofit organizations in their online communication and fund raising efforts. So about a year ago, the hermit stuck his foot out of his shell and dipped his big toe in to the wide, facebook ocean.

The abuse your psyche takes while adopting facebook behavior is subject matter for another post. I just want to mention one of the transitional states that happened for me, and what propelled me into an advocate for the tool.

I joined facebook about a week before the video application was added. As soon as I saw that you could send private and public video messages to your friends walls and inboxes, facebook felt much better to me. I can't tell you the number of facebook friends who were so excited to get video messages. Especially in those early days, it was the only thing that kept me using the tool.

Then I was asked to pledge a dollar amount for this non profit group that I really cared about. In the process of figuring out how I would meet my pledge, I decided to use my facebook network. At the time I sent out this video, I had about 330 "facebook friends."

I reached my stated pledge goal within four days. By the time the day of the event came, we had raised 180% of my pledge, just using facebook.

There are dozens of little observations that can be made and applied to fund raising strategies that I could share with you from that little experience. However, at the end of the day, I really just applied sound fund raising principles and applied them to the facebook distribution channel.
I owned facebook on this one.
I honestly was able to do this without facebook owning me.

So the hermit comes late to the party, flirts with technology from a distance, and then is able to use the tool (without my facebook friends being used I didn't get punched in the throat one time!) and not be owned by the technology.

Twitter for Listening or Broadcasting?

2009-01-29T21:24:00.000-08:00

Ongoing Experiment Number One - Corporate Contest for who is listening the best.

Like me, corporations are just figuring out a strategy in using twitter. They are hiring social media executives to handle their online image. I'm sure the job description for these people is a work in process. There are CFOs who are pulling their hair out trying to assess the value of the position with old tools of analysis.

The promise of tools like twitter and the corporate use of them is that corporate communication will become more and more decentralized and an ear turned to the individual consumer will grow bigger.

Like an anti-Pinocchio (sort of).

My first contest was an experiment between homedepot and lowes.
Both home improvement giants have corporate twitter accounts.
I tweet out

"hey @lowes and @homedepot, my wife doesn't believe me that you are listening. Prove her wrong and throw her some love (she loves coupons)"

Very lame attempt to garner some swag, I know. But I was most interested in response time and if we can honestly show or predict anything from these very unscientific results.

Home Depot hits me back with this reply 90 minutes later.

Pretty impressive seeing that I didn't get their name correct. Part of Nick Jayres' job is to keep a search feed for everyone who is tweeting keywords like "homedepot" or "home depot" or "big orange box".

Sarah, from the home depot corporate communications is actually managing the corporate account. Following and Followers of just over 3,000 in each list. 1,249 tweets since last May acting mostly as a customer service line.

Lowes, who I can see by their twitter profile, jumped on twitter two weeks ago - is yet to hit me back. They have just over 100 followers and 100 they are following. Have tweeted out 11 times as "the corporation" - no name behind the profile. Looks like they are on the path to use the tool as a distribution channel for their broadcast communication.

I think I'm going to do this a few more times with a few more contests before I make any general observations about the nature of this beast.

Blogging Anxiety

2009-01-29T21:07:00.000-08:00

So I have been at this for about four days now.

I don't mind the pressure to create content - I just don't like pressure that surrounds me to create content where I don't get genuine face to face feedback.

This is not my diary.
This is ego-driven in sooo many ways. I suspect it (blogging) is for many people.
When I get four comments from four people in the first few days of doing this I am stoked. Stoked in a coy way. A way that doesn't let on to the fact that technology isn't owning me, your opinion of me owns me.

So, to escape the content/performance/blogging anxiety that I will no doubt feel to a greater degree next week...I am going to own this blog and do some experiments with it.
If you are a lurking hermit at heart (like me) here is your chance to watch me run the social media and technology maze. What I hope we can process, together, are the most redeemable parts of this stuff. This way we can keep each other grounded and I won't get punched in the throat too often.

1/2 second of my 15 minutes of fame

2009-01-29T11:38:00.000-08:00

Most of my office mates are on twitter.
Most of them were on twitter very early. It's just who they are.
But not me, my cell phone isn't even text enabled.

"That's OK. You can tweet from your computer using tweetdeck."

I say, "No. It will own me."

Then a business associate at another company in Iowa says to me.

"I want to follow you on twitter, what's your twitter name?"

She says, "Follow Lance Armstrong, he is so interesting."

So the hermit signs up for his account, follows the people he knows in the office, follows the Iowa lady, and follows Lance.

She is right. He is interesting to follow.
A couple weeks into lurking around the whole thing, posting once a week, logging in twice a week. I go ahead and hit Lance with this...and he tweets me back!

Now I'm cranked.
Twitter is the best thing ever.
I am score-boarding the entire office.
I call my brother and tell him to sign up for twitter.
I feel like a piece of me has given over to the dark side as I bask in my glory.
A few seconds of my 15 minutes of fame ticked off... and went straight into the twitter toilet?

I can feel myself becoming different. Am I starting to become owned? Is this what it feels like? If I ever interrupt a conversation I am having with you by answering a tweet - punch me in the throat.

Rude Technology

2009-01-28T11:24:00.000-08:00

I heard the author of this book interviewed on local public radio today.
While talking about various subjects that are brought up in his book, the interviewer asked the author about if we are generally more rude now than we were fifty or one hundred years ago. He made an interesting comment...

Technology has made it easier for culture to be shaped and emerge as new. We certainly have more opportunity to accidentally violate emerging or new rules we are not familiar with. It does not mean we care less about civility and conformity now than we did before.

It made me realize that this is a reason why I am typically slow to fully adopt and engage some technologies. I don't know the rules, and I don't want to thought of as rude. Interestingly enough, the longer I stay away from an emerging technology, the more I am prone to be defined as rude by the early and mainstream adopters who have already begun to establish what is and is not civil.

My default rule of thumb has been to stay out, observe, glean the most redeemable parts of the technology, use it without being owned by it, and be willing to be called rude.

Now that I'm actively experimenting with this stuff--- I guess I'm inadvertently helping to shape the civility.

Dont Want A Blog

2009-01-27T13:58:00.000-08:00

That was the title of my very first blog. I set it up three years ago just to experiment with the posting routine and the html and the whole process. I posted several items to just figure out embed code and such. -- I was hot stuff. But I wasn't going to be a blogger. That label ought to be reserved for a professional class anyway (the label, not the activity) I think the same thing about golf/golfer.

So it turns out that blogs are now the destination for content. Most everything else in the social media world works as a distribution channel.

So it feels that blogs have become the center of it all. The platform that the rest of social media propels itself from. Before blogs, what was at the center of it all? Newspapers? Publishing Companies? Media Conglomerates?
Do you think those people are freaking out right now?

Cell Phones are the Devil

2009-01-27T13:35:00.000-08:00

My brother in law is a classic example of a guy who wants access to people when he wants access to people. Now that the technology exists for the to be a 24/7 possibility, I somehow have an obligation to him (and everyone else) to make myself completely accessible at every waking moment.

He finally gets a hold of me...

Why isn't your cell phone on?

He knows why. We have had this discussion before. He represents the group think that is pulling me to think just like him. Apparently, our society is evolving into people that believe a lack of always-available connectivity is my signal that I don't care about people who know my cell number.

Can I have a cell and not be owned by it?
How can I use emerging technologies and not be owned by them?
Text-enabling my phone frightens me because I think it will own me.
I'm flirting with twitter, but I think it is the bogey man to my obsessive personality type.

So what do I do to work this stuff out?
I start my first blog.
In a few years and a few posts, who knows who will own me?