Archive for April, 2010
Attend BlogWell Seattle Series, Get 20% off with the SCG Coupon Code
Monday, April 26th, 2010
The BlogWell series, presented by GasPedal and the Social Media Business Council, is coming to the Microsoft Headquarters on May 5th. The event will feature corporate social media case study presentations from major brands including Microsoft, Starbucks, Xerox, Nokia, PEMCO, ExOfficio, Boeing and Intel.
The conference will focus on practical, how-to advice on creating great content, getting management buy-in, educating employees, keeping lawyers and regulators happy, simple and ethical disclosure, and engaging fans.
Learn how to get started, get past roadblocks, and make your social media program phenomenal — in one afternoon.
For more details visit: http://www.gaspedal.com/blogwell/seattle. Apply the coupon code SCGSENTME to get 20% off registration.
Facebook: Spinning a New World Wide Web
Friday, April 23rd, 2010
Socializing the web, Facebook unveils its grand plan.
The F8 conference is wrapping up in San Francisco and we have learned that Facebook has planned what is potentially one of the most impactful things to happen to the internet since the glossy button. Mark Zuckerberg and the Facebook team have the ambitious plan of socializing the entire internet and making your experience personal with their newly-announced toys.
Zuckerberg said, “The Web is made of unstructured pages linked together. The open graph puts people at the center of the Web.” Using examples like Yelp, Pandora, and CNN, he made the case that internet users surf around collecting content in a disconnected way. Facebook would attempt to connect these fractured online communities to show users what their friends like and who of their friends are connected to the same sites that they are. The idea is to make the user the center of the experience and to pull from the user’s friends’ experiences– or share their own– to drive traffic around the web.
How are they doing this you ask? With Twitter.
Just kidding.
They will employ a couple of key new tools, i.e. the “toys” mentioned above.
The Open Graph Protocol will open the social graph and create objects of websites that users can add to their Facebook profile. A user can make this connection through a Facebook “like” button included on the website. The webpage will be linked to the user profile, publish to the news feed, and be included in Facebook searches and analytics.
Facebook is going to release a new Graph API, which will be built around this Social Graph. The API is intended to be a simple representation of data within the graph, and will allow for the objects and APIs to be accessed by URLs.
These new protocols and APIs will enable a new set of Social Plugins. Social Plugins are new, easy solutions to integrate the social graph into your website. The aim of all this is to make your whole internet experience personal and exist in real-time. Here’re some examples of plugins that will be available:
• A “Like” button plugin will now share a user’s interests on the web via the user’s Facebook profile.
• An “Activity Feed” plugin will show what a user’s friends may have liked on a particular site.
• A “Recommendations” plugin will allow for content suggestions from that website.
• The “Facepile” will show the profile pictures of users’ friends who are already signed up.
For the brand, these social plugins will allow for a more personalized experience while driving traffic and engagement.
Perhaps raising the most eyebrows at the Privacy Advocates Club meetings would be the impact of the new graph API on your profile. What might have been commonly considered unintentionally shared Facebook profile information such as favorite movies, music, books, etc, will now be automatically updated by your actions on the web.
By “liking” a band on Pandora, or a movie on IMDB, that action is turned into an object that’s instantly updated into your profile. What previously was a temporary glimpse on your wall into what you like is now permanently part of your profile. Brands will be able to serve your interests much more easily. Ads can be targeted upon what the user has liked from all around the web. In addition to the opportune peeking at what you like, think of the ramifications of seeing what your friends like or recommend. Imagine product marketing based on personal recommendations and peer review.
It’s a glimpse at the marketing holy ground that has long been so coveted by so many.
Read more about these exciting new changes on the Facebook Developer Blog.
Congratulations Again, Trish Millines Dziko
Friday, April 9th, 2010Trish and her nonprofit organization, Technology Access Foundation (TAF), are in the news once again being recognized for their outstanding work. This time, the co-founder and executive director of TAF – which is better known around SCG as our key not-for-profit partner, has been selected as one of the 5 local winners of The Jefferson Award. This prestigious recognition began in 1972 as a way to distinguish outstanding citizens who put the needs of others before their own.
Trish Millines Dziko left a successful career at Microsoft to pursue her goal of closing the technology gap and enriching young minds. TAF was founded in 1996 with the mission of giving “children of color the tools to be inventors and creators of technology.” TAF exists side by side with educational resources that are already in place, and works to connect technological resources and education to those that need it most.
Let’s help Trish represent Washington State for the national Jefferson Award by voting for her at http://www.king5.com/on-tv/evening-magazine/promos-contests/88831432.html.
To get to know Trish and TAF better, check out King5’s profile of the exceptional nominee: http://www.king5.com/on-tv/Jefferson-Award-Nominee-Trish-Millines-Dziko-90048037.html
The World According to Wentz: #OldFailLady
Thursday, April 8th, 2010
Dear Mr. Nick Bilton,
This letter is in response to your New York Times article entitled “Twitter Needs More Filters.” Typically I appreciate when the mainstream media prints geeky rants generally reserved for tech-bloggers, but in this case, your article appears a little off-base. What Twitter users are missing is not a lack of filters but a lack of knowledge of the tools available to use in concert with Twitter and the native tools within it.
Let’s start with the search tool within Twitter. As you mentioned, the service can become overrun with trending topics like “SXSW”, “iPad” and the omnipresent “Justin Bieber” (my heart skipped a beat when I was typing his name!). The answer to your troubles here is as simple as a minus sign (-). Let’s say this past weekend you were searching Twitter for the “Big Apple” to find something fun to do on Saturday night in NYC but all you were getting were users’ tweets about how long they’ve been waiting in line to buy a plus-size iPhone. Simply use the (-) limiter like this: “Big Apple – iPad” and you will get the results you wanted sans the Apple fanboys. Mess around with Advanced Search at http://www.search.twitter.com and learn other cool search limiters like date range and retweet exclusion.
So how do you manage your friends’ updates? Adding more features to Twitter will only spawn more Failwhales. The beauty of the service is its lack of bloat; they leave that to the app developers. Use clients to create groups, alerts and more with tools like TweetDeck and CoTweet. Who goes to http://www.twitter.com anymore anyway? Clients are a light-weight and (usually) free way to manage your feeds. I know that you were looking for a way to filter your friends’ feeds down within Twitter but unfortunately, that’s not part of the service. Take TweetDeck for a spin and I promise you that you’ll find a Twitter user experience unlike any you’ve had before.
Cordially yours,
@Frenchtron300
@Chex_Mix: The Healthy Alternative to Boring Corporate Twitter Accounts
Thursday, April 8th, 2010If you read our blog and Twitter feed regularly, you may also follow a number corporate Twitter accounts, both the stellar and lacking. If you have a customer service need, you may have even reached out to the infamous Frank (@ComcastCares) or Elliott (@Alaskaair.) Brad Nelson (@Starbucks) has developed a huge following by leveraging the power of the Starbucks brand with relevant and interesting behind the scenes content. It’s been well documented that the leaders of these Twitter profiles can point to their level of engagement and solving customer issues as the primary reason for their huge success. People want access to these brands, and the Twitter profile is a chance for real representatives of the brand to chat with real customers.
But for every Brad, Elliott and Frank, there are 100 corporate Twitter accounts mired in obscurity despite efforts to engage with those who reach out to them. McDonald’s appears to be decentralizing their efforts so that regions can run their own accounts. However, their own outgoing messages can have the same kind of impersonal feel of a press release or print ad, with lines such as, “Latté or Cappuccino? Mocha or Vanilla? Iced or Hot? So many ways to @McCaféYourDay! (Keeping it simple today. Small coffee. Black. Only $1!).”
Now, over on the other side of the Twitter content spectrum, there are the Twitasodes of Twit-coms like @ShhDontellSteve or @$^1#MyDadSays. The content has no real purpose besides entertainment, and to draw us in to the personal lives of people who probably aren’t real.
So, the team here at Spring Creek Group was quite pleased and surprised this week to see a huge Consumer Packaged Good product that was actually journeying to the creative and risky world of fictional characters, in order to develop a humorous Twitter presence. The antics and conversations of their made up charcter, a bowl of actual @Chex_Mix are incredibly clever, and the pace at which he/she/it is pumping out content is already legendary. @Chex_Mix’s success falls into a few key twitter lessons:
1) Be funny and/or interesting. Everything from the bio to the content says this account has a sense of humor.
2) Reply to those who follow you.
3) Reach out to the influencers. Already I see @Chex_Mix trying to reach out to @ChrisBrogan.
4) Reply quickly. You don’t get to ruminate on a response, pass it through PR and Legal, and respond to someone else’s tweet.
5) Have fun. This is Twitter, not brain surgery. If it’s not fun for you, why would your customers think it’s fun to follow you?
We’re looking forward to seeing more from @Chex_Mix. Well done. The folks here @SpringCreekGrp have poured a fresh bowl in our snack room, to honor your efforts.
Spring Creek Group re-brands as SpringCreek9000
Wednesday, April 7th, 2010We here at Spring Creek Group are constantly on the lookout for new trends and thought-memes in the social media marketplace where we ply our trade. Well, we realized recently that what began as a few small rivulets has developed into a full-bore flash flood in the realm of social media technology and services firm naming convention. [BTW, like the way I subtly incorporated both a water reference AND a 10-dollar word into that last sentence? What can I say, we’ve got a lot of clever copywriters on the team here, and occasionally I go a bit overboard trying to keep up with all of these creative writing majors…]
Allow us, if you will, to drop the following list on you of industry contemporaries, partners, competitors, friends, followers, and those-we-do-not-yet-know… see if you, too, can determine the hip company naming convention that’s been sweeping our industry these past few years:
We know, and we agree: there really is just something so modern, so interactive, so un-old-school about a company name that dares to bring together both letters and numbers in a space-less string of alpha-numeric freshness.
And so, not wanting to miss the chance to ride this wave, we humbly submit our (potential) new company name to you, dear blog readers. What say you?
SpringCreek9000
Graphically Speaking: Retweetability Equation
Tuesday, April 6th, 2010
Retweets make the world go round. Just think of all the cool stuff you wouldn’t have known if your friend hadn’t retweeted someone’s thought-provoking ideas.
We all know that Tweets need to be interesting and through-provoking enough for someone to forward on to their friends, but with that knowledge also come the restraints of a 140 character limit.
With that said, take a gander at Professor Hoo’s equation for crafting a Tweet that’s readily-retweeted.
Our thanks go out to many team members for their help on creating this equation, but most-notably Aaron Graham.
Note: In our studies we have noticed the occasional insertion of a colon after the RT. To account for that, Professor Hoo has added the colon to his equation, making good on his motto “Everybody Wang Chung tonight.” Wait, not that motto, this one: “better safe than sorry.”
Facebook Gives More Power to the People
Friday, April 2nd, 2010
While brand pages are popping up at a rate that seems almost akin to rabbit reproductive rates, users aren’t truly able to express the passion they have for these brands (or causes or public figures). Facebook’s new ‘Community Page’ option lets users create a page, similar to that of a brand page where they can go buck wild with their creativity (or snark, apparently).
While Facebook is fairly vague about exactly what the pages entail, they do get as specific as to say that once the pages gain “thousands of fans” the pages are somewhat wiki-fied and turned over to the users, creating a true community atmosphere. Somewhere in a marketing department, brand managers are cowering under their desks and wishing for the good ol’ days before the Internet.
However, artistic and expressive freedoms don’t have to mean bad things for brands. I see brands that embrace the fact that their users can create a community around their love for a brand coming out ahead in the long run. Think of the opportunities for brand pages to highlight work and discussion on unofficial pages within the Facebook environment. Linking to a community of Brand X lovers who are touting the reasons why Brand X is better than Brand Y is easier for a brand than creating their own messaging about why they’re better, and they probably won’t incur the wrath of Brand Y supporters.
Stay tuned for more on this new Facebook development.
