A Wider Net

Check out HP’s Twitter Feed to see how they’re handling a scavenger hunt at the “BlogHer” event.

Thanks Pistachio for the tip (also through Twitter - check out how she has designed her Twitter page - very nice lesson in personal branding)

Twitter may not have the user base of Facebook or MySpace, but as social networks go, Twitter contains a dense population of internet early adopters and technology evangelists. Scattered among the millions of 140 character messages floating through Twitter each day, when it isn’t down due to capacity issues, are threaded discussions about consumer experiences with brands. Recently, Twitter users witnessed step-by-step “tweets” from one power user as she struggled with customer service at an Apple Store. She was having a terrible experience and her thousands of tuned-in Twitter followers knew about it. These are the sort of conversations that brands need to monitor and react to. Tracking twitter conversations is fairly easy. Doing something about what you find there - that’s not so easy.

Enter Frank Eliason. Frank is the person behind the Twitter account Comcastcares. I first heard about Frank through a technology podcast called “This Week in Tech” (TWiT). They described a person at Comcast Customer Outreach who had taken the initiative to handle service questions through Twitter and respond to them promptly. During the recording of the TWiT podcast, which is usually done in one take without edit, they were able to use Twitter to reach Frank at Comcast through his comcastcares account, and get him to call into the show via Skype. I was shocked at how quickly they were able to get him on the phone (although the skeptic in me is still not convinced it wasn’t staged like a “millionaire” lifeline call.)

To date, Frank has sent 4,000 public updates to his twitter account, each under 140 characters. He answers questions as well as he can and sometimes forwards information to his office for direct follow-up. I recently had an awful experience at a local Comcast branch (an hour wait in the rain to pick up a set top box) followed by a so-so experience with a pair of smart yet helpless technicians who visited my home. I decided to give Frank a try before I called Comcast to express my sentiments.

I sent a message to comcastcares telling him that my cable signal looks far better when I connect my cable directly to my TV then when I use their new high-definition cable box. This is only a problem on standard definition channels, which look great on my other HDTV on an older HD cable box. Two technicians had been out to look at it and told me that the problem was the new line of Motorola set top boxes and that they decoded standard definition channels poorly. I was told to find another out-of-service old cable box or “live with it”. The technicians, in their defense, were friendly and fairly knowledgeable, but had their hands tied. Within seconds I had a response from Frank asking questions. We exchanged short messages off and on for a little while and then he took my account number over a private message and said he would have someone from his office contact me. Within 24 hours I received a call from their executive offices who are now working the problem. I will update the post with news of how this turns out.

Frank is a breath of fresh air at a company that I was convinced had completely lost their way. Comcast may still have fatal flaws when it comes to pricing, quality, and service, but Frank is a big step in the right direction. By listening to the conversations on Twitter and answering them publicly to the best of his abilities, Frank is helping to turn some of the Twitter community into Comcast fans, which is both a tall order and a powerful PR achievement. The real question will be: Is Comcast simply satisfying the needs of these few in return for some positive word of mouth like this, or is Comcast taking this feedback from the tech-savvy Twitter crowd and using it to adjust their business? In other words, does Comcast really care, or is it just Frank? Time will tell and Frank will, hopefully, let us know.

Update: Shortly after the call from the executive offices, I received a call booking an appointment with a technician. That technician came to my house and while his knowledge was exceptional, mine was a problem he was not able to resolve. The technical description is below. The story from the perspective of customer service is simply: they made a good effort to resolve my issue. It was, ultimately, an issue that will require improvements in their infrastructure to resolve so I was fairly out of luck, but they tried. Am I happy with the result? Not at all, but I understand that this is the best they can do at this time. I will be giving Verizon a close look when my year of free digital voice runs out, listening to the reviews of my neighbors who are switching to Verizon this month. At the end of the day, all the customer service in the world can’t save a bad product, and that may be what we’re dealing with here. If they want to keep customers, I think they need to start acknowledging their shortcomings, make a road map to improving their product, and stick to it in a very public way.

Technical Answer: We tried swapping the NEW Comcast HD box with a previous model, which had been working beautifully in my house on a much larger TV. The result was that the picture did, indeed, get cleaner on standard definition channels, but my other TV still looked better. Apparently my other TV, a 3-yr-old Sony HDTV, has a much better ability to clean up crappy signals than my brand new Samsung. Both look great on HDTV channels. But the older model Motorola set-top box also crushed the contrast and color of the picture, and I rejected it. I preferred the noise. So it appears there aren’t enough bits in each of the Comcast digital channels - they’re compressing video into too narrow a signal, and depending too much on the set-top box and TV to decode and clean it up. Most of what we watch now is HDTV but most of the channels are still standard def, and most of them look like relative crap.

Just a quick note to highlight my current favorite Twitter stream: Tweets from the Mars lander, Phoenix can be found here.
This is a very nice bit of PR from NASA/JPL. As Hollywood fuels our fondness for robots with personality (good or bad) we love this personification of a robot that has successfully traversed millions of miles, landed on the pole of another planet, and has now begin digging in search of ice and other goodies.

I look forward to it’s updates and I find it’s handling of public questions to be more interesting than anything on the NASA and JPL pages. Well done. Now, if only Twitter were one-millionth as reliable as Phoenix…

Photo of today’s first dig in the dirt was snagged from Phoenix Mars Mission page.

Pistachio, a.k.a. Laura Fitton, wrote about a very interesting project underway right now on Twitter. In fact, blink and you may miss this one - things happen FAST in the Twitter world.

Roll back to yesterday, when a Twitter member sent an invitation to all of his followers saying “BBQ at our company - tomorrow - all are invited”. 24 hrs later, I was eating a burger with some cool social media experts in the parking lot of his company, Mzinga, and meeting some of his other Twitter peers. One of them, a presentation expert and speaking consultant, whipped out her Nokia phone, started a live broadcast using mobile streaming site Qik, and those of us around her became cast members in a video appeal to someone they were trying to convince to make a trip to Boston. The owner of the phone turned out to be Pistachio. Hours later, we’re now connected through Twitter and LinkedIn and I’m picking up a post from her blog and sharing it with you.

To the social media mavericks at Mzinga, the concept of a “Flash Twitter-croudsourced BBQ webcast” may be old hat. At the rate we’re going, the rest of us have about a week to catch up.

But back to our headline - check out how an article about Twitter is being sourced through the Twitter community. Books have been written this way. None as crazier as this one.

Here’s a cool widget article from Adweek featuring a quote from yours truly.
Thanks to Richard Brunelli for the mention and for the insightful article!

Here’s an insightful piece about a recent flak in the gaming industry concerning the rumored firing of an employee from top-tier gaming site Gamespot because he gave a game a bad review. The rumor contends that the game’s publisher offered a six-figure advertising deal in return for the reviewers head on a platter. Regardless of exactly why he is no longer with Gamespot, the piece really discusses the relative value of “professional” reviews versus the reviews and opinions of actual consumers. From the article, and the comments, it’s clear what this group feels - user reviews are far more valuable anyway.

While there are quite a few articles about companies scamming user reviews by paying people to pose as users in order to skew the user ratings, ratings from large volumes of legitimate users tend to overpower those efforts. At the end of the day, there is nothing more trusted than the direct recommendation of a trusted friend. That’s where everyone is headed - finding ways to connect buyers with the opinions of their friends and peers.

You can apply this to most any marketing and communications program - not just B2C campaigns. Attendees of a conference will find value in peer recommendations of breakout sessions, exhibits, hotels, and evening activities. Sales employees will appreciate knowing which tools and techniques have worked best for their teammates. A webcast audience will more readily choose to watch archived programs if their friends or coworkers recommend them. Building in the ability for people to rate, recommend, and review content as well as the ability to track the opinions of people they actually know, will ultimately benefit you as well as your audience.

Now, on a B2C note, I would be willing to buy this amazing robotic critter, only if I could find anyone I know who bought and loved it.

Google’s Open Social announcement last week has potentially significant ramifications to marketers trying to tap into the social networks of Facebook, Myspace, and others. First, let me explain what Open Social is and then we’ll go into the “why it matters” part.

Open Social is best explained on the official Google Open Social page and on this terrific “Open Social for Dummies Executives” page. Open Social is a Google-led initiative to bring some open standards to social networks that will allow applications/widgets to work across networks, and possibly utilizing and sharing the data unique to each. The new application standards will have immediate effects.

20 or so companies are on board with Open Social already. This list includes MySpace, Ning, LinkedIn, Friendster, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, and Orkut. If you noticed that Facebook is missing from the list then you noticed the very reason that this is big news. Google seems to be intentionally fragmenting the social network business and preventing the dominance of a closed-environment player like Facebook. Google can’t sell ads to Facebook users (now that Microsoft bought those rights) and as more and more developers are devoting their time to building Facebook applications, Google is seeing too many people spending too much of their time away from the Google ad ecosystem (search and iGoogle). So, just when you may have opted to spend some marketing dollars building a cool Facebook app, Google goes and lobs a massive cluster bomb at you.

But you will soon have the opportunity to pay for a killer mini-application that can be developed once and deployed across all those other social networks. Most app developers are expected to develop each application twice - once for Facebook and once for the Open Social consortium. As a marketer, you will probably find better results in the Open Social sites which allow you far greater access to data mining and measurement.

Mark Andreessen, the founder of Netscape and recent co-founder of Ning, is apparently a major proponent of Open Social and Ning appears to have launched the greatest support for Open Social on day 1. Recent comments from tech analysts seems to indicate that Ning has tremendous momentum and a fairly unmatched toolset for creating feature and media-rich social networks.

I also recommend the analysis at Forrester.

I apologize - I’m a little late to the party with any mention of Google Android and the Open Social initiative that seems to be smashing Facebook with a book in the face. Honestly, things have been very very busy and I’m still digesting the big news from Google this past week.

Here are some of the recent happenings that I need to write more about, and a quick idea of what they’re all about:

Surface: Last Friday we were given a private showing of Microsoft’s Surface product. WOW. This is the most natural human-computer experience I have yet to encounter. I love this and can’t wait to offer it to customers for a variety of applications.

Google Android: This is a mobile operating system (sort of) and not the Google Phone everyone was waiting for. It has tremendous potential but was honestly a bit of a let-down. We have a while to go before the potential is realized, but it does appear Google is out to fragment another industry and keep it open (and keep it hooked on search). It may be the best thing to happen to the US mobile phone market ever, but I doubt Verizon is going to let it happen casually, since they will be less able to control the sale of overpriced ringtones and wallpapers.

Open Social - probably the biggest Google announcement - has immediate application. This initiative will (in theory) allow developers to make “widgets” or “applications” that work on any social network that supports the Open Social initiative. It will also allow users to share their data across all those social networks, making it easier to maintain just one “page” and “friends list”, etc. Social Network startup and emerging juggernaut Ning has already rolled out support for the platform, and almost 20 companies are on board immediately. Except Facebook. They’re clearly left out for a reason. Google seems to want people to stop flocking to Facebook and return to an open internet (where they still need Google and their advertisers). Open Social will be very important to marketers. More to come.

Today, I’m visiting Mobile Internet World and I may have a tidbit or two to discuss regarding the future of web marketing to handhelds.

Oh, I also recently visited Communispace in Watertown, MA - they have a truly remarkeable approach to building and maintaining highly focused and vibrant social communities for market research, brainstorming, and many other applications.

Catch you later.

First, Facebook snubs google and sides with Microsoft:

Update: Facebook chooses Microsoft over Google | InfoWorld | News | 2007-10-24 | By Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service

Second, Facebook is going to be accessible through Blackberries:
Update: Facebook teams up with RIM | InfoWorld | News | 2007-10-24 | By Stephen Lawson, IDG News Service

While the Microsoft deal is significant, it was the RIM deal that gave me something to think about. Facebook users are using blackberries. That means Facebook is growing up (demographically).

The winners of the annual EIBTM Worldwide Technology Watch were announced last week. SpotMe 2, a handheld networking and communication tool, won top honors. The runners-up included nTAG, eTouches, Jambo Networks, and Jot Event Messaging Systems.

Shown below: The SpotMe 2

Complete details at MeetingsNet.