Until someone invents something new (and I’m sure it’s already being done) social media is the best communication tool we’ve got going for us. If you don’t believe it, you might be interested in how our world looks according to Facebook.

As part of the hack-a-thon series of events Facebook engineers came up with Project Palantir (’that-which-looks-far-away’ or ‘one that sees from afar’ for Lord of the Rings buffs). The project allows us to visualize Facebook data as it appears across the globe.
The team created a video of the project where each action is geolocated and visualized using “java and open source jme framework.” Not only can you see individual actions of facebook users, but interactions such as pokes, wall postings, and friend requests.

Poking, friending, and posting

According to facebook blogger Dan Rose, “Over 100,000 small businesses now have their own Pages on facebook.” Dan recently shared the story of a specialty chocolate store, TCHO, owned by Wired Magazine founder Louis Rossetto in San Francisco. ”Within 24 hours of creating a Facebook Page, TCHO already had dozens of fans on the site.”

And as the fourth most visited sight in the world with over 120 million active users, if you don’t have a facebook page that highlights your product or services, now might be a good time to get one. Like we’ve mentioned in previous posts, many companies are increasing on-line presence during this economic crunch. Moving into social media is a cheap and easy way to accomplish this.

Some of this action could be yours.

I’m worried that in the not-to-distant future, regular people will lose interest in social media sites like Facebook and Myspace and we’ll only be left with companies talking to each other. But for now social media sites could be the best low-cost place to reach customers you never knew you had.

Watch the entire Palantir Project video demonstrated by Facebook engineer, Jack Lindamood on the Facebook blog.

Want an easy way to hear what all your competitors are talking about? Think of the Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki as a dedicated channel for listening in on what they are saying and what customers are saying back. It’s also a good place to get free advice on what makes a good company blog and what doesn’t.

The Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki started as an idea of Wired Magazine’s Chris Anderson back in 2005. He wondered why some companies were blogging and some weren’t. One theory he and fellow tech expert Doc Searls were toying with was if companies started blogging as a last ditch effort to save a sinking ship. So they began compiling a list of Fortune 500 company blogs they defined as “active public blogs by company employees about the company and/or its products” to compare against the companies’ previous 12-month share performance. They also wanted to see if blogging made a difference in performance moving forward. In October 2007 their wiki combined with the Fortune 500 Blog Project Wiki (“another wiki project that sought to review all the Fortune 500 companies that blog”) in an effort to expand both projects. You can read the whole story on Chris Anderson’s blog.

In the early days of the wiki a scant 4% of F500 companies were blogging. Though they still lag way behind the Inc. 500 (blogging at a rate of 39% according to a recent study), the Fortune 500 Business Blog wiki has tracked an increase to 12.8%  of F500 companies blogging by November15, 2008.

At Southwest Airlines interns are cool

So F500 companies are starting to catch up for all the obvious reasons, but their blogging approaches vary greatly. Some use lots of widgets and links to other cool tools (like twitter and flickr) and some don’t. Some get lots of comments and some get none. Some blogs even think interns are cool and let them blog right along with marketing managers and CEOs.

You might think nothing is more uncool than an F500 company. I have visions of guys in suits running around placating stock holders, too. But you might be surprised by what they are doing on their blogs and what types of communications they dispatch. It’s not all mea culpa posts about product recalls and poor customer service. Knowing what makes for good F500  blogging (if you don’t already) is a good way to know what’s good for our own blogs. After all, they remain on the F500 list for some reason.

There are lots of reasons to visit the Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki that I will write about in a future post. But one of the biggest reasons is that visiting often can help you make your own blog better. It’s the only place (that I know of) where F500 blogs are viewable from one location, are always current, and are routinely reviewed by other bloggers. So you can easily pick from any of the more than 130 blogs listed (companies such as Microsoft and IBM have multiple blogs) and do some informal research.  See what pulls you in and makes you want to stay for a while. What are the posts talking about? Are they all about product-speak? Which blogs are actively engaging in conversation? What kind of feedback are they getting from your mutual (or potential) customers?

While you are on the wiki take some time to read the assembly of reviews by other bloggers. The ones I read were thoughtful, constructive, and use what reviewers call “businessandblogging.com’s methodology for reviewing companies.” Though I couldn’t find reference to the methodology on the businessandblogging.com web site, it apparently rates blogs according to ease of finding, frequency of posts, engaging and relevant writing, and perceived honesty, among other things.

A good example of one review discusses the Southwest Airlines blog, Nuts about Southwest. Not only is Southwest blogging, they are Twittering, Flickring, YouTubing, Linking In and Facebooking.

You might think that’s overkill for an airline blog. Like Tony Chung said in his article last week, “Nobody wants to read a stupid blog.” And who would read and airline blog? Apparently a lot of people. Southwest consistently has several comments on each post. So they must be doing something right. You can read a review by Mack Collier at The Viral Garden to see what else they (or you) might be doing right.

Uh, BTW, that's a dumb name

In some cases even if the company is talking, no one is talking back much. But at least they are trying to engage in the conversation. For example Johnson & Johnson’s blog, JNJ BTW (Am I the only own who thinks that’s a dumb name?) has some interesting posts, but they rarely get any comments. Is that because they rarely reply to them when they do come in? You can read a review by Richard Young on his Whole Nine Yards blog.

Fortune 500 companies couldn’t ask for better, free, feedback on their blogs than this. Really, they should have to pay for it, and maybe they will some day, but that’s not the intent of the wiki. In the meantime the rest of us can use it for our own amateur research. Being better able to see what is or isn’t working on other blogs gives us some precious insight into what may or may not work on our own.

Have you ever stopped to think about all the signs, infrastructure, access, and coordination it takes just to get people to work each day in a major city? World Usability Day gives us a chance to do just that. The day itself was Thursday November 13. I hadn’t stopped on that day to take notice of what the day is all about so I thought I’d take some time now to look into it.

The Usability Professionals Association (UPA) created the initiative of taking a day a year to increase awareness and support making transportation easier and safer to use while also supporting a more energy friendly approach for our environment.

I work in software, so most of my usability focus is on user interfaces on a computer including desktop applications, web applications, and website usability. I was fascinated to think instead about the usabilty of transportation this year. Being a mom of young children and driving a stroller all around town has opened my eyes many times to the difficulties of using wheels for your ambulation rather than your stair-climbing legs. Visiting the Texas state capital in Austin with my two kids involves some lifting and struggle with the stroller since I don’t want to use the retro-fitted wheelchair ramp for my 28-pound two year old. But it does give me some limited perspective so I immediately thought of accessibility for transportation usability.

Another area of making transportation friendly to both users and the environment is considering your carbon footprint while traveling. I use Dopplr to share my trips with others, and just this year they integrated a web application that calculates and displays your carbon footprint. Somehow my trip to Philadelphia in June outpaces my driving trip to Houston and flying trip to Columbus this month. One trip was for business and another for family, but it is helpful to compare the two months. With the information in front of me, I can choose to ride my bike to work to make up the difference.

Another aspect of World Usability Day and Transportation is signage. Let’s take for example the failure of the signage on this London Bus - Break Glass for Hammer next to Use Hammer to Break Glass. I guess the moral of the story is to always travel with a hammer.

It seems a little unfair to usability professionals to take a day that might points out the difficulties and foibles of travel and usability. But awareness is a good start, and I hope your holiday travel plans involve useful signs, accessible paths, and a low carbon footprint.

I was reading SEObook’s blog regarding marketing lessons from Google and particularly enjoyed the suggestion that you should strive to “become a verb.”  Google, of course, has entered the vernacular as almost synonymous with search engine.  And the act of “Googling” is simply searching for things on Google. Thus Google has become a verb.

Therefore, it was with great excitement that I learned the other day that we had been “Duo-ed” Or said differently, somebody was “Duo-ing” us. OK, it doesn’t have the same ring as “Googling” but the concept is the same.  If mimicry is the highest form of flattery, certainly having someone bid on your firm name in search engines is second highest in the flattery department.

We have the greatest regard for Greenfield Belser, a leading branding and design firm in Washington, D.C. In fact, we are even working jointly with them on a web project. Greenfield Belser has chosen to use Google AdWords to bid on our firm name. Eight years ago when we entered the same law firm marketing arena in which they compete, I doubt that we were a blip on their radar. Today they are paying hard coin to be found when people are searching for us. We’ve been “Duo-ed.” We’ve become a verb. Watch out Google, here we come.

A blogging or social media policy describes how an employee or volunteer should represent themselves and the organization online. It also describes whose time and whose equipment may be used for blogging or other social media activities, and it also clarifies when someone is representing themselves, and when they are representing an organization. I’ve written blog entries based on a corporate policy at BMC Software, and it was helpful to know what were the expectations for my time investment and also where privacy lines could be drawn.

Many blogging policies are still either non-existent or in infancy, yet they can help your organization free up employees or volunteers to blog about their passions and start real conversations. Easter Seals, a non-profit organization whose goal is to help people with disabilities achieve more independence, has a policy that encompasses all social media representation. In fact, it is called the Internet Public Discourse Policy and I first found it reading Beth Kanter’s blog where she has a blog entry that includes a copy of the Easter Seals Internet Public Discourse Policy. While blogging policies are important, in fact, these are Public Relations and publications policies, it’s just that blogging makes every one a journalist of sorts and publishing is faster than ever.

I think this example is a really good one for its entirety and completeness, and also for the transparency it encourages while still protecting the heart of the goals of the organization. It also tells people what the main goals are for outreach through the tools the Internet offers, which I think helps focus the efforts.

Protection of image and brand is an important part of a blogging policy. While the employee needs to feel protected, the organization should also feel like it can protect its brand. It’s certainly a balancing act. As Blue Avocado points out in, “What Should We Do About an Employee’s Outrageous Blog?”

Employee blogging could be deemed protected speech under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) or whistleblower laws. The NLRA allows employees to discuss the terms and conditions of employment with the purpose of engaging in collective action to change them.

The Easter Seals example is so down-to-earth, well-written, and pragmatic. It really shines. Some of the highlights include “Be Smart. Write What You Know. Work Matters.” This is an organization that really “gets it” and their policy reflects that. How’s your public discourse policy looking? Could it use a Blogging update? We’d love to hear your stories as well.

What happens when cyberspace laws don’t reach far enough to save us from ourselves? Laws can protect us from litigation and hefty settlements, but they can’t keep us from losing customers because we let the idea of “engaging readers in a conversation” go too far. That’s our responsibility. So how do we know what is okay to post on our sites and what isn’t?

It seems the debate over ownership and liability regarding third party content is going to rage on forever. Defendants like eBay and others are taking refuge in the so called “safe harbor” immunity offered under the section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. But this doesn’t seem to stop anyone from filing costly law suits anyway. So it’s no wonder companies are being more cautious about what they allow on their sites. Some organizations have resorted to employing a team of lawyers and content moderators to protect their sites from potential liability. Who can blame them?

Freedom of speech doesn’t mean it’s a good idea for people to go around saying anything that pops into their heads. Didn’t we get into enough trouble for that in grade school? Nor should we necessarily use our company blogs and forums as a place for exerting First Amendment rights–unless, of course, you are a First Amendment rights web site. Why let controversy distract everyone from what you are really trying to accomplish?

What are others doing to mitigate the problem?

Some highly visible sites have taken steps to assure this doesn’t happen. A partnership between YouTube and PBS launched a video your vote, social media site last summer that encouraged people to document their voting experience and post it to the site.The goal was to document voting processes and experiences, not actual votes. They were in no way trying to coerce voters.

Video your vote took great pains to inform users that in many states taking cameras into the booth is illegal, and posted a link to Citizen’s Media Law Project, so amateur videographers could check on their own state laws. The site also posted some video your vote basic rules of decency. But some contributors were filming themselves holding up marked ballots and pulling levers.

To discourage these kinds of posts, Video your vote went even one step further. An AP story reports they also checked video contributions to make sure they were legal:

YouTube spokesman Aaron Ferstman said PBS is checking videos in the “Video Your Vote” section to make sure they’re from a state where creating a video is legal. “That said, it’s in the hands of the voter to know what’s legal and what’s not in their area,” said Ferstman.

In another highly public instance, on November 6, craigslist signed an agreement with 40 States Attorneys General to “prevent illegal activity and improve safety” of its online community even though a US Court of Appeals earlier this year ruled that craigslist wasn’t liable for discriminatory adds place on the site. Apparently there are limits to how far some companies are willing to go to protect human traffickers and other despicable criminals and at the same time retain its own credibility. A press release posted on the craigslist blog shares with readers some of the steps they have taken, including:

“craigslist is constantly working to improve its existing tools for enforcing its terms of use. In this regard, the company has continued to refine its protocols for blocking inappropriate postings and advertisements for illegal services. In addition, a flagging system accompanies each ad, so that inappropriate content can be identified by users for quick removal. craigslist has also implemented the industry standard PICS rating system for tagging adult content, to facilitate parental screening software on home computers.”

So, it seems taking a little preventive action could save you from lots of problems later (as craigslist nearly found out).

What can we do?

Organizations need to consider carefully what price they are willing to pay for moderating (or not moderating) comments and postings on sites they build. If you are a small company or the lone blogger for your boss, aside from employing that team of lawyers and content moderators, how do you decide what kinds of content to allow on your blog or forums? You can try posting “guidelines for posting comments,” but those go largely ignored.

First, talk to a lawyer. Get a referral from your corporate lawyer (You do have one, don’t you?) for someone who practices Cyber law from an accredited university. After all, they know the law, and are familiar with current decisions that could affect your organization.

But the law only goes so far. It’s not illegal (at this point, anyway) to use four-letter words on your blog or web site, nor to post comments that contain them. It’s also not illegal to post sexualized photos or gory images. But again, just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. Along with following the advice of your cyber lawyer, the best way to determine the more subtle do’s and don’ts of posts and comments is the same thing your high school composition teacher always said. Know your audience.

Know your audience

If your web site primarily attracts a smarmy under-thirty crowd, then allowing someone to post a comment saying “Your product is F’n great,” might be okay. But if you sell diabetic supplies to seniors or church supplies to pastors, it’s probably not. If you’re trying to attract a family audience, it’s probably best to refrain from the sex and gore.

Am I making generalizations? Sure. Some pastors user four-letter words. Some families let their kids watch gore. But unless you have a very small and specific customer base, your web audience, or the new audience you are trying to reach, is determined by demographics, not individual behaviors. Communications based on customer behavior data are best saved for targeted email blasts, and other direct marketing efforts. In other words, you have to write for your audience, but keep it broad.

In the cyber world we can’t know each customer intimately like we do when calling on them in person. There’s no way to know how to monitor our words or behaviors by reading body language or facial expressions. It’s tempting to allow controversial comments and posts on our sites and hope they encourage conversation (and increase Google presence), but not at the risk of losing important customers. Again, why let controversy distract your users from what you are really trying to accomplish. Most people who don’t like something they see on our web site will never write in to let us know, they’ll just stop buying.

I’m interested in what others’ experiences have been with this and what types of efforts you or your company are making to protect your credibility when it comes to comments and forums.

Amazon just announced CloudFront, a content delivery network that relies upon their amazing S3 storage product. S3 is used as the origin server and Amazon will then elastically distribute content to edge servers that are located in your user’s locale. Plans are in place for the US, Europe, Hong Kong and Japan.

Another amazing product from Amazon that is likely to shake up a number of markets.

Duo uses a persona-based approach to website designs - which should help answer questions like, “Are potential clients or current clients the most common website visitor and your target for content?” Personas help designers and programmers visualize real people reading and acting on the content they find on a website. But after the design is done and the website is implemented, you have to know what your visitors are doing, how long they’re spending doing that, and whether your website is efficiently “converting” the behavior you want to see - buying a product, signing up for a class, or connecting with other like-minded individuals. So you constantly monitor your website to answer the questions related to your personas’ behaviors.

Visitorville is a visual website metrics tool that lets you go beyond just the numbers - “hits” don’t provide enough inforomation for you to know how your site is being used. But using a helicopter to circle your Very Important People around your website virtually, now that is above and beyond your usual website metrics tool.

Which pages are the most visited? Which personas visit those specific pages most often and how long does it take them to accomplish their goals? You can visualize people coming and going in buses, with traffic in buses and people that look like the Sims (in the 2D view) and they also offer a 3D view that looks like Second Life. The screen shots are really amazing and you can wow your friends and clients alike by showing them around your website in a way they’ve likely never envisioned it before.

I get a little bit creeped out sometimes by MyBlogLog displaying my profile picture while I’m viewing a blog. Every time I read a certain blog and it shows “user from Austin, TX” on a map or list of some sort, I wonder if anyone knows it’s me and if that matters.

Yet, despite my own trepidation and refusal to use such widgets on my site, I know bloggers who find it great fun and a motivator to keep writing. Using Feedjit as an embedded widget on your blog or website may help other website visitors as they browse, who knows?

What are your thoughts? Is it useful and motivating or simply too much information to have these visual methods for watching your web traffic?

There’s more than one great mash-up tool out there, but only one I’ve found that a “regular” person can use. It’s made for kids, but it’s genius is its simplicity. I know I’m the slow one in class. I was late catching on to Twitter, and now I can’t seem to get Pipes. Anne Gentle wrote a great post last week on Pipes and some interesting and useful mash-ups created by techier people than I.  But I’d really like to connect some pipes of my own. Couldn’t someone invent a  mash-up tool for grown-ups that is easy and intuitive?

I’m not a programmer, so even though some claim Pipes is easy to use I can’t seem to master it. I tried to create a pipe using the TMZ celebrity feud RSS feed and the LAPD crime map just to see if  I could come up with something, but I couldn’t figure out how to create a pipe output. I’m sure I could if I wanted to spend a lot of time wading through help files and video clips, but I don’t.

Pipes disconnected

Really, that’s what it’s about for me. I want the tool—all tools really–to be intuitive, without a lot of how-to instructions. Though I sometimes write user manuals for a living, I don’t necessarily want to read them before I can use the product. I want the software, gadget, device, or tool to work when I pick it up and turn it on.  If I can figure out how to set the time and date, upload some photos, or hammer it together without a lengthy explanation, I’m in love. If not, I don’t want to be bothered.

You see, I am a typical user.  And I always feel compelled to speak on behalf of other typical users. I’m not stupid, just busy.  Several months ago I was complaining about Pipes to my friend Scott. He told me about Microsoft Popfly, described as Pipes for mere mortals by Jack Schofield on The Guardian technology blog when it was released in its Alpha version in May 2007.

It looks like an advance on Yahoo Pipes in being much prettier, more powerful and easier to use… but it’s still far from finished.

Now that Popfly is in its Beta version I’m still not convinced it’s any better than Pipes. Sure it’s drag and drop—a huge improvement over Pipes’ Visio-like network of  boxes and connectors—but I still can use it.

I was thinking this whole idea of mash-up just wasn’t for me. Until . . . that is. . . my six-year-old nephew came over. He begged me to get on the Transformer’s web site with him to look at toys.  We looked at toys, we played games and . . . we created mash-up. Hasbro.com has a web site for kids and grown-ups (like me) who happen to think cars that morph into dinosaurs or military vehicles is both plausible and cool.

And they have a  Transformers video mash-up tool that is both intuitive and fun.  It has a one-page graphic illustration of how-to-use. Did you hear me? One page!

One page how-to

But you don’t really need it. You can see how to use it without any explanation. Grab a video clip—drag it to the video track. Need a laser gun sound effect? Drag it onto the SFX track and align it with Optimus Prime hitting Megatron with his blaster. Take a metal-sounding sound track and back up the whole thing. Then play it over and over, save it, email it to yourself or a  friend, or send it to Hasbro for posting. It’s that easy.

Though our video project didn’t get posted to the site, check out some others made by a kid or a  regular grown up like me—then go to the Transformer Video Mash-Up page and try it yourself. It’s the most fun you’ve likely had in a while on a rainy afternoon. Send us your video if you want. And if anyone can figure out how to mash the TMZ celebrity feud feed with the LAPD crime map, send me that one too.

Read the rest of this entry »

When I’m not pondering the status of the Internet I help a graphic designer friend by writing code for her clients’ websites. One of our clients owns a hip and trendy spa that marries a massage clinic with a gallery featuring work created by local artists. As I spoke with this client, I discovered that this was more than a business for her. It is a reflection of her passion for wellness, a holistic sense of being.

In addition to her knowledge of the musculoskeletal systems she treated, she considers artwork to be a form of therapy that provides healing for the mind. When she talked about her clinic, her passion was contagious. Fairly soon I began to see the world through her eyes, and started to want what she wanted: for the world to experience total wellness.

Our conversation developed along the lines that she should capture these thoughts and release them on her website as a blog. I suggested this to the graphic designer, who immediately kiboshed this idea, saying, “When I visit a website to read about a spa, I don’t want to read a stupid blog.” So that was the end of that. I promised myself that I would not let this die.

Maybe your business isn’t a massage clinic, but you are probably as passionate about the heart of your business as my client is about hers. I’m not talking about what you do. I’m talking about your business being an extension of who you are. For your business, I believe a blog is the answer. But not a stupid blog.

Why a Blog?

When I told the graphic designer that we should incorporate a blog, her first thoughts were that it would be a collection of meaningless posts amounting to nothing more than naval gazing. I explained that she described “Twitter”, and that a blog doesn’t have to be like that. I’m sure she also thought about how managed blogs on blogspot.com and wordpress.com don’t give users explicit control over the layouts.

A blog engine is a content management system (CMS) that provides the simplest means for content entry and publishing on the planet. Engines differ in scope of features, but most users would find it easy to enter and edit articles, and installing the software on your own web host provides the ability to customize your page layouts. Most engines provide a means to install plugins and widgets that extend the functionality of the blog, adding really cool features that average website users would never have thought possible to include on their own sites.

What Do I Blog About?

My intent is not to convince you to use your blog as a marketing tool, which is the most common use for a blog after random sputtering, but rather an online repository of informational articles, discussions of subjects of interest, news and notes, and in the case of my spa friend, upcoming events and reviews of past events at the clinic.

My spa friend considers herself a “wellness practitioner”, and could write about the role ergonomics, diet, meditation, and regular treatment play in maintaining wellness. Also, their esthetician is passionate about using organic products in her treatments.  If they didn’t feel confident about writing their entries, I could have written the articles for them based on our discussions about what they were interested in.

Likewise, there are aspects of your business that you find work well, and others that are more challenging. You could use blogging as a means to elicit discussion in your search for a solution. Since I started my multifarious blogs, my topics ranged from the foibles in setting up my Tablet PC, coding websites to be compatible with the Mac, and most recently, my struggles learning to code using the ExtJS JavaScript framework. The last post elicited a comment from the development team, which gave me enough hope to continue pushing through.

How Can Blogs Help My Business?

While the impression is that blogs are a one-way, “push” communication mechanism, blogs are designed to be conversations. News sites post articles about recent events (hello—that’s a blog entry) and other users respond to that entry by posting comments. The most controversial articles incite discussion between comment writers themselves, and that adds new value to the existing content on your page. Now, instead of only reading your post on the wonders of caffeine to stimulate your dreams in sleep, readers can participate in the ensuing discussion, more than likely quoting studies of the effect of caffeine on the nervous system, the loss of REM stage activity, et cetera.

The reader community improves the quality of your content, and suddenly, your post takes on a life of its own.

If you don’t feel like you have the time nor the talent to write the quantity of quality entries you want to see on your site, you can hire content creation specialists who can blog for you. You can work out in your deal if the work is meant to be in your voice, or if the writer will receive public credit for their work. Several such services exist, and many content management specialists will contract out to them.

Frequent blog posts of consistent information quality also help your business by adding to the content from your site indexed by search engines.  Your site’s page rank is driven first by popularity—the number of external pages that link to your site, and then by currency—how recent the pages were most updated? Content quality is rated by relevance and keyword frequency—the number of pages within your site that emphasize the same subject matter.

Search engine algorithms are actually a lot more complicated than that, and change often. However the basic rule still applies: websites that contain well-written, quality content, properly structured for machines to read and index well, supported by accurate keywords and summary descriptions, rank higher in search engine indexes. While it’s not a good practice to try and fool Google, it is possible to use blog software to create a site with valuable content that drives your site to the top of the search engine index for your chosen subject matter.

And that can no way be considered a stupid blog.