Using the Social Media Firehose, which I built in order to listen to people talking about salesforce.com, I often happen across conversations that weren’t intended for me. Choosing whether or not to respond to these conversations, and how to respond to them, can be quite a challenge, as this NYTimes article on comcastcares covered today. Over time, I’ve developed some rules of thumb that may be useful to other social web enthusiasts.
- Try to imagine how startled the other person might be when you respond. It’s often easy to judge from the other conversations people are having, whether they are used to talking with strangers on the internet. Most people choose to be in denial about the open nature of the internet, so it helps your cause to not perturb their flimsy shells.
- If responding makes sense, but you feel that the other person will be startled, use a long introduction describing what you do and why you do it. Something on the lines of “My name is XYZ and I work at BigCorp. I try to proactively help people who’re having trouble with our services, so I run daily searches for anyone writing about our product on the internet. My searches brought your blog to my attention today…” would work nicely. The buffer of words helps soften the surprise. If you’re surprised by what they’ve written, say so – mutual surprise often has a way of resolving in laughter.
- Choose the medium you want to use carefully. Some people are pleasantly surprised when you respond to them with a personal email sent to an address they expose. Twitterers almost always appreciate replies, but don’t want you to start following them just because they tweeted about your brand once (I learnt this one the hard way). Tracking back someone who doesn’t even know they’re using a “blog” is just nuts.
- Never, ever use the words “monitor” or “overheard”
In the end, simply use your emotional & social intelligence. Try to put yourself in the context of where the other person is coming from. Not everyone thinks about the internet the way you do.
Categories: Marketing · Social Media · Web 2.0
Tagged: big brother, comcast, comcastcares, listening, marketing 2.0, nytimes, Social Media, social media marketing, social web, stalking
Speculation is still hot on whether or not Google will be acquiring Digg very soon. Hotter still is speculation on why in mighty tarnation Google would want to do that. As someone involved in a Digg-clone acquisition recently, here’s my 2 cents.
I think the algorithm is definitely part of it. But the people are going to be an important part too. What Google would be buying, if they do buy, is the ability to process direct, high frequency page ranking signals on a sustainable basis.
Links = Indirect, Slow Signals = Page Rank
Currently, Google ranks search results mostly on the basis of how other web pages link to a given page. Information about this linking behaviour (which is typically agnostic to the indirect effect it has on search results) provides Google with various “signals” that they can then use to sort search results. This is a ear-to-the-ground approach to understanding what’s going on in the web. This works pretty well for traditional search results.
Votes = Direct, Fast Signals = Digg algo
Digg works with a very different type of signals. When users vote on an article, they are explicitly trying to move it up to the home page. That is a very direct signal. This is a keys-to-the-castle approach, and it works particularly well for news. After all, you want your spys and messengers to have ready access to interrupt you with important news.
Props to Digg
The problem with explicit signals is that they are easy to game, as diggers keep re-discovering. The other problem with them is that they happen a lot within short bursts of time. So not only do you have to be good at filtering out malicious votes that are not based on the merit of the article, you also have to be able to do it in record time.
While we may debate on whether or not the current Digg algorithm is gameable, we have to acknowledge that it is the most sophisticated, evolved algorithm that addresses these issues at scale. But the algorithm itself may not survive the brutal onslaught of Google users. That’s why the Digg team is important. Their experience in reacting, almost in real time, to deal with suspicious voting patterns and significant new social dynamics is extraordinary. But here’s the kicker – when they do react, they are usually not acting as moderators and manually fixing things – they fix the algorithm to account for the new patterns of usage.
This combination of algorithm, the massive Digg community and the people who are intimately familiar with both, are what would make this worthwhile to Google.
Categories: Technology
Tagged: acquisition, algorithm, Digg, Google, page rank, rumors, Social Media, social search, speculation, Web 2.0
Through my Social Media Firehose, I happened to stumble upon a conversation that Marc Canter (a futurist trapped in an entrepreneur) said he had had over salesforce.com. He mentioned the force.com platform’s “lock in”, a topic to which I have given a considerable amount of thought. My conclusion is this: you can either have an undifferentiated but open platform, or you can have a “locked in” platform that offers unique capabilities.
Most recent platforms – the force.com platform-as-a-service, the Facebook platform, Apple’s iPhone platform and Google’s App Engine are often called “closed platforms.” This is because the code you write to leverage these platforms cannot be run as-is on other, “open” platforms, such as LAMP (are there any other ?).
Vigilance against portability issues is definitely a laudable geek virtue. Unfortunately, the concern is at odds with that other, even more laudable geek virtue – innovation. If you choose a platform based on what it is uniquely good at, and you exploit what is uniquely good about that platform, then your code becomes hard to port to any other platform.
The trick for platform makers, I think, is to make the platform so that you can use standardized protocols to access the generalized parts of a platform and use specialized code and skills to access the unique parts of it. And I believe we do this well at salesforce.com – take a gander at the web services API.
Categories: Technology
Tagged: force.com, lock in, platforms, salesforce.com, web development
Testing this new Tumblr-like theme on WordPress. BTW, the new blog URI is http://blog.kingsley2.com . I love hosted providers who’ll sub my domain – wordpress.com, tumblr.com etc.
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: blogging, test, themes
January 24, 2008 · 1 Comment
Seriously people. Have some respect.
Categories: Asides · Humor
Tagged: Benazir Bhutto, Nigerian Scammers, Pakistan, WTF
This NPR article gives me hope:
Samuel Aranda
Hotel maids don’t always realize their jobs qualify as exercise. When one group of overweight maids was told they exceeded the surgeon general’s guidelines for fitness, they started losing weight.
Now all I have to do is think myself a millionaire pimp. Here goes, hmmmmppp.
Categories: Humor
Tagged: fitness, health, hotel maids, Humor, idaho, millionaire, npr, pimp, placebo effect, potatoes, sinfest, studies
Categories: Asides
Tagged: 2008, new year
Wow, what a smart search engine:
So Salman Khan is more popular than salmonella, but less popular than say, Salma Hayek
Categories: Asides
December 13, 2007 · 1 Comment
Categories: Tagline
December 12, 2007 · 1 Comment
For long, I’ve conflated the personal and professional in this blog. But I think the time has come to end that. I resent not being able to touch on personal, but possibly controversial things and things that might make me look stupid. I never set out to be a serious blogger, and my terrible attempts at being one, to put it frankly, suck. So I’m looking for a place where I can talk freely without being identified with my professional persona. For many, this has turned out to be Facebook. But that’s not going to work for me because I want to own my trash. It looks likely that I will start another blog under another name. I’ll let some of you know it’s me. I’ll probably keep this space for public and professional stuff.
Categories: Asides
Living between the Mission and Castro neighborhoods of San Francisco is fun and fabulous. Unfortunately, the downsides lurk around every street corner. Yes, I’m talking about the stoners collecting signatures for some dopey scheme or the other on 16th and Valencia.
You can tell the type from the fact that they’re giving away free copies of “Socialism Today” in return for your valuable signature. I ran into one today who wanted to know if I wanted to “help stop the corporations from running the world”. It must have been a practiced speech because she was half way through her next sentence before she actually registered my reply, which was “No, I think the corporations are doing a great job. It’s the government that I’m unhappy with.” I hadn’t actually thought that her stare could get any more vacant, but it did.
Of course, it’s incomprehensible to think that anyone living in the Mission would hold anything other than left-liberal viewpoints. You can just picture the “does not compute” loop that talk like that incites. What gets me riled up though is less the assumption of liberal mores and more the patronizing condescension with which other views are treated.
Take for example the time I was stopped by someone running a signature campaign. The beneficiaries of the campaign were soldiers who refused to fight the war in Iraq and are being court-martialled. I told this dude that while I thought this was an admirable and brave action in support of a just cause, it would be neither if they didn’t face the consequences. And then he looks at me and says “well at least you support the cause, that’s a start.” So I told him to not fucking patronize me. They’re like fricking street corner Ann Coulters, so smug that they believe that the rest of us are just not evolved enough to share their superior understanding of the world.
So I tell them. It’s a complete waste of time, but I get some satisfaction when they stare at me, perplexed. My next target is the guy who’s campaigning for amnesty for illegal immigrants.
Categories: local · politics
September 7, 2007 · 1 Comment
There is not a single new iPod that comes in white. Not one. End of an era?
- Derek Powazek
Categories: None
From Moonwatcher:
… given the frictionless way in which we can process individual transactions it’s actually easier and cheaper for us to sell 1,000 $25 licenses than do a single $25,000 deal.So how to make a million dollars? Create something that can leverage the Internet to drive your transaction costs to near zero and is interesting enough that other people will promote it for you for free and compelling enough that people will pay for it.
Categories: None
Not that 
