Sky’s Blog

The Traveling Geeks are at it again. This time the destination is Paris for LeWeb and some other tech meetings.

Organizing a tour for 15 geeks was a nightmarish task for TG Co-Founder Renee Blodgett, who worked for weeks to put this one together – much shorter lead time than for previous tours. And her co-organizers Eliane Fiolet and Phil Jeudy, plus two web developers, did a heroic job.

The online developers were tasked with creating the new web site, but I came in for the last few weeks to preside over one of my (current) specialties -  ensuring that we can mash information together in real time. Here’s what it required and what I learned: (continue reading…)

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Companies are using social media to “be where their customers are.” In this panel, sponsored by Omobono and East of England International, up in Cambridge on Friday, Susan Bratton talks about this important change of orientation which more and more companies are putting into practice.

Earlier, in London, some of us had similar conversations with companies who are implementing social media strategies to be in closer touch with their customers. One of the companies I spoke with, in a conversation held under Chatham House Rule (meaning “not for attribution” or “off the record” in US press terminology), the head of customer support told me he had opened a Twitter account, reviews around 500 tweets a day, and helps between 10 and 50 dissatisfied customers resolve problems they’d been having with his company. This apparently takes him only a small amount of time (an hour or two, from what he said) and generates a huge amount of goodwill at very low cost, for his company.

I’ve been advising my clients for at least the past year to not worry about “attracting eyeballs to their web site” but instead to focus on making there presence felt “wherever the customer lives online.” In the case of my customers this means setting up Facebook fan pages and Twitter accounts, and then using those to engage in genuine conversations with customers – not one-way marketing-speak.

Oops, almost forgot – listen to what Susan has to say about all of this!

She calls it Social Influence Marketing and it has three core components: 1) Social Listening; 2) Participation; 3) “Appvertising” (Give-to-get).

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The Washington Post (byline Ariana Eunjung Cha, Washington Post Foreign Service) reports that several authoritarian governments, including those of China, Cuba and Myanmar (Burma) are censoring in whole or in part, news of the strife that has followed the Iranian elections. Probably for fear that people living under the control of their regimes will get the message and understand that modern viral (social) media have the potential to spread dissent much farther than it ever might have gotten before, in eras when media publication could be held tightly in check.

Of course this is a fundamental human tendency – to do things we’ve seen done elsewhere. In criminology it’s called “copycat crimes.” And certainly these regimes consider those who do this kind of thing to be criminals.

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For my friends in the UK, if you life or work in London you might like to join the 12 Traveling Geeks (includes me) who will be at a tweet-up at Juju in London on Sunday evening July 5th (2009).

A tweetup (like “meetup”) is a face-to-face meeting of people who previously only knew each other through Twitter. For some of the well-known geeks, like Robert Scoble, who has over 95,000 followers on Twitter, this could be a big thing – Robert might be able to fill the room just with his own followers who happen to be in London that night.

Where I stand right now, at 165 followers, maybe a couple of you will know someone who’d like to meet the geeks – reserve a place in advance online.

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