Technology and geeky stuff Archives - Page 19 of 45

This delicate interconnected world

13 August, 2009 by sky Leave a Comment

At a dinner in London^[1] four weeks ago I was asked to introduce myself and in the process mention one of the things that I have hope for, related to the Web^[2]. Well it was too hard to think about hope, because I was overwhelmed by the little things I face every day that remind me of the fragility of this precious thing that we call the Internet.

Every day some client or other says “my site is so slow, what’s wrong?”
Outages (last week we had a router go down and a dozen sites were unavailable for 12 hours)
Undersea cables
Satellite communications subject to sunspot and other disruptions
Routing snarls (YouTube and Pakistan)
The sheer volume of indecent-to-pornographic spam
The unreliability of email
Spoofing and attacks against everyone
Bandwidth challenges – you just can’t count on getting enough bandwidth when you’re on the road
Hey, Sky, why doesn’t this program (MS Word, Excel, etc.) work? What key do I press to make this happen?

A friend, Greg Walton, reminded us a few years ago that the severing of just a few undersea cables would cause the Internet to grind to a halt. I’ll research those connections and put up a short article about it, but here’s a preview – a cable connecting the west coast of Africa has been damaged and has caused critical disruptions.

[1] During Traveling Geeks 2009.
[2] They said “the Web” but I always talk about the Internet as a whole because the World Wide Web is only a portion of the whole big transport medium. Otherwise you lose the impact of email (which is huge) and Twitter (SMS) and lots of other services that ride the Internet but are only peripherally involved with the Web.

Tech recap from Traveling Geeks

3 August, 2009 by sky Leave a Comment

JD Lasica interviewed me (for socialmedia.biz) about some of the tech we used on the Traveling Geeks trip to London. Topics covered are connectivity using cellular modems (provided by BT), the FeedWordPress plug-in, Flip (Mino and Ultra) video cameras, video streaming (on Nokia n79 using kyte.com), Google Latitude…

You can download and use Google Latitude in the US, but you can’t download Google Latitude in the UK because it is “voluntarily” blocked by BT for privacy reasons (it discloses your location to others).

I just can’t say enough about how much use I get out of the little Flip MinoHD and UltraHD video cameras. I use them for all of my interviews now, and for shooting “trailers” to serve as proposals for projects.

My favorite part of the interview is when I wax poetic about the fact that the technology actually worked while we were on the road. I was really expecting much of it to fail. We really have a wired and wireless world today!

Reaching Advocates and Influencers

23 July, 2009 by sky Leave a Comment

Rather than blasting out advertising indiscriminately to everyone, firms are finding they can target individuals who like their brand and can influence others to see the brand more positively. There are more and more ways to find out who your brand’s advocates and influencers are. That’s because software is now tying the data together so we can actively decide how to reach and, more importantly interact with, our passionate customers. Social media allow us to openly and transparently interact with and have conversations with our customers.

Susan Bratton, JD Lasica, Renee Blodgett and Robert Scoble discuss these aspects of marketing and customer relations in this roundtable in Cambridge as a part of Traveling Geeks 2009.

Companies must go where their customers are

22 July, 2009 by sky 1 Comment

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).

Social Media forces immediacy of customer support

22 July, 2009 by sky 2 Comments

A theme that came up again and again during our London/Cambridge Traveling Geeks tour was that social media, and especially those that provide “immediate” access to company representatives (such as Twitter), are really changing not only how fast a company can respond to customer questions and problems, but are relocating (dislocating?) where the control of the customer relationship resides within many companies. Twitter provides 24/7 access to company representatives (if they’re actually online), and it shifts the decision point or the point at which the company takes responsibility for a problem, outward from the PR department and “C-level” executives (CEO etc.) to the actual front lines where the company’s employees are talking with the customers! Here’s what Robert Scoble said about this in a roundtable held in Cambridge on Friday. The sponsor of this session, Omobono, also has put up a page about the Traveling Geeks visit.