The heart of a community

August 25, 2008 in social media | 2 comments

Forums, or discussion boards are one of the oldest types of communication and collaboration on the internet.  This does not mean that it is an aging and irrelevant form of social meadia though.  I was talking to a friend of mine, Brian Ellefritz, about the history and effectiveness of forums, and it is interesting to see that they are still widely popular on sites that have a large community and following.  Forums allow anyone to join in on conversation or start discussions.  In my opinion there is something about forums that is addictive.  The ability to tap the minds of multiple people on a subject is exhilerating and gratifying when solutions are presented and problems are solved.  The main question is whether or not a particular site can be a feeding ground for community forums.  The answer for this has always been a bit vague in my mind as a website owner of a couple of sites.  Number one, I think the site has to already be getting large amount of visitors, and secondly, the site has to niche enough for people to feel that they can go into a discussion and know that there will be others who are knowledgable on a particular subject.

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Inconvenience your audience to persuade

August 23, 2008 in marketing | No comments

I’ve just started reading “Yes!  50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive” and so far it is very interesting.  One of the first couple of chapters in the book describes how inconveniencing your audience can increase your persuasiveness.  An example the book gives is one where a commercial changes the call to action line from “call now our operators are waiting” to “if the lines are busy call again.”  I think in certain situations this is true, and others not so much.  I recently heard about a sneaker head shop that is very discrete and hidden in the Bronx.  The appearance of the outside said grocery with miscellaneous kitchen and housewares goods on display.  The word of mouth worked like a charm in this situation.  The difficult part is deciding how much inconvenience should be present.

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Yahoo pipes

August 20, 2008 in social media | 2 comments

Since working on a social media plan for my group here at Cisco, I’ve been exploring all the options for searching and aggregating key words into a single place.  Tools such as google alerts, technorati, alltop, and the old fasioned rss feeds are all great tools and I use them frequently, but I love yahoo pipes.  For those of you who don’t know what yahoo pipes is, it is a web app that aggregates information from accross the web into one place.  For example I have created a pipe that searches accross Q&A type forums such as yahoo answers and linkedIn answers for specific key words.  It then brings in all questions and dicussions according to my filters.  There is really so much you can do with this excellent app, and I’m only really at the tip of the ice berg.  One thing I love about pipes is the potential for customization.  There is a bit of a learning curve and at first glance, it may look very intimidating and I think this is the reason why it hasn’t really taken off.  I found it best to look at other people’s saved pipes and make changes best fit for your purposes.

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Social Media in Plain English

August 19, 2008 in social media | No comments

I love the plain English videos. Lee Lefever uses very simple paper hand drawn icons and graphics with an excellent clear voice to break down subjects into a very understandable terms. Here is the social media video.

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Social media releases

August 19, 2008 in cisco, social media | No comments

Cisco recently hosted a round table discussion around PCI/data security with retail and health industry experts.  The key points of discussion were around real-world business challenges, PCI’s position to managing compliance.  Yadda yadda  (credit George Costanza).  The social media seemed to be an rss feed and a series of youtube videos that covered the discussion.   My question is your opinion of an ideal social media release?  Is it a combination of all posibilites or is it just a select few that will target a specific audience?  In my opinion I believe it is better to cover a broader range of mediums to have the possibility of being viral among a larger group of people no matter the interest.  There are many times that I will come across a certain blog post that looks interesting to me only because of the way it is being presented and the purpose of eye candy.  It guess this all goes back to core of marketing techniques…just some food for thought.

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Balsamiq for Mockups

August 18, 2008 in social media | No comments

I found a great tool this morning for creating mockups.  Balsamiq Mockup offers a free flash version and a $79 dollar desktop version.  The program is easy and quick and can be especially useful for those that want to get their group or company on the social media bandwagon and propose or investigate different possibilities.  Check it out.  I’ll definitely be using this product for some of my projects.

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Tweetburner Stats for Business

August 15, 2008 in social media | No comments

I found a great web app called Tweetburner for keeping track of how many clicks your twurls are generating.  We all know that one way conversations are frowned upon in the social media community, but for purposes such as press releases or website updates it helps to see how effective or interesting your twitter titles are to your audience.

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Facebook Groups for IT?

August 14, 2008 in social media | 1 comment

I’ve been doing quite a bit of research on how to effectively utilize a facebook group in a social media plan at Cisco.  Being a group at Cisco that is all about giving best practices, case studies, and experiences in IT I’m still trying to decide it would be worth giving a try.  Another group at Cisco has effectively created a group that targets the Internet uber users.  They created a calendar that scheduled each and every new post of information a few months in advance.  For right now, I’m not sure our team will be as open and willing to dedicate the resources to a project like this…Any thoughts or recommendations on how to successfully launch a facebook group for those interested in IT?

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Groundswell Post Method

August 14, 2008 in social media | No comments

I’ve been looking into the POST method from the book Groundswell by Charlene Li and Josh Bernof to get a social media marketing plan going for my Cisco group.

P is People.  Finding your target audience.

O is objectives.  What do you want to get out of the plan?

S is Strategy. How to go about achieving your objectives.

T is Technology. Your medium of choice.

I feel like I’ve gone through the first three steps thoroughly, but where I’m stuck is the technology part.  I’ve been using tools such as LinkedIn answers and Twitter.  So far Twitter seems to be most effective and promising.  I’m not really sure how effective LinkedIn will be for us in the end.  I feel like I’m spending quite a bit of time researching and testing different tools only to feel unsatisfied in the end.  Any recommendations for a group that is information driven?

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Twitter Metrics

August 14, 2008 in social media | 1 comment

After recently taking the dive into twitter for a social media marketing tool in my group at Cisco, there was some discussion on how we can measure our success as well as our deliverables.  Twittercounter.com helps us do exactly this.  It’s all about follower count and growth.  It gives both a nice bar graph along with predictions for the following month.  Those of you who need something to measure your twitter account by, this is the perfect solution.

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