Darren's blog

Twitter and the Usefulness of Real Time Social Networks

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 23:39:50 -0400

I don't feel the same way about Twitter as I do about my blog. If I don't get a chance to, uh, tweet for a couple of days, I don't feel an itch to get back at it. I'm in Twitter because, as my colleague once put it, "it's an excellent lens for focusing attention". These days, I can't not be in Twitter. In a year, I'll be saying that about some other tool, no doubt.

That said, Twitter sure is handy for solving tiny, localized problems. For example, today I asked my tweeps (and don't get me started on the language around Twitter) three questions, and each one was well-answered:

What's your preferred local ISP? I got two quick votes for Retrix.
Where, aside from Future Shop, could I order an external hard drive online from a Canadian Vendor? I probably got ten responses, and most of them were for NCIX. They're reputable, but pretty geeky.
What's up with the live, online feed for the Canucks game? I had some browser troubleshooting to do there--others verified on Twitter that it was "working for them".

We need to continue to be skeptical about the value and distraction effect of these always-on and always-connected tools. Still, they can prove handy if you've got a problem (and particularly a geeky problem) to solve.

Everybody Loves Lists

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 16:48:05 -0400

This comes as no surprise to anyone who's lived through the last fifty years, but humans in the modern world love lists. If it's not American Bandstand, it's Letterman's top ten schtick.

Bloggers of all stripes understand the power of the list, and exploit them all the time. I was reminded of this courtesy of popurls. Check out what the list of top items for del.icio.us--seven of the ten are lists:

Blogging for the Capitals

Wed, 24 Oct 2007 08:50:59 -0400

James Mirtle points to this story in the Washington Times about the Washington Capitals' aggressive blogger relations program. The team has struggled on the ice, and that's been reflected in poor attendance over the past few years. In the face of diminishing coverage from the mainstream media, they've been inviting bloggers into the press box:

"I was watching the traditional coverage, both broadcast and print, and was remarkably underwhelmed," Keeley said of his decision to begin blogging last year. "The first thing I wrote was a general sense of being frustrated — well, really more than frustrated. Really angry. I started from this premise that Washington is not a sports town, but there's nothing innate that says it can't be. But the old media don't do anything to change that perception. In fact, they perpetuate, in my opinion. So we started this blog, the idea that if you're interested in hockey and want more coverage, come here."

Capitals owner and AOL magnate Ted Leonsis is really drinking the Koolaid. He's got his own blog, and posted a thoughtful response to the article yesterday:

Also, I do question some of the mainstream media and its programming choices and how it creates self-fulfilling prophecies in how it allocates its dwindling resources on some matters and ignores others. I also wonder - if you are programming one traditional way and you are shrinking, then why don't you try something different? What do you have to lose as an enterprise if what you are doing today isn't working? Embrace change. The NHL has and so have the Washington Capitals. Change is good.

Few CEOs blog, and fewer still would include an emoticon in their post. I'll forgive him that idiosyncrasy, but I can't forgive him for not accurately citing the Great One's most famous quote (or, possibly, the Great One's dad).

PR Tips From James Hoggan

Fri, 01 Jun 2007 11:05:02 -0400

For the last few years, local (local to Vancouver, that is) PR guru (and, tangentially, our client) James Hoggan has been publishing weekly PR tips in the Vancouver Sun. They're pretty elementary , but still useful reminders of what to do and what not to do in the thorny world of public relations.

As it turns out, they've got over two years worth of tips on their website. Here are a couple of samples:

If You Can’t Fix it, Don’t Ask About it - A critical step in any consultation comes in conceiving the questions that you put to your audience. If you start asking for feedback on issues that you can’t – or won’t – change, you are setting them up for disappointment and yourself up for a heap of grief. So, define the parameters carefully and whatever questions you ultimately ask, be prepared to treat the answers seriously.

Public Speaking: The Risks and Rewards of Winging It - Most people have been impressed at some point in their lives by a speaker who could be scintillating off the cuff, who just seemed to grab one great idea after the other out of the air. So it’s tempting, as a presenter, to want to emulate that style. And in rare cases it could be the right thing to do if you have easy command of the material and if the risks of an error are negligible. But if the stakes are high – and you’re not completely confident – work up a prepared text. Even if you memorize it and only refer to it for prompts, the discipline may save you from making a serious mistake.

That's a big schwack of tidbits. Some are less useful than others (do we really need tips on 'a winning wardrobe'?) but the majority are worth reading. Especially, as Glenn Kelman recently recommended, if you want to do your PR DIY-style.

When to Hit it Big With Your Web App

Thu, 22 Mar 2007 21:39:21 -0400

Over at Read/Write Web, Emre Sokullu has written an interesting piece about the different paces at which Web apps should aspire to hit the Web 2.0 homerun:

Aha, you think, the cheapest and shortest path is viral marketing - via blogs and social news sites. So you turn to your favorite sites like digg, del.icio.us, TechCrunch and (of course) Read/WriteWeb. Somehow your email to Michael Arrington or Richard MacManus gets noticed above the hundreds of others, so your site gets featured and then other blog coverage follows! Yippee, this is the fame you were waiting for! But a few days later....absolute silence.

Emre's advice for most Web startups is to focus on niches and then broaden your user base.

In my experience, web traffic is spikey. When you plot healthy web traffic on a graph, you should get big spikes, occasional troughs and steady, upward growth. If you're lucky enough to get Dugg, and drive that huge chunk of incoming traffic, then probably some subset of those Digg users will hang around. Those folks represent an upward blip in your daily, regular traffic.

The real trick, of course, is in converting those spikes into customers. If you've built your site with the right calls to action (whether that be buy, download, contribute, subscribe and so forth) in the right spots, you can take full advantage when Digg comes a knocking.

Tags: web-20, marketing, traffic, visitors, digg

Adding User Voting to Online Advertising

Fri, 16 Mar 2007 18:54:30 -0400

As our clients know, we're pretty sceptical about online advertising. Contextual keyword ad programs like Google AdWords work great, but we generally discourage most other programs.

Seth Godin announced Squidoo's new variation on the online a--the SquidOffer:

So we invented SquidOffers, which I hope will work for us, and which I fully expect will show up in other places soon. The idea is to combine the voting mechanism of Reddit or Digg or Plexo with the text ad mindset of a Google ad. But instead of an ad, it's an offer.

Make an offer. Pick a category. Pay a small fee ($100 a month). Then, our users vote on the offers. Get a lot of votes and you rank more highly, which means more clicks. And you don't pay for the clicks.

We've signed Capulet up to give it a try (it looks like the program actually goes live on Monday). We assembled a page of our best web marketing articles and then wrote a (hopefully) clever, informal ad for it. We'll see how it goes.

Tags: web marketing, online advertising, cpc, squidoo, AdWords, Web-20

Five Tips on Obtaining Customer Testimonials

Fri, 16 Mar 2007 17:32:34 -0400

We do plenty of case studies for our software clients, and so we tend to solicit a lot of testimonials. Here are our top tips for getting great testimonials:

Most of your customers will decline doing testimonials. They're time consuming and have little or no upside for the customer. Unless you're big and flashy or are willing to offer them free licenses or upgraded support, I'm afraid it's just a fact of life.
If testimonials are important, consider including them in your contractual agreements with customers. State upfront that you will offer a discount or upgrade their support level in exchange for their participation.
I'm biased on this, because we do it for a living, but it's often a good idea to get a third party to obtain the testimonial. This enables your customer to be honest about your company. Customers can be a bit like distant relatives. They might only say nice things to your face, but will be six kinds of nasty behind your back. A third party is objective, and that tends to eliminate any emotional component from the interaction.
Don't ask for a letter. That's a lot of work for them, they may not have written one before, and they're going to take forever to deliver on it. Instead, conduct an interview with them, gather their quotes, and send a prepared testimonial back for their review and approval.
Be patient and be persistent. The review process almost always takes longer than you expect. The bigger the company, the more departments have to review the testimonial.

This article originally appeared in our newsletter. If you want to read it sooner, sign up using that box in the sidebar. Here's another article on obtaining testimonials.

Tags: software, PR, marketing, testimonials, website writing

Subscribe to Capulet's Newsletter

Tue, 06 Mar 2007 23:07:52 -0500

Every couple of months we send out a newsletter. We try to emphasize content that's useful to our subscribers, as opposed to just silly corporate dreck. Most of the content is from the blog, but not all of it.

For example, our newest newsletter has a short article entitled "Five Tips on Obtaining Customer Testimonials". We'll probably get around to posting that to the blog anyway, but if you want to read stuff sooner rather than later, sign up!

How to Run a Great Barcamp or Unconference

Mon, 12 Feb 2007 21:29:14 -0500

My friend, client and former boss Joe Drumgoole is helping to organize BarCamp Ireland 3.0 (and here's the blog). We've signed on to sponsor the event, and we're planning on making it to Europe in time to attend and participate.

I helped to organize BarCamp Vancouver last August, and of course we're organizers for Northern Voice, now in its third year and bigger than ever.

Joe asked me for some advice on organizing an unconference, and here's what I wrote. They're eleven slightly random points, but I figured I'd post them as they might prove useful to other organizers around the globe:

Despite it being an 'unconference', where everybody's all groovy and doing their own thing, you still need a few people to be dogged organizers and keep things running smoothly. Specifically, you need to make sure sessions start and end on time. This is an unpopular but fairly essential job.
On a similar note, you should definitely do an email out to all attendees a few days before the event. Not everyone's going to be watching the wiki or blog, and the email can cover everything they need to know. Here's a copy of the email I wrote for Barcamp Vancouver. This is particularly handy if you've filled up and want to get people on and off the waitlist.
If more than two people are organizing the event, you'll need some permanent, ideally public place to have online conversations about planning. For BarCamp Vancouver, we used a public Google Group.
You should be able to borrow projectors from participants. They're expensive to rent.

The ROI of Blogging

Fri, 26 Jan 2007 13:20:15 -0500

Charlene Li is a Forrester analyst who often writes about user-generated content and social media. This week she's written a new Forrester report entitled The ROI of Blogging:

Many large companies stand on the brink of blogging, yet they are unwilling to take the plunge. Others, having dove in early, now face the challenge of managing existing blogs without the ability to show that they effectively support business goals. While blogging's value can't be measured precisely, marketers will find that calculating the ROI is easier than it looks. Following a three-step process, marketers can create a concrete picture of the key benefits, costs, and risks that blogging presents and understand how they are likely to impact business goals.

It sounds really interesting, if the chart and associated notes on Charlene's blog are any indication.

Tags: blogging, online+marketing, Forrester, roi

You Can Still Own the Story

Thu, 18 Jan 2007 12:51:09 -0500

A few weeks ago, a couple gave birth to sextuplets in a Vancouver hospital. The media, as you might expect, sped off to the hospital in their satellite vans and junky sub-compacts to get the first footage of the babies, the first interview with the new (and busy) parents.

They got nothing.

No interviews, no photos and a bare minimum of facts from the BC Women's Hospital spokesperson. It was hilarious to watch the CBC or CTV evening news, as they tried desperately to pad out the story. There were reviews of fertility treatments, discussions of the odds of such a birth, and analyses of the couple's religion (apparently they're Jehovah's Witness).

It goes to show that the average person can still control a story if they hold all the cards. The couple wanted their privacy and they, more or less, received it. I'm pleased to see that none of Vancouver's media has tried (or at least succeeded) in playing paparazzi with the new babies. In cases like this, I think the message from the hospital should be 'no comment' to every question.

Sadly, there are now reports that one of the newborns has died. That's tragic. It's made a little more so because we know about it when the parents obviously want complete privacy.

Tags: media+relations, pr, spin, journalism

18 Tips on Building Buzz

Thu, 11 Jan 2007 14:45:44 -0500

At Boris's urging, I checked out LinkedIn's new Answers section. It's essentially a business-specific version of Yahoo Answers, and another way to network (and seek validation from strangers) on the site.

I answered a few questions myself. Unfortunately, I don't think there's any way I can show you a view of my answers. That'd be a feature request for me. Also, where's the RSS feed for a particular category of questions, such as sales and marketing?

Regardless, I spotted this question and enjoyed reading the broad range of answers:

What is the best free thing you have ever done to create some buzz for you or your organization?

The answers range from the mundane ("Added the new offerings to my signature and mailed all my friends") to the bizarre ("we created a fake action group against the World Cup"). That second one was apparently quite effective, though any non-North American doing that risks a lynching.

Tags: linkedin, viral+marketing, promotion, buzz

Email Spoofing From Our Domain?

Wed, 20 Dec 2006 17:48:55 -0500

Just a quick FYI. It's come to my attention that a spammer may be engaged in spoofing from the Capulet.com domain. The messages appear to come from 'bcapulete@capulet.com', but, of course, aren't actually from us or this domain. We use Gmail for Domains for our email, so it'd be nearly impossible to spam, even if we wanted to.

I suspect the origin of this is coincidental, not malicious. Juliet@capulet.com is a common test email address for Jabber developers, so I'd guess it's inspired by that.

The Wrath of a Junior Designer

Tue, 12 Dec 2006 12:08:48 -0500

As technology industries watchers surely know, there was a foofaraw between Google and Yahoo yesterday. As Jeremy Zawodny reported:

Back when IE7 launched, Yahoo! created a customized version and began to market it to our existing IE users. Today it seems that Google has similar intentions. So similar, that they decided to basically copy our page and slightly Googlify it. If you look, the design, layout, and most of the text are the same!

Because it involves Google, Yahoo and a simple, blatant misstep, the story is everywhere: TechCrunch, Scoble, Techmeme, Digg and so forth.

Practically speaking, the actual error was no big deal. I imagine that some junior designer at Google was pressed for time, and just copied Yahoo's effective approach. Still, it's resulted in a torrent of bad PR from the technology community.

What are the lessons? The scale of the error and the scale of the response rarely match. More importantly, make sure your employees understand how much attention their work receives.

Tags: web+design, Yahoo, PR, crisis

Calling Things What They Are

Mon, 04 Dec 2006 12:25:22 -0500

We occasionally get to contribute to the naming of companies and their products and services. This can be a real minefield, as you negotiate the marketplace, naming trends, subjective responses and, occasionally, client egos.

We have sundry philosophies on naming, and they change over time. There is, however, one reliable strategy we always consider: call it what it is. To put that another way, it should do what is says on the box.

I recently encountered an excellent example of this strategy. Kirsten wrote about her band being in the studio, and having acquired a new 'studio control center'. I'm not sure what that is, but I'll bet I could find it if I wandered into the control booth, because it's called The Big Knob.

The device does have a, uh, very large main knob, so the name is accurate. More importantly, the name is fun and memorable, and fodder for dozens of silly jokes among cheeky musicians.