I haven't written much lately because I've pulled some weird stunts, like stay awake 26 hours and tweet for a good percentage of that while triaging bugs. I've put on my painted shoes and my marketing hat and gone to conferences while blitzing in and out of ops calls. This being in PR while shipping web stuff is a little nutty. ( My main search feature is http://www.bing.com/community and like any new community site it is in a constant state of improvement.)
There's a lot of blogging and tweeting going on about bing - some of it even from my team or me - and I think its best if other folks try to parse out the brand, the new features, and the context of what this means for the industry. As usual in my community woo woo way, I have to go back to the people both inside and outside of the search team and that's where I get my bearings on bing.
This search release was assisted by the internal testing of thousands of Microsoft employees on their lunch breaks, spare time, late nights. Way more people than is represented in the search organization, which despite all "still hiring" reports, is still not as big as you'd suspect for an org taking on a major player like Google.
Those employees' feedback made bing what it is today. That's an important difference from other launches.
Then of course there's our twitter and facebook accounts. I know more about those because they started really during the time I joined my current team. Those are the folks that keep us honest, cheer us on, kick our butts, and make us think. This too is an important difference, which I hope will only be assisted by the /community site's forums and blog commenting capabilities. There's more you in bing than there was in Live Search. Because we have these new tools and the folks ready to listen.
People who have gotten email from my Microsoft email address know I always carry the Anais Nin phrase "Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage" in my signature. I remember being in the search engineering building, talking with Andy Oakley about the search presentation to MVPS at the MVP summit, and being spontaneously dragged by him into some sort of beer thing with the entire org and VP Satya Nadella giving a short speech.
Satya may shoot me for this bc I don't remember what he said. But I remember looking around at the faces of the search employees around me which were carrying a totally different vibe than two years ago when I left search for Xbox. It's hard to explain those ineffable crowd moments where you know folks are committed and its a quiet commitment, not rowdy, not arrogant, but just in it. Every time I faced a skeptical customer at a demo (you know who you are MS Hater Guy) I remembered that sea of faces, just in it. Showing up and saying hello to the doubters and the haters.
There's a bit more smiling around the building now, because it always feels good to get something out the door. And everybody knows there's more work to do, we can't just stop here. But the essence of bing to me are those non-search employees who never gave up on us, and gave us feedback whether we liked it or not. And the customers, who, whether they liked us or not, cared enough to give us feedback. And of course the search team, who have spent a couple years since I left, working to create this thing you have now before you, called bing. They pushed and pushed through it. Here it is - a start at what we hope will be a new way to think about search.
We hope you try bing of course. And send us feedback via the feedback link, the twitter acct, the blog, the http://www.bing.com/community site. But remember us when you are faced with something tough, where you commit without knowing the outcome, and do it because you choose to & your heart says so. That's what we made it for, that's what we made it with.
Live it vivid!
Recently, in the process of promoting Will Code for Green, our killer Live Search API contest that lets you use whatever technology stack you desire to write your Web app, I dug deep and went back to one of my old teachers Tim Maher from http://www.consultix-inc.com who is a Perl guru around these parts of the Northwest. His educational company essentially gets people ready for system administration gigs using some variety of Unix.
Even after more than a decade having passed since I took his class, Tim responded pretty quickly. He kindly said he'd pass the contest along and that he remembered me and was glad I found a tech job I liked.
Which consideirng I'm part of the "Evil Empire" to some Open Source folks, I felt was very gracious and also why I'm blogging about Tim here.
Tim is one of the better technical teachers I've run into in the course of my nefarious tech career and it's because when I took his courses, they iterated each time they were taught. The feedback from one class drove a better experience for the next. When I went, the courses on Unix had been honed to concentrate on things that you needed immediately to get oriented. It had smooth building blocks. Things progressed fast enough that your head stopped just short of exploding, and you could leave his classes and feel like at least some tasks, you could do at your job right away.
What Tim does in his classroom is a great model for certain kinds of software evolution (Agile anyone?), or in my current line of work, honing your presence in social media. Keep listening, keep honing, and keep it central to what your passion is.
I outgrew my passion for Unix/Linux (when it became readily apparent I don't have the temperament to be a system admin - of any stripe) and my ability to explain Unix concepts faded with my memory of where everything was in the filesystem outside of dev/null . I'd be a sucky OSCON evangelist. But Tim lives in this stuff, and he loves it, and I remembered him and his company al this time because he had stayed central to his calling.
There's a complete credibility gap in me recommending his classes - I did not ultimately go into Unix system administration you may have noticed. Also, I'm essentially a PR shill for Microsoft, and I truly think Win7 is sweet, and writing C# games for the Xbox is cool, and Silverlight is da bomb, so I'm not believable as testimony. You have to talk to other people who took him recently and actually remember any of the curriculum to get the detailed goods. :)
But over a decade later, who Tim is as a teacher, his "personal brand" if you will ( I hate that term) is what stands out over time. So it brings out the question - how will *you* be remembered?
Live it vivid!
I was going to write a long post about personal brand, and how I don’t really believe in it as a phrase. I believe in protecting your good name, and standing for something, but I personally am not a product, I personally can’t be bought (only rented) and it was going to be this long diatribe.
Then, as happens in Seattle sometimes, it got sunny and like any other Seattleite, serious thoughts fled my brain and I only wanted to be outside. It was then that I decided to paint more shoes, and from this exercise you can probably learn more about ‘personal brand’ than if I went on a long rant.
First off, I have been dying to paint some shoes ever since Howard Rheingold declined to paint some for me, but instead opted to teach me to paint my own. (He is such a wise sensei of the internet – only when I realized what it meant to paint shoes did I realize why he would not paint shoes for me). I also hadn’t realized this shoe-painting movement or frame of mind, is a pet thing of his and he has been part of the paint-your-shoes movement for quite some time.
Howard’s amazing how-to (which talks about the philosophy too) can be found here: http://www.rheingold.com/paintyourshoeshow.html
The other resource I’ve been reading is the guide to customizing your sneakers by Sabotage in this forum post (there is apparently a book called Sneaker Freaker that really tells all):
http://forums.n-sb.org/index.php?showtopic=11778
Unlike Howard, I don’t trust myself as a visual artist, so the first shoes I tried to paint were some secondhand ones purchased at a thrift store – the loafers you see above. I was overly optimistic – when I read the part about sanding and acetone, I thought – but maybe MY shoes are worn down enough – they seem worn down enough. Ooh lookit the pretty colors!
WRONG! You can see in this photo that the paint is starting to crack on them. I can still wear them places but they won’t last long.
Personal brand tip # 1 – Believe what sage experts who have done this before tell you, even if it means more work you hate. It'll last longer. :)
Personal brand tip # 2: Think about the underlying materials you are working with – old leather shoes have chemicals on them to repel things like paint. You can’t get around the intrinsic nature of what you are working with. In social media, that’s the tools or the tech or the industry OR EVEN YOUR OWN PERSONALITY :) . When you make a name for yourself don’t ignore underlying material.
So this time, I bought 2 sizes of shoes that don’t fit me – so I wouldn’t be as tempted to cut corners or have personal angst if they flaked out as well – and proceeded to follow Howard’s advice more closely.
This time, I skipped the acetone treatment bc he said the sanding is more important – if you listen to Sabotage though, acetone is the way to go.
Once I had sanded to raise a “tooth” I painted white dots. You can't really see the tooth here bc of the distance but the shoes looked suede-like.
And then after that dried, I went for the color.
Personal brand tip #3 that would apply here is: Do not be boring. Black and white works for some people, but in my case, if I was going to go to the trouble of artsy shoes I wanted them to 1) not necessarily match 2) be COLORFUL. You want people to remember who you are right? At least let them remember you on a day when you were "on" and not say, when you wake up in the morning.
I did all this outside. It’s a good idea to paint and to sand and to (next step) spray the clear coat on outside because of the mess/fumes. This is the picture of the shoes drying from the clear coat. I have about 3-4 coats total before I can see if these will flake like the originals.
Personal brand tip #4: If there’s a lot of makeover in your brand, do it in a well-ventilated place. :) (There’s a lot of bad jokes to make here, suffice to let you do it on your own!)
My next step after these shoes dry enough from their clear coat, is to get some friends to “test drive” the shoes and give feedback.
Personal brand tip #5: Try out your social media experiment/identity first with a few people (friendly or at least not haters) to make sure you are on the right track. If my friends find that the 2nd wave of shoes flake like mine do, then I know I need to go the Way of the Acetone. Since I’m recycling these shoes into ‘new shoes’ from Goodwill, I don’t mind taking the time to figure it out.
Bonus tip: Why not test out your personal brand on free services before you start playing in the paid (advertising) or other market? Don’t be afraid to be wrong or innovate.
....I'll let you know how they progress. Thanks again Howard!
This blog post is a combo conference narrative and a summary of my presentation. Because so much of the conference is in the conversations done without fear of blogging (or tweeting), I felt better about airing more on what I presented than speaking for others. Really other folks said more brilliant things – I just don’t own their words. :)
Oh and it rambles a bit – my sleep deficit is starting to look like the national deficit. :P
By all accounts, our experience in Cambridge, MA and the first Foo Camp East was a bit upscale from the normal Foo. For one thing, the building facilities were new – so new they’d not been used yet!
An essential aspect of Foo Camp has often been, well, the camping. Because it was still wintry and rainy and this is Boston and they do things posh there, folks who camped did so on the inside of a snazzy building with shower facilities and a beautiful staircase (in this photo Barney Pell, founder of Powerset, vaults down the staircase).
I, as my readership may expect, was a total wimp and slept at a nearby hotel. But the key to the Foo Camp experience is not to sleep much so I didn’t.They advise you to overdo on sleep before Foo and unfortunately for me, that wasn’t really that possible.
Foo Camp is one of the great unconferences. Participants were told to come expecting to present. I presented on Social Media and Bath Bombs which actually dried faster than expected so folks got to take them home.
Readers of my blog know where the bath bomb recipe is. I first got everyone setup with their own soap molds (stars and hexagons) and artistically arranging the petals/petal fragments at the bottom of the molds before putting the bath fizz mixture in. We used blue as a coloring agent for one bowl of mixture and kept the other white.
While people pressed and stirred and such, I told them why bath bomb making has such parallels to community building and social media. For one thing, you can’t rush the process. It takes about 10 min to spritz a bowl with witch hazel and you can’t skip or over do, you have to keep checking on the consistency to make sure it is gelling right.
Just as community managers have to test the waters repeatedly, and build trust over time. Have the right ingredients to hand. Timing is everything. Gelling seems to happen on its own and you have to be watchful.
Everyone’s bath bomb designs actually (to me anyway) surpassed the ones *I* usually make. A testimony to the power of many people approaching a design problem - imagine what you could do with your software.
Rob Faludi even managed to figure out a way to put his business card elements at the bottom of the molds, and pressed hard – when his came out, his business info was embedded in the bath bombs. He could give them out as business gifts. Dong that had never occurred to me!
I told them about how I had posted the bath bomb recipe on Wikipedia, and how its gone now. I pointed them to bliss soaps in Seattle, whose word of mouth, their many free samples ethos, and warm and friendly storekeeper demeanor have made them the darling of Yelp. In fact if you look at their Live Search results, the yelp references are among the highest. Think of how much the avid endorsements mean to a small business online!
Liz Lawley got us all started talking about social objects, that is, those things we talk about with others that help form bonds. I give bath bombs out to co-panelists and people I know from the social computing symposiums at conferences just for fun, and she pointed out they become objects of conversation, shared experience (scent is a very powerful memory-enhancer and emotional connector), and created a community of folks who knew what the bath bomb experience was like.
I know if I do this presentation again I’m going to improve on it – for one thing, I will suggest to them the business card trick. I’ll also increase the number of molds so that more people can have a bunch of fizzies to take home. I’ll also factor in the dryness of doing it in an office complex vs. my old Craftsman house – my house is often too wet for the bombs to dry out in one day, but a Microsoft office building? those puppies were dry in 24 hours! (note the photo below depicts an actual chair)
I am grateful to the folks who tried out my class (Other Foo Camp advice is to go to things you wouldn’t normally attend) and to the folks who gave the talks I attended and stretched my neurons considerably. I hadn’t thought much about vendor relationship management, social media in government, open source stuff, or the origins of the Web and folks opened my eyes. I’ll admit death of newspapers I had previously thought about, but I’d forgotten some of the key things in my past that made being a reporter so solid for me: that people respected the newspaper, that the newspaper would fight to get me out of jail and prevent people from taking my notebook with confidential sources in it.
Oh, and the Poynter Institute. If anyone asks you to take a class or attend a conference there, you should go. The Dali museum is right near it with amazing art, but more than that, the folks there are smart and will blow your mind. I hope for one they can help keep the journalism flame alive, regardless of the form the new world order for newspapers might take.
Now, I pack for San Francisco! I'll be tweeting you... so...
Live it vivid!
Well, I admit it; I've been textually unfaithful. I've blogged in everyone's blog but my own (Live Search, Eileen Brown) about my adventures and my tweet stream probably equals 10 blog posts in length (if not in actual coherence or sanity).
Community tip of the day (or reminder): Try to live large enough that you can either repurpose or re-use your textual genius. I'm just old school and hate to repeat posts.
While Search Road Warrior Aya is tearing it up in New York I will be in Boston this weekend, attending O'Reilly's FOO Camp. Next week: San Francisco and Web 2.0. Then after that, we actually have to do real work on this team and stop drinking mojitos. Too much mint, bad for you.
Anyway, I would tell people I was going to Foo camp and they'd say: Food camp, how awesome, is the Iron Chef coming? You marketing shills have all the luck, etc. etc.
Then I would say no, Foo. Like Foo Bar.
Oh you mean like there's a bar?
No F-O-O. Like Friends of O'Reilly. Oh forget it. I hope to be presenting on bath bombs and social media.
Bath bombs...?
Yes, like I was making in Search a while back. I actually gave bath fizzies out to my team at XNA too, but people looked at me funny. Like, there's no fire button on this thing, why do I care? Although their female relatives and significant others benefited.
Anyway, O'Reilly tends to favor hands-on presos and as I was preparing for this craft and crafts session I realized there are actually a lot of things I can say that tie the making of bath fizzies and social media. I have a great example, http://blisssoaps.com, local to Seattle, that I can talk about Whuffie with as well as the supplies store for making them. Well, as long as the package I mailed to Microsoft Cambridge made it. :)
More from the other side of the country - live it vivid!
Last time I was in Texas, I bought a cowboy hat outside of San Antonio. It was a real Stetson, would keep the rain off, and of course to work with my urban wardrobe, I bought it in black. I think I made Paul Tidwell on the XNA team wear it once or twice, but there was a Viking helmet they used for "dude you broke the build" and that really reigned supreme.
This time, like last time, I am going on behalf of Live Search, but unlike last time, I don't have to present and I've realized with all the other stuff I have to pack, the Stetson has to stay at home. A nice offshoot of not being on a panel (since I didn't know a year ago I'd have this job) I get to enjoy the experience without the "speaker jitters" dominating my thoughts and also just get to meet up with folks I have not seen in ages.
I will also get to meet Nadia Payan for the first time; me/Live Search ended up sponsoring her on her odyssey to go to one of my favorite conferences ever.
Internet geek girl (lurv that pink!) has a nice post about the tweetup Live Search is sponsoring - 4-6 pm on March 13th at point in the conference while people presumably still have intact livers. :)
Windows Mobile setup the space but we provide the drinks, food etc so you can prefunc prior to the rest of the evening.
I will also be booth babin' it for a couple of days in the convention center, as will Aya and Stefan. Then on to MIX09, another adventure entirely....
So, I've done many awkward things in my bespeckled and bespectacled community career.
I've worn speaker Oxford after speaker Oxford - and you tech geeks know the ones. The ones that have embroidery that say "Speaker - Teched Amsterdam 2005" and you feel you can't give them away, yet you can't wear them to a hipster bar - or anywhere except your own house - without feeling like Class A Dork.
I've been recorded saying "um" on channel 9, channel 8 and other random podcasts. Be ready for more!
I've been photographed with Ms. Dewey. That, may not come again.
But now.
Now, it's my duty not only to man (or woman) a blog for Live Search on occasion, but to drink and stream into (now, that doesn't sound right does it) the firehose that is Twitter. And more than that, I have to pick a twitter client. Because like blogging, mystic vital forces forbid you actually type into a Web interface. Nonono. The hands they must not be sullied in touching web...parts. No, you have to find some desktop client with a t in the first part of the name - twhirl. Tweetdeck. Twitterific. T-rouble my friends. T-rouble right here in Twitter City.
Pray for me. And if you have a favorite Twitter client (sorry no Macbooks - just a T-Mobile Wing and a T-hinkpad laptop running Vista) feel free to tell me what to do. I am currently fascinated by this writer who left the choices of his life up to the community.
Live it vivid!
A job where they had free beer on Fridays. Free video games handed out by our administrative assistant. A job where a person can be "working" by playing with a big Xbox and TV sitting on their desk.
Yep, the days (daze?) of XNA Community Games are behind me. I've gone over to the Dark Side. I work for Stefan. I flipped over from engineering to...dun...dun...dun.....marketing/communications.
This change was not without drama. Frank Savage sat me down and schooled me one last time in Star Trek lore so I wouldn't forget where I came from. I've discovered there are some swear words they say in Xbox they just don't say in PR. And, of course, I had to give my beloved covered-with-crumbs Xbox 360 back to Vern, along with my monitor and TV.
But the new gig is going to be cool for these reasons:
- You. This new job is about listening to you, meeting you at conferences, hearing what you have to say on blogs, twitter, facebook, etc. If I don't seem to be listening, click the email link on this blog and kick my ass. It's my job to be there for you. I'm accountable, and I'm not going anywhere. The developer denizens of the dearly departed Gotdotnet know this part of my drill, but I literally lose sleep over community issues. Tell me what's on your mind.
- Change. If I do the first bullet item right, then both of these online products are going to change in the ways that you want them to. It helps that I used to be on the product team in Live Search (though admittedly in the Live QnA part). I still think like a Web program manager and I know about the cycle by which Web sites get built. There are some excuses that won't slip by me.
- Outings. Don't look now, but I think they may let me out of Redmond more often. This tracks back again to the first bullet point, but it means I get to emerge a bit from the Redmond bubble and see the real world. I'll be seeing you all at South by Southwest Interactive (one of my favorite conferences) and Mix09 (which I've oddly enough never been to).
A couple of us will be manning the twitterphone but check out the new official location... Live Search on Twitter: http://twitter.com/Live_Search .
I'll be working on my wisdom.
More to come...live it vivid!
Ah community.
- Where the seething hordes of imbeciles and bad spellers heckle the makers of perfect prose.
- Where the trolls and the ogres outpace a Tolkien novel. Where There Be Dragons.
- ...But when it shines, it really shines.
For example, there is a Facebook photo album I became aware of through my Facebook network called "Everything is possible..." and repeats the phrase in French. It features a photo of what looks like a young Jewish boy with his arm around a young Arab boy walking along (they are seen from the back.)
The originator of the album says she intended to put it up and have a few friends tag it. She's now replicated this photo 72 times so that people can see it through their friends' tagging and add their own names (I think 30 people apiece can tag a photo). It's become a meme about peace.
There is no info about the source of the photo, which implies the originator didn't shoot it. It may be two kids in a US high school play or summer camp, or it may be in the Middle East. The image however - combined with the caption - was so captivating it took on a life of its own. The album grew so large replicating the photo that she gave up and made a Facebook group out of it where there are over 150 comments as of yesterday...today it has over 500 and the group has over 12,000 members today. Mostly the comments left have been about peace, and possibility. Some have been angry or have their own axe to grind, but mostly it is positive and keeps spreading.
I call this effect the latte of human kindness because it is not really milk - hot milk puts me to sleep and sometimes the milk of human kindness is so soothing it lulls. Sometimes kindness can be so relaxing you lose barricades in your head. The facebook album image is a kind image - two young boys together. Like the cuteoverload blog, or LOLcats, any photos of children together tend to give humans a feeling of warmth.
But by calling it "Everything is possible," the originator just added the two shots of espresso. The photo now tells a story and the image is striking enough you know instantly what the story is, and how the originator meant you to read it. It is a call to action: Those kids can get along, why can't we?
Social media gurus will tell you tricks to make your community messages snappy and pithy; marketing and brand folks will tell you how to sell yourself. But there is something about kindness and calling out possibility that sells itself.
So you know, I purposefully do not link to this Facebook group because
- this blog isn't about politics and I don't want to get embroiled into the reasons why peace should or should not happen in the Middle East- that's not the point of community tip of the day - you can type in the name and search for it on facebook to see the group
- this photo and group is a Facebook "friend" phenomenon and that's the way it should spread...it's had no difficulty and its power lies in itself.
Live it vivid! (what world-changing photo album will YOU create? :) )
Warning: this is one of those Betsy posts where I combine a lot of disparate points. :)
One of my late night reading addictions recently has been watching the personal finance/frugality bloggers expound as we go throught this economic downturn.
Personal finance/frugal bloggers in the tradition of the Tightwad Gazette are a unique breed and because they talk about money (which is like sex and tech, people can't stop reading) there is a lot of community activity and a lot of real-world anecdotes coming in.Because technology workers are often in their own little bubble (the dot com bust hit just us for example, though on normal days we can make above the average) reading the PF bloggers also keeps me in touch with what the rest of the world may be thinking.
Today's post by the guy who runs Get Rich Slowly was an interesting post in itself, but it went on to spawn a lot of thoughtful and passionate comments about what is the price of selling out? Is there such a thing as situational ethics? Should you take the money and run?
http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2009/01/09/how-much-money-would-it-take-for-you-to-compromise-your-principles/
What struck me in reading the slew of comments about his decision was how many people just typed a quick" good job, that's why I keep coming to your blog." Because my life has gotten me thinking in science fiction cliches these days, these comments reminded me of the book Dune (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(novel)) where the young Duke, Paul Atreides, keeps getting reminded of what the ethics of his ruling dynasty are ("Your father would've been more concerned about the men he couldn't save" ) and that "the Atreides buy loyalty with loyalty."
Anyway, JD of Get Rich Slowly - who is a blogger concerned with money - and whose constituents are also obsessed with money - now has a much more loyal fanbase than before. Why? Because he's showed them that even though money is his main theme, even though he knows they too are all about money - the money isn't as important as his contract with his readers. For him, it seemed, in the famous words of Betsy's gut speaking, "It was ooky and I just didn't like it." Taking the money would have violated his fundamental loyality to his customers.
Microsoft is a for-profit company, and for gosh sakes, even has a online/software product called er, Money. But the places where we win - and where we can always stand to win more - is if we show you folks that you have our loyalty. When I spoke in October to folks at the CEA Industry Panel, and talked about how one person with an email can make a difference, I was really talking about this.
XNA Community Games is an interesting venture because it takes on that risk of showing belief in the customer. Hey, we will have a team spending over a year working on a mechanism where you show off your stuff as game developers and can thus make some cash. As with anything a big corporation does, there's a "work iceberg" under the surface of the water. :P Meetings, negotiations, discussions, comps, cross-team integration, Phil's pile of soda cans...Randy the (desiccated) Red Vine -- stuff you just don't want to see.
I won't bore you now with the death of a thousand cuts (via email), but a small dedicated group of people put some soul into it - the tools, the framework, the Web site. Because we believed you would create the games that would stand up and make the world take notice.
We don't know you, but we are loyal to this idea of your greatness. We don't know you, but we trust you to peer review your community's games and help them out in the forums. And now we have over 100 games showing on marketplace, game sites are starting to review those games, and its only two months in. Thanks for repaying us with your belief in this brave new world of community games. It's good to get this chance to know you and see your potential.
Now go kick some more butt in this new terrain.
Live it vivid!
1. Blog more. Try not to suck.
2. Come up with a phrase that is a counterpart (but not the opposite) of "Blog Smart." A phrase that is the opposite of Blog Boring 'n' Safe but not the opposite of Blog While Still Employed.
2. Yes, this is the second 2. Be willing to revisit old ground to learn new things.
3. Twitter @ more people. It's always nice to get the @ from folks and you know you peek like a voyeur into their lives and munch the tidbits like hard candy Jolly Ranchers. Pay them back with some tweet love.
4. Start leaving respectful comments on gaming blogs. You know you want to. And get out more into the world of gaming forums. Even if you get the "are you a real girl" question a bajillion times.
5. Try not to sell out and let everyone be your friend on Facebook.
6. Try to resolve your identity crisis on LinkedIn.
7. Ask for endorsements on LinkedIn even though you feel like you are lame asking for praise. It's supposedly good for your career. But mostly it is just ego stroking, so pay back people who ask you and you don't have to lie to endorse.
8. Tout the Windows Live What's New feeds on your live.com personal page and messenger. Dang, it's even busier than Facebook! What the...! Now you have to put more photos on your Space...!
9. Read more social media blogs and quote people. Like this great post from Marc Sirkin about the torturousness of trying for greatness. Seek out unconferences like She's Geeky and anything ending in camp (and hopefully starting with bar, but they can't all be that way. :))
10. Read the stuff that keeps you humble and self-critical, on purpose. Like this great post by Danny Sullivan. Anything by Mini-Microsoft. Mary Jo Foley. Lose weight with Scott Hanselman.
11. And cause this thing goes to 11 like Spinal Tap, watch the video that went round the world again: The Last Lecture. About taking your life to 11.
Live it vivd!
By now you've seen the photo of the overhanging buses, heard the mockery of Fargo, for the Redmond wimpiness and realized that Seattleites just can't drive in the snow.
If you need even more voyeurism (or are just trying to get to that last-minute Christmas purchase and need a heads up, check out the Twitter feed for the state dept of transportation http://twitter.com/wsdot. They also have a blog here: http://wsdotblog.blogspot.com/ .
What I found fascinating was when I followed WSDOT on twitter, THEY decided to follow me. On the one hand, having a government agency hear about my cat seems like a waste of tax dollars. On the other hand, see how they are using with their customers below....I've been impressed with the two-toned approach (remember my previous community tips where I tried to advise folks? I think WSDOT has walked the right line).
They likely auto-generate tweets about the problems on the highways, like
"I-5 southbound to 164th st sw accident blocking offramp - fire dept , incident response team , state patrol on scn http://tinyurl.com/4h6ayv 19 minutes ago from web"
But they are keeping it real with these tweets from humans....
@NotJoelShapiro, @PeterEllis, @zaatar Can't give personal reports, wouldn't be able to keep up. Be prepared and drive for winter conditions
Be sure to take the time to check on your neighbor, see if they need any help, we are all in this together. #seatst #pdxtst #watst about 3 hours ago from web
.... and humor....
@jvreagan - busy morning? We've been here since the 13th. However, I've decided snow officially became a nuisance at 6:00 am this morning about 4 hours ago from web in reply to jvreagan
And response has been positive, such that one person wants to study how this all went down...
@badsquare - send us an email at webfeedback@wsdot.wa.gov and we can chat about how invaluable Twitter has been for us about 3 hours ago from web
The WSDOT traffic maps of current road conditions have been an amazing resource ever since they first put them up, and it's great to see them using even more online tools to assist customers.
Live it vivid!
....I think it's time to play all those community games I've been promising myself. The holiday chores are done. The cat has been confused by the buckets of snow falling from above that she has to swim in to get anywhere. There's only so much snowboarding down my back alley I can do before the old bod gives up. I may not get to visit relatives because the airport is snowbound.....and the new games just keep a comin' in.....
http://www.xbox.com/en-US/games/community/default.htm
XNA Community Games. They just might be what is for breakfast, now that we are all snowed in.
Live it vivid!
In the last community tip of the day I talked about moderation - that is, the ability to undo, modify or delete user-generated content or prevent access by said users to your community system.
That was the stick part of the equation; the carrot comes now. There will be other posts about community building but here I'd like to cover the basics.
Who comes, what they do
First, before you ponder anything promotional like FREE HOT PINK T-SHIRTS FOR EVERYONE, you might want to look at the pattern of behavior most community attendees exhibit. I've seen varying figures over the years but this Gartner diagram matches what I've seen in developing communities at Microsoft and other places. The folks that keep your community lively, policed, and creative tend to be 10% or less of the total number of people who will visit you. And, unless you have pre-seeded your community with active people, all of your power contributors will end up having to move through the stages from lurker to casual participant to more active participant.
Pre-seeding saves you time but may cost you money (or time)
Having folks who are experienced community moderators, leaders in the topics your community is about, or real-world leaders in a community that has just moved online can create a focal point or energy for your community that is hard to achieve when starting from absolute zero. MSN Money forums for example have their normal Money columnists leading discussions in the forums as well as setting the tone/theme for the areas discussed (MP Dunleavy's Women in Red forum really acts as a user group nexus for her various Women in Red personal finance groups around the country).
Another example of pre-seeding though folks may not normally think of it this way, are applications like evite.com or meetup.com. Your offline community (yer partying friends) already existed - if only in your mental rolodex - before the event. The software made it possible to meet in meatspace. Your community is short-lived (one birthday party, one fried turkey event) but it's now also a group that can meet again next year. Cost applies to this too, however. To make these friends, you probably bought them beers or bought THEM birthday presents.
Sometimes you don't need pre-seeding or its not possible
Way back in the dawn of the Web (1995) when I founded the Seattle chapter of Webgrrls, there was no such thing as pre-seeding. I was on the hunt for ANY female I could find working on the Web professionally - everyone was an expert because the whole genre of work was so new, and women not that common. If your group is intended to highlight a certain subspecialty or interest - certain kinds of cancer survivors, top executives of X industry, people who LOVE surfing one-legged, then pre-seeding isn't the issue - just finding people who fit is the issue. Here you have to focus on promotion and attracting the lurkers to your door and sifting through those to find the folks for whom the community is built. In that case, scale and numbers may not be the main goal of your community building - but having the right people, is.
Even in small communities there are always the divas and the catalysts that keep the community growing. You yourself are one, but you need others. Guy Kawasaki put it as "recruit your thunderlizards" in his excellent blog post on the Art of Creating a Community. Jeff Sandquist nicely noted that the community host is a lot like a bartender - cleaning up the messes, jumping in to make people feel at home and/or leaving them be if the conversation is flowing. if people are attracted to your beer joint, who needs a pre-seeded crew of "welcomers"? All you really need may be yourself as the warm and welcoming guy selling the brew.
Be hospitable
Hospitable is one of those great words that always makes me think of its opposite. ("John Carter's square jaw set as he looked around the icy, cavernous, acid-spewing, hailstorm raining, garbage collecting INHOSPITABLE SANDS OF MARS..."). Chris Brogan has a great post about making a great blog that hits on key points around the crosslinking, writing tone, and attitude that allows bloggers to help each other up to search engine traffic. I talked before about writing from your best place which means - be authentic, try not to be a bitch, and in general be generous to your audience. I'm seeing a trend toward "shorter is better" (hence my long discussion of twitter in a prior post) but when you think about it: people are busy and they don't have time to read long treatises on the burger you just had.
I've been seeing more research around the net and in the MSR symposiums about the difference between teen attention span and my own. These are kids used to IM, texting, and Facebook updates. They are used to really horrible spelling and video getting its visceral licks in before the brain wielding its text hammers can get in to decipher the content.
(Probably the length of this blog post indicates what an old fuddy duddy I am but that's fine, they can use it for their homework papers on "what was the Internet like in 2008." )
When those kids are CEOs, info compression will be so matter-of-fact that being hospitable in a community may take on new levels of complexity. And yet, certain human impulses will stay the same. Everyone wants to be known by name, like the bartender on the TV show Cheers.Everyone wants to think their contributions matter. Everyone wants the chance to get positive strokes from people they are interested in. The wavelength can't shorten beyond a certain point or the signal will be lost.
These human foibles are what you will think about when you ponder promoting your community...which will be the next community tip of the day.
Live it vivid!
Where do you begin when you show people who you are?
In a previous post I mentioned briefly how people construct a sense of you - your Internet presence - on things as little as 140 characters in a twitter tweet. This can be extended to a 90-second podcast, a 500-word blog post, or your entire usenet history.
Because I am at heart a writer (and despite protests to the contrary, DO look fat in all my event podcasts or channel 9 videos :) ) I will be looking at community presence mostly from the textual point of view. This enables me to talk about texting, forums, blogs, newsgroups, question/answer forums like QnA, email, IM and a bunch of other social media apps that signal presence by text (twitter, facebook, etc). The medium I am comfortable with, and comfortable advising folks about.
Presenting cross-format
But I mention the formats I am less comfortable with because pushing boundaries like that can be personally or professionally useful. I have a community agenda at Microsoft - that is, I work on community applications, evangelize using community tactics to improve your business, and try to hook other community-centric people up with each other inside the company in my spare time. It's a bit dorky to espouse all that community and then say OH NO, I WON'T BE ON A PODCAST BECAUSE I LOOK FAT ON VIDEO. I mean, take one for the team girl.
The other thing that is close to my heart is women in technology. If you checked out the Behind the Code episode with Rebecca Norlander you heard an awesome discussion of careers at Microsoft done by an executive level person with poise and humor. Rebecca's straight shooting style is one I want to emulate, one I aspire to, and even she said something to the effect of: I'm not really comfortable doing these video things, but I do it because I want people to see that women work here on technical projects.
For me, Betsy, it's important that other women see me despite my glorious lack of thin-ness, in love with community technology applications, generally a newbie but always digging into the technology of the group I am working with, because it is the truth of what is possible. Even if my hair is a mess, and I'm hapless at certain points, I'm on video presenting from my best place - what I love to do , what I care about, how I want to change the world, how I hope you can help me in that.
Not-so-best place
Conversely, even in the medium I love best (writing), I can be presenting from A Bad Place. There's been enough Internet lore about "reply all" and email subpoenas and such that I think even if you have never written from A Bad Place, you at least know someone who has and their digital words have come back to haunt them. Mastery of the medium is only the first step. Translating from your best knowledge and intentions into a useful post or text message or business video is the necessary alchemy. You have to be translating from A Good Place, or the ensuing transaction with your customer could go poorly.
Though I tout my Gotdotnet emails with customers, I am sure (because some of them were written past midnight) that a few were not the smoothest customer-service-sounding epistles a customer could desire. I'm pretty sure at least one person wanted to talk to my customer service manager at one point because I couldn't fix something fast enough, only to be told there isn't one - you are talking to the main person running the resurrection efforts of the Web site.
Final advice: I think enough jokes have been made about "friends don't let friends blog drunk" that I can stop with one sentence.
Get into a zone, careful contributions
Just as people can be parents, siblings, bosses, underlings, and cooks all in the same body, and persona switch to handle their lives, you may want to consciously set out align each social media type with one aspect of your helpful business self. Maybe your Tweet Self is more about showing people news stories that will help their business, whereas your Blog self has more time to reflect and synthesize information to talk about business trends, and your Spaces or Facebook self allows more photography and information graphics to explain what you mean. All of these selves have a goal to serve people - to help your customers understand Silverlight, or Xbox gaming or where to find the best Chinese food in San Francisco perhaps.
I mention personal roles because I think people do manage to talk differently to their children than to another adult, and have different expectations of their dog or cat in communication than they do their significant other. If there are words you'd never say at work to a coworker, or to your child, and you are consistent in adapting your voice to their needs, then it's possible for you to tune your approach on social media as well. Maybe you schedule your chats with your spouse or your kids at certain times of day, so you know you are doing it when you are not tired or cranky. Social media timing can follow that non-cranky circadian rhythm.
Did I mention not tweeting while drunk? Right. Be careful on the tweets as well.
The argument for less than careful contributions - or at least short ones
Ok, you say, but I've gotten tweets from people saying "Dang this is the best hamburger I ever had at Lunchbox laboratory" and they were sent from a phone and frankly isn't the rest of twitter like that? You know, useless points-in-space trumpeting literally from a place?
Well, aside from Lunchbox Laboratory making killer burgers people should know about, the tweets from space actually give you a sense of dialog and interaction with the person tweeting that you don't get from an article or report or even blog commenting. When I scroll through my friends' tweets I get the feeling of a party of many conversations and because they are not remote in time, a sense of being connected even though they don't know I am reading them. While we don't need to know everything you ate for dinner, there are often little ephiphanies folks want to share that only fit in 140 characters and for that moment in time. It creates a sense of closeness ironically even as the medium is short-winded and you are checking twitter because you aren't talking to that person right now.
Even if you aren't interested in using twitter for your business you should check it out to see how it's being used by people and what mistakes/good moves they are making there. The concise stream of data is mimicked on other apps - Facebook and the What's New feeds from Windows Live come to mind - but that knack of writing short and punchy that will help you frame for yourself what you want to get done out there.
I just learned recently that Shel Israel, the fellow who wrote Naked Conversations with Robert Scoble, is now doing a new book called Twitterville. His idea is that the very random/intimate/daily/ordinary conversations - small tweets - are what pave the way for more complex and deeper business conversations as well. The book isn't done yet but it looks like one to watch on this front. Comments on his blog about this forthcoming book are gearing up (I learned about the book from my twitter feeds) as folks have chimed in to say how immensely relevant this research will be for business.
Live it vivid!
