Tag: Social Networking

  • X Marks the Spot

    X Marks the Spot

    After I got laid off from my last job, I started working full time on my consulting business while applying for jobs as a product manager. I also started posting more on LinkedIn and Twitter (X) as a way to engage with the product management community.

    I’ve been following Dan Koe and Sean McCabe (formerly SeanWes), both of whom have encouraged me (through their writing) to start with writing – so I wanted to share a few thoughts on what I’ve been doing and how it’s going so far.

    A follower or connection doesn’t usually count for much of anything on its own. However, those followers only allow me the opportunity to say something interesting and possibly attract new consulting business or product manager jobs.

    Trust Beats Consistency, and Consistency Beats Message

    Ultimately, if people don’t trust what you have to say, the rest doesn’t matter. What you say needs to communicate trust. If you are consistent, you will learn what to do. Practice leads to improvement, which leads to success.

    But the main reason I want to post every day is because I believe my income depends on it. But it’s also a form of journaling, which helps me think, create new ideas and synthesize thoughts; and it helps my brain work better.

    Finding Your Voice

    Most people don’t find their voice on social media because of consistency. It takes practice and time to find your voice. It is scary to post something where your friends at the companies you are posting about might find offensive.

    Before posting, ask yourself these questions:

    • “Can my audience learn something from this?”
    • “Would I have liked to learn this earlier in my career?”
    • “Do I have something unique or different to say about this issue?”
    • “What are people in this industry thinking about but are afraid to say?”
    • “Do I have a bias here, and is it apparent to both me and the audience?”
    • “Is the intention of my feedback to tear down – or to guide improvement?”

    But generally speaking, a good rule of thumb is to stick to what you know. When you find yourself overreaching your expertise, you risk your credibility.

    My goal is to post every day at least once. Eventually, I settled into every business day posting something that I saw interesting in the industry.

    I enjoy writing, and I have for most of my life. I’ve written many blog posts here and even some books, and although there were long periods of time when I didn’t write anything, I never lost my love for writing.

    Consistency Pays Off

    So far I’m in the early stages of developing the habits of daily writing, journaling, and posting, but I’m already seeing some effects from it in the form of increased interactions and direct messages. I’m going to keep doing it.

    I don’t know exactly where I’m going to end up, but having a plan and working towards a goal with intention will put me in a better position than randomly doing things and reacting to the world around me. X marks the spot.

  • Twitter Ads: My Experiment and the Results

    How Much Does a New Follower Cost on Twitter?

    That’s what I wanted to find out. I’d never ran a Twitter ad before. You can run ads for more than just new followers, you can also do it to drive more engagement (retweets, favorites, and clicks). I wanted to experiment with gaining new followers.

    I’d had experience running Facebook ads before for new Likes and Google Adwords for page clicks. I was familiar with setting a budget, identifying a target audience, and crafting the ad text. This was no different. The first step is choosing @usernames.

    Twitter Ad Targeting

    This was an ad for @skinnycoco so I targeted two of it’s competitors as well as “users like our followers”. The latter means similar interests and demographics. You can add multiple usernames and even exclude usernames you don’t want to target.

    Like Facebook ads, doing the above step gives you an estimate of reach. In my case it was 7K. The next two steps allow you to choose interests by browsing categories and to choose locations. I chose not to choose a category and chose United States.

    Twitter Ad

    The most important aspect of creating the ad is the text of the ad itself. You can either choose from an existing tweet or create a new tweet. Anything you could post under a normal tweet can be posted here (ie. text, picture, or link) in addition to “cards”.

    Twitter Cards allow you to attach rich media experiences to tweets about your content. If you’ve ever seen a longer post with text, image, and a call to action underneath, that’s a Twitter Card. These cards can be used at your promoted tweet in your ad.

    How Much Does a New Follower Cost on Twitter?

    Twitter Ads

    I budgeted $20 to see how much each new follower would cost, on average. For $20 I got 3,977 impressions (views), 66 clicks through to the Twitter profile, and 26 new followers. That translates to $0.77 per like and an engagement rate of 0.65%.

    What Could Improve Those Numbers?

    The first thing I would change would be to try different tweets and run them at the same time to test engagement. I didn’t realize that you could, like with Facebook and Google ads, run multiple ads on a single campaign. If I do it again, that’s what I’ll do.

     

  • What Happened to the Color App?

    Why Did Instagram Succeed When the Color App Failed?

    We hope you’ve enjoyed sharing your stories via real-time video. Regretfully, the [Color] app will no longer be available after 12/31/2012.

    That was the message posted on Color.com [Update 7/15/2003: The site is no longer up.], the domain Color Labs paid $350,000 to acquire in 2011 almost a year after Instagram was founded. A year later their photo sharing app would be on the way out while Instagram was getting bought for a billion dollars. What went wrong? Why did Instagram succeed when Color failed?

    Color vs. Instagram

    What Happened to the Color AppColor Labs was a start-up based in Palo Alto, California whose main product was a social application for photos called Color. It allowed people to take and view photos matched to a location. Color grouped photos based on a user’s friends so that they are more likely to see those pictures that are most relevant. Like Color, Instagram is an online photo-sharing and social networking service that enables its users to take pictures and optionally tie them to a location. Unlike Color, users can apply digital filters to photos and share them on a variety of social networking services. It confines photos to a square shape, similar to Polaroid images, which along with the filters gave photos a retro look and feel.

    A Difference in Startup Methodologies

    Color Labs started after co-founders Bill Nguyen and Peter Pham received $41 million in funding between 2010 and 2011 from Sequoia Capital, Bain Capital, and Silicon Valley Bank before the app had a single user. Conversely, Instagram was started by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger in October 2010 with $500,000 and teams of just a few people. As Instagram introduced successful products and attracted users, they slowly raised more money and hired engineers. Meanwhile, Color Labs spent $350,000 to buy the domain color.com (and an additional $75,000 to buy colour.com), rents an office in downtown Palo Alto, California, where it employs 38 people to work in, according to the New York Times, “a space with room for 160, amid beanbag chairs, tents for napping and a hand-built half-pipe skateboard ramp.”

    Instagram’s $500,000 seed funding round came on March 5, 2010 from Baseline Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz while Systrom was still working on Burbn. By February 2, 2011, it was announced that Instagram raised $7 million in Series A funding from a variety of investors, including Benchmark Capital, Jack Dorsey, Chris Sacca (through Capital fund), and Adam D’Angelo. The deal valued Instagram at around $25 million and later that month, Facebook made an offer to purchase Instagram and its 13 employees for approximately $1 billion in cash and stock. By May of 2012, the number of photos has exceeded one billion. Google offered to buy Color for $200 million in July of 2011, but Color Labs turned down the deal. They were later acquired by Apple (mostly for their patents and talent) in October 2012 for an undisclosed sum.

    A Difference in Responses to the App

    On March 24, 2011, Color Labs launched its first application “Color for Facebook” in Apple’s App Store and within a week released an update allowing users to see photos from events “Nearby”, a “Feed” of relevant photos, and a “History” of groups that users can participate in. In June 2011, less than three months after the company officially launched, Peter Pham left Color. When it first launched, the application had around 1 million downloads, but as of September 2011, the service had a little under 100,000 active users. The app was poorly recieved, attracting few users and many who did not understand what it was supposed to do. One reviewer in the Apple App Store wrote, “It would be pointless even if I managed to understand how it works.” Users were confused with the application’s user interface and purpose. Its initial rating in the App Store was 2 out of 5 stars.

    For Instagram, the response was much different. It rapidly gained popularity, with over 100 million registered users as of January 2013. Support was originally available for only the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch, but on April 3, 2012, support was added for Android phones. Instagram for Android was released[18] and it was downloaded more than one million times in less than one day. An app rating under 3.5 stars makes users considerably more reluctant to download the app. With an app rating of 2 out of 5 stars, the Color app was doomed. Once entered into the cycle of bad reviews it was nearly impossible to break out as there were wasn’t enough new downloads or positive press to bring the average back up and over the 3.5 stars mark. Meanwhile, as of this writing, Instagram has 4.5 stars ouf of 4 on the Apple App Store with over 62,000 reviews.

    A Difference in Purpose

    Color was first meant to help you find and share pictures related to your location, but Instagram was solving a different problem. They were making mobile camera photos look better. The Color app only worked if other people were using it (a chicken and egg problem), while Instagram solved a problem people had right away. This could have been because Kevin Systrom had already developed a check-in app called Burbn. Josh Williams of competitor check-in app, Gowalla, said, “Early user feedback, coupled with a desire to avoid the check-in battle…led them to drop everything to focus on one simple feature: photos. They made the act of taking and sharing photos (many of which just happened to be location-tagged) fast, simple, and fun.”

    In Summary

    Color was a company in search of a product. They didn’t have much more than a mountain of cash when they started, but it was spent on things like numerous employees, fancy offices, and marketing rather than product development, user feedback, and customer interviews. Color may become a PR lesson for the future as they may become legends for squandering one of the biggest and most covered product launches in app history. On the flip side, Instagram already had a product they were trying out, were listening to their users, and created a new company based on the results. They continued to listen to their users and made their product even better. They didn’t hire a bunch of people or spend a lot of time talking about their company. Their product solved a problem, people liked it, and they used it. Each company had a runaway effect, albeit in different directions. Once those directions were set in motion, it was hard to change them.

    In closing, I’d like to quote from Color’s about page, which says a lot about how the company thought. If you have a different opinion about why Color app failed and Instagram succeeded, please let me and other readers know in the comments.

    At Color, we believe in the opportunity that the new mobile era presents and are excited about developing products that transform the way people share the stories of their lives. We work collaboratively, iterate often, and enjoy problem solving. Color is a company of entrepreneurs and innovators, highly skilled in their respective specialties, constantly striving to learn and grow. We’ve cultivated a very relaxed and informal culture and enjoy our extra curricular activities, which include but are not limited to: ping pong tournaments, ball pit acrobatics and impromptu poker nights.

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  • Big Data in a Small Shop

    Four ways to react to client insights

    So, if you have read any business journal, blog, or magazine in the last year you’ve heard ad-naseum about the power of Big Data. Combing through the digital exhaust that all consumers produce to better understand their preferences and habits can produce big dividends to big companies who have big data (notice the trend here?). But what if you are a small shop? You can’t pay MBAs and Quants to comb through your data to produce insights and most likely – you don’t have the mountains of data to pore through anyway. But, I’m here to say that Big Data is simply a way for a large company to feel like a small one. Your small business has the advantage!

    Big Data is simply about responding to client behavior. It’s just that the huge companies have to hire those big guns to get down to knowing the client behavior before they respond to it. But your small business can gain that client knowledge without the technical know-how and the sterility that can come from a numbers-only approach like Target recently used to predict when their shoppers are pregnant.

    So, ask what your clients think about you. Then be flexible, and most importantly, do something about what you hear! Here are four ways to how to ask clients what they would like more of:

    • Add comment boxes on order forms (both online and offline). If you’ve got the space, add some open ended prompts to get them writing. Be creative and write like a human because you are one (and so are your readers!).
    • Ask your best clients what it would take for them to leave you for your competition. That will show your their sensitivity points and give you some target areas to focus on.
    • Write thank you notes for business are simple and effective. Send a thank you note with a brief survey with plenty of open-ended questions and offer a thank you gift when they return it.
    • Engage with your clients via Twitter. This is a no-brainer to get with your most influential clients and just have a conversation with them on why they are your brand champions.

    A company who views their client as a number has nothing on a small business owner who truly cares about his or her clients. There is no better way to show that you care than to heed their desires and innovate new products and services to meet their needs inside of the relationship they already have with your business.

    This is a guest post by Jason Cobb. Contact Jason today to boost your brand and grow your sales via effective social and web marketing.

  • Seesmic VS Path

    A friend of mine recently started testing two social media tools, Seesmic and Path. Here is what he discovered:

    I would recommend Seesmic. It currently is free only because it is in beta. It will be a pay service when it comes out of beta.

    Pros:
    -Can post to multiple social media outlets at once (and can easily switch your mix in-message)
    -Can handle multiple iterations of the same social media platform (your can connect as many twitter, etc. accounts as you want)
    -Can schedule post and reliably deliver at the scheduled time
    -Adjusts the “Characters remaining” indicator according to the max of the minimum social media platform (i.e. it shows 5000 char remaining if just facebook and 140 if twitter is in the mix.)
    -handles photos, links, and tags accurately and intelligently
    -interface is simple, efficient, and aesthetically pleasing; good UX
    -has a “save drafts” queue

    Cons:
    -Only posts to facebook, twitter, and linkedin
    -their icon/badge (especially on facebook) looks stupid and will be on your messages viewed on the web
    -the cost of service is unknown
    -there isn’t a “pending posts” for posts that have been future dates
    -setttings management is somewhat limited on the iphone app – some things have to be done on web
    -links aren’t auto-shortened (may be too long)

    As an alternative, there is Path. Compared to Seesmic, Path’s advantages are:
    -free
    -can post to tumblr and foursquare also (but not linkedin)
    -can be used as one-stop social media manager and public-or-private quantified self tool
    -added functionality to tag with people, places, music

    As an alternative to Seesmic, Path’s disadvantages are:
    -can’t schedule posts
    -no characters remaining gauge
    -no “saved drafts” page
    -can only establish one profile per social media platform (1 facebook, 1 twitter)
    -difficult to add new profile once you have it set up

  • Facebook Book Printing Companies Review and Analysis

    Back in June, Mashable wrote an article on 7 Facebook book printing companies. As Christmas is now approaching I remembered that article and wondered if any of the companies let you print other people’s Facebook walls. Not everyone wants a book about themselves for themself, but if someone else gives it to them – hey, that’s a gift.

    Facebook Friend’s Wall Book

    Out of the seven Facebook book printing companies, only two let you print a friend’s Facebook information: Book of Fame and Ego Book. I also added Social Print Studio, which doesn’t print books, but does make posters and photo albums of your or one of your friend’s Facebook pictures. Between Book of Fame and Ego Book, the biggest difference is not price, but layout. Book of Fame will print one status message per page, essentially making a customized notebook for someone, while Ego Book is more of what you would expect in a Facebook book: pictures, wall posts, and comments of you and your friends. You’ll pay more for Ego Book, but you get what you pay for.

    Ego Book – Choose who you want the book to be about.

    Your Facebook Wall Book

    For those interested only in printing their own Facebook wall, Ego Book is still a good choice, but you might want to compare it with Jot Journal and Year Bound. Jot Journal is less expensive, but offers fewer options. Year Bound had more options, but it’s software seemed buggy. I had to try it several times before it would stop ‘blueing out’ the screen.

    Jot Journal

    Life Tracking Stats

    For those interested in printing their stats for the past year, Social Memories is the only choice on the list. Even if you don’t choose to buy it, you can still create the book and post it to your wall as an album for free. To print the 25 page book it costs $27 US.

    Social Memories

    Here’s a link to the Facebook Book Printing Chart I created in Google Docs.

  • What Meetups Mean to Me

    In January of 2005 I started my first Meetup called Indy Game Dev. One person joined and together we started to code a game. I didn’t know how to code a game. I had just graduated college with some Computer Science classes where I had to make a few small games in Visual Basic.NET, but I didn’t really know how to make a game.

    We started out meeting once a month, and then weekly at his house in Noblesville. He didn’t even have his own computer so we had to use the computer in his mother’s bedroom. I researched gaming engines and different programming languages, but we ended up going with a type of game similar to the NES game, Shadowgate.

    We had agendas and a group logo. We created the first screen in the game and started working on the story line, but then that’s when things started to fall apart. In April of 2005, Meetup began charging group owners a fee for hosting a group and the bottom sort of fell out as far as my desire to make games. What I realized is that I didn’t want to make games, I wanted to learn how to make games. Once I did that, my interest level was gone. My partner continued the group and the game for a while after I left, but I didn’t really start going to Meetups again until three years later in 2008.

    A Brief History of My Career

    I worked full time for the last two years I was in college and then immediately after helped a friend start a computer repair business on the side while continuing to work full time. It was during this time that I started going to Meetups, but I didn’t start going again until I left that job I had through college, started my own business, and got a new job in IT in October of 2007. This is when having a day job and going to meetups felt like I was living a double life. During the day I was a computer technician for an IT company and by night I was a web designer wanting to learn more about Adobe products or PHP.

    Through web design and SEO work, I was introduced to the world of affiliate marketing and started making money that way too. Eventually my web design customers started using me more for their technical needs and I began acting as their outsourced IT firm, or simply, their “computer guy.” Eight months after doing IT full time, I became a business analyst at a mid-sized, regional bank. By August of 2011 I was making enough from all of my side ventures to go at it alone so I quit my day job and went full time on my own. That’s when I really started to take advantage of meetups.

    Why Go to Meetups?

    To Socialize

    When I worked for other companies I was around other people all day long. We had meetings. I sometimes got to go places on the company’s dime. Some of these times were good. Most of them were not noteworthy. However, once they were gone, I started to miss that in my life. Sure, I met with clients occasionally, but for the most part I stayed in my office at home. While my family is a joy to me, there is a certain need to go beyond that and meetups can help with that. I wouldn’t go as far as to say I’m lonely, but there is a certain amount of Edward Norton’s Narrator that goes through my head when I visit a group for the first time.

    To Form an Identity

    What consistently meeting new people does to you is to help define who you are. This is partly because of the amount of times you have to explain who you are and what you do to new people, but also because simply by going to a particular group, you are associating yourself with that type of person. I’m currently a member of 16 meetups: Affiliate Freelancers Indianapolis, Affiliate Summit Indianapolis Meetup, AgileIndy, Central Indiana Entrepreneur’s & Vendors, Coaches, Consultants, Authors, Speakers & internet marketers, Esri Dev Meet Up Group – Great Plains, Geeks with Swag, Indiana Small Business Networking, Indianapolis Lean Startup Circle, Indianapolis Marketing Group, Indianapolis Search Engine Optimization & Internet Marketing, Indy Cowork, IndyDevHouse, TechLunch, Verge, and the WordPress – Indianapolis Meetup Group. I recently spoke at the affiliate marketing group, which gives me credibility with the speakers group, even though I already am a consultant.

    To Learn

    While I have been encouraged to get my masters and have gone back to school for Microsoft, A+, and Network+ certifications, meetups allow a different type of continued education in a wider array of fields. They are also the fields you’re most interested in learning about, or else you probably wouldn’t have signed up or gone to the meeting. Even though I’m profitable with affiliate marketing I still learn things from my affiliate marketing group, but a better example may be the Agile Indy group I attended last night. I had no idea what Agile was, but I kept hearing it and seeing it so I wanted to find out more about it. I wanted to learn. I can’t say I’ve gone to a traditional classroom much with that mentality. If you’re interested in what Agile is, review the Agile Manifesto or visit David Christiansen’s blog, Technology Dark Side. Speaking of affiliate marketing, David makes $2000 a year from advertising Rally Software on his blog. Rally sponsored last night’s meal, which brings me to my next reason.

    To Eat

    Most meetups either serve food or meet at a restaurant where there is an opportunity to eat food. If you enjoy breaking bread with your fellow man around a topic you love, what better place than at a meetup. The early Christian church would call this their communion time, while the modern church might call it “small groups”. What are meetups, if not small groups of people, passionate about a topic? One exception to “small” may be Verge Indy, which currently has 1,280 members and regularly has to limit members to their events at Developer Town. Most meetups who serve food serve pizza and most of the time it’s free, but there’s no such thing as a free lunch so be prepared for the corporate sponsor to pitch their goods to you. Don’t worry if you’re not interested, maybe one day you will be. Maybe one day you’ll be the sponsor.

    To Travel

    You probably can’t just walk into Miles Design or Allegient‘s offices, but that’s exactly what I did when I attened Joomla Indy and Agile Indy, respectively. While Joomla Indy isn’t an official meetup, it still meets regularly, in-person, around a topic, which is what meetups are all about. Tonight I’ll be attending the Lean Startup at Green is Good off 86th and Zionsville Road and the Esri meetup at Harry and Izzy’s on Illinois Street, downtown Indianapolis. When I was a business analyst I got to visit the Greater Indianapolis Chamber of Commerce’s board room once, now I’m visiting new board rooms every month.

    To Network

    If you’ve ever been told that you need to get out of comfort zone to grow, meetups are a great way to do that. Most of the people at the meetup I attend, I don’t know before attending. In fact, it’s actually rare for me to know someone there at all. However, once I’ve gone once, I do at least recognize them and can start to get to know them. Networking is a natural result of getting to know other people and meeting new people. Sometimes business cards are passed around and sometimes they are not. Meetups that are specifically setup to network don’t seem to be as popular as ones that are setup around a specific topic. What makes Verge so popular is that it brings together inventors, startups, and venture capitalists with those interested and willing to help. The energy there is intense and the barriers to entry are low. There is no fee for most events, food is provided, and those attending get the chance to pitch and network with others. It’s a great mix.

    To Succeed

    Whatever you’re trying to accomplish, there is probably a meetup out there to help you do it. Whether it’s meeting like minded people for encouragement or collaboriation, or learning from others who have paved the way before you, meetups can help you become a success. As Eric Willke, agile adviser and speaker at Agile Indy said, “Know you can succeed,” and to that I add – “and you will.”

  • Backlink Bookmarks

    This is a list of sites I use to backlink from for myself and my web design, SEO, and social media marketing clients:

    Social Bookmarking Sites

    Social Networking Sites
    • Facebook – necessary socially, but doesn’t help much with SEO
    • Google+ – more effective than Facebook
    • Twitter – can be used to display Facebook posts for SEO reasons
    • YouTube – most effective, but requires the most effort
    Online Classified Ads
  • The Gig Economy

    We went from trading mp3s with Napster to trading cash with Paypal to trading actual work for goods. Brace yourself. The barter economy is back.

    Gigwalkers, Runners, and Giggers in the Cloud

    You can now pay for anybody to do almost anything, anywhere, at any time. From gig walkers at Gigwalk, to runners at Taskrabbit, to peer to peer, realtime bartering over your mobile phone with Zaarly, the barter economy is here.

    This new peer-to-peer economy is all be part of a bigger trend, or movement towards leveraging social platforms as the new killer app: cloudsourcing.

    Cloudsourcing is when you use social network platforms to crowdsource a group of eager participants into creating something that may have been impossible for one man or woman to accomplish on their own. Call it peersourcing, a peerforce, or peersourcing, companies are reaching out to the general public to get new ideas or new inventions – or creative new ways to solve a problem they may have.

    For example, Quirky lets anyone submit, vote on, and improve an invention in order to create products that people actually want (and will buy). Kickstarter uses it’s social platform to allow people to ‘vote with their dollars’ towards a new, creative project. If enough funds are raised, the project will start – and if not, it doesn’t. Call it survival of the fittest, it’s an extremely efficient business model and we’re going to be seeing more of it soon.

    The CEO of Salesforce.com, Benioff, saw it coming and calls it “social enterprise” because he believes social platforms are the disruptive technology – on par with the development of the Internet itself. That’s why Benioff pushed to develop and rollout Chatter, a private and secure social network that allows users to follow others, information, and groups; and share files and status updates.

    Amazon’s Mechanical Turk has been crowdsourcing “requestors” since 2005, and Reckitt Benckiser uses IdeaLink to invite the public to submit ideas, products and technologies that they want to see built. Imagine what some organization like Google could do to the job hunting network if they could create or purchase a social platform that connected people wants with people’s needs and availabilities inside a massive database?

    If you’re interested in learning more about crowdsourcing, Crowdsourcing.org is the place to go if you want to check out what’s happening with crowdsourcing or if you want to join the debate on ‘all things crowdsourcing’.