Author: Perry Hewitt

  • How to staff an effective social team

    How to staff an effective social team

    Good post from Jerry Kane on the difference between strategic and procedural social media practitioners. The former group understands your business and its vision, and the latter are the digital natives, expert in the tactical usage and what’s next on the horizon. The strategic team members have experiential business knowledge; the procedural pros have the digital muscle memory that informs both gestures and interface expectations. Clearly, age serves as a useful proxy for this divide.

    Social media can enhance the status quo, or disrupt and advance business goals. If your organization’s social media is only a vehicle for news releases, a procedural approach can inform choices of the best technical tools, hashtag usage, and posting times. But if you want to use social media to change what you are doing alongside how you are doing it, cultivate strategic capabilities for your social team as well.

    gratuitous dog photoA concrete example: if you are a high-end pet care company, you can amplify your communications with a procedural approach to going social. Develop an Instagram program that posts your pet grooming success stories, and ride or create a hashtag for people to share similar photos. Create and actively curate a Facebook page with a system of recognition and prizes, and empower local moderators for that page.

    But if your pet care company vision is growth into new revenue streams, you may want to take a more strategic approach to social. Think about offering your customers a sponsored sharing marketplace for your customer community to exchange good and services from crate exchanges to cat-sitting. In return for advancing a “collaborative economy” community, your company gains access to new, younger markets, and intelligence into demand for emerging products and services. This is a uniquely social opportunity, tied to your overall business vision.

    As Kane points out from his teaching, “Classes that include both types of students are often more effective than either one taught separately.” The power of the mixed-capability team holds true in a business setting as well. Build a social team with procedural and strategic capabilities combined to avoid the pitfalls of silos and hierarchies. You’ll end up with a social-enabled organization that’s less reliant on a SWAT team and more aligned with your business goals.

  • Emerging law for data inheritance

    More broadly, America’s Uniform Law Commission, a non-partisan group that creates model legislation that is then adopted unchanged by many American states, has a “Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets” committee working on amendments to existing ULC laws that would give executors many of the same powers over digital assets that they have over financial and physical ones, while absolving service providers of any liability. These adjustments could be incorporated into some states’ laws as soon as 2015, though some federal fiddles may be required as well. In her paper, Ms Perrone notes that such uniformity would mean that “people would no longer have to rely on companies’ varying terms of use to determine how to manage digital assets.” When dealing with death, a little certainty can be a great comfort.

     

    – The Economist reports on “Who owns your data when you’re dead.” Good summary of a recent paper and legal progress on how to distribute data post-mortem in a world with a couple thousand years of familiarity with the concept of physical asset inheritance.

  • Friday 5 — 07.19.2013

    Every Friday, find five quick links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas. Source: the internet.

    1. Game development company Valve continues to think different. This week it launched Pipeline, an experimental project to introduce high school students with minimal experience to the video game development industry.
    2. Is user experience finally moving beyond the tech domain and being perceived as a strategic business asset? Robert Fabrikant describes how UX is the new black.
    3. A Pew survey finds that middle and high school teachers believe that students’ use of digital tools encourages creativity and personal expression (78%) as well as greater collaboration among students (79%). Regrettably, this doesn’t always translate into effective writing, and teachers expressed concern about students’ ability to “read and digest long or complicated texts.”
    4. Readwrite describes how to get the most out of Google+, with a good explanation of its different (and clever) hashtag behaviors. I still believe the unintuitive navigation poses a barrier to widespread adoption, and that community is hard to cultivate without that critical mass.
    5. Twitter released a gorgeous data visualization of all the verified accounts. It’s colored by category: blue for news, purple for government and politics, red for music, yellow for sports, and green for TV. You can zoom in close to see the verified account names. The yellow patch bottom right shows sports accounts in with music and TV at bottom right — at first glance, it looks like mixed martial arts tweeters are making a big media splash.
  • How to manage deceptive online reviews

    How to manage deceptive online reviews

    reviewVia Bits Blog, an academic study on deceptive reviews explores why web reviewers make up bad things. It turns out that false negative reviews are not written predominantly by competitors or disgruntled employees. These reviewers are often loyal customers who have made multiple purchases from the company — just not the product in question. Customers writing false reviews may be upset about a different transaction, see themselves as “self-appointed brand managers,” or be seeking social status and validation in a public forum.

    The paper offers some recommendations for those designing business rules for review sites to consider:

    • reduce social status ties to reviewing like “elite reviewer”
    • stop reporting every user’s number of reviews
    • make it more difficult to see all reviews by one reviewer
    • require prior purchase of the product before writing the review

    False reviews provide a terrific example of unintended consequences, like these unexpected benefits and perils of showing quantifiable metrics like a user’s number of reviews. Review sites are communities where human primate behaviors, as one colleague likes to call them, tend to inflate rather than retract. It’s clearly worth investing time upfront in experience design to increase the likelihood of legitimate reviews, and ongoing analytics to spot the trends surrounding the deceptive ones. You might want to leave just a little room for gaming the system, though: the 4,288 reviews of the Hutzler 571 Banana Slicer are priceless.

  • Google Reader, you still autocomplete me

    Google Reader, you still autocomplete me

    Google autocomplete

    Google Reader may be nearly two weeks gone, but Google Chrome’s autocomplete feature just took me back to our 7+ year, highly co-dependent relationship. Reminder: you have until tomorrow (12pm PST July 15, 2013) to download a copy of your Google Reader data via Google Takeout.

    Where should you go from here? Some people aren’t replacing their readers at all, where others view this time as an unexpected RSS renaissance. I’ve been deep in feedly for a while, but look forward to checking out digg.

  • Friday 5 — 07.12.2013

    Every Friday, find five quick links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas. Source: the internet.

    1. What would reddit be without GIFs? Buzzfeed asks if imgur is not-so-stealthily taking over reddit from the inside.
    2. Coursera brought in $43 million in an allegedly oversubscribed round — raising their total VC funding to $66 million. Goals are to grow team, expand into mobile, and improve third party integration.
    3. The Washington Post reports on new research on women leaders and the Goldilocks syndrome. Still a double bind between being assertive and acquiescent, but some progress in perception of the assertive.
    4. For those of you obsessed with productivity hacks, IFTTT goes mobile with an iPhone app. Who knew back in sixth grade math that if-then statements would be an important part of daily life?
    5. Hard to believe that it was only five years ago that Apple’s app store opened its virtual doors. Here’s a recap of some of the significant advances during that half-decade, like the creation of a $10 billion new industry, and impact of a mobile workforce on enterprise IT practices.
  • .nyc enters the domain name fray

    nyc domainJust over a year ago, I wrote a couple of posts about generic top level domains (gTLDS) — what people were applying for, and the risks of domain expansion.

    Last week Mayor Mike Bloomberg announced .nyc, a top level domain the city will make available only to NYC-based businesses and residents. The theory is that a high-rent, sought-after internet domain is a brand benefit, and an opportunity for NYC-based businesses. There are still a number of legitimate questions about the both the execution and the benefit, but it’s an interesting effort in the context of Bloomberg’s broader digital innovation legacy.

    On the coattails of this announcement, GoDaddy announced a marketing effort to push Los Angeles firms to adopt the .la domains. Unlike the newly approved .nyc, the domain is already available, and assigned to Laos. Not sure how much traction this will get as a non-exclusive offer without alignment to broader digital city initiatives.

    Is there value in .nyc and other city-based geographic domains promoting locale as brand? Or will knowing domain names become a charming anachronism, like knowing telephone numbers (1-800-54-GIANT, anyone?) before an age of one-click mobile Yelp and speed dial? Traffic referrals today come primarily from search and social, with mobile social on a rapid rise. If I had a relative investment to make, I would prioritize optimizing for social before the additional domain, but am curious to see who opts for both.

  • Friday 5 — 07.05.2013

    Every Friday, find five quick links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas. Source: the internet.

    1. Coverage of RSS technology that had largely faded from conversation reached a fever pitch this week with the July 1 shuttering of Google Reader. Digg Reader launched; Flipboard experienced some transition pain; and Anil Dash tries to direct attention to what matters.
    2. An undertold story on July 1 was the new COPPA regulations affecting data collection from people under 13 years old. If you’re developing an app for K-12, watch this space.
    3. Pew Internet confirms it: 6% of online adults are reddit users. Males 18-29 lead the category, and a casual glance at the headlines will confirm that many journalists are spending time sourcing stories on the site.
    4. I’ve long been an advocate for devil-in-the-details digital as a greater determiner of online experience than the direction indicated by mood boards. Here’s an interesting argument for the value of “micro-moments” in ux design.
    5. And the Harvard Gazette gets its first major refresh since 2009. Approach is mobile-first, analytics-informed, and media-rich. Baked in WordPress, measured by Google Analytics and Chartbeat, and hooked into social, the site reflects  a create-once-publish-everywhere (COPE) approach. Check it out for yourself.
  • Friday 5 – 06.28.2013

    Every Friday, find five quick links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas. Source: the internet.

    1. Is the 800 million dollar valuation of Snapchat the sign of the bubble poised to burst or a smart bet on the need for ephemeral content in an always-on world? Here’s an interesting read on the valuation and the parallels with Instagram, including shared focus on experience over revenue.
    2. Fragmented operating systems and the mobile-first world we live in are just two of the drivers for content management systems that encourage the right amount of structure for content. Contentful headed into beta this week, seeking to solve the problem with a publish-everywhere, API-driven approach.
    3. Enterprise is heading for mobile to reap productivity gains, and enterprise mobile is heading for the cloud, largely via backend-as a service. Here’s a take on how it’s all playing out.
    4. What’s a library these days if not card catalogs, dark wood and walls lined with  books? Lots of smart people hard at work on this problem, and Pew Internet weighed in this week with a report on Younger American’s Library Habits. Unsurprisingly, Americans ages 16-29 expressed a strong interest in apps for finding library materials within the library or accessing library services on their mobile.
    5. Since it’s the Friday before a holiday week, and everyone’s planning their barbecues and/or reading reddit, why not craft your invitation using this handy new meme generator from Imgur?