Leveraging Social Media Presentation Feedback

My presentation at Affiliate Summit East earlier this month in Boston had pretty good reviews. Thanks so much to Missy Ward, Shawn Collins and Amy Rodriguez!

Here’s the presentation:

And here are the reviews:

Sunday – Leveraging Social Media

Sam Harrelson, Publisher, CostPerNews

Well done! Learned a great deal!!!!!!

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Sam provides great insight and experience on many social media options.

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Good session for beginners who don’t know social media sites. I was looking for something at a more advanced level.

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Awesome presentation, very informative.

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1. No handouts, why not? Outline, urls, etc…
2. No twitter “how to” examples for affiliates. Coupon, theme, personal vs. website, vehicle examples; insurance, loans, games.

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Speaker was very knowledgeable but room configuration (large pole in the middle) made the session a little less desirable.

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It’s warm in the room. Clearly not enough seats. Need to get more chairs in the room. Speaker talked too vague in terms, seemed to jump around a little hard to follow. Clearly speaker is very knowledgeable. But I didn’t really walk away with any specific concepts, points.

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Could have been about 30 min longer to go into more detail

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Sam did a great presentation on social media. Learned a lot of good strategies to leverage these tactics in the right way as a marketer.

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Great overview of tools, would like more practical examples.

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I have not used the social networking channel yet and was unsure how I could. The session provided a better understanding, such as twitter search and trwhil.

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Spent too long on one subject. Did emphasize values of twitter-like tools. Entertaining and engaging powerpoint presentation.

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Interesting, Sam presents well. However as Sam wrapped up, it was really a presentation on technologies in the social media space.

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Very informative! Really enjoyed and got some great ideas and input.

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Very good session, he knows what’s happening in terms of new web applications.

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Very interesting. Would be interesting to see demos of each social site. I like his encouragement for interaction and questions.

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Great!

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Great show. Thanks for bringing in seats.

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Nice coverage of social media websites, there is a twitter love is you! Wish you had talked about social shopping sites like stylefeeder.com that have built apps on facebook to grow business.

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More examples would have been helpful (of how to actually use the apps for Marketing), but good overall nonetheless.

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For a general overview, I think there could have been more of a well rounded view of tools. Sound was low in the beginning so hard to hear – but all in all – pretty good, great topic.

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Good overview of new/up and coming social companies/tools. Would have liked to hear/learn more on how affiliates/merchants could leverage and integrate otherwise extremely helpful.

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Great!

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Stats at beginning were boring. Examples not well thought out. Too much time spent on twitter. Not enough examples how merchants or affiliates are using these services successfully. Geared towards how to use for self. *good example is jetblue

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The content did not deliver on the description for the session. It was really a “what is twitter” session than a “How to leverage”

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Great info didn’t talk into mic enough, could barely hear him at back of room so missed lots of details. Fast paced. Good stuff what I could hear – whew! 

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Very thorough. In spite of twitter preference, still managed to fit a lot of information about many social networks in a short time frame. Also added lots of good tertiary information about each network, such as desktop clients.

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Great information, good direction to not waste time, reasons for implementation, great marketing strategy

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Excellent presentation and content.

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Excellent presentation, good info, engaging speaker, very accessible.

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Good session. Very knowledgeable about social media. Would have liked to see one real example of how social media has been used to support affiliate marketing programs.

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Information was helpful but not for mass marketing.

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Insightful with good focus and recommendations about social media. A lot of ideas to consider.

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Good introduction to “What’s Hot” in social networking. Some good tools that aggregate the content.

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Lots of interesting information.

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Some good information, had to fight sleep though. I came away feeling I learned something but wasn’t fully sure what that was. Hope I can quantity when I get the powerpoint later or look at the video later.

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I had fun and learned some things myself during the presentation. Glad to see a couple of others did as well.

Real Time


I’ve been having conversations with folks about why Identi.ca (or Laconica, the mothership code base of which Identi.ca is the flagship derivation, but there are many possibilities available such as Leo Laporte’s TWiT Army) matters so much for the present and future and why Twitter has failed to keep the great commission by hampering its real time flow (made possible via XMPP) in hopes of monetizing it with partners such as Zappos.

The question here is what use is a service such as Twitter if the ability to Track keywords in real time is not an option. To some of us who used Twitter primarily for this function for months and months, Twitter’s plug-pulling action was a punch in the face. Suddenly, we had to rely on RSS, Summize or API clients such as Twhirl.

But the power of Twitter is not, and has never been, about latent searches, API calls or RSS deliveries to find relevant information. What makes (made) Twitter so revolutionary is the real time experience.

While those means of parsing data are sufficient for some, those means are 3 steps back in the general evolution of the web that Twitter had started to spur. Just as more and more users were being converted to the power of Track via IM, Twitter closed off the firehose and took the goose that will lay its golden monetization egg back into the royal stable, away from us peasants, forcing us to glean the fields at night after the nobles had finished their harvesting for the day.

Real time matters. And that is why Identi.ca matters. Identi.ca recognizes the power of real time and with its federated sense of micro-blogging and its wise reliance on developers for Track, Identi.ca has the foundations in place to provide the type of experience that will transform the web and relegate the Twitter silo to CompuServe status.

Here are a few great pieces I’ve come across that reverberate this growing awareness (and demand) for real time trackable services to fill the gap that Twitter created…

Joe Magennis nails it with this piece on Identi.ca and community building. I particularly enjoyed his reminder that the current Twitter/Identi.ca microblogging environment looks a lot like email in the early days when a CompuServe subscriber couldn’t email a Prodigy member because of data silos:

What’s a real world example?

Right now I am in the process of working with a client who is opening a motorcycle service shop. The owners are interested in developing a strong base of local riders who trust them to perform superior service on their equipment. The owners are also very involved in advancing a local riding chapter that organizes events, hosts charity rides and in essence builds a community with the repair shop as the center …

I see micro-blogging as a way for the entire group to communicate about upcoming rides, as a way to follow riders who might be taking a long cross country trip, or simply to connect when the weather turns against getting together for a day on the open road.

Here’s a though provoking piece from Echovar:

As we deepen the questions about the real time web, we uncover the startling fact that underneath all the layers of technology and specialized lingo, we find only ourselves. Human beings, mortals, gathering together to share our joys and sorrows, our dreams and aspirations, our humanity. As we pound out, hammer and tongs, the basic shape of our experience through the real time Network, we would do well to heed the words of that guy who said, “what if all this stuff really matters?”

Karoli makes the epistemological connection between the power of real time and the more political “fierce urgency of now” movement that Obama supporters mind find familiar:

In a time where young men and women are dying alongside tens of thousands from the country we occupy without invitation, when everyone is suffering from foreclosures and four-dollar a gallon gas, in a time where our standing in the world is in grave danger and we’ve lost all moral authority to conduct ourselves with diplomacy and dignity, all that is urgent is NOW. And inside now, change.

And finally Amyloo gives a practical example of how and why real time matters to fans, businesses and the wider social web:

Weezer outrage. Last night I noticed a Weezer song used in a Beaches resort commercial. I wondered if other fans were reacting in the same negative way I do when a song I like has been cashed out. They were. Check out the Twitter search compared with the blog search. No comparison. You’d have to spend 100 times longer on the blog search to open each post and see if it’s relevant, while the Twitter results page tells you the answer in a glance, a few seconds.

I’ll leave it to your own imagination to connect the dots and see how it might be to a company’s advantage to use this resource, especially a consumer-facing company.

Search is valuable, but track, the lightning-quick realtime stream via IM and XMPP, is gold. Steve Gillmor has to be right; that has to be why Twitter has clammed up and blocked it off. I guess the only answer is to drill offshore, or threaten it.

People using Twitter (or people interested in why other people use Twitter) need to see past the initial surface rendering of the service as a social network. The real power of Twitter is/was its real time facility. The implications for business, social, political, religious, etc are astounding.

Yet, there is very little recognition among the wider base of users as to what they are missing. Look at the cave walls around you… those are not real beings… they are shadows being projected from a much brighter and much more real time world outside the Twitter cave.

Bible 2.0

Twelve (?!?!) years ago in 1996, I bought the first edition of the Harper Collins Study Bible (NRSV of course) for a summer school session of Old Testament 101. Back then, I was a self-assured Chemistry / Computer Science freshman double major at Wofford College and decided to take summer school to get a couple of required classes “out of the way.”

One of those classes was Prof John Bullard’s Old Testament class. Prof Bullard is/was a legendary “old school” prof who had a very straightforward method of interpretation and teaching. To my ears, hearing him dissect and then re-assemble Genesis 1 was the most astonishing thing I’ve ever heard. Within the first five minutes of class, something had sneaked up behind me and tapped me on the shoulder… my life had changed. I switched my major to Religion that first day of summer school.

So, I have a great deal of love and reverence for that study Bible. I’ve lugged it around with me to classes at Wofford, Yale, South Carolina and now Gardner-Webb for over a decade and it is definitely showing its wear:

The entire thing is delicately held together by super glue and duct tape that has been applied and re-applied over the years.

The inside doesn’t look much better because I like to write marginalia (the original “user generated content”) as I take notes in my studies. Here’s Romans 7:

There are parts that I’ve studied heavily where you can barely read the text because of the marginalia. Thousands of years from now, my notes on Galatians will be a goldmine to some poor text critic studying early 21st century Biblical interpretation:

All that being said, I’m going to start this next period of my academic career with the newly published revised edition of the Harper Collins. This isn’t an easy decision since I have so much invested in the browning pages of the first edition, but I think it’ll be neat to have notes from my initial years of study and then have a source of notes for my more professional studies as I pursue the PhD.

One of my Prof’s from my time at Yale, Prof Harold Attridge, is the General Editor of the revised edition (Prof Wayne Meeks was the Editor for the first edition), so there’s a little connection for me there. Plus, Yale Professors John J Collins and Adela Y Collins (John was my advisor at Yale) submitted pieces for certain books. The notes and maps are revised along with some stylistic and formatting points.

I’ve been poking through the new textual notes which appear below the actual Biblical texts, and so far I’m impressed. With the old version, I was frequently frustrated with some of the things that were included (and not included) in these notes since it is incredibly easy to warp a beginner student’s mind with just one slip or one assumption. These notes, for the most part, seem more comprehensive.

Here’s Genesis 1:

So, we’ll see how it goes. I’ve got so many random notes, memories and ideas wrapped into the old Harper Collins, but I look forward to a new slate on which to project my marginalia love.

I’ll give updates as they come…

29

Today is my last day of being a 20-something year old.

It’s one of those big days that we in the cultures of the West like to put great emphasis upon. You spend your 20’s figuring out who you are, exploring ideas, being idealistic. Then, you transition into a real adult focused on career, family, mortgages, etc in your 30’s.

I’m not sure if that’s supposed to happen in one day or over the course of the 30th year, but I’m working on it. Having a child is a big wake up call in terms of personhood, the awareness of mortality and the need for responsibility (etc).

However, turning 30 still scares the hell out of me because I don’t want to loose my idealism which is tied so close to my own identity.

When I was 10 or 12 (maybe 11?), my best friend and I would make out these “life plans” that detailed our futures, careers, wives, etc. Mine went something along the line of going to Clemson then playing catcher for the Chicago Cubs for a while, retiring around 42, becoming mayor of Chicago then Senator and eventually running for President. It was a good plan until I blew out my knees playing catcher in high school and had to take up golf. Plus, I never made that move to Chicago.

When I was 26, I was convinced I would spend the rest of my life as an 8th grade science teacher. I was so happy with that.

Somewhere along junior or senior year of high school I realized I was going to suck as a business person and needed to find a career where I could be paid to think or do something harmless like teach. I’m still working on that plan now that I’m back at Gardner-Webb finishing up my Masters of Divinity and hopefully heading to PhD work soon enough.

When I was 24, I used a map on a trip for the first time. Don’t get me wrong… I traveled a great deal by road (and by myself) before that, but I had always just felt my way around since I have a pretty keen sense of geography. I would just sail into a big city and figure out where a concert hall or ballpark was located without much thought. But on this trip, something changed. I lost a little bit of myself on that trip.

When I was 15, I gave my first real sermon at my small country church in Mullins, SC on Youth Sunday. My topic was about the silence of the Gospels in respect to Jesus’ youth. There are the birth and infancy stories of Jesus and then we skip to Jesus as an adult with very little in-between.

As a kid with too much righteous indignation and not enough temperance, I was often frustrated with the church in terms of how the “youths” were handled and took that to the pulpit that Sunday with pictures of people we teens were turning to (at the time it was Kurt Cobain for me) and how the church was missing the (fishing) boat. I hope I never forget that sermon wherever my career path carves.

I discovered Dura Europos when I was 22. My life hasn’t been the same since.

Jesus re-emerges as an adult at age 30 after evidently spending his youth and 20’s “finding himself” and working. Even with years of Biblical scholarship, it still puzzles me as to what exactly Jesus was doing in his 20’s. Was he conflicted? Scared? Waiting for 30 to get into the game? Why did he wait? Why not give sermons on the mounts when he was 21 or 25? I always found great solace in the fact that the Gospels tell us Jesus waited until he was 30 to start taking “this stuff” more seriously.

Problem is, I’ve only got a few more hours before that solace evaporates and I have to go to Canaa.

Cory Booker Keynote at Affiliate Summit

Newark mayor Cory Booker spoke at this month’s Affiliate Summit in Boston. I’ve heard too many political speeches in life, but this one is up there with Obama’s “Yes We Can” moment in Columbia, SC during the primaries.

If you want to get a glimpse of a future president, go watch this video (and head over to the original Affiliate Summit blog post to thank Shawn and Missy for posting this up so quickly):

http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=-4158354476639468131&hl=en&fs=true

Yes, that is the famous Blue Man Group doing the intro for Mayor Booker. It was strange, but it worked.

Cory Booker Keynote Address at Affiliate Summit: “Cory Booker is the Mayor of Newark, NJ, as well as the subject of the Academy Award nominated documentary, Street Fight, a Rhodes Scholar, graduate of Yale University School of Law, blogger at HuffingtonPost.com, and he played tight end at Stanford University.

Mayor Booker spoke at Affiliate Summit 2008 East on August 11, 2008 in Boston.”

And here is the mp3 if you’re so inclined.

Evernote for Class Notes


So, I’m trying to get Evernote (one of my favorite web/mobile/desktop applications ever) to work with the notes I’m taking in classes.

Why not just type in the notes?

Good question. Basically, I like to hand write notes from classes and seminars. Something about muscle memory as well as respect to seminar participants (a lot of my classes are smaller, so having a laptop out is not necessarily disrespectful but I think it takes away from the human element of a seminar).

So, I get something like this…

What I’m attempting to do is take a pic of the page with my BlackBerry Curve, then send that over to Evernote via email to take advantage of Evernote’s mostly awesome text recognition capabilities.

This would allow me to keep notes searchable by specific terms and topics. That, my dear readers, would be killer.

Alas, it’s not working (yet). I’ll keep toying with it to see what I can do.

And I’ll keep you posted.

XMPP as the Marketer’s Golden Egg; Latency as Magic Beans

XMPP has had a meteoric rise in term of its profile and application over the last two years. Part of that is due to the rise of microblogging services such as Twitter or Identi.ca that leverage the XMPP platform to deliver real time updates to users.

However, there has been a hiccup in Twitter’s usage of XMPP over the last few months and that hiccup has helped to give more exposure to XMPP instead of putting it on the shelf. The increasingly popular Track feature of Twitter (which allowed users to follow certain keywords they were interested in… in real time… without having to rely upon the latency of RSS and/or an increasingly hampered Twitter API) was pulled a few months ago. Twitter’s Biz Stone comments about the disabling of Track for everyone here:

Our goal is to support as many applications, projects, mash-ups, and devices as possible so we’ll continue to think about how best to do this. While the XMPP feed of the full Twitter Public Timeline is an amazing resource, drinking from the fire hose is not the best way to quench a thirst. With continued updates and refinement, our API will support most scenarios in a way that preserves overall system performance.

Track WAS the ultimate web tool and began to function as the neural spine for many of us. The latency of a hampered API does not fill the void. Early adopters like myself got a taste of its power and now thinkers and users such as Steve Gillmor are looking for an angry fix:

But Twitter is living on borrowed time with its XMPP blockade. The flowering of micro-objects opens the door to applications that leverage swarming around events and the growing availability of iPhone-class mobile devices. The success of App Store stars such as Evernote suggests that adding micro-object support will accelerate usage of the XMPP backbone. Latency in that environment will be an instant deal-breaker, opening the door for better-financed competitors to subsidize real time services to capture audience.

Before we go too much deeper, it’s important to explain exactly what XMPP is and why marketers should be researching and developing its application.

Wikipedia explains:

Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) is an open, XML-inspired protocol for near-real-time, extensible instant messaging (IM) and presence information (a.k.a. buddy lists). It is the core protocol of the Jabber Instant Messaging and Presence technology. The protocol is built to be extensible and other features such as Voice over IP and file transfer signaling have been added.

Unlike most instant messaging protocols, XMPP is an open standard. Like e-mail, it is an open system where anyone who has a domain name and a suitable Internet connection can run their own Jabber server and talk to users on other servers. The standard server implementations and many clients are also free and open source software.

That sounds incredibly geeky and innocuous to most direct marketers, but put on your thinking cap for a moment and re-read Gillmor’s quote above with that information in mind.

It doesn’t take too much imagination to come to the realization that in the coming years, the real world web stars will be applications that deliver on demand, in real time and with micro-object support. XMPP stands as the protocol, above all other protocols, to deliver those messages to the masses.

The future of marketing is not based on latency or delayed access to timely information. RSS is wonderful and has changed my world, but its asynchronous delivery only makes me want to plant the latency bean in some fertile garden so that I can climb the vine to the ultimate marketing prize… real time tracking and delivery of information that I opt-in to.

Keep an eye on XMPP. And especially keep an eye on the first company to tap into its marketing power (Identi.ca?).