Christopher S. Penn – Marketing AI Keynote Speaker

Category: Technology

Social Media Dashboard – Bloomberg for Social Media

Social Media Dashboard – Bloomberg for Social Media

This morning started off thinking about Bloomberg’s wonderful but hideously expensive terminal, and how it gives you insight and also a dashboard to instantly know what’s going on in the markets. I thought, wouldn’t it be interesting to have a Bloomberg for social media? Sure enough, a platform exists to manage all your social media in one place, and that’s iGoogle.

Click on the photo for a larger version.

Take a look at what we’ve got here.

Facebook, GMail, and Google Finance on the left, because if I’m doing this for a purpose, for, say, the Student Loan Network, it’s more than just conversation, it’s also understanding what’s happening in the bigger picture. Thus we see a public portfolio of companies in the student loan sector and broader market stuff. Not only does this keep on top of things for my client (the company I work for) but it also gives me the ability to be current when I participate in social networks.

In the middle, a mashup of Yahoo Pipes culling from Twitter Search on specific topics and keywords relevant to the industry. This can be anything at all, but for this, it’s all financial aid stuff, so I can stay on the pulse of financial aid as reported by customers and consumers. Below that, Feedburner for the podcast and customized Compete analytics to monitor what’s happening on my sites and my competitors’ sites.

On the right, Twitter replies to see if anyone needs my attention, and Digg to see what’s buzzy in the world. Obviously, swap this out for Reddit, Stumbleupon, Yahoo Buzz, or whatever your buzz-watcher of choice is.

This, incidentally, is social media with a purpose, highly focused for one specific task – being a financial aid expert in social media. It’s most assuredly not a fishbowl setup where I watch social media for social media’s sake.

Try it for your own vertical and niche, and see if it works for you!

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September 17, 2008
SEO more important than ever with Google Chrome

Google’s announcement of Chrome, their new open-source browser, was greeted with a relatively lukewarm reception online today.

Here’s the part that a lot of folks missed, from the Chrome comic book. (yes, a comic book)

Get it?

If your SEO efforts aren’t up to par, Google’s ignoring you in the testing of their browser, too.

If their browser achieves any level of success, Google will test against your site – if you rank.

Now this part is the gem, the part that marketers NEED to pay attention to, or ignore at their peril.

If users think your site is worth remembering, Chrome will do it for them.

If your site ranks for your keywords, Chrome will suggest it – IN the browser itself. No need to be using Google suggest.

Seth Godin is fond of saying that if you make your content remarkable, you win.

Google Chrome now says if you make your content remarkable, they’ll market it for free to their users directly in the OmniBox.

We’ll see how this new browser does, but marketers – pay heed.

Google Chrome debuts September 2.

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September 2, 2008
Spam is a market signal

Here’s a thought. What is the killer app online? How would you measure such a thing? I’ll throw this out there: follow the spam.

Spam = unsolicited commercial bulk messaging.

Spam is a mass market play. Paraphrasing the words of Matt Mason (of the Pirate’s Dilemma), spam is a market signal.

Why? Spam follows the money. You need massive quantities of people (who preferably don’t know what they’re doing online) to make spam work, since it probably has a conversion rate in the hundredths of a percent. Likewise, spam requires a marketplace where a minimal amount of work generates maximum results. Create once, send everywhere, wash, rinse, repeat. Spam that requires babysitting, customization, and customer service is a no-go. In the largely unregulated world of the Internet, spam is the marketplace acknowledging value and potential for commercialization.

What does this mean for social media and all things 2.0? Simple. You can measure the probability of success for a service by how easily it is spammed, or by how much time the service has to devote to fighting spam. If spammers move in, congratulations – you’ve got a product or service that the marketplace thinks can or has the potential to reach large groups of people. You’re starting to see plenty of blog and podcasting spam in the form of RSS scrapers. You’re seeing spam on MySpace and Twitter. You see a never-ending flow of spam in your inbox.

Spam is a market signal. If you operate a 2.0 service of any kind, and more of your time is going towards fighting spam, congratulations. The marketplace thinks you have serious, legitimate potential.

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August 12, 2008
Virtual Reality Cannot Yet Replace Real Life Presence

Image via Wikipedia

Virtual Reality Cannot Yet Replace Real Life Presence

I’ve seen some discussions on various mailing lists about attempts to virtualize conferences as a way to save money for participants, given outrageous travel costs these days. Believe me, as an avid conference-goer, I and my wallet couldn’t agree more about travel costs. However, technology isn’t there quite yet, at least not for what makes conferences and other social meetings important.

The talking head portion? That’s easy. You can, and in fact anyone can, record a talking head session, where the presenter gets up in front of a crowd and chats about whatever. In fact, for PodCamp Boston, we have an mDialog channel that does exactly that. You can watch pre-recorded talking heads in advance of the conference, get whatever you can from those presentations (if you have recorded sessions from other PodCamps, please post them to this channel!), and then show up at the actual event with a better idea of what questions you need answers to.

Here’s why technology still fails at the most important parts of presence. First, there’s a technical limitation. Our human sensory systems are calibrated to three dimensional space, to perceive five different senses, and to do so all in parallel. Virtualizations like Second Life and Google Earth deliver more or less two of our five senses, and omit a tremendous amount of data.

Second, there’s a contextual limitation. Have you ever been to a conference in which another participant catches your attention? How much of that was a verbal, obvious gesture and how much of that was non-verbal communication? Even with Qik, Seesmic, Utterz, and all the other forms of rich media communication, our devices and our use of the devices is still so poor that we miss most of that data.

Second, there’s a metaphysical limitation. Think about it for a second. The technologies we use to represent sight and sound on computers are calibrated to a very narrow spectrum of visible light and audible sound. As a result, we automatically get a diminished experience. For example, no virtualization currently transmits infrared or ultraviolet wavelengths – thus, you never feel that sensation of body heat when you get closer to someone at a virtualized conference. Think that’s not important? Watch when a conference gets underway, and see how many times people touch – shake hands, hug, pat each other on the back, and so forth. Part of touch’s magic is the infrared spectrum.

The computer can’t deliver ultraviolet, either. Classic example: you can put up a picture of the sun on your 34″ Apple Cinema Display and you will never get a sunburn. The virtualized experience can’t deliver because we’re not transmitting that data.

How much other data don’t we transmit? How much else is lost? If you believe in the power of prayer and the ability for someone to spiritually heal another person, you can bet our technology does not transmit the extra data that the in-person experience undoubtedly contains. If you believe that chanting Sanskrit mantras has power, how much resonance do we create when we chant that’s outside our range of audible sound but is still very much a part of the experience?

This is why conferences still matter. This is why even though MP3s are ubiquitous, the live musical performance is still irreplaceable. This is why human intimacy is still desperately sought after even with the most robust technology solutions we have available to us.

It’s foolish to believe that technology can replace the full experiences of being there in person. Absolutely, there’s benefit and gain to be had by recording, podcasting, and streaming events for those who are there and those who can’t make it, but don’t think for a minute that current technology can replace the in-person experience.

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June 15, 2008
How to auto-follow on Twitter

Image via Wikipedia

UPDATE:

As of September 1, 2010, Twitter has nuked functions like this from orbit. I now recommend you download and install the paid TweetAdder software that does substantially the same thing but is compliant with Twitter’s OAuth protocols.

The old post is kept below only for historical purposes.

(more…)

June 13, 2008
Woopra!

I just got the Financial Aid Podcast approved for a beta of Woopra.

Oh. my. goodness.

This really is web analytics porn. There’s no better way to describe just how neat this is.

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June 4, 2008
Brain Buster

Hat tip to Guy Kawasaki for this one.

Watch this video from Cisco.

Brain buster.

This reminds me of the first time I used talk on a Digital VAX, back in 1993. Talk was a UNIX-based synchronous chat client, and a fairly ugly one at that. I remember talking to folks I met on other UNIX systems at Harvard, Drew, and schools all over the world via this black and green terminal.

The Cisco 3D teleconference is the same for me. This technology is just taking its first baby steps, and what it will look like in just 15 years is as unfathomable as where the Internet is today from my freshman year in college – when talk was insanely cool.

How will college change when you can virtually attend anywhere?

How will medicine change when a world class surgeon can remotely guide you as if he were standing next to you?

How will politics change when you can’t shoot at someone at the podium?

How will business change when you don’t need to get on a plane?

How will family change when Grandma and Grandpa can visit without leaving home?

Moments like this make me very happy.

May 30, 2008
Power Calendaring with iCal, Google Calendar, and Sync

My calendar grows increasingly crazy as the various ventures I work with continue to gain popularity, from the Student Loan Network and the Financial Aid Podcast to Marketing Over Coffee and PodCamp. Recently, I found myself having to sync two iPods, a phone, Google Calendar, and iCal, and in the process, a whole bunch of things got badly messed up.

Here’s how I fixed it.

First, I took Google Calendar – since that’s where I do most of my data entry – and exported the calendars there as iCal ics files. Those I saved to my desktop.

I deleted my entire Google Calendar, top to bottom.

I also reset sync on all my devices, effectively telling those devices to start from scratch the next time they started up.

After all the external points were deleted and reset, I disconnected everything and started up iCal. I imported all the different ics files and found I had a calendar about 10 times as large as I expected. Literally had half a dozen entries for every single event, which was unmanageable to say the least.

I found this terrific script called iCal Dupe Deleter (donationware). Ran it against iCal overnight (it took that long!) and when I woke up this morning, I had a clean calendar, free of duplicate events, ready for the world.

I connected all the mobile devices, synced them, then connected back to Google Calendar using Spanning Sync. Now iCal was serving as the master record, and everything else got copies of iCal. Going forward, Google Calendar will remain the data import point for new events, but iCal will still be the “golden master” if I need to do this manual re-sync process again to de-dupe and clean up.

Disclosures: Spanning Sync, by the way, is $65, just so you know. I get zilch from recommending it.

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April 30, 2008
Unsponsored Review: SuperDuper

I wanted to take a moment to very publicly thank the developers at Shirt Pocket for making SuperDuper, the backup software for the Mac.

A few weeks ago, my MacBook Pro started making noise. A LOT of noise. One of the fans broke and made my Mac sound like it was harvesting grain or sanding plywood. Needless to say, I was less than thrilled at the idea of repairs, and Apple confirmed what I’d not wanted to hear – 3 to 5 days of repair time to get the machine fixed.

At the Student Loan Network, we have extra machines in case things like this happen, but as anyone who’s ever gone through the process knows, sitting in on a hot spare means operating in an environment that isn’t yours. Shortcuts and aliases, preferences, it’s literally like trying to drive someone else’s car, wearing someone else’s clothes, living in someone else’s house. It’s never pleasant, though usually tolerable.

Enter SuperDuper. I originally chose to use it because it uses half the disk footprint of Apple’s Time Machine, and unlike most users, I actually do backup my data regularly. In the manual for SuperDuper, it says it’s possible to boot from its backups. Unfortunately, I found out that if you back up to an image on disk rather than a disk partition, it’s not bootable.

Except…

… If you boot from the Mac OS X install/repair CD and fire up Disk Utility, you can load the disk image of a SuperDuper backup, mount it, and use it to restore your hard drive.

So when the AppleCare box came for me to ship my ailing MacBook Pro to Apple, I did a final incremental backup, shut down, booted the spare MacBook we have in stock, did a restore, hit reboot, and hoped.

If I believed in an external deity, I would have yelled that my prayers were answered. Not only did the MacBook boot, but it loaded in my environment, with all my Quicksilver hot keys, iTunes, everything, exactly as I’d left it when I shut down the MacBook Pro. It was like my computer just decided to go on a hardware diet but otherwise was exactly the same, not a thing out of place.

Today, the MacBook Pro came back from Apple. I did the process in reverse – backed up the MacBook, Disk Utility, restore – and here I am, typing on my MacBook Pro, as if it had never left. Only now the fan is quiet.

SuperDuper not only saved my data, but it made a 3 day absence of my computer more than tolerable – it let me work uninterrupted, save for the hour to backup and the hour to restore. I can’t thank the folks at Shirt Pocket enough for making such a damn fine utility, and it has certainly paid for itself MANY times over in the past few days.

If you run Mac OS X, go buy SuperDuper and start backing up today.

Full disclosure: I paid money to Shirt Pocket, Inc., not the other way around.
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February 22, 2008
Quick look: the Nokia n810

I’d been hearing a lot of buzz about this little machine ever since Podshow’s sponsorship of it with a few prominent podcasters I listen to, like CC Chapman and Julien Smith. Yesterday I got to play with one of the boxes, courtesy of Peta Andersen, and I think one of these is in my future soon.

Why?

Take a look at this picture. What do you see?

That’s an n810, and it’s running terminal.

The n810 is a Linux box. Yes, it comes with all the shiny applets and stuff, but it also comes with a Linux distribution called Maemo. Maemo makes the n810 a big deal because it’s a variant of Debian Linux, and that means you get a command line.

Poking around a little more, that terminal is running bash, and apt-get is installed on there.

apt-get, if you’re unfamiliar with Debian Linux, is a package manager that lets you download and install packages from the command line. To install, say, wget, you’d type apt-get install wget when you’re online and the service would do the rest.

Why is this a big deal? Unlike my iPod Touch, which I still love, the n810 is a true portable computer. The existence of a bash shell and apt-get means that I can run most of my marketing software (a lot of the stuff I do is on the command line on my Mac, such as wget, perl, bash scripts, etc.) from a microcomputer in my pocket. That plus a large, tactile keyboard makes this little device a winner.

Now if only I could get a better price than $400…

If you’re a podcaster promoting your show’s coupon codes, you are welcome to post the codes in the comments.

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February 20, 2008

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