Exclamation blog: Stories, Ideas and loud noises
One Stop Shop for Docs
There is a new start-up in Southern California that I have been excited about for almost a year now. Docstoc is the latest brainchild of one of my former business school classmates, Jason Nazar and his partner, Alon Schwartz. It’s a user generated community where you can find and share professional documents, ranging from legal to technology to business and beyond. Docstoc announced this week that it has raised $3.25M in its series B round of funding from Rustic Canyon Partners.
Docstoc is a great example of the increasingly transparent world that we live in, a vast database of useful information that is part blog, part social community and part encyclopedia of free information. An interesting attribute and arguably the most compelling reason that this start-up attracted the attention (read: money) of such an esteemed, media-savvy venture firm is that it has popularized the ability to embed documents into any blog or website, a feature that we know very well in the PR world is popular in the blogoshpere and on news sites.
I like Docstoc for many reasons; the site has become my go-to resource for information that I might have had trouble tracking down previously, but I also think that it is leading the charge in changing the way that people use, store and share information. The site is still in beta, the company is brand new, so for me, I will be watching to see what it does with its $3.25M and whether Jason can get another winner off the ground…
Serph - What’s Its’ Buzz Tracking Werph?
There have been loads of products purported to do real-time buzz tracking in the last couple of years. Some cost a lot of money (Buzzlogic, Coremetrics), and some of them are free (Google Trends, Alexa Stats, Pagerank).
(Had it not been for Google Trends, I wouldn’t have known that a New Kids on The Block Reunion may be in the offing…)
When a relatively new entrant comes onto the market, especially a free one, I’m always wondering how solid the data will be.
I ran into Serph’s creator, Hiten Shah, at a Songbird event a few weeks ago, and he encouraged me to check it out. Signup for Serph was easy enough, and it actually allowed me to bypass the usual email registration. I was also fairly impressed that this free service allowed domain blacklisting. For example, if you’re searching for information about your company (i.e. “LaunchSquad”), you’re not going to want information from your own website reporting into the data you’re trying to obtain. It ain’t buzz if you said it about yourself, right?
The backstory on Serph is a little unusual; instead of being created as a product by a software company, it was compiled by ACSSEO, a social media marketing and SEO agency, who have some cool clients (HP, Dogster, TechCrunch).
While Serph’s queries are not lightning-fast (20-40 seconds, typically), the total aggregation of data looks pretty neat, and a lot cleaner than, say, what one would get in a Google Alerts email. The ideal way to track the Serph information, as far as I can tell, is in one’s RSS feeds, especially since the way it reports into feeds looks really nice and neat.
My initial queries for LaunchSquad’s name and the MetzMash social media blog (my other blog) seem to have yielded all of the right hits. While Serph may not be the most robust tool out there, but for brands on a budget, Serph is definitely a clean-looking jumping-off point for buzz tracking.
One-To-Many Text Messaging: How Soon Is Now?
I’m an iPhone geek. I was the third LaunchSquad team member to get an iPhone, and I evangelized it until three more colleagues and my wife bought their own. Obviously, I was delighted when I read (on my phone, natch) in the Gearlive blog this morning that the new update of the phone’s operating system will contain one-to-many text messaging. A lot of brands have tried to create one-to-many and swarm-like many-to-many text messaging solutions, but few have seen mainstream success.
Many a business model has been built on the premise of solving the one-to-many text message problem. 3Jam and NetworkText have tried to solve this problem head-on, and rock brands and corporate brands have also done innovative stuff with text-messaging on the Mozes platform.
If you’re wondering about the usefulness of one-to-many text messaging, consider the following scenarios:
1. Four friends are going to meet at an Italian restaurant. One arrives early, and realizes the restaurant is closed, and wants to notify the others quickly, so they can coordinate an alternative plan.
2. The location for a business meeting is changed at the last minute, and all participants need to be notified, quickly
3. You want to send a message out to a large group of friends (”I just got engaged!”) without putting it in a public space like Twitter, Facebook or Jaiku.
Twitter, Jaiku and Facebook’s newsfeed updates do fulfill a similar function, but I think it’s a pretty big exaggeration to say that adoption of those technologies is widespread. With bloggers predicting that there will be 5 million iPhones sold by the end this month, I think it’s a pretty safe bet to say that one-to-many text messaging will be a pretty widely deployed technology by the end of the year.
A colleague showed me how he could do this on his Blackberry, but the process involves selecting the recipients individually, and they can’t tell that the message sent to them was sent to multiple recipients. It’s quite possible that RIM may have been the first brand to bring one-to-many texting to a widely deployed device, but I don’t know if they will be the brand to capitalize on this innovation. Maybe consumers will only adopt this technology if it’s really easy (and fun) to use. That’s something that Cupertino figured out about 24 years ago.
The RSS Engagement Problem
Last Friday, at the SNAP Summit (basically a Facebook conference), I sat down to have a chat with Newsgator’s Jeff Nolan and we stumbled onto the topic of RSS engagement. This is a really, really thorny problem not only for companies like NewsGator (our client), who build the RSS infrastructure but for media entities that publish lots of RSS feeds (like, say, the NY Times blogs).
If I were able to define the solution, I’d have a bestselling book on my hands. My conversation with Jeff only defined the problem, and I hope this becomes the start of a larger conversation about RSS engagement. We temporarily labeled this problem The Loop. Maybe I called it that because I lived in Chicago for a few years. But this loop is a loop that stubbornly remains open. The question is this: how do you effectively put a metric on one’s engagement with an RSS feed?
I have a few blogs that I read when I’m at home on the weekend; I have them set up in both NetNewsWire and my Google Reader, and I’ve read over the Google Reader’s stats a few times. Google has a real basic approach here; they can put a metric on which feeds you’re clicking on, so the reader can understand how valuable each feed is to him. Let’s call this the UTILITY metric. For example, if I realize that I’m only reading 20% of what comes in on the Oakland Tribune’s feeds, and there’s a high volume of feeds, then that feed has really low utility to me.
But let’s say that I’m reading 100% of what’s coming in from the Entrepreneur Watch blog. So, that blog is a high-utility blog for me. But if that’s all the information I can get, then I’m stuck, as a publisher, wondering what the next-action is for someone who reads that blog. RSS feed readers and enterprise content-management systems lack an effective way of tracking what the reader does as a result of the information they read in an RSS feed.
RSS readers can map out discrete metrics. Google’s Reader can tell whether you’ve shared an item on their service (which ports over to Facebook and a host of other social networks via in-network applications) and NewsGator’s Enterprise Server product surfaces the most popular feeds and articles within organizations, which is really useful. And they also do the Facebook thing well with their NewsFriends application. But no one, so far, has figured out how to close The Loop and really map out any kind of ENGAGEMENT metric. (By the way, this FeedHeads Google Reader application is seeing really low adoption - like under 300 users).
This is only the beginning of this conversation, and a little work has already been done on this in the social media blog space, but the thing that’s clearly come out of that writing is that somebody needs to do something about it (and waiting for metrics companies like Factiva, Buzzlogic or Buzzmetrics to just come up with the answer is probably not the soundest business strategy). I’m beginning to wonder if some sort of engagement consortium is in order, because this is one big question mark.
Microformats: Do You Need To Know This?
I’ve been reading up on microformats for the last few weeks and spending a bit of time over at Microformats.org. Today, I came across a pretty interesting but very dense book by John Allsopp called Microformats. (For your convenience, I’ve added the title to the Metzmash Canteen). The point of understanding how microformats will play in your future communications and marketing is all about figuring out how your brand is going to answer questions.
How is your toilet company, for example, going to answer a question like, "What is a toilet that will fit into a 38" x 24" x 24" space in our new bathroom, that doesn’t use a lot of water and is available in black?"
It would probably take a human searching on the Kohler website and about 15 or 20 minutes to figure that out (have you figured out that I’m in the bathroom remodel market yet?). But there probably is a toilet on that website that meets those exact specifications. That’s where microformats could feasibly come in - product pages and PDFs can be enabled for better searchability. That’s what John Allsopp’s book is all about.
Chapters One and Two are a sturdy preview of what you need to know about microformats, and there’s a fairly solid breakdown of publishers who are currently using them (Yahoo, Cork’d, Eventful, Apple, edgeio). The later chapters get into some real heavy stuff that you’ll want to look over with the I.T. department, but Parts One, Three and Four look like they’re gonna be required reading for marketing and brand managers in the next few months.
The bits and pieces of Alsopp’s book that I’ve investigated are definitely on the geekier side of the marketing spectrum, but if you’re looking for a pretty solid download on emerging best practices of the semantic web, this is a helluva place to start.
Mobile RSS Solutions - What’s Out There?
Exclamation is usually our blog that’s reserved for storytelling. Well, half of storytelling is listening, right? And it’s pretty hard to “listen” to a story on the bus or the train unless you’re into books on tape, and, as much as Audible would like, I doubt a majority of the people I know are as into books-on-mp3 as I am. I think they’re much more likely to read, rather than listen, on the fly.
One of our clients told me the other day that he wanted to start reading and commenting on more blogs on his Blackberry. I realized, in talking to him, that I don’t know what are the best mobile RSS readers, as of this summer. I remember setting up HubDog about 18 months ago on the lousy T-Mobile MDA smartphone, nearly vowing never to use mobile RSS again. Mobile RSS has been tossed around for the last couple of years, but only recently have a few real contenders come along. I know that EnGadget did a posting on this a while back, and I don’t think of this as so much of an update as a condensation!
So, here’s a quick roundup, based on the popular platforms. One disclosure: NewsGator is a current LaunchSquad client.
Blackberry: NewsGator Go! is the best thing I’ve seen, but you can use a web-based app like Google Reader, if you’ve got the time to do a bit more clicking.
iPhone: The native Safari RSS reader on the iPhone is pretty strong, but lately, in the the Apple forums, NewsGator has been gaining some traction. Most of the iPhone RSS conversation takes place in Apple’s Internet & Networking forum. To register for a Newsgator account, you can go here, and you’re you’re set up you can log into the mobile RSS portal here. It’s definitely what I’d use to sync mobile and desktop RSS together. If you want to view multiple feeds at once using feeds that you’ve read before using Google, you can use Google Reader, as it’s been recently optimized for the platform. What it lacks in comparison NewsGator’s horsepower, it somewhat compensates for in look and feel.
Palm: Bloglines Mobile has a light-looking PDA interface, but for more robust RSS reading on the Palm platform, but if you’re looking for a standalone application it looks like QuickNews may be the answer. Google Reader is also a suitable alternatative, but I haven’t personally used it on a Palm.
Regular Phone: Feedm8 seems to be the service of choice for most major publishers (CNN, Reuters, Engadget), and I’ve even seen Digg using it lately. It works fairly well if you’re just reading basic RSS feeds published by large publishers. On the other hand, I wouldn’t recommend it for encrypted RSS, and it’s a free service that’s only usable with some publishers. If your phone is even slightly Java-enabled, NewsGator Go! would be a good fit, and is worthwhile for any heavy-duty RSS usage.
Exclamation Interview: Everything Is Miscellaneous Author David Weinberger
If you ever find yourself singing, “Don’t know much about ontology…,” then maybe it’s time you picked up David Weinberger’s Everything Is Miscellaneous. In a year when Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point and Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail sit comfortably in the Amazon Top 40 and Top 400, respectively, it’s no surprise that Weinberger’s book isn’t far behind. (Top 650, anyone?)
Never before have I been so enthralled by a book about order. Yeah, that’s right - how stuff gets sorted into clumps and piles - from 18th Century Botany to reddit. Everything has already made some enemies; Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is killing our culture violently disagrees with Weinberger on many points, but no matter which side you’re on, Weinberger really explains the why of the miscellaneous.
