We had another great meetup at RefreshMiami last night at Yahoo! Hispanic Americas. Adam Singer presented a “Coffee 2.0″ social media case study, Michael Montgomery spoke about microformats, I presented “You, the online brand“, attached below, and Davide Di Cillo presented his new Twitter social football service, Twootball:
Just why did Davide create Twootball? He says:
I was in an unfortunate bind: I am Italian and I love soccer. Of course, I wanted to create a Twitter application about soccer.
But then I realized that no one in Italy uses Twitter, and no one here watches soccer!
So I had to make a Twitter application about American football …
LOL!
The presentations were great and it was fun to catch up with everyone afterwards at Novecento’s.
Shel Israel has been conducting an excellent series of interviews over the past two months for the SAP Global Survey. As is the case with social media, the process of conducting the survey and the questions themselves have been transformed by bloggers and Shel published some early findings. I was honored to be included and he published my interview today: “Blogging, social media and game play allowed me to meet and exchange ideas with brilliant people around the world.”
This interview follows an interview of me by Jeremiah Owyang on how Scrapblog”builds community using images”, in reference to our fun photo stand at the BlogHer07 Conference this year.
I look forward to continued inspiration and thought leadership from both Shel and Jeremiah.
Technorati Tags: global neighbourhoods, redcouch, shel israel, jeremiah owyang, community, scrapblog, orkut, flickr, blogher, blogher07, marketing, social media
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If you’ve followed this link, thanks for stopping by. You may want to see the other cartoons Hugh drew that night.
From what I hear, it’s been challenging to organize blogger/geek dinners in Miami, for reasons I won’t go into (I’ve read all the posts and comments). Somehow we got past the cynicism and understood that "Love and goodwill are driving this revolution. The selfish will be left behind."
Because when you look past the local politics and the flash of ZIP 33139, aka South Beach, you’ll find real people that care, that are friendly, that want to make a difference, that want to do the right thing. And so it was that night, when we got together, had a good chat, drank some mojitos and caipirinhas and dug in to some good pasta and pizza, all in the coziness of the back porch of the Margherita Regina restaurant on Lincoln Road. We were joined by Chris Saylor, Caleb Elston, Brian Breslin, Maria, Gus and Michelle Moore, Cristina, Frank Astor, Jason Baptiste, Carlos Garcia, Jorge Barroso, Leonard Boord, Jason Korman and Hugh.
Our dinner was organized quickly, in 48 hours, using Upcoming.org, RefreshMiami.org and a couple of local blogs. I also posted to Craigslist but I don’t think that made a difference. Brian helped a lot by posting to RefreshMiami. The idea was to get together, meet Hugh MacLeod and meet other local bloggers. Stormhoek tried to get wine, but 36 hours was too short notice to get the bottles.
We’d like to thank Jason of Stormhoek.com, Leonard of TheGorb.com, and Carlos of Scrapblog.com, my employer, for sponsoring the event and footing the bill.
Don’t know Gapingvoid? Go read it. Now.
Technorati Tags: gapingvoid, stormhoek, "hugh, macleod", "geek, dinner", web2, "web, 2.0", miami, florida, refresh, refreshmiami, tech, web, online
Customer service is the new black. The Customer Service is the New Marketing panel at SXSW talked about how "online businesses that provide superior customer service are earning fanatical devotion … Doing business online is anything but impersonal and an obsessive attention to customers *after* the sale is a killer advantage." The panel featured Thor Muller, Managing Dir, Satisfaction Unlimited, Heather Champ, Community Mgr, Flickr, Tony Hsieh, CEO, Zappos.com and Nick Wilder, Principal, 30 Boxes
Heather spoke in good detail about how Flickr manages their community:
- They keep different channels of communication open with their members. They have a help link at the top and footer of every page, a help by email with a drop-down topic selector and links to forum topics and activity. Flickr’s team can access this help and feedback system on the fly from wherever they are and they use a sitewide status message to let people know what’s happening.
- Flickr has three forums: Flickr Help, Bugs and Ideas - that provide immediate feedback on the mood of the community on any particular day. Community managers, including company founder Stewart Butterfield, monitor these daily to take the temperature of the community. About a million photos are uploaded every day, so a lot of people actively participate on the site and in the forums. For example, the community recently flared up over Yahoo!’s decision to convert "Old Skool" Flickr users were not happy about this and within a few weeks of the announcement, 2,650 comments had been posted on the forum thread about the change.
- Even as things get heated in the forums, Heather’s mantra is to use a "soft pleasing tone of voice"; she even taped this sentence to her laptop, as a core principle to follow. The point is to cool things down by being level-headed at all times. She will let members be abusive to her, but never to one another.
- When they know of a new feature or a bug, they will put a notice on the top of mebers’ home page with a link to the discussion
- Every Flickr empoyee is an active member of the site with their own photostream: they are who they say they are and you can see their profiles. In fact, the people who built Flickr really participated and actively engaged with the community
- As an online service provider, you cannot assume nothing is going to go wrong … but you can prepare for when things do. For example, on July 19th 2006, they had to take site down to fix a nagging issue. On this occasion, since they didn’t know for how long the site would be down, they replaced the standard "flickr is having a massage" error page by a coloring contest with a way to win a free pro account. The contest details were on the flickr blog, which is run on a separate system and is not connected to the Flickr site. Within 24 hours, they had 1100 photographs. They gave away 14 pro accounts to the top entries as well as a 3-months pro account to all contest entrants. They did this because they didnt know how long it would take them to bring Flickr back up, so they wanted a way to engage with the community.
- They remain honest, transparent and they ‘fess up when they do things wrong, in particular Stewart
- How do you deal with crazies? It’s important to realize that people are very passionate about certain things and you have to remind yourself not to get angry and to understand when to step away and take a breather. The key is to have a firmly established community guideline, so that you can take the appropriate action when people step over the line. Sometimes there’s "trout slapping" going on between members, and the community managers have to position themselves as referees: "step back from the abyss and if not, we’ll lock down the forum". You can have people rail against you, but not against other people in the community. They only delete spammers out of the forums and infrequently block people from forums, if they’re being real jerks. This action is not irreversible and gives people time to reset. According to Heather, it’s good to wear "asbestos underpants" when dealing with hot topics.
- It’s important to hire the right people and their employees have been interviewed by 8 or 9 people. You need to find people with the same values. Also, everyone has to answer 10 to 20 customer care questions everyday to understand the interaction with the community. "We’re all in this together".
- Is there a cancellation policy? Flickr has a firm, no refund policy. Because a year’s membership costs a mere $24.95, it’s more expensive to deal with refunds, so they’re not given. But you want to make sure people are there because they want to be there, not because you’re holding them hostage, so it shouldn’t be hard for users to cancel their accounts. In fact, every additional minute members spend trying to cancel their account creates unnecessary hatred, so the advice is to make it easy for members to discontinue their membership if that’s what they wish.
- Finally, it’s important to subscribe to watchlist feeds to see what people in the blogosphere are saying about the company in blog posts and comments
Technorati Tags: flickr, customer service, marketing, communitysxsw, sxswi, sxsw2007, sxswi2007, sxsw07, sxswi07
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Hugh MacLeod of Gapingvoid.com will be in town this week and we’ll be going to dinner. The details are to be determined, but the dinner will be held on Thursday, March 13 15th, 2007 at 8pm. We know it’s very short notice, but we only confirmed this today. Please sign up at this post on the Scrapblog blog so we can get a headcount and plan accordingly.
Most readers of this blog would know Gapingvoid, but if you don’t, here’s a quick bio of Hugh MacLeod. Besides "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards", Hugh’s main gig is Marketing Strategist for Stormhoek, a small South African vineyard, whose Web 2.0 approach to wine making is currently getting a lot of international attention in the wine trade. Hugh also does the marketing for a bespoke Savile Row tailoring firm, English Cut with Thomas Mahon, arguably one of the best half-dozen tailors in the world. Stormhoek and English Cut have all to do with what Hugh calls "The Global Microbrand". He was named one of the top 50 marketers of 2006 by AdAge.
There may even be some some Gapingvoid and Stormhoek goodies to give out. And again, we apologize for the very short notice and hope you can make it.
Update: The dinner will be held at Regina Margherita at 626 Lincoln Road, Miami Beach, FL 33139
Technorati Tags: gapingvoid, hugh macleod, scrapblog, dinner, blogger
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