Levy Rivers's List: net-access

• First, I agree that the Manifesto totally missed the boat when it said that companies need to get out of the way. Smart companies like Dell empower their employees and then act on what those employees, and their customers, tell them. Only a smart, strong company can do that. In my mind, that's why Microsoft has failed to capitalize on the changing nature of media and communications: They empower their employees, but they have grown too ponderous to act.

    

  Second, command and control is definitely something that must stick around. See my first point, above. But command and control is only as good as leadership. Folks who aren't good leaders need to have the courage and intelligence to understand that and step gracefully over to the roles at which they excel.

    

  Finally, I do not think that social media as it currently exists can deliver the ultimate promise of the Cluetrain Manifesto. It's too anarchic. The people with smart answers are often drowned out by the crass jokes, spam and generally poor communicators.
• In your second comment, you give the roadmap for how a company can empower employees to converse. I was thinking is there a way to empower employees also to act? Though in talking with Dell this appears to be the strategy the company is using, I think we can learn a lot from the current election in how candidate campaigns use social media to organize people. Perhaps the focus of more social media research should be on how to organize and empower employees to act.

• 11. People in networked markets have figured out that they get far better information and support from one another than from vendors. So much for corporate rhetoric about adding value to commoditized products.
• 14. Companies that don't realize their markets are now networked person-to-person, getting smarter as a result and deeply joined in conversation are missing their best opportunity.
• Dell is controlling networked conversations now that the company has developed a process to engage customers with their issues and complaints about the company, in blogs and social media.
• 48. When corporate intranets are not constrained by fear and legalistic rules, the type of conversation they encourage sounds remarkably like the conversation of the networked marketplace.
• 54. In most cases, neither conversation is going very well. Almost invariably, the cause of failure can be traced to obsolete notions of command and control
• - One criticism I level at the cluetrain manifesto is that it fails to recognize that without command and control, there's no budget, companies give budgets to departments, campaigns, and disciplines, typically not individuals.
• Dell is probably one of the best stories about the use of social media for engaging customers; in July of 2006 the company realized that 50% of comments about the company in their blogging community held a negative sentiment. T
• Macromedia was another company that focused its efforts on a few employees, 65, in development and product development when the company launched blogs in 2002. Macromedia has since merged into Adobe and their social media story is not quite as compelling, however, in 2005 Macromedia was using blogging for product development, customer service, sales leads, and higher rankings.
• My gut tells me the dedicated approach works better than the open approach in companies. Now there's a dilemma for cluetrainer's. In Thesis 57, the cluetrain states, "Smart companies will get out of the way and help the inevitable to happen sooner." I don't think this is correct, unless those companies that have tried the cluetrain manifesto approach did not really follow the entire theses. In which case is there an example of a company that is actually following the manifesto successfully, used the open approach and had success? If not maybe it is time to reevaluate some of the details of the hypothesis?
• "These two conversations want to talk to each other. They are speaking the same language. They recognize each other's voices," this is in relation to the conversations happening among customers and employees. I would suggest that most employees are not empowered to converse in the way that cluetrain manifesto suggests, and even if they are employees have as many cultural hang-ups as management.

•  62. Markets do not want to talk to flacks and hucksters. They want to participate in the conversations going on behind the corporate firewall.

    

  - Do employees actually want to talk to customers?
   
• But don't mistake the current state as an endpoint but rather see it as limited progress. That is why I think it is worth talking about the Cluetrain Manifesto in 2008, 10 years after the team got started on it -- because it is still so early in the transformation of the relationship between companies and their market

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• And the major players have all recognized that they and their users are better off with secure contacts APIs (rather than having third-party services ask for users' credentials in order to scrape their data). As a result, we're seeing major Internet companies making contacts APIs available, such as Google's GData Contacts API, Yahoo's Address Book API, and Microsoft's Live Contacts API (with more to come).

• Notice how short the dispatches are. Twitter is a free Web-based service that allows anyone to type short comments (maximum 140 characters per "Tweet"). You broadcast these to anyone who chooses to follow you, and you follow anyone who you think is interesting.
• However, the real power of Twitter is the interaction it allows. Readers asked questions and got answers. Readers told us of areas of destruction through Twitter, and our reporters checked out those areas. And when we saw a good dispatch from a non-journalist Twitter user, we retweeted their posts to give the most comprehensive news possible.
• Twitter, which is popular in Austin partly because it was introduced during the 2007 South by Southwest Interactive Festival, is growing quickly. Nielsen Online says Twitter had 2.3 million unique users in August, a 422 percent growth rate over the previous August.

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• During the last debate I took part in the use of a service related to twitter: Plodt.com What it does is captures on a free web site yours and others reactions from their tweets. In the graphic to the right it shows how the those that tweeted during the debate rated Obama and McCain.

• The first issue many of you have brought up that we’d like to address right off the bat is the concern of those of you who have aliases on Yahoo! Groups, Games, Finance, and Chat. The new profile provides users with a single identity while they’re on the Yahoo! network. Some of you may have heard about Yahoo!’s new strategy for a more open and social network, which allows for you to have one identity while you’re using Yahoo!, essentially making you, you.

   

  This doesn’t mean that you can’t still have an “alias” while you’re on the Yahoo! network-you can still use multiple identities on Groups, Chat, or Finance. However, these aliases CANNOT have their own profile page, nor can they have any unique profile data associated with them. This means that by default when another user clicks a link pointing to your alias, they’ll be greeted by a message telling them that “there is nothing to see here,” unless you bind your alias to your primary profile. This also means that if a user tries to search for you by your alias, they won’t be able to find you.
• create a completely new account
• bind your alias to your profile
• bind your aliases to your profile,
• anyone who searches for you by your alias will now be able to find your main profile.

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• The two poles of the debate are apparent in the world of microblogging, where people use the Web or their cellphones to blast short updates on their activities to a group of virtual followers.

  Twitter, a start-up company in San Francisco that has become a household name, is the leading microblogging outfit. At least three million people have tried its free service, according to TwitDir, a directory service. But Twitter has absolutely no revenue — not even ads.
• Twitter has drawn much attention in the tech world since the service began in 2006. When a user is logged in through the Web or a cellphone, it asks one simple question, “What are you doing?” Users answer in 140 characters or less. While some of these “tweets” have the profundity of haiku, most are mundane, like “Sure is pretty out tonight” or “My eyes itch. I am very aggravated.”
• Yammer tweaks the question, asking, “What are you working on?” The goal, said its chief executive, David Sacks, is to make offices more productive. People on Yammer update colleagues on company events or ask work-related questions without clogging e-mail boxes with mass mailings.
• Early next year, Twitter plans to introduce several ways to bring in revenue. One idea is to charge companies that want to use Twitter as an official channel to talk with their customers and monitor what they are saying.

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• Let’s define social networking for those not familiar with it. “Social networking” is a technology-based means of communication utilizing the power and variety of the Internet to provide an infinite variety of tools and offerings
• People can leverage these sites to create a sense of presence that even traditional marketing experts can appreciate: brand awareness, lead generation, information sharing and so on. And the real keys to success are the same as in traditional marketing: frequency, relevancy and cross-marketing, to name a few.
• Critics claim that social networking is merely a gimmick. In reality, while it is true that social networking alone will not likely produce substantial leads in the absence of other critical methodologies, it IS true that combined with other methods, and when used regularly, social networking can, and has, produced excellent results.
• there is relatively NO barrier to entry

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• Keep your Twitter stream ticking over with new tweets even when you're not in front of your computer. Or, use it as your personal reminder system.

• hat said, given that Glue is in its infancy, and that there will soon be IE browser support available, it’ll be interesting to see how AdaptiveBlue develop the technology in future builds.
• you’re right that sites like Amazon and Netflix themselves have an abundance of reviews; however, we’re different for a few reasons. First, we’re not focused on providing aggregate reviews for products. We think that it’s interesting to see friends who have interacted with the same object (as well as what they thought).
• Viewing the common connection strengthens the social bond.

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