Coporate Social Media Done Right

Okay, I guess I cannot uphold the Twitter writing ban that Allen Stern of CenterNetworks proposed for this week ..

As many of us know, more and more companies are using Twitter as a means to reaach out to their customers.  We have seen JetBlue, Soutwest Airlines, and Comcast.  Comcast has gotten a lot of good press lately in helping out some complaining customers, to include one Michael Arrington.  I even saw this tweet earlier today form a customer fed up with their dsl and asking @comcastcares what they had to offer.

But I was not aware just how entrenched Zappos was into Twitter and using it to their advantge until I read a great post over at ReadWriteWeb.  Zappos has developed a great reputation in their customer service making some fanatical fans.  And obviously they get the fact that they can use tools like Twitter to make their service and customer outreach even better.

According to the post, Twitter has 198 of their employees on Twiiter anc very active.  Zappos has even gone so far as to dedicate an entire section of their website to Twitter.  They have one page that shows all the tweets with mentions of Zappos, a Zappos exmployee tweets page, a leaderboard of Zappos employees and how many twitter followers they have, and even a Twitter Quick Start Guide out up by their CEO, Tony Hsieh !

Other companies would do well to follow the lead of Zappos.  I am convinced it is the way of the future.  It seems the “flattening” of the world is removing some of the insulating layers between these corporations and its comsumers.  They are being forced to listen as the widespread use of tools like Twitter and blogs give the average consumer a voice that must make the old guard of these companies shutter in their corner offices.

Twitter hits a million and a call for week boycott

Some news reported that Twitter was closing in on a Series C round of funding at a reported $60 million valuation.  On the heels of that news, Twitter Facts is reporting that according to twitdir, Twitter now has 1 million registered users.

As many of you are quite aware, Twitter seems to be the topic de jour in many upon many of blog posts these days.  So much so, that Allen Stern of CenterNetworks is calling for a week long boycott of Twitter reporting.  He has been kinf enough to provide a badge, as you see here in the post.  Here is the code is you are interested in posting it on your blog posts.

<a href=”http://www.centernetworks.com/centernetworks-declares-twitter-free-week”><img src=”http://media.centernetworks.com/images/twitterfree.png” title=”Twitter Free Week” border=”0″ /></a>
So what do you think?  Can it be done?  One entire week without a Twitter post?

2 Days of SXSW, Twitter Going Strong

Well I must admit, if I was a betting man, I would have bet we would have seen one of those “Something has gone technically wrong” screens as we tried to use Twitter by now. But much to my pleasant surprise, we have not. Actually it just dawned on me this morning as I was finishing up some final touches on the blog redesign. I thought “Heh Twitter has not crashed yet ..”

I mentioned previously about a post by Allen Stern over at CenterNetworks detailing the preparations by the Twitter team leading up to SXSW. The included increasing capacity, reducing API calls allowed, as well as some other measures. And apparently it has worked pretty well up until this point.

To be honest though, this is how it should be. We should not being using one of our favorite web services while in the back of our heads, we are just waiting for it to crash out from under us. But i am happy to see up until this point, I have been proven wrong. I figured we would all be running for the Pownce hills.

Maybe this is a corner turned for the Twitter folks. This will be a big feather in their cap if they can sustain the momentum and carry it out of SXSW into a bright future. Great job so far guys.

Will Twitter Survive SXSW ?

Here we are on the eve of the ever ever growing in popularity SXSW conference in Austin, TX.  Last year the darling of the dance was our favorite, yet fickle, micro-blogging platform twitter.

Over the last year, Twitter has seen exponential growth and experienced the growing pains that go along with that growth.  We have seen events in the recent past take Twitter to its knees and many fear that may happen again as we get ready for SXSW.  CenterNetworks had a good post on Twitter’s preparations for the event.

Frankly, I think this may be a make or break week for Twitter.  Many of there biggest fans will be at the conference and be wanting full and unfettered use of Twitter to get news out.  This same group is and can be a very fickle group whose loyalties will wane as quickly as they come.  If Twitter hiccups this week, it may be their last.  I think the likes of Pownce, fresh off the release of their new API, can pose a serious threat to Twitter this very week if things do not go smoothly.

So here you go Twitter, here is your big shot to step up and prove all the naysayers wrong.  Personally, I am preparing for the quick switch over to Pownce, which has been made all the easier with their new API.  Good luck twitter, I think you will need it.

Will Pownce’s New API Finally Battle Twitter?

As many of us Twitter users are aware, it can be a fickle experience at best.  Our alternative has become Pownce in those bleak times of Twitter outages.  Many have often wondered why Pownce has not given Twitter a little better run for its $$.  I mean Pownce has some great features that Twitter does not, like the ability to post events, notes, links, and share files.  The common argument that had Twitter always winning out was its API that developers have used to their advantage to give users so many choices.

Well that may change now.  On Thursday, Pownce announced the release of API 2.0, a much more complete and robust API opening the door for developers to code away to utilize the Pownce platform.  Here is the announcement from the Pownce blog.  To me this may be a turning of the tide.  If Pownce can build a critical mass of developers coding cool things like we see on the Twitter platform and give us a more robust and stable platform … the twitter phenomena may be in trouble.  We are a fickle bunch and if the currents carry us in a new direction to the shores of Pownceland, we may have a huge shift.

On an ending note, I wanted to pass along one of the first cool new tools for Pownce based on the new API.  It is a Pownce It bookmarklet.  Simply drag the bookmarklet to your browser toolbar and click it to share cool links with your friends via Pownce.

Track and Report Local Traffic on Twitter

I saw a cool post on Lifehacker today about traffic updates via Twitter.  A new service Commuter Feed is all set to help track traffic issues at several metropolitan areas via Twitter.
Here is how it works:

Follow @commuter on Twitter to get and receive the updates.

Then you can send updates on traffic in your area.  It does it by the local airport code.  So our area we would use IAD (Dulles) or DCA (National) or BWI (Baltimore).
Then to report on and accident or traffic you simply send a tweet to @commuter as follows

@commuter IAD Accident on Toll Road near Herndon

The only thing I see as a small issue, is trying to filter out your area versus all the updates people are sending to @commuter.  They have a web page specific to your area and you can subscribe to the RSS for that page, but as far as I could see there was not a way to only get the tweets for IAD.  Otherwise it seems like another great idea to use Twitter for.

hellotxt.com: Cross Platform Posting

As our platforms we interact with continue to grow, our needs to connect to those platforms also grow. But it is becoming more and more difficult to have to log into each one to submit status. I was online this AM and saw a post from a friend @troyturner asking if there was a way to post to both Twitter and Pownce at the same time. As I noted in an earlier post as well, Twitter has been very unreliable and people are looking to new ways to keep in touch and status their friends and followers.
Enter hellotxt.com. It is a great service that llows to to interface with twitter, pownce, facebook, jaiku, tumblr, as well as some others. Here is a shot of your dashboard to send messages from:

I have tested it and it seems to work great. Just type your message and select where you want it sent to and viola ! You can registered an account and it will keep your account info saved for easier use. They have a timeline as well, but form what I can see, it is only your Twitter timeline. It would be great if this timeline could include all the services as well.

PownceMeme: Whats Hot on Pownce

I have recently began heading over to Pownce a bit more as Twitter has been becoming more and more flaky.   Since Pownce added a mobile interface a little while back, it seemed to be a viable alternative to twitter.  Anyway, we are aware of the great Twitter tools for tracking all things Twitter, sites like Twitter100, Tweeterboard, Favotter, Tweetmeme, and our local favorite Politweets.

Well now the Pownce crowd has its own Meme tracker, its called PownceMeme.  It is a site tracking the hot stuff taking place in and around Pownce.  Not only is it tracking the popular threads, but also photo and links, which is one thing Pownce has over Twitter.  They even have RSS feeds for each type for you to follow along as well.

I think that the arrival of tools like this revolving around Pownce may signal a shift toward Pownce as more of a Twitter alternative.  What do you all think?

How Many Times ..

Does a web service have to go down and be very unstable before we all decide to leave their sandbox and go play in someone else’s ?

As I am sure all of us Twitter’holics are aware, Twitter has been a bit of a dubious uptime record. Especially lately with the growth in users, big events like the primaries, etc. We touched on this back in an earlier post. Lately it seems however, that I have been seeing more and more of the “Something is wrong” message when I go to access Twitter. According to the Twitter blog they have been undergoing some much needed infrastructure changes, which is a good thing, but with continued downtime, it is not.

The good news is we finished a major infrastructure project tonight, which we’ve been working on for months and that we think is going to help a lot. I’m sure there will be some glitches in the coming weeks, but we’ve laid some important foundation that’s going to help us build toward the future.

We Web 2.0 people can be a fickle bunch. We have latched onto Twitter with a vengeance and use it in oh so many ways. It has the potential to be a foundation for many things to come, but how long will people tolerate the instability before moving to the next great thing ?

So what do you all think ? How much longer does twitter have to work it all out before people start heading for the exits ?

UPDATE:  Just after publishing this, I went over to Twitter to find the following “Something is Technically Wrong”

Microblogging the Campaign Trail

Of course the “staff” here around the East Coast Blogging offices are well engaged in all things Twitter, but I am not so sure about the rest of the mainstream population. Twitter has become a valuable tool in tracking and following the Presidential campaigns, but until now I think it was mainly to a rather niche audience. Not that this will change anything, but the NY Times ran a piece today about journalists using Twitter following the ongoing events. The piece is titled “Campaign Reporting in Under 140 Taps“.

It starts by showing an update by John Dickerson, chief political correspondent for the online magazine Slate:

NASHUA: Just saw Bill O’reily misbehaving at Obama rallly. Shoving Obama staffer.

And from there goes on to mention others, to include Time reporters who have begun using the tool. I was just imagining non-tech saavy people getting up this morning to read about this “Twitter” thing those crazy kids are using these days. We are in it and know it, but to others it must seem as foreign as aliens.

I found a quote by Olivier Knox, a White House correspondent for Agence France-Presse very interesting. He stated

Despite the new gadgetry, these journalists are actually rediscovering telegraphese — the clipped (ideally witty) style that flourished because of word limits imposed by an earlier technology, the telegraph. Today, it is the limits imposed by text-messaging.

Interesting how we see Twitter as new technology, the underlying message snippet is actually older than most of us using it today. I can see all of us now, in the backroom, visor on our heads, tapping away on the telegraph machine as the letters goes racing across the cable to its destination. Odd irony isnt it ?

Anyway, its pretty cool to see a new technology hit the mainstream news. Hope everyone doesn’t rush to use it … I don’t know if Twitter can handle it ….

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