Category Archives: Social Media

Business can be rough, especially when dealing with customer service. Whether it’s failure to provide adequate Internet service or airline mishaps or even catching a cab, people are getting tired of the status quo when dealing with a company’s representative. They’ve taken to going onto social media sites like Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and even on blogs. So when technology is being used to revolt against customer service, shouldn’t the technology also catch up to benefit it as well?

This is where UserVoice comes into play. This enterprise service has been used by many brands and businesses to reach out and connect with their customers in order to help stem the tide of anger against them. Since 2008, UserVoice has been around to help empower customers to speak and help businesses understand. Through the use of feedback forums, support systems, and other tools in their arsenal, UserVoice allows you to offer your feedback and lets the community contribute to what’s important and what’s not as much. In a sense, it’s like letting the crowd handle your customer service, but in a constructive way that the business can pay attention and easily respond or implement the needed changes. And just about a year ago, the company launched a brand new service designed to help companies better respond to feedback: Helpdesk.

As part of their new package, Helpdesk is designed to give companies a bit more control over their customer service, but without all the unnecessary tools for integrating feedback and case tracking. But on the other hand, it offers businesses more than simply receiving feedback from the customers. Helpdesk is geared towards allowing people to submit support tickets, allow for service rating, and also promotes humane treatment of customers.  And it looks like this gamble has paid off for UserVoice. After a year out in the market, Helpdesk has received it’s 1,000,000th support ticket. According to UserVoice CEO, Richard White, the fact that the usage of Helpdesk has been so great is because companies are recognizing that they need a better experience for both their team and customers. He says in his post, “these are people who want to have a conversation with their customers…and they want the tools to make this easy.”

It makes perfect sense what he says because back in the day, we’re all used to picking up the phone and speaking with a live representative, which soon turned into an automated message that never allowed us to speak with a human (so impersonal). Now, in the digital age, we’re demanding better and through social media, we’re using the technology to force our way back to speaking with humans–because customers don’t want to be treated like they’re just a number anymore. When we want help with a problem with a business’s product, we’re going to want to receive it somehow and that could be through a company’s support forum where the more users that have that problem can vote it up, or by submitting a ticket that receives a much needed response in a timely manner. The technology and practice that UserVoice has is surely picking up steam as their customers are still growing: from Worksmart Labs to Blackbaud to Seesmic, Posterous, and even Rackspace…the growth is becoming phenomenal.

Congratulations UserVoice on your success and your one millionth Helpdesk ticket!

Photo Credit: Call center workers by contrapart/sxc.hu

Have you ever tried to set up a press page for your company? Do you even know what belongs on one? Well look no further because Totem, an independent provider of press page solutions just launched their flagship product into public beta. The goal from creating your own totem is to help set up location where people can find information about your group. In customs that subscribe to the totem, these symbols are a representations of a group of people, such as a family, clan, group, lineage, or tribe. So what it seems that the service Totem is providing is to offer a symbol of the company/group that marketers and interested people can find – a totem, if you will.

Just who would be benefit from Totem? Most likely not established companies like Proctor & Gamble or any other enterprise company since chances are that they’ll be too big or have the resources necessary to bring on big agencies like Edelman or Burston-Marstellar. So we need to think a bit smaller and that points to only one logical choice: small businesses/startups. Startups are usually very small that they wouldn’t have enough resources to handle developing a press page — this is probably the last thing on their list, way behind actually creating the project and raising funds. So that’s where Totem will benefit them. And it seems like a perfect fit because of who created the service: Jones-Dilworth.

Wait, that name doesn’t sound familiar to you? Jones-Dilworth is a power public relations agency based in Austin, Texas and focused on helping early stage startups in technology to market. They’ve been doing so with folks like Siri, Wolfram Alpha, Twine, 80legs and more. Maybe this is a way for them to get more clients, but the ulterior motives are far outweighed by the fact that they’ve created something that caters to startups – it’s almost like a freebie to start off with. It might seem like linkbait to you, but when you see what options you have with Totem, it might make you think about it.

First of all, it’s super simple to sign up for your very own Totem. Just fill out your basic login credentials and then you’re off. Over the next four screens, you’ll be asked to name your press page, create a custom URL for it (e.g., domain.totemapp.com) and then provide the standard contact information for people to reach out to you for press questions or information. In the last step, you’re going to add resources to your totem and this can be recent articles, press releases and blog posts. Documents, screenshots, infographics, product sheets, headshots, and other relevant information can also be dumped into your totem to make it appealing to the media.

So what’s it look like? Well see below…

As you can see, the above example is Totem’s own totem and it looks like a pretty solid template. That’s probably what you’re going to get when you have a “do-it-yourself” simple press page. But what’s good is that you’re going to be able to provide all sorts of contact information for people to reach you, and it’s not just limited to traditional methods. You can include your blog RSS feed, links to you on social networks and even stream your tweets right on your totem. A bookmarklet can be added to your browser to allow you to easily capture coverage and publish it to your press page — Totem makes it much easier to share your good fortune.

Josh Jones-Dilworth, co-founder and CEO of Totem (and also the agency that bears his name), says about Totem: “Totem is a best-of-breed solution that provides incredible agility to organizations that are struggling with mission-critical press page updates. Look at most press pages out there — they’re ugly, incomplete, full of jargon and almost never get granular enough to properly serve anyone. We’re revolutionizing the press page, at long last.” And I agree — they are providing an incredibly agile service to fledgling companies and also aesthetically appealing to users and viewers.

But with this template press page, there’s got to be limitations as well, right? Yes, since it’s a free plan, what you’re going to get are unlimited press pages with all the features the press is looking for. The ability for collaboration with your co-workers and clients, free hosting, a press widget to embed on your site/blog, and a scrolling “as featured in” widget for your homepage are also part of the free package. But, if you pay the one-time $99 upgrade fee, you’re going to be able to customize your domain so that instead of linking to yourstartup.totemapp.com, you’ll point the press to press.yourstartup.com. Oh, and separate yourself from all the other Totem users too since your upgrade will allow you to customize your page and white label your page as well.

According to Jones-Dilworth, press pages have long been the “low-hanging fruit of PR and marketing programs”, but they rarely get the attention they deserve because they require a tremendous amount collaboration between webmasters, designers, community managers and outside consultants. Totem is going to eliminate those business barriers and puts the marketing team in control of the press page, a vital marketing asset. In an almost meta-fashion, Totem is disrupting the press room world by creating a new press room. It’s press room 2.0!

Go ahead and check out Totem yourself and see what you think about it.

Yesterday, one of the biggest news stories was about one of the tech world’s media darlings: Path. It turned out that within their iPhone application, Path had been importing whole contact address books from users into their system. This lead to a big uproar within the community and has some even raising the issue about user privacy. Of course, this whole conundrum about privacy isn’t lost on me since I penned a post saying that I felt that Path’s saving grace over being “just another Facebook”  was that it was a private social network…only 150 people of my dearest and closest friends would see the photos and thoughts unfiltered. Well if, on one of the biggest platforms out there, Path purposely (or unintentionally) imported contact information into their servers, then that would clearly raise some cause for concern.

How serious has this become? Well so big that one of Path’s investors, CrunchFund’s head and founder of TechCrunch, Michael Arrington, has published a blog post stating that Path’s founders, Dave Morin and Matt Van Horn, should immediately “nuke” the data in the servers. However, one needs to wonder whether all the hoopla was over the fact that Path imported the address book contacts or if it was that they didn’t give users an option to either opt-in or opt-out (I personally would have liked to have seen it be opt-out by default). And I notice that there are some significant differences between Path’s iPhone version and their Android cousin — for one, I’m asked whether I want to add certain people from my address book on Android. There was never this problem for these devices. Nevertheless, now that this error has been done, Path should probably purge the lists and invite people to do so, but only after making it 100% clear what’s going to happen with this data and reassure people as to the benefit.

And they’ve stated that they’ve done so and put their money where their mouth is:

We believe you should have control when it comes to sharing your personal information. We also believe that actions speak louder than words. So, as a clear signal of our commitment to your privacy, we’ve deleted the entire collection of user uploaded contact information from our servers. Your trust matters to us and we want you to feel completely in control of your information on Path.

TechCrunch writer and CrunchFund partner MG Seigler wrote that while we’re up in arms over the privacy concerns (while totally valid and justified), we might want to step back and analyze the situation to see why Path did what they did–basically we need both sides of the argument:

One thing overshadowed by this situation is that there’s a reason Path was doing this — and it was anything but nefarious: it makes the service more useful. Path is about your personal connections and the best way to establish those connections is for Path to find your true friends also on the network. What’s a great signal if someone is a true friend? If their information is in your address book and if you’re in their’s.

And he’s right…Path is designed to offer us more signal than noise and only those chosen few who we entrust with our phone numbers and reciprocate and place their numbers in our address book are probably more likely to interact with us on a private social network like Path. Nevertheless, Path’s Dave Morin has quickly and publicly apologized for this incident and admitted their mistake.

Whether people accept it or not remains to be seen. Jeremy Toeman from LIVEdigitally thinks Path has betrayed his trust…he didn’t want to publish photos of his kids on Facebook and may have decided to use Path for this, but since this issue arose, privacy fears have come back. When I read his post, he’s right…Path is also at the crossroads and will need to be firm on what their stance on privacy is. With this issue plaguing Path for a while, will people be a bit more timid in using the service? Or does anyone really care and believe that privacy is dead?

No matter the answer to that, Path is learning from its mistakes, getting more users, and chugging forward.

Photo Credit: Balotelli’s clash with Parker went unpunished by referee Howard Webb. Photo: Getty

Event managers and planners have something to celebrate today. I’m sure you can ask any event planner how long they take to struggle to find the right place for your party or event. Not only do they have to navigate around the city, quotes, and specs, but it’s all time consuming. And often times, there’s not a website around that features photos of the event space — just how efficient is this? Well not very. But now, thanks to Los Angeles’s newest and hottest tech incubator, Eventup is here to help make your event planning much easier.

LA’s tech scene has definitely been heating up over the past few months and one of its main contributors has been the new incubator Science, the brainchild of former MySpace CEO Mike Jones and Color co-founder Peter Pham. After the latest collapse by MySpace, the LA tech scene took a hit and needed to find a solid foot hold in which they could bring back the success of days past. And with the recent release of Eventup, it looks like the incubator is onto something. And it’s not surprising since they have some of the best minds in the LA tech scenes, such as Mike Macadaan and Sean Percival, two former MySpace execs who have gone or are going through the fires of entrepreneurship and have created something great. And you might wonder why are all MySpace colleagues working in the same incubator? It seems to be perfectly normal, especially when you consider that MySpace encompassed a large portion of the existing talent pool in the city. VentureBeat’s Jolie O’Dell has a great interview about Science that you can read here.

But back to Eventup…we know that it’s a product of Science, but now that it’s launched, just what does it do? Well in a nutshell, it’s the AirBnB of event planning. As TheNextWeb’s Courney Boyd Myers writes, “just Googling ‘event spaces’ brings up a load of miserable options…” So why don’t you save youself some time and just go to Eventup’s website and do a search of what you want, easily. Right now it looks like only Los Angeles and Southern California venues are available in their database, although they’re doing a bit of a grassroots approach and crowdsourcing for venue information — so if you want to make sure your city is represented in here and help bring in more business, then share your venue with Eventup! But enough of the San Francisco plug, let’s talk about specifics in what event planners will get as a result of this experience: a pretty good results page that shows a lot of promise, I must say…let’s take a look at one in particular:

What event planners will get is a helpful screen with a description of the venue, the types of parties that can be held there, maximum capacity, photos, location and calendar of availability. And the fact that there’s a “verified listing” badge also adds a measure of security knowing that you’re looking at something legitimate.  And no longer will you need to trouble yourself into wondering whether it’s available or not — the calendar will allow you to easily look and book! It’s easy, right? I couldn’t have put it better than what they have on their site:

Simply, search by location, filter down by event type, your budget, how many people are attending, and find venues that are available for the date you have your heart set on. You’ll have high-resolution images, maps to show you what part of town it’s in, and ratings and reviews that help you not get ripped off. All of this, without having to spend hours, if not days, searching through various websites and making phone calls.

The cost? It’s probably all set up by the homeowners and venue managers, just like you’d expect when trying to find a place to stay outside of a hotel. Eventup will take 10% of each booking and will manage all financial transactions and bookings. And for your safety, they also offer venue owners insurance options just in case (we all know what happened to AirBnB, right?).

In one of my former lives, I used to work in tourism and each city has unique spaces that you could rent, like a museum or hotel conference room or even a restaurant back-room. Eventup is the replacement for that and very much the yellow pages of event space. Imagine being able to find some ridiculously awesome venues like Jim Morrison’s former residence or even one of Entourage’s actor’s home just to have an event — that’ll give your attendees something to remember, right? Right now they have over 350 venues in LA and I’m sure that it’s only going to grow.

Eventup is out in the wild now for you to check out. It’s also one of six products to come out of Science and is headed by former MySpace exec Tony Adam.

Yesterday, we bore witness to one of the greatest sporting events in the history of the modern age. A clash of titans, as it were…the New York Giants slugged it out against the New England Patriots and emerged to come out victorious in what is now being called the most-watched television program in US history and also the highest-rated Super Bowl in 26 years! Congratulations to the New York Giants!

But while we remember the game, let’s not forget all the other news that are happening around the Internet simultaneously as the big game. Not only was this the first time the Super Bowl was livestreamed on the Internet to mobile and tablet devices (leading to more viewership, I’m sure), there seemed to be a greater play on social media by not only the NFL and the NBC Network, but also advertisers too. Twitter reported today that the service set a record for the most tweets sent per second (TPS): 12,233 tweets! That’s an amazing amount since in 2008 during the Super Bowl, it was 27 TPS, and in 2011, it was 4,064 TPS. Of course, this massive record of tweets per second occurred during the last three minutes which is when Twitter says an average of 10,000 TPS were sent. But what does this all translate into? Well during the Super Bowl, there were 13.7 million related tweets sent out during the five hour game. These numbers are absolutely staggering!

And what about the other part of the game? The so-called “Brand Bowl”? Well some of them did very well in terms of the conversation, but it’s a bit of a mixed reaction. First, let’s see which of the brands succeeded in getting the most comments:
 In Advertising Age this morning, Bluefin Labs analyzed data of all the television commercials to see which one of them earned a spot in the top 10 highest rated spots with the most response. It should be noted that Bluefin only reviewed content pushed on two major networks: Twitter and Facebook. I wonder how these would be changed with Google+ or on social sporting networks like on OnShare?

Regardless, each ad was tracked for 45-minutes after it began to air and what’s surprising is that one of the first commercials to air during the game was the David Beckham H&M underwear commercial and received 108,914 comments – a sign that the first is the best? Either that, or sex sells…

Not surprising, Chrysler’s hit ad featuring Dirty Harry himself, actor/director Clint Eastwood in “It’s Halftime in America” was a rousing success with over 95,000 comments and came in second. It was definitely one of the big winners of the evening and people are STILL talking about it today! But nowhere on this list was the GoDaddy commercial – perhaps a sign that after years of the racy ads, the public is getting tired about ripping on them and decided there’s much more worthy commercials to talk about?

Perhaps the biggest stumble in the “Brand Bowl” this year was the use of the hashtag in commercials. In light of the McDonald’s hashtag debacle, it might not have seemed good to throw out a hashtag unless you were 100% sure that your commercial would ellicit the response you were hoping for. Some had a pretty good chance at positive reactions, like the Audi vampire commercial (#solongvampires) and the Bud Light Platinum (#MakeItPlatinum), but then there were others like GE’s commercial with the hashtag #whatworks — a friend of mine said that he would tweet out “#whatworks not this commercial”. Hashtags were genuinely a gamble for advertisers in an attempt to get into the social scene.

But did advertisers really embrace the role of social media this Super Bowl? According to the Altimeter Group’s Jeremiah Owyang and Brian Solis, maybe not and they’ve discovered five interesting trends out of the 87 advertisements:

• Brands heavily invested in promoting their traditional websites
• Many did not promote a call-to-action
• Only a sixth of ads explicitly promoted social media
• Hashtag marketing emerged to stimulate continual engagement
• Cutting edge marketers teased with new marketing tactics, including Shazam

So while I think that the hashtag attempt on commercials was a fumble, it’s a trend of the Super Bowl nevertheless. But is anyone still surprised at any of these trends? The website is here to stay and advertisers will continue to push people to them just like they asked them to call their 800 numbers for several decades. There are a few risky marketers who will ask people to tweet at them using the hashtag, but if anything, the Super Bowl is showing us that advertisers are starting to be a slightly bit more innovative in how they reach people, especially on television. Just take a look at this breakdown from the Altimeter Group:

Maybe the 32% of brands during the Super Bowl were airing ads more as brand promotion, but the question is why aren’t you giving your customers something more to take away from it? Even those commercials that asked viewers to use Shazam were giving them a song that would forever be associated with their commercial (lasting branding) and also invited them to rate their commercial (feedback), but by not doing anything like that leaves much to be desired.

So I leave you with this fascinating tip from the Altimeter Group report: promoting traditional websites still king with brands while social integration is “nascent”. Yes, that’s right…brands seem to be gun-shy at using social media to help converse with their customers and the viewers. If anything, the most successful commercials from last night will become viral and people will be talking about it. But will the brands actually be listening?

Photo Credit: Football field by Juggernautco/Flickr