It seems like almost every month I hear of another senior software engineer in the Portland area leaving their company to go work for Apple. I finally figured out why: Apple’s hiring people to work on their iWork suite in downtown Vancouver. Here’s their Sr. Software Engineer job post.

Just in case that page goes away, here’s a text copy:

Requisition Number 4513546 
Job title Sr Software Engineer Location Vancouver (Washington)
Country United States
City Vancouver, WA
State/Province Washington
Job type Full Time
Job description Apple’s Productivity Applications team is looking for a proactive and hardworking software engineer to contribute to current and future applications. Our team is responsible for Pages, Apple’s best-of-breed word processing software, as well as text and drawing features for Keynote, Numbers, and iWeb.

As an engineer on the Productivity team, your responsibilities will range from helping to define new features, to implementing high-level user interfaces, to designing private frameworks for use across the suite. You’ll also be responsible for debugging and delivering the best possible application performance. You will work closely with other engineers, human interface designers, and different groups across Apple.

Key Requirements:
* BS CS/CE or equivalent
* Strong programming skills, preferably with C, Objective-C, and/or C++
* Excellent communication and collaborative skills
* Excitement and passion to work on amazing products
* Deep understanding of performance assessment and optimization
* Proven ability to excel in a fast-paced development team

Preferred skills:
* Mac OS X and/or iPhone OS programming experience
* User-interface programming experience
* Familiarity with web technologies and XML

* BS CS/CE or equivalent       

rethinking the link
Ward Cunningham
@ward
AboutUs.com
  • Ward is the inventor of the wiki: the Portland Pattern Repository. http://c2.com/cgi/wiki 
  • What they’ve implemented in Ruby on Rails and Javascript
  • What is a link?
    • Something to click that takes you somewhere
    • a relation to resources : Ray Fielding (inventor of the wiki)
  • is a link that goes where broken?
    • Not necessarily: as wiki proved
    • so Ray Fielding says a link is “a relation to resources, possibly zero”
  • wiki turns the zero case into an invitation
    • a link that doesn’t go anywhere is an invitation to author that topic.
    • wikipedia wisely color coded the link: a red link doesn’t go anywhere, a blue one does.
      • It’s pretty hard to find a red link these days on wikipedia: it’s been so successful that virtually every topic has been written about.
  • bringing the state of destination page to the link avoided the dreaded “under construction” on to-be-developed pages.
  • two kinds of links
    • internal links: essentially a query to see if the page exists
    • external links: aren’t checked
    • it means every page is dynamic: even if you don’t expect the page itself to change, the state of the links can change.
  • extending the wiki color code
    • blue link means one (links to exactly one place)
    • red link means zero (nothing there, we have to write it)
    • orange link means many (have to choose)
  • there are 30,000 disambiguation pages on wikipedia.
    • there are people whose whole contribution to wikipedia is disambiguating terms
  • happy collision / happy accident
    • originally wiki (Portland Pattern Repository) was 30,000 pages on a single topic: how to go about doing computer programming
    • a happy collision is when you write a WikiWord expecting to see a question mark (indicating that the page wasn’t written), but it is a blue link (the topic is already written about.)
  • sister sites
    • pretty early on, other sites on related topics started up.
    • “let’s share our names”
  • what is the Japanese word for “glitch”?
  • social jargon
    • part one: you have a glossary of words you use: not every word, but words you use that not everyone knows, but you want them to know.
    • part two: your writing automatically links to words in your glossary. (no special brackets or action needed)
    • part three: your readers learn your words automatically
    • part four: your words spread friend to friend as they are used
      • when someone else uses a word, it gets added to their glossary
  • social jargon is a feature of AboutUs.com
  • AboutUs:
    • Community generated content about domains: an expanded version of whois.
    • People don’t want to write encyclopedia articles
    • So they focus on micro-summaries. A single sentence.
  • The purpose of social jargon is to add precision to concise summaries:
    • Example: “JiveSoftware moves its HQ from Portland to the Bay Area”. 
    • What do they mean by Portland? Portland Oregon? Portland Maine? Portland Cement? By detecting it and disambiguating on the fly with a glossary, then others can know that Portland, Oregon is meant.
  • It allows people to be casually precise. In a world where we want to write less and have it mean more.
  • is it important? are names important?
    • “The dominating feature in the [energetic neutral atom Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) all-sky maps] at low energies is the hydrogen, helium, and oxygen interstellar gas flow.
      • super long noun: many words used to achieve full precision. 
    • it’s a natural human feature to compress and utilize context to fill in the gaps. 
    • context, adjectives, and syntax are all normally used to help achieve precision…
      • context: “it was a dark and stormy night”
      • adjectives: “energetic neutral atom”
      • syntax: “meeting @ward at #wv2010”
    • interaction helps:
      • “By wiki, did you mean Portland Pattern Repository or collaborative software?”
  • Give it a try on AboutUs.com
  • The future of writing
    • Wikipedia has had a tremendous impact on writing.
      • And a tremendous impact on linguistics who have something to study that is properly licensed and has a full history.
    • Texting trend: short messages
    • Social trend: context for everything.
      • We want to use the computer and language in a way similar to our colleagues and friends. 
    • Tapping trend: favors choosing over typing. (e.g. better to write something short, and be able to choose the precision than to have to write something long and precise using an iPhone keyboard.)
  • Impact…
    • accelerated evolution of language: it will be easier for new words and concepts to propagate rapidly.
    • specialize language used freely: when you find that existing words don’t work, you’ll make up new words
    • hard to read offline: you’ll be able to read further from your comfort zone because you’ll be able to look up words as you go.

33 Lessons about Beer, Life, and Building a business
Dave Selden, 33 Books Co.
  • A graphics artist by background. Starting a business stretched his comfort zone.
  • Background
    • Went to art school and journalism school. Main lesson: beer is awesome.
    • Ended up in advertising.
  • Art/Journalism school is great, but doesn’t teach you everything.
    • They teach you critical thinking skills and art skills, but none of the business skills.
    • But you can teach yourself…
  • Started a blog (Blog Sober Brewing Co.)
  • But art school taught him how to see possibilities.
  • Scout Books: 32 pages, 100% recycled. You can customize the cover. Local, family business with emphasis on sustainability.
  • Gave idea that he could create a book for beer tasting.
  • Made a spreadsheet to estimate costs and profits.
  • “The road to hell is paved with good intentions”
  • “33 bottles of beer book”
    • 3-pack is 99 bottles of beer
    • Each page has:
      • a flavor wheel with characteristics like: linger, body, bitter, sour, burnt, toffee, alcoholic
      • stats like IBU and ABV
      • notes
      • beer name, brewer, etc.
  • http://www.33beers.com  -> website to sell beers. nice looking, emphasis on how much it costs and where to buy it.
  • But building a website isn’t enough… You need to get people to go to the website.
  • PR doesn’t have to start with bloggers.
    • Simple intro letter to bloggers with link to website, low-key solicitation. Every person contacted took the free sample.
      • It’s a given that you should avoid stupid stuff like attaching a 3 mb pdf to the email.
  • Some of the blog reviews were totally awesome… but it generated at most a dozen orders after each post. Good, but not enough.
  • But seeding blogs like to some other sites picking it up: an online beer site reviewed the product, and that generated 150 orders in one day.
  • And that led to traditional print publications like Food & Wine, and Sunset magazine reviewing the product, which has led to even more reviews.
  • “Beer can be tax-deductible”
    • blog project to taste 999 beers in 999 days.
    • the blog draws search traffic, which helps sell the product.
    • so the cost of the beer is an advertising expense.
  • E-commerce can be simple…
    • Just string together a little PayPal and HTML.
  • USPS is great, and easy.
  • Pricing isn’t easy.
    • Subsidizes shipping to keep it simple.
  • Shipping out books takes 30 minutes to an hour every night.
  • Retailers are important:
    • He gives them a free sample. Of those, about 75% will actually decide to sell the product.
    • He makes the display stands himself from recycled wood.
  • The other thing that is awesome is that as a web person, he felt like he missed the green thing. Now actually making a physical product, he can make a green product.
  • The time to expand is when you have orders.
    • 33wines 
    • You don’t want to run out of stock. Especially you don’t want to run out of money to reorder stock.
  • His wife is very supportive, which is critical. She ships when he has to go on business.
  • Other facts:
    • Hops and marijuana are 99% genetically similar.
  • Q: How does it work with retailers?
    • A: When I first got started, I asked to put the book in the store, and they paid me only if the book sold. Then later, it worked out that I sold the books in bulk at discount price to the retailer, and then the retailer sells it for profit.
  • Q: Are you continually doing marketing and PR, or does that diminish?
    • A: Doing less now than I was before. I’m spending more time doing fulfillment than marketing. I used to have a sales week, in which I would approach retailers, and then a marketing week, in which I would approach bloggers.
  • Q: Are you doing any affiliate marketing on the website?
    • A: Oh, that’s a great idea… I should do that.

As I was sitting in a web design session today, I had a thought that we’re entering the age of the UX geek. What I mean by this is that we’re reaching the point where the user experience is the predominate hurdle to cross.

Where once businesses were launched by business people who could secure sufficient capital to build factories, web businesses have tended to be launched by programmers who had the skills and talent to build web applications. But the technology of web applications is getting easier and easier: a Ruby on Rails application is a small fraction of the effort to build a Java Enterprise application circa 2000. Meanwhile user expectations for interaction design are increasing. This means the major hurdle to be cross for launching a business is not raising capital or mastering technology, but designing a good user experience.

I wonder if we’ll see more startups launched by designers now.

After recently getting a second wireless access point, I was finally able to set up my preferred home network configuration. This topology consists of both an open access point and a closed (password-protected) access point. I wanted to have our network fileserver and PCs on a closed network, but I wanted to have an open access point to make it easier to connect smartphones and other network devices (printers, netflix device), as well as to allow guests to our home to connect to the network, and to serve as an emergency backup internet connection for neighbors.

It was easy to set up, and the only cost was for a second access point, which I was purchasing anyway because I needed gigabit ethernet between my PC and network fileserver. 

In the technical support documentation space I’ve been recommending wikis as a way to enhance collaboration on support documentation as an alternative model to the traditional approach of having a small cadre of technical writers and experts using a traditional content management tool to publish documents to the way.

While I’m an advocate of opening up the wiki to customer input, there are levels of collaboration that may make it easier for companies to get their feet wet without going so far as to open it up to customer input. The wiki could be used, for example, to allow input from other employees across the company, from R&D engineers to call support agents.
However, whenever I propose this, the established parties usually say “Why don’t we just fix the content management process we have?” or “If all we want to do is collaborate inside the company, we can use the content management tools we have for that.”
Wikis aren’t just another content management tool however. Wikis embody design principles that encourage contributions. When Digg was first implemented, the earliest versions had a two-step process to submit a digg vote. Kevin Rose, founder of Digg, spoke about the impact that moving from a two-step to one-step process had on the site:

There was a huge shift in activity on Digg when we made the move to the one-click digg in November 2005. Once we added Ajax, activity went through the roof on [the number of] diggs. It was just insane. Just the ease of the “one-click and you’re done” made all the difference in the world. Once the users grasped that the content is syndicated to friends, friends’ activities then went through the roof. These small incremental steps in feature additions drove the growth.

The more direct and lightweight the process is for contributing, the greater the number of contributors. And it’s not just pure volume of contributors: a simple contribution at first can then lead a user from passive recipient to enthused contributor. The editors at Wikipedia that devote much of their lives to upholding the quality of Wikipedia all started their involvement with a single, simple contribution at some point in time.

Wikis are perhaps the purest embodiment of the design principles of directness and lightweight processes. Every page has an edit button, so contributions are never more than a click away. The act of adding a few words to a document t is rarely more than clicking edit, inserting those words, and then clicking save.
Contrast that with a typical content management system: As a user who is browsing support documents on the web, and then spots an error in a document, if I’ve already used the content management system before, I have to then:
  1. find/launch the content management system
  2. login
  3. navigate to the document I was already viewing, usually by an obscure mechanism that isn’t the URL of the public document
  4. choose to edit the document
  5. make the edit
  6. save the document
  7. probably go through an edit review process relying then on other people to review the edit
  8. wait for notification that the edit is published
  9. check that the web document reflects the change
If I haven’t used the content management system, I would need to:
  1. Find out how the content is managed, probably by emailing peers until I get an answer
  2. Find out how to apply for a login
  3. Justify my need/right to modify the content (usually a lengthy process)
  4. Find out how to use the system
The two choices differ so significantly in effort involved, that the result is not just a quantitative difference in the number of contributions, but a qualitative one as well: true collaboration among a large group of contributors is unlikely using a traditional content management tool, because only those whose primary job it is to manage content are likely to invest the effort to use it.
By comparison, wiki makes it clear that editing is possible, puts the edit tool only a click away, and removes the step of having to renavigate to the content to be edited. While these steps may seem small, like we saw with the Digg example, small reductions in effort correspond to large increases in contributions.
Side note: I’m currently reading Designing Web Interfaces: Principles and Patterns for Rich Interactions, which inspired some of these thoughts.

Makin’ Bac’n: From Idea to Web Startup in 21 days
Scott Kveton & Jason Glaspey
This was my favorite talk of the WebVisions 2009 conference. Fun, interesting, applicable.
Top three highlights
  • Using a combination of open source and free tools (detailed below), they were to go from domain name to full website in 2 weeks, including fully functional store and checkout process.
  • Their operations costs for all web/phone infrastructure are $84/month
  • They’re having lots of fun, and people of all kinds are contributing just for the fun of it, like the Playboy bunny who took photos of herself wearing an “I love bacon” T-shirt.
Full Notes
  • Started blog called bacondesk
  • My first online order of bacon from BaconFreak.com
    • “Bacon is like meat candy” ™
    • He had an affiliate program
    • It was clear they were getting about 1,000 orders a week. At about $100 an order, it was clear this was a business
  • Decided to have a Bacon Meetup
    • Listed on Upcoming.com
  • At Christmas, everybody gave me bacon gifts
  • 3 guys…
    • We’re going to make money from day 1
    • We’re going to launch in a month
    • We’re going to have fun
  • Confirmed plans between the week of Christmas and new year’s.
  • Wanted to launch by Master Bacon, on January 21st.
    • Forced themselves into a 3 week process
    • Bacn.com (the “o” is really, really expensive)
  • Recipes drive organic traffic and sales
  • Bacon is a shelf stable product when cured. Then shipping isn’t a problem.
  • Where are we going to get our bacon, and what’s it going to be?
  • Decided on 3 suppliers… the suppliers were saying “we’ve got people who have moved out of our distribution area, and now they want bacon”
  • Have instructional cards on how to cook and store bacon
  • Fulfillment isn’t that tough
  • U.S. Postal service gives you free boxes. Just go to their website, and they’ll send you hundreds of boxes to your house.
  • Website
    • Used a basic content management system, plugged into Google checkout. Do 3-4 hours of work each evening, plus Saturdays.
    • Hired local guy to do design.
    • Didn’t get design until 2 days before the launch
    • Fully functional website in 5 days
  • Twirl.cc: is a url shortener. Leveraged the code to do bacn.me to create a bacon url shortener. Can impose a big bacon picture across the website. Picked up mashables story, lots of promotion.
  • Blog lets them take bacon related content (have you seen the bacon 747?) and put it on the site really quickly, drives more and more organic traffic.
  • Used twitter to solicit people for photo shoot
    • Made bacon tshirts, gave shirts plus PBR away to people whose photos they could use
  • Budget: To get to launch…buy domain name, plus everything else, was $15,000. the biggest chunk was the domain name. Bacn.com was about $5,000. Bacon.com was $750,000.
  • Used all open source for everything…
    • Djenko
    • WordPress
    • IntenseDebate…great commenting system for WordPress
    • UserVoice: really easy to get feedback. Don’t need to login.
      • Found out really quick: bacon lovers are really big dudes. Offer 4x and 5x sizes.
  • Total operating cost is about $80/month: fax, hosting bill, etc.
  • Cool group bacon photo was actually a photoshopped picture…all people wearing bacon shirts lined up on wall. Pictures were taken individually, then photoshopped together.
  • T-shirts are their biggest product. They licensed the design of existing bacon t-shirts from individuals / small other businesses.
  • They don’t do any Google adwords revenue, instead they do all affiliate revenue with sites that are bacon focused. They offer 10%, but it is only on purchases, not clicks or views.
  • The vast majority of users don’t like to be referred to another website for payment. So Google Checkout is a major deterent. Having to sign up for a Google account is a major turnoff. But didn’t spend time up front to delay launch. Could launch quickly using Google checkout.
  • Having their own product…
    • Bacn sausage
    • Bacn hamburger
    • They are the only online distributor for these products
  • Q: Did you need to get legal support?
    • A: The company runs as an LLC. The company never opens or handles the bacon. They don’t need to worry about handling the bacon. There aren’t a lot of legal ramifications, other than those that are the usual ones.
  • Q: How do you manage inventory?
    • A: Turnaround from suppliers is just a couple of days. So only hold a little inventory. USPS has priority mail…can ship bacon anywhere in U.S. for 2 days for just $9.80.
  • Q: How did you find out that people didn’t like Google checkout?
    • A: From UserVoice. Someone mentioned it, so then offered it as a choice people could pick “Would like other options for checkout”, surprised by number of votes for it.
    • Use crazy egg to make heatmaps of site
  • Comprehensive list of equipment
    • Craigslist for equipment
    • Friends for models
    • IntenseDebates for comments
    • WordPress for blog
    • GoogleCheckout
    • Endicia for postage: prints label and postage all together. Works with custom label design.
    • UserVoice for feedback.
    • Mimeo for video
    • Django content management
      • Even does packing slips and manages inventory
    • Mycorporation.com to incorporate. Used LLC, but would do it again as a C corp.
  • Use google adword keyword service to assess market size per month
  • Use videos to do education: how to make bacon with a grill bacon. Has a splash page, but it isn’t primarily an advertisement.

Research from Stanford School of Business Professor Itamar Simonson and coauthor Chezy Ofir at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, points out that telling customers they will be surveyed, or asking them about their expectations ahead of time creates significantly more negative feedback. A quote from the article:

The researchers found that people who expect to evaluate are decidedly more negative. They also discovered that merely asking people to state their expectations before they receive a service made people morenegative—even though their predispositions may have been quite positive. For example, people who are asked if they think they will like a movie before seeing it will be statistically more negative than people who were never asked that question.
Simonson and Ofir studied the responses of customers who had called for service at a major computer hardware and software company. The researchers divided the customers into four groups. Participants in the first group were told a technician would service their problems and that they would subsequently be asked about the service, such as whether the tech was on time, whether the employee was polite, and whether he or she solved the problem. A second group was not told there would be an evaluation, but the customers were asked to state their expectations, such as how long they thought it would take for a tech to arrive. A third group was told both: to state their expectations and to expect a survey. Members of a control group knew nothing but were later polled.
The result: People who expected to evaluate were significantly more negative than members of the control group. The same was true of the group asked to state their expectations ahead of time. Interestingly, the group that was the most dissatisfied was the one that was asked their expectations and also warned about a survey.

This has serious implications for customer satisfaction surveys, but also for product research groups. Showing product prototypes to customers in a research setting is a context in which participants will frequently both be asked about their expectations and expect a survey. The effect can be research that “finds” problems that aren’t really problems:

The researchers warn that while marketers must stay on top of customer desires and complaints, they must also be aware of the effects the mere expectation of filling out a survey can have on how customers view their experience. “It may not be realistic,” says Simonson. “They may be chronically more negative, pointing out problems that are not problems to the average consumer,” he says. “You want people who are representative of the marketplace.”

This suggests that if you have any opportunity for analysis that doesn’t rely on surveys, but instead relies on behavior, the results are likely to be more accurate. Social media buzz, word of mouth, and collective intelligence applications based on behavior may all be more accurate than survey responses.

I frequently find in my job that I’m the proponent for lots of  iteration and learning. Gifford Pinchot terms this “early learning beats better planning”. By comparison, many folks I work with emphasize getting it right the first time.

While I have nothing wrong with getting it right the first time (if you know what right is, if you have some way to test it, if it doesn’t delay you in getting something out), the problem with it as an approach is that practicioners don’t emphasize closed-loop learning and improvement the way that a “launch and learn” practioner would. So if it isn’t right the first time for whatever reason, you don’t have the processes set up and in place to monitor that, learn from it, and respond rapidly.
I came across an interesting anecdote (via Chanpory Rith, via Trent) from Art and Fear on early learning verus better planning:

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.
His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot—albeit a perfect one—to get an “A”.
Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work—and learning from their mistakes—the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

I attended the Portland chapter of the Social Media Club today for a presentation by Kelly Feller of Intel on Social Media and business. It was titled “Careers in Social Media”, but it really addressed many different questions from gaining alignment within an organization to the different kinds of resources and people needed for a social media campaign. I thought it was a good session, and I especially liked that questions were taken through the presentation and addressed on the spot.

I did want to address one question that came up during the session that perhaps Kelly misunderstood. I think the question was “What do I do if my customers don’t participate in social media?” The particular situation cited involved customers who were engineers. Although my experience is that most engineers are in fact interested in social media (many are highly dependent on blogs and forums to research engineering questions), there are of course some groups of customers that, for one reason or another (cultural, age, region, background) that may just be resistant to social media. 
If this is truly the case, then instead of looking at social media that requires explicit contributions (such as forums, blogs, or wikis), look instead at what you can do with implicit feedback. For example, Amazon, Netflix, and Google Search are all examples of what you can do with implicit feedback or minimal explicit feedback. These sites harvest the behavior of users to recommend products, movies, or search results. They deliver stunningly good results. In many cases, adding this kind of wisdom of the crowds can be enough to differentiate one business from another. Check out my notes on Derek Powazek’s SXSW talk on Designing for the Wisdom of the Crowds. At HP, one of the the innovations we’ve introduced are recommendations on our support web site: “Other customers who viewed this document were ultimately helped by one of these documents…”. This implicit customer feedback capability is implemented by analyzing the patterns of how previous customers accessed support documents. It makes it easier for subsequent customers to find relevant content.
My full notes from the session Kelly Feller’s talk are below. 
Social Media Club PDX #smcpdx
Innotech: eMarketing Summit – Social Media Awards http://eMarketingSummit.com
April 22nd, 23rd
Social media marketing summit conference
Kelly Ripley Feller
Intel Social Media
Center of Excellence
  • “What Do You Hope To Get Out of Tonight?”
    • Let’s hear about Intel Social Media team
    • A job
    • How does an idea get sold when it first gets started
    • How do roles get defined, in a larger organization
    • The future of social media: “just five years out”
    • How does your ROI get measured?
    • What tools do you use?
    • How do you create a job?
    • What are the key resume indicators you are looking for?
  • Just a few years ago didn’t know anything about social media
    • Started as a second life blogger
    • “I just jumped in”
    • Stop worrying, obsessing, thinking, and just start doing
  • New:
    • New capabilities out there (blogging, twitter, wikis, etc.) and way many new tools out there (big slide of tool logos)
    • Go toward what you are interested in. You’ll never master it all.
    • New customer expectations: 85% of americas wants companies to be present in social media. 51% of consumers want companies to interact with them as needed or by request. 43% of consumers want companies to demonstrate customer service via social media. 90% of people get their purchasing and product information via social media.
    • New roles: writer, video editor, community mgr, social media strategist, social campaign mgr., research/data expert, privacy and security experts, lawyer, bloggers, social web UI experts, public relations, software application developer. Online customer service.
      • Data is key. Without data, you don’t have ROI, you don’t know how it affects the brand, the bottom line.
      • Online customer service is one of the most important roles. No one would have thought this just a few years ago. Now it is the centerpiece. Examples: Intel is doing this, Dell is doing this. Intel talks a lot with Dell about this.
    • Organic Word of Mouth versus Amplified Word of Mouth: Slide from the Word of Mouth Marketing Association.
What you do to increase activity for organic word of mouth is different than amplified word of mouth. E.g. Focus on customer satisfaction versus create an online community.
Organic activities: Focus on customer satisfaction, improve product quality and usability, listen to consumers, respond to concerns and criticism, open a dialog
Amplified: Create an online community, develop tools that enable customer feedback, start a conversation, motivate activities to promote a product
Roles to help:
Organic: Social Strategist, Customer Service, Social Operations
Amplified/Social Media: Marketing Campaign Mgr, Community Mgr, Web Developers/Designers
  • Examples of Social Roles
    • Strategist: Social media guidelines, training, internal social media evangalist, social media practitioner (blogs, twitters, etc.)
      • Go to intel.com and read the social media guidelines to see an example. You want people to stay on message, not put your brand at risk. You create a path for people to share online without having to go through PR/legal in order to publish.
    • Campaign Mgr: Integrate social components into marketing campaigns, often social media practitions, large corps; develop agency relationships
    • PR: Cultivate relationships with influencers, bloggers, media; Help define guidelines for engagement, social media practitioner
    • Operations: Develop social assets & infrastructure like websites, communities, etc.; Lgeal, privacy & security expertise
    • Customer Service: Respond online, track responses & coalesce metrics
    • Research/Data Expert: Define research guidelines, deep familiarity with topical and keyword analysis, metrics like Google Analytics, Omniture, WebTrends
  • Q: “How does all of this scale down to a small organization?”
    • A: “Look at getting interns.” [Will comment: Getting buy in is easier, but doing it all is harder.]
  • Q: “Should we use a 3rd party site like Twitter?”
    • A: “Meet the customer where they are.” Lots of companies try to direct the customer back to their own site, but it is totally transparent and intrusive to a certain degree.
  • Q: What kinds of tools do you use, something with natural language processing, or something with a manual process?
    • A: We’re running two simultaneous projects to evaluate two tools, one more automated and one more manual.
    • We’re evaluating a tool that identifies conversations that are happening and tracks action/participation and gives statistics. This makes it easier to show the ROI: We engaged with 50 conversations.
  • Q: Where do you find people to do it, how do you train them?
    • A: WE look for affinity, to see who is interested. You can’t go out and tell people “OK, now you are going to blog.” Then see what we have after we have the volunteers. Our tool, that identifies conversations, really helps. Because sometimes you have an engineer who has really focused knowledge, and they can share that knowledge, but they don’t want to wade through all the other stuff.
  • The FCC has ruled that participating in advertising falls under “truth in advertising” laws, and that means any time any employee writes, whether anonymously or not, they are speaking as a representative of the company.
  • Q: What about seperation between personal and work identify?
    • A: To a certain degree, I am always “on”. But my personal brand is good for Intel, and if my personal brand is helped by me talking about food in Portland, then I’ll talk about food in Portland.
  • Just Do It
    • Join the conversation.
    • Participate personally (“don’t ask people to twitter something for you.”)
    • Be authentic and be human. If you just twitter about one subject, you’ll just get one audience.
    • Q: Should you focus on just one thing, become a master of that one area?
    • A: Is that what you are drawn to? Do what you are passionate about.
  • Leave no stone unturned…
    • Facebook
    • Twitter
    • Blog – You can’t not have a blog, especially if you are in a big company
  • “I already do that, now how can I stand out?”
    • Be Free to be yourself
    • Advertise Your Doggafiddum (be yourself)
    • People have relationships with people, not companies
    • Sharing “who you are” helps humanize yourself and your company
    • Bloggers need to be authentic and transparent
    • Personality inspires trust –> trust builds loyalty
    • “How can I be more me?”
  • What is a personality moment?
    • Your goal should be to more efficiently turn every such situation into a personality moment. Brands that do this succesfully are the ones that develop personality.
    • Southwest Airlines: how their flight attendants go outside the box. Google southwest airlines rap for a video of a guy rapping the announcement.
  • Blog Post: Formal versus conversational
    • The conversational post tells a story. Kelly will post the slides
  • Resume Example: Formal versus conversations
    • “The big picture” versus “my manifesto”. The conversational one stands out, the formal one is just like every other resume ever written.
    • Q: “How do you get past the folks in HR?”
    • A: “I have two resumes.”
  • Tips for Better Conversational Writing
    • Write in the 2nd person (“you” as the subject”)
    • K.I.S.S.: keep it short, silly.
    • Write like you were describing something in a conversation
    • Use the “cocktail party rule”: you don’t just jump into a cocktail party discussion and say “hey, you want to hear about me?”
    • Fight the bull : http://www.fightthebull.com: put in the complete text of what you are going to write, and it will tell you how much bullshit is in there.
    • Structure of blog post:
      • 1st paragraph: setup (interesting anecdote, story, quote)
      • 2nd paragraph: tie to your point
      • 3rd paragraph: make your point
      • 4th paragraph: include bullets
      • 5th paragraph: summarize
  • Q: What if a small company doesn’t have the bandwidth to do social media? Can they hire out and still be authentic?
    • A: I would question that you don’t have the bandwidth. Do you have even one marketing person? What are they doing? Where are they spending their budget? Why aren’t they spending it on social media?
  • Q: What if you have to deal with engineers? They are social media laggards
    • A: They might be, but if you convince just one or two, they will become your biggest advocates.
  • Good examples of social media
    • Mattel Playground: 500 moms invited to come participate in an online community. Mattel asked the mom how to handle the recalls, now this year Mattel’s sales are up 6% despite all the recalls.
    • Intel: Mass Animation. Collaborative Animation project, 50,000 participations in Facebook community.
  • Bad Examples
    • Mars Turns Skittles.com Over to Twitter: it may have gotten them some buzz, but did it do anything for the their brand? What was the long term effect? It was a drive by marketing shot”
    • Small Things: (Intel site): Intel is giving money to certain charities, for anyone who clicks on the button. But the site didn’t include any social elements, so it really hasn’t taken off.
      • Whenever you are doing any kind of marketing campaign, look at how you can include social elements.
      • How can people share moments of their life?
      • http://SmallThingsChallenge.com
  • How can you help them (e.g. corporate management) get it?
    • Do not advocate “agency bloggers” (pretty please)
    • Do your homework (don’t advocate something the company is already doing) – it’s all online
    • Use industry tools (e.g. Forrestor POST methodology)
    • Don’t assume they don’t get it (sometimes they just gotta do what they gotta do, like get a product out, but that doesn’t mean they don’t get it)
    • Also…
    • Hand out books: Groundswell, Personality Not Included
    • Twitter: @KellyRFeller
    • Kelly.r.feller@intel.com
    • Text Kellyfeller to 50500 for text info card