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A few weeks ago, I saw a Twitter post from Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh about a Twitter-related problem his company is having. As we’ve written about before, Zappos loves Twitter and hundreds of its employees actively use the micro-blogging tool. Zappos has even built a micro-site that aggregates all Twitter messages that mention the company. The problem is that, in their enthusiasm for the tool, some Zappos employees began following any Twitter user that mentioned Zappos in one of their tweets (Note: following is the Twitter equivalent of a friend request on Facebook). According to Hsieh, this freaked some people out, as they felt that Twitter was sort of stalking them online as some sort of corporate policy. I’m not sure what Zappos ended up doing (let me know in the comments if you know).

For me, this situation really demonstrates how tricky using these social tools can be.

On a personal level, I’m happy to have anyone follow either my personal or our Bivings Twitter accounts. But my use of Twitter is 90% professional and probably 10% personal. I’m very aware that everything I write is viewable by the whole world and have no expectation of privacy. I want strangers to read what I write.

Others use Twitter in a much more private way, only following people they know in real life and using it primarily to talk to their friends. These types of users are going to get a little creeped out when strangers, and particularly strangers working at a company they buy shoes from, start following them out of the blue.

So how should companies go about adding followers on Twitter? How do you build a user base without making everyone think you are a stalker?

When we set up our Bivings Twitter account, I initially started following around 50 people through the account in an effort to get the ball rolling. In adding followers, I tried to follow people I’d met in real life, people I knew read our blog and/or people I was fans of. Just as importantly, I tried not to add anyone whose account looked to be used primarily for private conversations. I guessed this by seeing how many people they were following and, most importantly, what they were writing about. If they were using Twitter to share links and to add their two cents in on general discussions, I added them. If they were talking primarily about their kids and what they had for breakfast, I didn’t. I never followed people who have set their accounts to private. Since this initial burst, we’ve focused on adding people to follow organically as we come across them and aren’t forcing things. Slow and steady wins the race.

So I do I think it is possible (and desirable) for companies to build relationships on Twitter by following people, so long as they are sensitive as to how the person is using Twitter. Just like when reaching out to bloggers, I think you should familiarize yourself with a person before you try to engage them on Twitter.

But I also think this is new ground and feel the rules are sort of being written on the fly.

How do you feel about companies and individuals that follow you out of the blue? Does it creep you out?

Inspired by a recent article at Wired Online, which detailed the lamest gadget ideas from the mid-1990s, I decided to make a list of five of the biggest flops in gadgetry during my lifetime.  In addition, the list shows some enlightening reasons as to why each of the products did not ever hit the consumer jackpot. (more…)

Tagging is a relatively easy way to organize data.  For instance, people who use bookmarking sites will write a few works related to the link that they are saving to help them remember what that link is about.  However, this is not the only use of tagging.

I learned about how Noah Brier, a marketing man, is experimenting with tagging in relation to branding and public relations.  NPR's Bryant Park Project featured his brand tagging site - Brand Tags - today.

When you visit Brand Tags it presents you with a brand's logo.  Below the logo is a text box for you to enter the first word(s) that come to your mind.  You can then go check individual brand pages to see tag clouds for all the words that people have entered in for that brand.

For instance, on the NBC tag cloud, you'll see (as of this writing) that the the tags "30 rock," "friends," and "office" are really big, and that means that many people typed those words in for tags.  In this case, these tags make sense since they reference popular shows on the network.

The potential of this site is that it can help reveal what people really think about a brand.  We're talking more than just positive and negative metrics.

However, there are some important things to consider when checking out this site.  First, I doubt that everyone types in the very first thing that enters their mind.  Further, they could enter in a highly biased word.  Second, this site is brand new, and I barely heard about it.  I wonder who else hasn't heard of this.  Probably most of the population. 

So, check out the site since it is interesting, but don't make too many conclusions since it is so new and the audience so far is probably not representative of the general population. However, having said that, I think that this use of tagging has potential.

BusinessWeek magazine must understand how to use web analytical data, at least a little.  In its June 2, 2008 cover story titled "Beyond Blogs," Stephen Baker and Heather Green reveal that the magazine's web site got a lot of traffic from Google to its May 2, 2005 cover story titled "Blogs Will Change Your Business" since the article was the number one result for the keyword "blogs business."

Clearly, at least in this case, the magazine pays attention to different traffic sources to their site, and it acted upon this data. 

Needless to say, much has changed in the blogosphere and now greater social media landscape that has made the 2005 story outdated.  For instance, the article heavily featured Steve Rubel and his Micro Persuasion blog.  Back then his blog was an authoritative resource for using emerging social media technology to influence the general public.  In fact, it helped him get a job at the PR giant Edelman & Associates directing digital media work from an office overlooking Central Park in New York City.  Not bad.  However, he doesn't blog as much as he did back in 2005, and although he still holds a lot of clout in this realm, he attributes his lower frequency of blogging now to the fact that megablogs that actually hire full-time staffers like TechCrunch reign now.  Further, in 2005 blogging was the big deal, but now a story like this must include so much more of social media.

As the magazine realized that this article was no longer relevant to those searching for "blogs business," it decided to place an editor's note on the original article page and send visitors to a new page with revised content (for instance, the titled is now "Social Media Will Change Your Business") and provided annotated notes with updates from experts — see the image for this post to see how these updates appear on the site.  It also used it blog to get feedback from what readers felt and wanted in the revised article.

I think that using web analytics data to inspire an update to the article is brilliant for a couple of reasons.  First, updating the article will keep people who visit the site from the search engines, since they really cannot take a look at the publication date of the article and move on to other search results in hopes of finding something more current.  Second, this helps BusinessWeek assert itself as a great resource of updated information.  Of course, I doubt that the magazine updates every article, but at least we know that it pays some attention to traffic data.

Does anyone else know of other news organizations acting in similar ways?

As we previously posted in a study on American newspapers and their use of the internet, the formatting of newspapers and the internet don't really go hand in hand. It has been a struggle for the folks at McClatchy and the New York Times Company to develop profitable methods as the internet sprawl continues its onward march.

Let me introduce the NY Times Reader, a desktop-based web application designed for reading the times on your laptop or tablet PC. It made its initial windows release in 2007, but just today the NYT digital production team announced the macintosh release (beta). (more…)

The Starbucks logo switch that had Christian groups up in arms was only the first in a line of logo switches to make the Starbucks coffee brand appeal as a luxury item.  Next in line: Ethiopia.

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Tricked you with the headline up there, didn’t I? Yes I did. There’s nothing wrong with John McCain’s third redesign. It’s just bluer than before with more right angles and stars. It is a nice upgrade from the last version which was not so bad either. McCain’s team seems to have Obama-ed this version up just a bit with the blues, the positive tone, the structure …in fact, look at this (click on image to see full picture).

It’s not a direct rip off by any stretch, but the McCain design team has taken a look at the competition and let’s leave it at that. I would (and have) done the same. Or worse. Here are some first impressions on the latest effort:

The silver star logo remains the branding for McCain and that Republican sans serif font style is right there with it. They’ve now added the url below it to be helpful. Or forceful. Something.

Like most modern political sites, the main focus is on a centrally located media section. McCain’s site is no different and does a nice job of incorporating this into the design of the home page. The video that clearly needs to be pushed is a Four Year Vision piece that once clicked reveals a vision of 2013 where everything is squared away or something. The baritone voice-over made me sleepy but I was then revived by clicking on the colorful Cuban Independence link and asked to sign a petition, which I respectfully refused as I’m very busy today.

To the left of the big dance number is a rubic’s cube of banner ads that magically switch every 5 seconds, creating; 1) a cascading vertical selection of issues to click on and, 2) my left eye to twitch.

The right hand side is the usual Join the Team plea, but nicely and very cleanly laid out. The Action Items (I call them action items because I’m in the biz) below are pleasantly low key and not even numbered. When did that staple of political site design die out? Was I on vacation? It doesn’t matter, let’s move down to the sections no one reads, but everyone needs to put in their own site. News and Upcoming Events are given a lot of real estate and not gunked-up with any icons or thumbnails.

The page finishes nicely with some thumbnails of recent photos that expand smoothly within the browser window.

Overall a pretty decent overhaul. I appreciate that you can cruise through this site very quickly. Except for the crazy moving blocks on the left, the layout allows me to scan the page in seconds and decide where I want to go. This can’t be said of the last 2 McCain designs. On a side note I really enjoy the Parade of Stars background image they’ve chosen. I feel like Lou Rawls might be back there somewhere.

HubSpot is an Internet marketing company that helps company increase their visibility online.  As part of their marketing strategy, they have built an interesting tool that grades how visible your site is in search engines.  Stealing an idea from TechCrunch, I ran a quick report that compared the McCain and Obama websites.    According the the tool, both sites get A’s, with McCain scoring a a 98.7 and Obama a 95.  Below is the a snipped of part of the comparison chart (click to see full table). 

Here are a couple of other tidbits:

• According to the tool the Obama website is written on an Advanced/Doctoral reading level while McCain’s is written on an Secondary/High School level.
• Both sites have a Google Page Rank of 7. 
• Three articles from the Obama site have appeared on the homepage of Digg and the site has received a total of 9,764 diggs from users.  No story from the McCain site has reached the Digg homepage and his site has attracted a total of 203 diggs.
• Pages on Obama’s site have been bookmarked on del.icio.us 1,059 times to 168 for McCain. 

These links will probably expire, but you can view a copy of the McCain report here and the Obama report here. 

For the record, The Bivings Report scored 98.1. 

Last night, the McCain web team launched a graphic redesign of their campaign website (feature set looks more or less the same). I like the new look a lot and think it is a real improvement over the well done second iteration and depressing first version.  This is a very nice looking website.

While I appreciate the professionalism of the design, I can’t help but think that the way McCain’s site looks is sort of beside the point at this juncture in the game.  From the blog that isn’t really a blog to the phony social network to the poorly conceived blast emails, McCain’s biggest problem online is a top-down strategy that has made McCain distant presence on his own site. 

Patrick Ruffini summed things up pretty well in a post on TechPresident last week:

Good online strategy is simple: reflect the very best of your candidate offline. John McCain offline is transparent, accessible, and willing to answer any question. John McCain online is stilted and awkwardly asking me for money. There’s a fundamental disconnect.

I don’t think slapping a new coat of paint on their existing strategy is going to fix that problem.

What do you think of the new site?

Times change, and so should ImpactWatch.  After becoming interested in all the China/Olympic drama while researching for this post on The Bivings Report, I decided that it was time for a new, more topical demo.  Replacing our current Real Estate Demo is a 2008 Olympics Demo.  This one continues to show off the great features of ImpactWatch, but the articles contained within it now concern anything and everything about the upcoming Games.

This new demo tracks media favorability for both the general Olympics as well as the country of China, specifically.  It also tracks which topics are covered in the articles surrounding these games, everything from Burma and Tibet to the worry over China's air pollution.  OlympicsWatch does all of this while retaining the sleek and efficient design that has made ImpactWatch such a valuable resource for so many clients.  The analytics section of this new demo takes full advantage of our recently created graphing tool, so feel free to explore this very useful device as well.

To sign up for a weeklong trial of our new demo, click here to head over to the ImpactWatch official site.

I finally caved…I caved and bought a Wii.  Perhaps it was because I have not had a gaming system since the Nintendo 64, perhaps it was due to the overwhelming press circulating the rarity of finding one, or perhaps it was simply due to the fact that I have a housemate with a giant television, which is perfect for the Wii's motion sensing controls.  Regardless of the reason, I soon found that one of Wii's main selling points was a boldface lie.

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Since when did Alyssa Milano and Ethan Suplee hawk Klondike Bars? (more…)

I have been a Windows user since 3.x on a 33 MHz Packard Bell PC with 2 MB of video RAM, which at the time cost an arm and a leg and blew our Mac 2e out of the water (the video memory was later upgraded to a whopping 4 MB to run Rebel Assault II, a top priority in my life at the time – along with some legendary SCUMM-based Lucas Arts titles , a topic in itself for an entire post). Since then, I have stood witness to several Windows releases, from the industry-changing release of 95 to the flop of “Millenium Edition”.

Somewhere along the way, I fell in love with the philosophy of open source software and was the only FreeBSD desktop user that I knew, but the lack of universal support and the work that went into configuring a usable system (I admit – this was actually most of the appeal) always had me turning back to a Windows-based system.

Now fast-forward to this past April, when the open source blogosphere was ablaze with rantings and ravings about Ubuntu ’s “Hardy Heron” release. I had been an early adopter of Vista, ready to move on after having “eXPerienced” for what felt like an eternity.

Dozens of system crashes later, I had almost migrated back to XP several times – if I could only remember where I had put those disks. After a thorough investigation of Ubuntu’s feature set, and the instant attraction to Compiz Fusion’s eye candy , a friend and I decided to just go all in. A fresh burn of Hardy Heron later, and I was up and running.

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I will be the first to admit that I do not embrace new technology willingly.  A colleague of mine recently described me as someone who "talks like [he] is from this century, but uses gadgets like [he] is from the 16^th century."  And yes, perhaps I was a little too harsh on my good friend, the Microsoft Surface.  I did venture to a bar that housed the machines, and yes, I enjoyed aimlessly flicking virtual bubbles around while making idle small talk.  Ah, the future.

I preface this post with this admission because I am about to ‘go 20^th century' on another product, the Amazon Kindle.

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Earlier today news leaked out that the comment management system Disqus (background here) has enabled video commenting on sites that use the service through a partnership with Seesmic. Basically this means that people can post video comments in addition to regular old text comments in response to articles, blog posts, etc. You can see it in action here. Seesmic had previously released a plugin that enables video commenting on Wordpress blogs, and plans to release a plugin for Typepad and Movable Type as well.

When I first saw video commenting on blogs “in the wild” a few months back, I thought it was a novel idea . At this point though, I find them mostly annoying for a few reasons:

• When I’m using the web, I’m not always in a position where I can watch a video.  Sometimes I’m listening to music.  Sometimes I’m in a public place.  Sometimes I’m on a mobile phone. If part of the conversation is taking place via video, I will often miss it.  Many others will as well.
• It is much quicker for me to read a comment than to watch it.
• The use of video in commenting is usually unnecessary - in most cases the same point could be made just as well through text commenting.
• Video comments disrupt the flow of text comments.

Beyond the initial gee whiz moment, I don’t see how the value video commenting provides the end user in most cases. For me, the rise of video commenting is largely a case of people using video for using video’s sake.

If video commenting takes off and becomes ubiquitous in the coming years, I think the best practice will be to separate video comments from regular text ones, as YouTube does with video responses. This will allow people to have the latest toy on their site without disrupting the experience of people just interested in text comments.