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Techcrunch features an excellent article today that discusses how the integration of Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook, etc. reactions into comment threads on blogs can kill the conversation by dramatically increasing comment volume.  Here is the key point:

Instead, there is endless, pointless repetition; conversations emerge, peter out and then re-emerge 50 comments later with new participants who haven’t noticed that the same issues were discussed 50 comments ago.

I couldn’t agree more.  We experimented with integrating Twitter mentions with our blog comments a few months ago and it made our comment threads incoherent.  If you want to track mentions of your article on Twitter or elsewhere, I think the best practice is to use something like the Tweetmeme button and keep comments completely separate from Twitter reactions. 

Twitter Yields Uneven ROI for News Organizations Using Automation, Curation, Interaction

Poynter looks at the different approaches news organizations are taking as they experiment with Twitter. My take: we’re in the early days here and still a ways away from establishing best practices for how the media should and shouldn’t use Twitter.

The Bivings Group this week launched OurIdaho.com , a site by the Idaho Freedom Foundation aimed at increasing government transparency in Idaho by displaying the state’s expenditures.

The site is broken into state expenditure records and employee salary records. State expenditures are documented for the 2008 and 2009 fiscal years, with backlogs to come.

The salary data includes state annual, weekly and hourly salaries from various cities, counties and school districts across the state. Data is added as it is gathered.

Ouridaho.com has gotten press coverage in Idaho based on one city’s refusal to include employee’s first names in salary records. Officials from the city of Coeur d’Alene claimed including first names reveals employee gender, a detail not required by the Freedom of Information act.

“Idaho code indicates very clearly that gender doesn’t have to be disclosed,” city attorney Mike Gridley told the Coeur d’Alene Press, according to 2News.tv. “We’ve honored that statute.” The city eventually agreed to release the first initials of employees, but the matter has not yet been settled.

Although this is the first government transparency site developed by The Bivings Group, other states have taken the lead.

Other private companies run the research and development behind the Kentucky and Nevada sites, while the state governments themselves in Kansas, Missouri and Texas run their own sites.

On the heels of an overhaul of their print product back in October, the Los Angeles Times launched a redesign of their website a week or so ago.  I like the new www.latimes.com a great deal from a usability standpoint.  The new sites prominent, simplified horizontal nav bar is a huge improvement over the more complicated content structure present on the old site.  And while I’m sure some will find the black and white design unexciting, I think the palette evokes the print product and makes it easy for the eye to focus on the content.  This is a nice improvement.

Check out the screenshots below to see how the site has changed.  Click on the images for full before and after shots.

So you’ve set up your Facebook Fan Page or Twitter profile and now you’re stuck wondering what to post.

They say content is king, and this holds true. You would be doing yourself a disservice by simply posting content without taking some time to think about the community you want to build.  With the wealth of information available on just about every niche, you can create a valuable social network that people will want to follow.

This is something I like to call the content bubble.

This idea probably isn’t revolutionary, but it has helped when explaining to clients how to fully utilize content on their social networks. Basically, you start thinking about content outside of your immediate subject.

For example, lets say you have a Facebook Page for your Italian restaurant (one of my favorite foods btw).

Now your first impulse may be to use the page as a bulletin board. But, before you send a flurry of links about the menu specials, consider your subject. Italian food = Italy, and there is much more to Italy than just your restaurant.

So lets start building your content bubble:

• Italian food has a rich and incredible history. Share this in your feed.
• What region of Italy does your restaurant represent? Are there stories and facts which you can talk about?
• Highlight specialty dishes.
• Share some links about all the different grades of olive oil.
• Who doesn’t want to know more about Italian desserts?
• Go on YouTube and find some relative videos to post.
• Talk about how certain ingredients became known. How is ricotta cheese made?
• What about Italian songs or music?
• Spotlight some famous Italian chefs.
• Explain how all the different types of pasta come about.

Getting the idea how your content bubble can grow?

In this example, the Facebook page doesn’t focus on only the restaurant. It covers Italian history and culture. Now you are providing value while also broadening your readership. This can help with word of mouth which may lead to more potential customers.

Build yourself up as a resource and you’ll start seeing the benefits of an effective content bubble.

So what do you think? What suggestions would you make?

Over the years, we’ve attempted to use Customer Relationship Management systems such as Salesforce and Sugar CRM internally as a way of tracking our own sales process.  Our needs on this front are pretty straightforward, so both Salesforce and Sugar CRM seemed like way more functionality than we needed and fell into disuse pretty quickly.  Given the success we’ve had with Basecamp, we decided to give 37 Signals contact tracking solution, Highrise, a try. 

As mentioned, our needs are pretty simple:

1. We want a central Contacts database that we can share and edit as a group. 
2. We want a way to enter sales leads and track where they are in the pipeline. 

We are still at the beginning of our experiment with Highrise, but here is a breakdown of the good and the bad so far. 

Contacts

The Contacts part of the site just works.  It is easy to add new contacts to the system, and Highrise does a good job of de-duping entries and associating contacts from single companies.  The simple and advanced search interfaces are both intuitive and powerful.  Users can also enter simple notes about the Contact and assign follow up tasks if needed, such as reminders to call someone on a given date.  The tool meets nearly all our needs.

The one criticism I would have is that Highrise doesn’t include the ability to import custom columns into the Contacts database.  Instead, the system wants you to use tags to add this kind of custom information to your database.  In our case, we have a legacy Access database with a variety of columns indicating whether the person is on our email list, etc.  Getting this kind of data replicated in Basecamp is cumbersome, and as of yet we have moved over all of this legacy information.

Deals

The Deals section of Highrise also meets most of our needs.  To add a deal (or sales lead), you simply enter the deal name and associate it with a Contact from the database.  From there you can enter deal amount ($), enter the Deal status (Pending, Won, Lost), the relevant deal category and the person responsible.  As with Contacts, you can also add Notes about a given Deal and assign follow up tasks. 

My only addition would be to add a fourth Deal status called On Hold.  Our sales process often takes a few months, and as such we can have a ton of Deals that fall in the Pending category.  Having the ability to mark a project as On Hold would allow us to better separate out active and non-active leads.

Email in Information

The feature on Highrise that I didn’t think I would use but do is the email dropbox.  Basically, each Highrise user is given an email address they can forward and bcc on emails in order to associate the emails with a Deal or Contact.  This tool is a great way of keeping an archive of correspondence that everyone can see, lessoning the need to play the chase the email game. 

Bottom Line

I think a lot of CRM software is overly complicated and way too feature rich for the average user.  In a lot of instances, you are bringing a gun to a knife fight.  Highrise is a great solution for companies that don’t need something as robust as something like Salesforce, but who want a tool more structured and user friendly than shared Excel sheets and Outlook contact lists. 

Here at The Bivings Group, we’ve dealt with a myriad of requests for mass emailing services, tools and strategies to help our clients make the most of what is the most powerful weapon in online advocacy. Based on our research and testing, here are some best practice tips for making your email campaigns as effective as possible. Most of these items fit a general theme of narrowing the focus and increasing the personalization in email messaging.

Smaller targets

The smaller the target, the more successful the email open and click-through rate. Emails sent to specific states or even determined areas around specific cities get much more attention than those sent to the whole country. People are generally inclined to get personally involved in local issues rather than national campaigns.

Specific goals

Ask people to do one single, specific thing. Example: “Sign the petition to protect America’s indigenous forests.” When these requests are linked to a form where users could do exactly that, success rates are very high. General requests such as “Support the Environment” with a link to a main homepage result in less clicks and less direct action by email subscribers. Emails that link to multiple items or actions are less successful than those focused on promoting a single action.

Getting to the point

Keep it short and simple. Getting a subscriber to open an email is just the first step. You want them to read and understand your message. Put your message in plain, direct words at the very top. Use short, single sentence paragraphs whenever possible to make the email as easy as possible to get through.

Repetition, repetition, repetition

Once your simple, direct message is at the very top of your email, repeat it throughout the body of the text. Two or three repetitions of the same call to action and link is not too much. Repetition is the best way to drive home a particular point. Repetition is the best way to drive home a particular point.

The visuals

To keep messages from looking like advertisements, it’s best to keep graphics and imaging to a minimum in general. Messages should not look dramatically different from the messages people receive from their friends and family. Some light branding images should be used in the header of the email and to emphasize the actions the email asks people to take. Keep in mind a large percentage of subscribers will only see a text version of the email or will choose not to enable graphics, so make sure all pertinent information in graphics is repeated in email body text.

Special requests

Timing is everything, even email. Give subscribers something to do, the reason to do it, the tools to get it done, but don’t forget to let them know they need to do it NOW. Emails sent surrounding current legislation or events in the news, letting subscribers know about upcoming events, or asking people to help celebrate important milestones, convey more urgency than emails unrelated to a timeline. Time-sensitive emails should be used sparingly, however, because the more you send, the less important they’ll seem.

.. add variation to an even tempo

A successful email effort has to find the right balance between being a consistent, reliable source of campaign news and flooding subscribers’ inboxes. Never let more than a few weeks pass between emails, and we should avoid sending more than two to three emails in a week unless we are in a period of intense activity. Keep in touch with subscribers without overloading them.

Efforts to boost robot-to-robot cooperation took a giant step during July’s International Joint Conference in Artificial Intelligence, when roboticists around the world decided to start with human-to-human cooperation.

The science of developing robots, though narrow, was surprisingly fractured until the development of the Robot Operating System (ROS).

“Each robot is individually manufactured to meet a specific need and more than likely built in isolation,” NewScientist.com reported Monday.

“It’s easier to build everything from the ground up right now because each team’s requirements are so different, “ said Anne-Marie Bourcier of Aldebaran Robotics in Paris, according to NewScience.

However, roboticists are collaborating on those aspects of their programming that can be shared with others.

“Any benefit that a robot maker might reap from keeping some aspect of their operating software secret would seem to be vastly outweighed by the benefit of pooling resources with other researchers and spreading out the testing and debugging among the group, particularly for the features that are common to almost all advanced robots and don't confer a particular competitive advantage,” OSNews.com reported.

Programmers at the IJCAI conference, held in Pasadena, Calif., were drawn from widespread teams, some hailing from Stanford University, MIT and the Technical University of Munich, Germany. Those institutions are behind the effort to establish a strong ROS.

There are several challenges to this type of collaboration, however, and many stem from the nature of a business where every project has very specific needs.

Robots range from nearly autonomous to human operated, so creating an operating system that works for all of them is nearly impossible. Still, programmers believe it’s important first step.

"Robotics is at the stage where personal computing was about 30 years ago," says Chad Jenkins of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, according to NewScience. "But at some point we have to come together to use the same resources," says Jenkins.

As in computing, competitive profit may eventually win out over open-source collaboration despite these early efforts to share information.

OSNews also reported that Microsoft has created a Robotics Developer Center, which may provide enough tools for robot developers to beat out other collaborative efforts in the near future.