November 25th, 2009

Facebook as a living obituary aka 'goodbye old friend'

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 12:03 pm

Categories: Facebook, Social Media

Tags: Facebook, Social Networking, Intellectual Property, Online Communications, Marketing, Advertising & Promotion, Research & Development, Business Operations, Jennifer Leggio

A few weeks ago I got word that an old college friend had passed away quite unexpectedly. A mutual friend notified a group of us, as she learned by visiting his Facebook page that he was gone. None of us were close enough to be notified by the deceased’s family, yet we all revered this man as one of the greatest hearts we’d ever met.

I immediately rushed to his Facebook page, which was still there and more active than ever. Friends and family had linked to dedications and obituaries and had been writing messages to him as if he was still here. While we knew that he was an inspiration to many — a strong man with the most gentle nature — I was blown away by the amount of people who had come to remember him. It was more moving than I was expecting.

So, after a sobbing phone call to a dear mutual friend, I started thinking about the bigger picture.

There’s been a lot written about what happens to our social network presences after we die. As a matter of fact, my friend Adele McAlear has proposed a compelling South by Southwest Interactive (SXSW) session on the matter it’s so top of mind. But most of the existing discussions I’ve read circle around what happens to your intellectual property, who manages the accounts, etc. Legalities and technology questions aside, what happens to the online memory?

In the case of Facebook, they were already a step ahead. As a matter of fact Facebook director of security Max Kelly blogged just a couple weeks earlier about Facebook’s feature that allows loved ones to report people as deceased so that the profile can stay on a site as a living memorial. Kelly said that the discussion of what to do with profiles postmortem came up after his best friend, a fellow Facebook employee, passed away four years ago.

“When someone leaves us, they don’t leave our memories or our social network,” he wrote. “To reflect that reality, we created the idea of ‘memorialized’ profiles as a place where people can save and share their memories of those who’ve passed.”

The wall remains, as do photos, but Facebook removes other sensitive information and also ensures that the profile does not show up in the “suggestions” section of the news feed, and so on. It’s just a small form, and it’s somewhat hidden on the site, but could make the world of difference to someone wanting to memorialize a dear friend or family member.

What do you think of Facebook as a living memorial?

November 23rd, 2009

Quick'n'Dirty episode 23: TripIt and Twitter lists top talk

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 9:43 am

Categories: Podcast, Quick'n'Dirty Podcast, Social Business, Social Media, Twitter

Tags: Network, Twitter Inc., Crowdsourcing, TripIt, CrowdCampaign, Twitterer, Podcasts, Social Networking, Networking, Internet

Can you believe we just finished episode 23 of the Quick’n'Dirty podcast? Time flies when you’re having fun. Or, well, skipping episodes. As my co-host Aaron Strout wrote last week it had been a good few weeks since we’d last podcasted together due to travel schedules and a minor health emergency on my part. But we were back in full force this week with a fun social network of the week, a great guest and a fun point/counterpoint.

We started by talking about CrowdCampaign, a neat crowd-sourcing tool that allows you to ask your network — or a broader unknown network — to chime in on queries, or even do contests or other types of voting. CrowdCampaign was recently used during the Web 2.0 Expo in New York for potential Q&A’s for Beth Noveck. The possibilities are endless and Aaron and I discuss some of these on the show. CrowdCampaign is brought to us by the brilliant minds at The Social Collective, which boasts the my.SXSW portal among its many impressive projects.

Next up was our special guest, Will Aldrich of TripIt. Will is the company’s vice president of product, and he joined us to talk about how the concept of TripIt was developed, how the company has been able to oust Dopplr as a the more popular travel social network incumbent, as well as how travelers can really benefit from the tool. If you aren’t familiar with TripIt, it has a bunch of cool travel features, from connecting trips with your friends to see who is going to be in what city when you are, to helping you organize all of those pesky, disparate travel confirmation documents. I would use it all the time if only they had a BlackBerry application. Aaron did a TripIt Q&A on his blog prior to our talking to Will on the pocast, so either give his interesting interview a read or listen to the replay, or both!

As always, we introduced a “featured Twitterer” of the week. The featured Twitterer is someone that we find to be informative, funny and engaging, and someone that we believe more people should know about and follow. This week’s was none other than Del Jones, aka @jonesdel, USA Today leadership reporter and all-around entertaining and smart guy.

And finally, we had our usuall point/counterpoint, and on this one we sort of disagreed for a change. The last one where there was absolute disagreement was when we did our iPhone vs. BlackBerry war, which seems to still be continuing in the background of every show. This week’s topic was around Twitter lists: are they good for businesses or are they just a big ego stroke? Aaron, as he’s usually the more positive one between the two of us, discussed some good uses and examples of Twitter lists. Me, being the pesky cynic, talked about how I don’t care much about public Twitter lists and the annoying redundancy they bring. It was a good one, so you’re going to have to listen to find out where we ended.

The Quick’n'Dirty podcast will be off the air this week so Aaron and I can eat some turkey with our families, but we will return on Thursday, Dec. 3, with Peter Shankman, the man behind Help A Reporter Out (HARO) and so many other social media successes. Get your questions ready!

Reminder that you can always listen to archived shows on BlogTalkRadio or find us on iTunes by searching for “QuicknDirty.”

November 19th, 2009

Hello Salesforce Chatter, so long Yammer?

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 12:37 pm

Categories: CRM, Corporate Social Networking, Dreamforce 2009, Enterprise 2.0, Marketing, Salesforce.com, Social Business, Social Media, Social Networks

Tags: Salesforce.com Inc., Sales Force Management, Sales, Jennifer Leggio

Salesforce.com yesterday announced its new Salesforce Chatter at Dreamforce 2009. Dubbed as an enterprise collaboration application and social development platform, Salesforce Chatter promises to provide a secure social network within the enterprise, complete with individual profiles, status updates, feeds, applications, as well as integration with existing popular social networks such as Twitter and Facebook.

“Why do I know more about strangers on Facebook than my own employees?” asked Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com. “Now, through Salesforce Chatter, my business is tweeting me. My employees can use the models they love to get the collaboration they need.”

When the product is available in 2010, not only will companies be able to use the standalone Salesforce Chatter features in new applications within the enterprise in a more secure fashion than one-off cloud offerings, Salesforce.com plans to immediately make social its other 135,000 native Force.com applications.

This is a good opportunity for Salesforce.com, as enterprise hesitation over pure in-the-cloud social networks is rampant — and legitimate. With Salesforce.com being a trusted enterprise collaboration and application development solution already, this could up-level the use of such social enterprise applications, and bring more Twitter and Facebook data, into the enterprise.

Salesforce Chatter’s biggest threat seems to be that of SocialText, which provides similar services and offers compelling enterprise-worthy collaboration and social networking services. It’s likely now, however, that current Salesforce.com customers would choose the incumbent offering, so Salesforce Chatter adoption might grow through current user base first.

Other competitors, such as Yammer, may not have as much of a leg to stand on in competing with Salesforce Chatter. While Yammer has made some enterprise traction, most companies that use it are smaller to mid-size businesses versus large enterprises. Most large enterprises with whom I’ve spoken about Yammer express trepidation over the service’s pricing and community model. At the same time, SMBs with whom I have spoken about Yammer don’t seem to have the same security or expense concerns, so Yammer could stay a viable solution for the smaller markets. The introduction of Salesforce Chatter, and the already strong SocialText solution, should knock Yammer out of enterprise consideration.

“We are constantly evaluating tools that promise to increase the productivity and collaboration of our employees. Salesforce Chatter recognizes that enterprise collaboration is more than connecting people, but also connecting content and apps. With Chatter, collaboration within our company will truly come alive, all from within our trusted Salesforce apps,” said Daniel R. Chiazza of Harris Interactive.

November 12th, 2009

What the duck? Aflac gets quackin' on Facebook

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 12:49 pm

Categories: Corporate Social Networking, Facebook, Fortune 500 Series, Social Business, Social Media, Social Networks

Tags: Facebook, Aflac Inc., Branding, Benefits, Vertical Industries, Marketing, Human Resources, Jennifer Leggio

Usually in my Fortune 500 series I take a look at a company’s broad social media strategy. But this time I decided to have a little bit more fun with it and dig into one company’s use of Facebook in terms of supporting its brand awareness as well as its charitable giving. That company is Aflac. You know, the insurance company with the endearing little duck.

Whether or not you are an Aflac customer, you’ve at least once tried to mimic the Aflac duck’s quacking of “Aflac” at the end of its commercials. After its commercial success, Aflac has taken to Facebook with a two-fold approach: increase its brand awareness through a fan page for the famous Aflac Duck and through a presence in the “Causes” application on Facebook for the Aflac Cancer Center at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, the same city in which the company is headquartered.

The Aflac “Cause”
With the Causes application, users have created more than 300,000 charitable causes that have benefited 60,000 nonprofits in the United States and Canada, raising more than $14 milliion in total. Aflac was able to raise $1.16 million to benefit the Aflac Cancer Center at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta during Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, making it the largest sponsored campaign in the history of Causes.

The company donated $1 for every Facebook member who joined its Cause page, as well as matched all monitary donations. As of today, the Aflac Cancer Center Cause has more than 1 million members. According to Laura Kane, Aflac’s vice president of external communications, the Causes application was chosen because it seemed to have potential to reach a wide audience.

“The fundraiser was very much a test of the application to determine whether it would be an effective platform –which it clearly was,” Kane said.

The company is still determining whether or not it will use the Causes application for another fundraiser, though the Aflac Cancer Center is the company’s main charitable focus and fundraising continues year-round through other means.

Just Ducky
From a brand awareness perspective, the Aflac duck has more than 164,000 fans. The company uses this page to interact with users, disseminate company information as well information about its charitable cause, and promote contests for friends of the duck. What I found most endearing about the fan page is how the duck’s “personality” shows through with its individual updates. Some are more serious, of course, but you can get the duck’s thoughts on even mundane daily things such as Halloween candy or even fantasy football.

While the duck’s fanship might be modest in comparison to some other consumer brands, this particular fan page is an example of how using a brand’s character as a cornerstone to a social media program is better than a static corporate presence. In direct comparison, Aflac the company has a page too, but it only has just over 2K fans in comparison to the duck’s 164,000. Aflac was smart about engaging the little duck to create customer loyalty and engagement through its Facebook presence.

Aflac isn’t currently tracking how its Facebook fan interaction is turning into sales of insurance policies, but more tracking it as a brand awareness activity on its own.

“Aflac views social media as an opportunity to generate awareness and a establish an ongoing relationship with users in a way that is relevant to their lives,” Kane said. “We don’t have any numbers that we can provide in terms of how many of the Duck’s ‘fans’ go on to become Aflac policyholders, but we do measure the number of people who become fans as a reflection of our success.”

November 10th, 2009

Creepy elves and disco dancing: A business win for OfficeMax

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 1:58 pm

Categories: Advertising, Branding, Corporate Social Networking, Customer Loyalty, Facebook, Fortune 500 Series, Marketing, Social Business, Social Media

Tags: OfficeMax Inc., Dance, Portals, Web Technology, Internet, Jennifer Leggio

Who knew that weird dancing elves could be good for business?

OfficeMax today announced the return of its Elf Yourself portal, a silly site that allows people to create elf-like images of themselves doing a variety of dances from country to disco and even hip hop. While I’ve been a fan of Elf Yourself for some time but had no idea that it had come back for the 2009 holiday season until ZDNet colleague Jason Perlow posted his (hilarious) personalized elf last night. While all of this is entertaining, I got to wondering about what value this is really driving for OfficeMax. Last year I spoke with OfficeMax vice president of marketing and advertising Bob Thacker about the company’s social media strategy for my Fortune 500 series, and he brought Elf Yourself up as a social media success.

“Social media embraced the ‘Elf Yourself’ concept, endorsed it and readily shared it among online communities, which turned this campaign into a digital phenomenon that attracted millions, set a new viral marketing record and landed a considerable ‘win’ for OfficeMax,” he said.

I reached out to OfficeMax again today given the launch of the new site, which is now chock full of Twitter and Facebook connectivity. As a matter of fact, users of Elf Yourself can just connect to the site with Facebook Connect and select a picture from any album, saving hassle and upload time. And later today, the feature will launch that allows users to automatically post these elves to their own walls or their friends’ walls, spreading the Elf Yourself chaos even further than before. An OfficeMax spokesperson said the company selected to leverage Facebook this year to enable a deeper social media experience.

But, beyond creating giggles, what is this really doing for Office Max? The stats I received from OfficeMax are surprising:

• The Elf Yourself site has had 284 million site visits each holiday season since the tool’s launch in 2006. These site visits were measured over only a two-month period each year when the site was live.
• Of these 284 site visits, 256 million elves were created
• A study in 2007 showed that more than 1/3 of Elf Yourself users said the visit to the elf portal influenced their decisions to visit OfficeMax

What’s so great about Elf Yourself is that while it’s clearly an OfficeMax deal (powered by JibJab, of course) it’s not so in-your-face with its marketing that you grow tired of the brand. Yet, somehow it gets engrained in its users that OfficeMax is behind the whole thing.

What do you think of OfficeMax’s Elf Yourself? Oh, and here’s my terrifying Elf:

November 6th, 2009

Twitter Lists will change the social dynamic

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 10:30 am

Categories: Social Business, Social Media, Social Networks, Twitter

Tags: Twitter Inc., List, Twitter Lists, Productivity, Public Relations, Strategy, Marketing, Corporate Communications, Management, Jennifer Leggio

* Jennifer Leggio is on vacation

Guest editorial by Mitch Lieberman

Twitter lists are absolutely going to change the way people use Twitter – exactly how is not really clear yet, it may take a little while before the dust settles on this one. Lists have added a new social element to Twitter, which did not exist up until now.  Lists will either be the great equalizer, or create a pseudo ‘class’ system within Twitter.

A ‘Class’ System, how so?
Those included on the cool Lists and those that are not, the influencers and the influenced. There are some lists that are purely factual, for example, people who work at XYZ company. Twitter, by its nature, does have a self policing mechanism, but I am not sure if it will work here. Needing differing perspectives, I decided to ask some friends and collaborators; Josh Weinberger (@kitson), of DestinationCRM has this to say:

“Sure, but that’s no different than the situation with a personal Twitter account. But if there’s status or “class” to be derived from whether others value your curatorial efforts, that’s something new, something Twitter itself doesn’t really provide. I may not want to follow @scobleizer in my main Twitter feed, but I might value his knowledge of the startup scene and want to follow his #List of entrepreneurs — and leave it to him to maintain it going forward.”

I framed my question a bit differently, when I asked Nicole Ravlin (@pmgnicole) a partner with PMG, a PR firm in Burlington, Vermont. I was seeking input in regards to how she might guide her clients, as they create lists.

“I think before you can address any of this you have to consider your [Company] overall strategy for using Twitter. Building Lists thoughtfully so that they are useful to you and your followers is key here.”

With respect our conversation in general, Nicole had this to add “From a stand point of organization of data and people, it [a List] is great, but what is more intriguing is what it will/might do on Google Ranking. I also think that it would be helpful for new users [to Twitter].”

Not yet convinced I was seeing a common theme, I spoke with Martin Schneider (@CRMoutsiders, also of SugarCRM) we tried to think of Lists in the context of a company [or vendor]. “Here Lists represent something a little different.” Beyond creating a List of people who are ‘on’ Twitter from your company, or who represent your brand, companies risk alienating people by way of exclusion. This brings out the emotional side of Lists. Companies will need to remain objective regarding Lists. Companies will likely have lots of private lists, just sayin’.

Read the rest of this entry »

October 13th, 2009

Twitter starts to get serious about spammers

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 3:11 pm

Categories: Security, Social Media, Social Media and Security, Social Networks, Spam, Twitter

Tags: Twitter Inc., Spammer, Spam, Cyberthreats, Security, Spam And Phishing, Jennifer Leggio

Today Twitter announced a new way for its users to alert the service of spammers with a quick link to a “report [user name] for spam” link next to the “message” and “block” links in the right column. This appears to be Twitter’s latest attempt at controlling the rampant abuse brought to the site from spammers, and a replacement to it’s already existing reporting feature, the @spam account.

In a blog post, the folks at Twitter write:

Click the “Report as spam” button under the Actions section of a profile’s sidebar and our Trust and Safety team will check it out to see what needs to be done. No automated action will be taken as a result of reporting a user as spam (in other words, it can’t be used to incite an angry mob against an account you don’t like.) And once you report a profile it will automatically be blocked from following or replying to you.

This is a decent attempt from Twitter to help give the users more control in reporting spammers, as it’s previous @spam reporting methods were often a one-way conversation. The instructions on the spam account currently read to DM the account for reporting, yet the report is only following roughly 30K of the 100K+ users following it. And while many users would report @spam through public messages, there was no way to know if Twitter was listening.

However, regardless of how good the spam reporting is, Twitter still need to get more serious about what it’s doing to stop spammers and bots in the first place. The battle seems to be currently led by the spammers.

This will definitely help those with protected accounts since we didn’t have any way to report spam before. Since @spam didn’t follow us, it couldn’t ‘hear’ us,” said Kevin Riggins, senior information security analyst, Principal Financial Group. “Whether it is any more effective at actually having an impact on spam is an entirely different topic and I think it is going to take more mature automated processes to help with that.”

October 12th, 2009

Quick'n'Dirty Podcast: Lucky number 18 and hashtag chats

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 9:49 am

Categories: Podcast, Quick'n'Dirty Podcast, Social Business, Social Media, Twitter, Twitter Applications

Tags: Podcast, Twitter Inc., Chat, Jennifer Leggio

The latest edition of the Quick’n'Dirty Podcast was an abbreviated one, but a very fun one to host. My jet-setting partner in crime Aaron Strout was literally leaving on a jet plane at the time our show was recorded, so I went solo. Well, not entirely solo. I was joined by the fabulous Deb Robison as she came up with the idea for — and helped us research — our topic of the week, which was Twitter hashtag chats. And, I must confess that we ended the show about 15 minutes early due to my having tickets to the home opener of my beloved San Jose Sharks. Priorities, right? Hockey aside, here’s the recap of last week’s show:

• Social Network: Digsby. So, it’s not really a social network, it’s a client. But it’s our podcast and Aaron wasn’t around to protest so I went with it. I use Digsby religiously. Not only does it have a super cute logo, but it’s highly functional. I use it to integrate multiple chat accounts, multiple Web mail accounts, notifications, a couple of Twitter accounts and once upon a time I used it for Facebook. I like it because it’s reliable and it’s current unmatched in terms of instant message integration. I did confess that I don’t use it as my primary Twitter client because TweetDeck has it beat in terms of usability, but I do use it to monitor some secondary accounts that are only seasonally used.
• Featured Twitterer: At least I know Aaron wouldn’t protest this one. I chose @marshallk aka Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb as my favorite Twitter this week due to his great sense of humor, informative tweets, and ability to say what’s on his mind, whether or not the sentiment is a popular one. Deb also said she likes following Marshall due to his “calls ‘em like he sees ‘em” attitude. Definitely worth a follow and his blog posts are always worth a read.
• Point / Counterpoint: We didn’t really do a point / counterpoint this week but rather had an extended discussion about hashtag chats — you know, those chats on Twitter in which everyone includes the hashtag and tracks the discussion. We issued a survey a few weeks ago asking people to give us their feedback on their hashtag chat experience. Deb and I had discussed that while there are hashtag chats aplenty, it’s really hard to keep up with them and also not lose followers who aren’t interested in the chats. However, most users of the chats find them incredibly valuable, with a only a small percentage wishing that they were more streamlined. We talked about some of the most popular chats, the top of which was #socialmedia, discovered a chat for designers called #dcth, and Deb talked about the research she did around #solopr.

To listen and get all of the gritty details, check out the replay or search for us on iTunes under QuicknDirty. Next week Aaron and I will broadcast live from BlogWorld & New Media Expo, where we are both speaking. So tune in next week for a surprise edition of Quick’n'Dirty, when we hope to pull some folks live from the show floor.

October 9th, 2009

BreakingPoint's letter to Twitter: 'Let us help you'

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 12:42 pm

Categories: Networking, Social Business, Social Media, Social Networks, Twitter

Tags: Twitter Inc., BreakingPoint, Networking, Jennifer Leggio

Amid all of the whining about Twitter downtime, one company is finally putting its money where its mouth is. BreakingPoint Systems, a network testing company, today published an open letter to Twitter in which it offers the social network free user of its server load testing and other products to help reduce the downtime and improve network performance. Blog author Kyle Flaherty, the company’s communications director, writes:

Yesterday, when Twitter was down due to a “bug triggered by an edge case in one of the core services“, I thought about how important Twitter had become to our business and me. I watched the predictable posts complaining about the fail whale and it hit me; rather than throwing criticism, I would be best served getting my hands dirty and helping with the problem. An idea surfaced, which I talked through with our CTO and co-founder Dennis Cox (@denniscox), and the green flag was waved.

BreakingPoint is a leader in network testing tools with customers spanning from giants to even companies of Twitter’s size. The cry to help Twitter was fueled after yesterday’s Twitter downtime / stream freezing issues after the social network reported a “bug.” Rather than join the myriad of people complaining about the service disruption, Flaherty and BreakingPoint decided to offer up some help. The Twitter loyalty is fueled by the company’s rampant adoption of Twitter used by both employees and members of its community of load testing professionals and network and security engineers. Recognizing the value of Twitter early on, the company even developed afeature to test the ability of network devices and application servers to handle Twitter traffic.

With Twitter’s continued of downtime it’s clear that they are having some scalability issues and BreakingPoint is a trusted company for dealing with such issues. Will Twitter take the company up on the offer? This user hopes so.

September 26th, 2009

I don't care if your company is on Twitter

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 4:41 pm

Categories: Social Business, Social Media, Social Media Best Practices, Social Networks, Twitter

Tags: Twitter Inc., Jennifer Leggio

I remember early 2008 just like it was yesterday. Twitter had become the social media standard among most early technology adopters yet the mainstream world was still slightly out of reach for the social network. We got excited whenever something new would happen on Twitter. Blog posts would pop up celebrating companies for “tweeting” or for using Twitter to deal with customer service issues. It was so new and shiny. I was definitely among the bloggers who got excited about every little move on Twitter.

These days I’m looking for a little bit more. I’m looking for depth. I’m looking for substance. I realize that a lot of companies are just now starting to get onto Twitter and that’s a big deal… for them. But several have already laid the groundwork so much that analytics tools are abundant, integration is on the horizon, and if social media has taught us anything it’s that Twitter is not the end all, be all of social strategies. It’s not even a strategy.

I find my eyes starting to glaze over whenever a company or public relations agency emails and says “Hey, X is on Twitter, do you want to talk to our C-level executive about how this impacts our business?” My response is usually silence, but I’m sometimes tempted to say, “Really? Your CEO wants to talk to me about Twitter? Can I talk to him about his overall marketing strategy instead?”

I want to be sensitive to the latecomers. But even the earlier companies who were first to join the Twitter ranks aren’t doing much other than that. These companies are not all innovators. Some of them are still merely using Twitter and aren’t doing much to manage it or grow the brand or presence. Some haven’t figured out that if Twitter were to magically go away (or become less reliable due to spam, which is more likely) then the bottom falls out of their so-called social media strategy. The social Web is much larger than Twitter and while it’s well and good if you’re using it, don’t expect anyone who knows better to jump up and down about it anymore.

Look at the companies that you might admire in terms of their social presence. Then strip Twitter away. What’s left? That’s when you really see who is social and who just jumped on a trend.