research work 03.08.10
TRANSCRIPT
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5 Free Ways to Never Miss a Twitter@Reply
There are plenty of Twitter apps and clients offering brand monitoring and keywordalert services, but if you’re only one person, you may want a more lightweight way
of keeping track of what people are saying about you on the micro-blogging service.To this end, we’ve found five free, web-based Twitter services that will let you know
via e-mail each time you are on the receiving end of an @mention, or get an @reply.Have a read through our picks below to see which one might suit your needs, and let
us know your thoughts. If there are any services you’ve used that didn’t make thelist, share them in the comments box.
1. Twitstra
About as lightweight as services come, Twitstra is a study in minimalist app design.
Sign in to the service using OAuth, enter the e-mail address you’d like the alerts togo to, wait for the confirmation link e-mail to come through, then hit the link and
you’re all set up.
Twitstra will then send you an e-mail every time a tweet mentions your Twittername. Pretty much as instantaneous as you could expect, a Twitstra alert e-mail tells
you who has referenced you in the subject line and then provides the full tweet inthe body of the e-mail in plain text.
Twitstra also offers a reply via e-mail service, but this was not functioning at the
time of testing, although the developer says a fix is promised soon.
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2. UgoTwitt
French service UgoTwitt will e-mail you notifications when your handle is tweeted.
Sign up on the site with your Twitter name, password, and e-mail notificationpreference (OAuth is said to be in the pipelines). After you’ve verified your address,
the alerts will start pouring in (this was the third-fastest service we tested).
The alert e-mails will come with a French subject “Vous avez recu x nouvellesreponses de…” adding a bit of charm to your inbox, but are simple to read with a
thumbnail image of the tweeter, the full text of the tweet and the option to reply.Hitting the “send a reply” link loads up your Twitter web page and auto-fills the
person’s Twitter name, readying you for an easy response.
3. TweetAlarm
TweetAlarm is a keyword notification service. Signing up requires the standardOAuth and e-mail, after which you can set up your keywords to watch.
TweetAlarm offers the really nifty trick of adding a list of users to ignore (which it
automatically adds you to, although this can be changed), which is a handy option if
you don’t want to be alerted to a particular user’s @replies. Making this an evenbetter feature, there’s also a shortcut “ignore” link in alert e-mails that comethrough, so if you forget to ignore someone and get alerted to one of their tweets,
you can just hit the “ignore” link and TweetAlerts will add them to the “don’t botherto alert me” list.
You can set up alerts to come through daily, weekly or as often as the service finds
tweets — although this is currently set at two hours due to Twitter’s new API search
limits.
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When e-mails come through, they offer details of all the mentions in the body,
complete with thumbnail images of each Twitter user.
4. Pu.ly
Pu.ly offers a few handy little services for anyone who doesn’t want to be signed intoTwitter all day, but needs to keep abreast of developments.
In addition to telling you via e-mail when you have an @reply or mention, theservice will do the same when you are added to a Twitter list or receive a direct
message.
For the purposes of this post, we tested the mention and reply alerts. Getting set upis easy; just connect via OAuth, enter the e-mail address you’d like the alerts sent
to, and then select “on” or “off” for each of the three functions.
When the alerts messages come through (which is very soon after the @action —matching Twitstra for speed) the subject line states, “mentioned in tweet by user”
and the full tweet is shown in the body copy. A handy part of the service is the abilityto reply in-mail to save loading up Twitter.
To reply in-mail, you simply hit reply as you normally would for an e-mail, make sureyou add the @name of who you’re replying to, and the service will send the first 140characters as a tweet.
5. Twilert
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Twilert is a good-looking web-based Twitter app that actually offers general keywordalerts, and can potentially be used as a simplified monitoring tool. But for our
purposes, we tested it as an @mention notifier.
To get going, sign up and in via OAuth, set your time-zone, enter your e-mail
address and then create your keyword-based Twilert; in this instance “@username.” Twilert lets you specify when you want the alerts to come through, with the
minimum time period a 15 minute check. We set our Twilerts to the minimum, butsaw gaps of two hours between alerts at peak times, suggesting system load was
heavy, although alerts did come through quicker at quieter times.
The e-mails that come through offer a list of who has @mentioned you in the timeframe you’ve set up, with thumbnails of the Twitter users and hyperlink-rich text
offering the ability to “view” or “reply” — both of which direct you to Twitter.
HOW TO: Manage a Sustainable OnlineCommunity
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A 2008 Gartner study on social software noted, “about 70 percent of the communitytypically fails to coalesce.” While the measurement and the statistics behind this
statement raise questions, there is an element of truth.
There are detrimental effects of over-hyping the technology and then committing thethree cardinal sins of running a community:
• If you build it they will come. This is probably the best-known online
community fallacy. The premise is that if I roll out a given technology set(blogs, forums, wikis, etc.), users will automatically appear and congregate,
forming a robust community. This can be attributed to the lure of “socialsoftware” that companies repeatedly bite at, as opposed to seeking to extend
or create value for their customers.
• Once I’ve launched it, I’m done. Many communities launch successfully,only to fade out and disappear. This is due in large part to a failure to assign
ownership of the community and to have a strategy that lasts past “launch.”
•Bigger is better. The assumption here is that the overall size of acommunity is indicative of its success. This is challenging for most community
managers and businesses to understand, as it is contrary to what they’veusually been told.
All three can cause a community to fail, and there are plenty of examples.
Understanding the community life cycle can help you avoid making these mistakes.
Understanding the Community Life Cycle
The image below is representative of the different stages of the community life cycle.
It’s important to recognize that this is a macro-view, and that within and betweenthe stages are smaller life cycles (learning, innovation, etc.).
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A community is constantly in one or more of the following states with the exceptionof the On-Board state:
• On-Board: This is the starting point of any community, characterized bypeople (seekers) looking for value (content), most of which is created by the
community’s founders.
• Established: The community is becoming self-sustaining, with the members
(influencers, originators, etc.) creating and maintaining value within thecommunity, although some reliance on the founders is still necessary. It is the
established phases of the community where analytics can be used tounderstand user behavior and value.
• Mature: The community is self-sustaining, and clear relationships betweenindividuals are being formed. Users are organized into clear types
(influencers, seekers, moderators, originators, etc.) and take full ownershipand responsibility for content. The founders, who become no more than
credible participants, require little to no supervision.
• Mitosis: Core community members become disenfranchised with new
participants who don’t share the same values. These core communitymembers seek more focus as they gravitate towards specific topics and
relationships. Successful communities enable this and allow the community tosplit into smaller nodes, thus returning to an Established phase and repeating
the life cycle process.
How Is Value Perceived?
Most discussions surrounding the topic of community life cycle are based on the workdone by Bruce Tuckman’s stages of group development: Forming, Storming,
Norming and Performing.
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In addition, much of the value proposition for “bigger is better” is based on
Metcalfe’s law, which states that the value of the network increases as the number of connections within the network increases. Hence the common belief is that the size
of the community is a clear indicator of the value of the community.
It is important to note that Metcalfe’s law was created to describe telephone andfacsimile networks. What’s not often considered is that social networks aredependent upon people, and people cannot obtain the same value from network size
due to the “cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain
stable social relationships,” otherwise known as Dunbar’s number. While Dunbarnever proposed a specific number of relationships, most researchers agree that it is
approximately 150.
Community life cycles are often portrayed as simple linear progressions, with thegoal of “maintenance” once maturity is reached. However, I have found that a
community has unique characteristics that conflict with many of the preconceivednotions of success. While the value of the community to its creators increases as
membership increases, the value to individual members may diminish. Disregard for,
or lack of understanding of these behaviors can lead to the failure of a community.
A great case study here is Twitter. There are some people who believe that Twitter
provides value through the size of their network and number of their relationships.Examples would include politicians, media, actors, and so on. They don’t maintain
relationships individually, but with an audience of followers. However, there arepeople who find Twitter’s value diminishes, as the number of relationships they
manage increases, as the initial draw was the ability to manage relationships, not anaudience.
It should be noted that I am not advocating that communities be limited by
membership size. Rather, capabilities should exist within a larger community to
support smaller, internal groups that can form around narrow areas of interest. Thisis validated by both Twitter and Facebook, which have in recent months both
introduced capabilities to narrow the scope of conversations: Lists, privacy controls,and so on.
The transition from “On-Board” to “Established,” and the recognition of the “Mitosis”
phase are the two areas where most organizations struggle. The first comes from the
inability to relinquish some control to the community; the second comes from aninability to recognize the natural evolution of the community as it grows. Mitosis
within the community is very healthy. In fact, a healthy community is thecooperative coordination of many smaller communities acting as a whole.
How Do You Apply the Community Life Cycle?
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Understanding the life cycle is key to building a comprehensive community strategy,
specifically when it comes to moderation and management. A few of the componentsimpacted include: Content creation, group formation, engagement tactics, expert
discovery efforts, knowledge sharing practices, and employee participation. Once thestrategy is clearly defined, goals and objectives can be identified, clear
measurements for success (return on investment) are marked, and the community
life cycle becomes the map or playbook for understanding how to reach those goalsand objectives.The three cardinal sins can be avoided if you understand the life cycle of your
community, and thus where and how to apply resources and strategy to running it.
Google Enables Multiple Account Sign-In
Good news for users of multiple Google accounts (i.e. one for work and one for
personal): now you can sign in to more than one of them from the same browser
window.
The feature has been in testing for several weeks, but now appears to be publicly
available by going to the Google Accounts page and enabling multiple sign-in (it’sturned off by default).
Before you can turn it on, Google wants you to be aware of a few caveats, mostnotably that not all products support multiple sign-in and offline mode for Gmail and
Google Calendar won’t work.
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Still, this is a convenient addition to those of us with multiple Google accounts that
previously had to keep multiple browser windows open (or have multiple systemsrunning) to deal with the problem. Once enabled, you can switch between accounts
via a pull-down menu that appears next to your e-mail address atop the Googleservice that you’re using.
6 Online Tools for Expanding Your VideoStrategy
Online video continues to be an area with huge growth and expansion for smallbusinesses and brands. Video is such a great way to connect with users and to tell a
story in a way that words or static images often can’t.
Thanks to advances in technology, buying equipment and producing video is easierand less expensive than ever before. The harder tasks are getting video online,
serving it across platforms, and integrating it with your existing advertisingstrategies.
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Fortunately, there are some great web services and companies out there dedicatedto helping business owners expand and improve their online video strategies.
1. Encoding.com
Shooting and editing video content is only half of the battle, and we would argue thatthese days, it’s actually the less painful half. Once you have that video shot and
edited, the next step is finding a way to serve it. The problem is, getting online videoto work across web browsers, mobile phones and connected devices isn’t as easy as
it sounds.This is where Encoding.com comes in. Encoding.com is a service that will convert and
serve your video into any formats you wish. That means you can take video youshoot and edit and serve it to users who visit your site on an iPhone, BlackBerry,
desktop computer or even a connected television device like the upcoming GoogleTV.
Rather than having to manually transcode your content into each format you need,Encoding.com does it all on their end and can even serve content using a technology
called HTTP streaming, which is specifically designed for making video look andperform its best on the iPhone or iPad.
Encoding.com also has its own white label service, so if you want to offer video
services to your clients, you can let Encoding.com’s backend do all the hard workand you can just package it together with your other solutions.
2. mDialog
In online video, one of the areas that is seeing the most innovation is the HTML5video space. HTML5 is important because it means that content can play directly on
devices through a web browser, eliminating the need for a plugin or player likeAdobe Flash. That ultimately makes video and by extension, video content, more
accessible.
One of the drawbacks of using a pure HTML5 solution is that many of the existing
advertising platforms for web video are based on Flash. However, companies arequickly filling in the voids in the HTML5 space; one company that is working hard to
make it easy to insert dynamic ads into live or pre-recorded video streams ismDialog.
mDialog offers publishers and content providers an easy way to encode and serve
video in HTML5, while also making it easy to insert ads or b-roll based on factors likegeolocation or the identity of the user. If you want to move to an HTML5 solution so
you can reach more users but are concerned with how to monetize that solution,take a look at mDialog.
3. Brightcove
Brightcove is one of the big players in the video platform space. It makes it easy to
upload, manage and monetize online video. You can customize the look and feel of
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the player and Brightcove supports tons of different platforms, including mobile andset-top boxes.
Brightcove also lets you track and measure your video metrics. Brightcove works
with practically every major ad platform and recently announced a partnership withFreeWheel to offer users the ability to serve HTML5 video that is ad-supported (on
FreeWheel’s end) and trackable. Likewise, advertisers can work with FreeWheel to
get their ads displayed across its network and across web properties regardless of platform.
4. Blip.tv
Blip.tv got into the online video space at a very competitive time, competing against
YouTube and countless other online video hosts. The reason that blip.tv has beenable to survive over the last five years — and in fact even raise additional capital —
is because it has never tried to be YouTube and instead has concentrated oncultivating quality content and signing deals to get wide distribution across platforms
and devices.
To that end, blip.tv has ramped up its own internal sales team and worked hard to
build advertising partnerships so that it can secure quality advertisements for thecontent it hosts on its network. For content creators, this is really great, because
they can just focus on making great content. Blip.tv in turn, focuses on providing itscontent creators with tools for better distribution, ad management and statistical
analysis.
Blip.tv sees the big picture and is focused on bringing content to all screens — not
just the computer monitor.
5. & 6. Thwapr and Mogreet
When we discuss mobile video, it is usually in the context of the iPhone or othersmart devices. That’s overlooking a very large audience of users who have the ability
to receive and watch video on their mobile phones, but may not have a smartphone.Using MMS messages, companies like Mogreet and Thwapr are enabling businesses
and advertisers to send video messages to their users via text message. If you canget an MMS message, you can get video.
For non-profits especially, this can be a great way to reach out and to get a direct
call to action. Mogreet teamed up with the David Lynch Foundation to provideLynch’s fans with MMS messages promoting the Foundation’s causes and putting the
spotlight on emerging artists.Thwapr has had similar success. The NHL team the Phoenix Coyotes teamed up with
the company back in April to offer fans special mobile video updates from games and
press conferences. Fans just needed to text a special number and they got free videoupdates from their favorite team. What makes Thwapr extra cool is that you can
even send video replies back using MMS, which makes it a great way to solicitinteractive feedback and support.
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As the Red Cross campaign after the Haitian earthquake proved, text messaging is agreat way to raise awareness and solicit funds. Pairing that with the power for mobile
video has some really important implications for small business owners or brands.