Inside the Marketers Studio - David Berkowitz's Marketing Blog

Conference Blogging Policies Need Updating

Conference blogging continues to fill a strange niche. In many ways, conference tweeting is overtaking it; far more people actively tweet events these days than blog them. Events I’ve participated in have taken a mixed approach to welcoming bloggers, from those that treat bloggers like press to those that don’t welcome them at all.

I was going to take part in one event recently as a blogger, and then I saw this message:

There will be reserved seating for bloggers in the front of the ballroom. Please note that live video streaming of the event is prohibited. And while we welcome your comments and analysis of the event via your blog and Twitter, out of respect for the hundreds of people who have paid to attend the conference, we request that you do not live blog a “running transcript” of the event.

In short, the policy rubbed me the wrong way. I had a long exchange with the person who sent it to me, and the policy held firm. I wound up not attending the event.

Here’s an excerpt of my response:

…When I have to sit there and wonder if I'm covering a session too much because it's really interesting, it's just not worth my time, and it sets a really bad precedent. It's like I'm getting censored because I type too fast and the content's too good… While many bloggers wouldn't care about the restriction since they wouldn't try to live blog it, it does set a dangerous precedent.

Meanwhile, if people who aren't there think they can get their money's worth from an event by reading a transcript - not even a verbatim, completely comprehensive transcript at that - perhaps you should cancel the events and sell the transcripts. That's not where the value is, and as a blogger I'm only adding to it, both for those who attend and those who don't, rather than taking anything away and diluting the value.

I’m leaving the name of the event out as I don’t want to malign the conference organizer or the event, both of which I respect. But I do want to hear from others who have blogged conferences if you’ve seen policies like this or any other. Do you know of any event policies that others should emulate? Have you ever declined attending an event as a blogger because of its policy?

Coca-Cola Brings Conversations to BDI's Social Communications: The Case Studies

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

This post was originally published on 360i’s Digital Connections blog.

At the Business Development Institute’s NYC event today Social Communications: The Case Studies, The Coca-Cola Company’s Director of Heritage Communications Philip Mooney shared a presentation on Coca-Cola Conversations – Connecting an Iconic Brand to its Fans.

He focused on his experience in the first year of blogging at Conversations. The About section of the blog is telling for a number of reasons. Here it is in full:

My name is Phil Mooney, and I've served as the historian/archivist for Coca-Cola for the last 30 years. Welcome to my blog! I'll share information on a wide variety of topics, ranging from our role in pop culture to brand history to Coke collectibles. However, the blog only works if there is a two-way dialogue. I look forward to chatting with you!

A few things stand out:

1. It’s his blog. It’s not Coca-Cola’s. He doubles down on personality. Score one for authenticity.
2. It expresses authority. This isn’t some intern who knows how to use blogging tools. It’s a guy who knows the subject material.
3. It’s really about conversations and not meant to be a one-way publishing tool.

In his presentation at BDI, he noted some issues came up in the process. For instance, he had to establish very clear blog commenting guidelines. Negative comments are welcome, but they need to be on topic. The blog lists the comment policy under House Rules on the blog’s homepage:

We want you to leave comments and ask us questions on this blog. However, we will review all comments before they go live, and will not post any that are inappropriate or offensive. We will only post comments that relate to the subjects covered by this blog, and may need to edit some of the comments from time to time. Please understand that comments posted to this site do not represent the opinions of the Company.

Over the course of the Year, the conversations expanded far beyond the blog. Here’s a smattering of other digital experiences that Coca-Cola launched that tie in with its history and archives:

• Coca-Cola Archives on Facebook with photo galleries (nearly 200 fans)
• A widget collection on Yahoo including recipe and calendar widgets
• A branded Coke Conversations channel on YouTube
• Coke_blog on Twitter with about 140 followers

Phil shared more insights during the audience Q&A:

Q: How much do you steer clear of controversy?
A: There's no reason for us not to address controversy. We're probably not going to use it to talk about labor activities in Columbia, etc. We have other social responsibility sites. We’ll only address it as it’s relevant to Coca-Cola Conversations.

Q: Best and worst lessons learned?
A: People didn't get they wanted to have conversations about this. People wanted to treat us like Antiques Roadshow, talking about bottles and the like. We can't respond to individual requests for appraisal. The best lesson: The more interactive we can be, the better it is.

Q: How did you get the word out about the blog?
A: No media involved. Pure word of mouth. It'll never be the Coke Facebook Page, but it can work in its own right.

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Adding Google Friend Connect to TypePad Blogs

Feeling inspired by a little blog consulting I received from Andy Wibbels (more on that in a bit), I decided to try to see if I could get Google Friend Connect working on my blog.

The Background: I'm not a coder. I know just enough HTML to fix a blog post, but not enough to code a blog or do whatever developers do. Whatever I was going to do was going to be on a TypePad template.

The First Step: Thanks to Andy, I found out about a great feature on TypePad that helps you enter HTML code. Already, I had cleaned up my blog a bit because of this. All you do is pick your blog, go to Design, go to Content, and scroll down the Modules tab and hit Custom HTML, and then add that module. Save the blog, as you'll need to edit this a bit later. You can put multiple blocks of code in there. For instance, I have my code for Google Analytics in that box.

Googling Google Friend Connect: This was a 'duh' step. I went in Google and Googled "Google Friend Connect," which not so amazingly took me to the GFC site. There's a big button that says "set up a new site." Click it. Click GFC for standard sites and enter your site name.

Create Pages: Now you have to start getting crafty. But again, you don't have to get too technical. You're supposed to download two pages from Google and upload those pages. The catch is that you can't just upload files like this to your blog and have them in the right place. I turned to Google again, querying "google friend connect typepad blog." I went to the third link and it showed me a great workaround. The gist: you create Pages on TypePad (instead of blog posts or uploading files).

For each of the files Google gives you, download them, open them in your browser, view the source, copy the code, and paste the code into the "edit html" part of the TypePad Page you're creating. Name the page after the file name (in the title, but "canvas" for the Google "canvas.html" file, for example). The only change I had to make to the HTML was that somewhere in canvas.html, you need to change "site name" to whatever name the name of your site is.

By the end of this process, you've got two new pages on your site that have the same names as the Google files you need.

Check, Please: Go back to Google Friend Connect and test the code works. Then you can design it. You need to set the right width. I wasn't sure the width of my right-hand bar so I went to my own profile photo on the right, right-clicked, hit "Properties," checked the width, and used that as the width for Google Friend Connect on my blog.

Come Full Circle: Now take the code Google gives you and put it in that Custom HTML module you have on your blog.

Two me, there were only two catches:

1) I couldn't control where GFC appeared on my blog. Not a huge deal.

2) It's a little narrow the way it works on my blog. It would be nice if I had more room. But nto a huge deal. You can also expand the window.

What I Like about Goo: Now I've got a community on my blog. It's not a very big one. But if I go to GFC or the expanded page on my site, I can connect with other readers of the blog. And more importantly, they can connect with each other. We can share information and get to know each other. All of it's without a separate log-in. I like viewing this blog as a community rather than a sounding board. Sounds cool, eh? It's not much, but given that it took me five times as long to write this post as it took me to implement a community on my blog, I'll take it.

Blog Search Stuck in Beta

Here's today's column, originally published in MediaPost where there are a number of comments, including a few disagreements and some new sites mentioned which I'm trying out. Feel free to share your own thoughts here or there.

Whenever I’m talking to marketers about how to listen to their brands, blog search engines always come up as a good starting point. I’ve been having the same conversations for years, and with minor exceptions, I’d do fine using the same slides I’ve used since I started.

Here are some examples of the blog search engine landscape:

Blogpulse, Icerocket, and Trendpedia: It’s really hard to tell the difference between these blog search engines. I like Trendpedia’s charts and interface the best, but I can’t swear  which engine is really the best.

Technorati: You can find useful information about blogs such as how influential they are, and the “rising posts and stories” section is helpful, but it still has been slow to evolve, and the one chart option available hasn’t improved at all.

Regator: I met the team behind this startup at Blog World Expo over the weekend. It does a decent job at categorizing posts and pulling in multimedia, but its layout is dizzying. Perhaps with some design fixes it’ll come around.

Alltop: This pseudo-search engine co-founded by Guy Kawasaki is more of a blog directory. Pick a topic and it lists relevant blogs and five recent posts. In a recent post about the latest site’s latest news, Kawasaki includes a stick figure drawing that explains Alltop. This gets to two problems I have with Alltop. First, if you need elaborate drawings and other documentation to explain a search engine (including a tutorial video), then there’s something wrong with it. Simplicity wins with search; Google never required a tutorial. Secondly, the drawing excitedly notes at the end that Alltop “kinda looks like a magazine rack.” I wouldn’t say that’s a compliment, as magazine racks are horribly inefficient to find anything besides titles you already recognize. More to the point, the Marketing category has 188 blogs listed in 63 rows. How is that an effective way to find good marketing information?

Google Blog Search: The interface is familiar, and I like how you can easily find posts on a specific date. The index also feels more reliable than others because of the halo effect of the brand. Yet there’s nothing there beyond the search engine and a few recommended blogs. With all of the resources Google has, including Trends, Analytics, and News, Google has the potential to offer the only blog search engine you’ll ever need.

What’s missing from these engines, broadly, is a sense of understanding a user’s purpose. Technorati seems to do the best job here, since it’s really a resource focused on bloggers (”tech” is in its name after all), and features for consumers, marketers, or others presumably aren’t as highly prioritized.

The problem for these engines generally is that people don’t wake up thinking, “Man, I wish I could find a blog.” That happens once in a while when people switch jobs (especially when switching industries), but that’s not an overarching need. There are several types of audiences, but I’ll focus on one broad category: marketers, and anyone who’s looking for the buzz on their business, industry, and competitive landscape. What would make blog search engines better for this audience?

1)      Better charts. Okay, so we can compare up to three terms on a line graph (Blogpulse, Icerocket), throw in a pie chart (Trendpedia), or use a bar chart for one term (Technorati). That’s it?

2)      Topic analysis. Why not parse the content to show what’s causing spikes or dips? What if there was a Farecast for blogs, which tried to predict whether buzz would rise or fall in coming days?

3)      Broad matching for searches. Do we really need to search for “Barack Obama” and “Barak Obama” just to be sure we’re getting everything? (Fun fact: Google Trends shows New Mexico residents are most likely to search for the misspelling.) Google handles misspellings better than others, but it falls short in other tests, such as showing very different results for “NYC” and “New York City.”

There’s much more that can be done, such as including blogs as just one social media channel indexed. FriendFeed might in time emerge as the most valuable search engine because of its advantages there. My bet’s still on Google to nail this, especially in terms of the features that marketers need, as it has the best track record of giving away information to bolster market share, and it’s in the financial position to do so. Just as Google Analytics competes with Omniture, and Google Trends for Websites competes with comScore, Google Trends for Blogs could emerge to rival BuzzLogic, Radian6, and other subscription-based buzz monitoring services.

That hardly means the books are shut. Heck, BuzzLogic launched an ad network to compete with Google AdSense, so no one’s rolling over. I’d just like to see the rivalries among blog search engines heat up so marketers can reap all the benefits.

Blog World Expo Startups and Superstars from A to Z

Image by miss604 via Flickr, added with Zemanta

Here's a round-up of companies I encountered at Blog World Expo. Most were exhibitors, but a few others came up in random or not so random interactions throughout the show.

It's possible some members of these companies will see this and think I totally botched their description. That's quite possible; these are my impressions, which I don't guarantee to be fully accurate. You can go to their websites for more official info. If I'm off or you want to clarify further, comment away or email me at marketersstudio @ gmail . com.

Lastly, this is not a comprehensive list. I talked to most exhibitors, but not all. For example, I didn't get to GodblogCon '08, which their site calls "a gathering of Christians to advance the kingdom through blogging + internet technologies". (I think they should call it "Coming 2.0").

On that note, here are some companies that made an appearance at the show, were memorable in some way, and were smart enough to give me a business card or schwag (maybe in future posts I'll add pink hearts to the schwag givers to encourage more bribery).

Apture: Here's a blogging tool for editing posts once you create them, making it easy to add multimedia and links.

b5media: This blog network is launching new vertical sites, and new ad opportunities. See info on their launch of Starked, an entertainment site.

Blog Talk Radio: I had a good time joining their Blog World show on Saturday. I'll post the link soon, but they're doing great work, and it was one of the more fun interviews I've had, especially since I was able to talk about some things I actually know about.

BlogCatalog: I forgot what's new with them (sorry!), but as a long-time BC member, it was fun meeting the owner.

BuzzLogic: An old favorite blog monitoring tool, they had a great, kitchy but fun booth presentation, and they're doing a lot more with the blogger ad network.

Divacafes: Toby Bloomberg is launching this site for "women over forty flying solo." Toby's one of the most beloved people I've met anywhere, and for her karma alone, I think this site will catch on.

Get Elastic: I forgot how good this e-commerce blog was. Fortunately blogger Linda Bustos reminded me. (Okay, she just reminded me to revisit it; I made the quality judgment on my own.)

gooseGrade: Add their widget to encourage anyone to submit edits to your blog as a way to promote accuracy. You aim for a score of 100, and you don't always have to agree with the changes. I think the end result's admirable, but I'm not sure bloggers want to draw readers' attention to inaccuracies, and I'm not sure many people want to be the editors. On this blog, at least, comments and email have been fairly efficient, and for any mistakes I've made, I think the readership's been mercifully forgiving.

International Blogging and New Media Association (IBNMA): Why might you join this group? Here are two reasons I did: I'm an association whore, and it's only $25 so I didn't have to try to expense it. Maybe one day I'll get a free t-shirt out of it. Really, though, they are advocating important things, like blogging, and new media,

Lijit: It's an awesome blog search engine that I really will put back on my blog soon. They rank very high among my favorite naggers.

MarketLeverage: It's a lifetime referral program for publishers (even if publishers aren't in it) and a pay for performance ad network. Full disclosure: I won $6 in their cash grabbing booth.

Mindtouch: They make it easy to make more multimedia-friendly wikis rather than your plain old Wikipedia-style layout that you see everywhere.

Network Solutions: They have a Solutions are Power blog for small businesses. Well thought out and a good resource.

Pajamas TV: Because Tuxedo TV felt too stodgy. Really though, I forgot what they cover. But the whole free t-shirt thing...

Regator: They call themselves a mix of Alltop and digg.

Soldiers Angels: From the military blogger pavilion (okay, a group of tables), Angels is a non-profit to help care for soldiers, especially the wounded.

SodaHead: A destination site in its own right, they now offer free polling widgets, including customizable branded options. At first I thought that was where I'd find the Jones Soda at the show. No free drinks, but the widgets look fun.

Technorati: I didn't get to find out too much that's new with them, but I want to dig in to their channels more to check out some other blogs by topic.

TechSmith: I've used their products off an on for years. One of their latest is Jing, a screencasting tool, which I had a little trouble with when I first tried it, but it looks much better now. They also make SnagIt.

Triggit: It's in-text ads (think Vibrant or Kontera) with a big focus on targeting, and very competitive pricing.

ViewBug: Share your photos and make a few bucks if you're judged as one of the week's top 50. There you go, start getting paid for all the time you spend throwing stuff on Flickr and Facebook.

Widgetbox: They're about to roll out some new options for advertisers (and thus monetization options for developers). With 4.5 billion widgets served so far, scale should not be the problem.

Widgetbucks: They've got a massive ad network of their own. I met the CEO on my panel on widget monetization. Note that Widgetbox and Widgetbucks can sound exactly alike depending on the speaker's accent, or if your hearing's shot from the Vegas party scene.

YardBarker: It's a massive sports blog network, with about 60 pro athlete blogs, if you can call Donovan Mcnabb a pro.

Yovia: Join communities or sponsor them and request posts. I need to take a little more time to see how they differ from the PayPerPost/SocialSpark model.

Zannel: I've been a big fan of this mobile publishing tool/site/platform - whatever it is, it works well for sharing and viewing content. (I'm there as dberkowitz.)

Zemanta: I'm using this plug-in to recommend links, images, tags, and other good content as I blog away. Perhaps this and Apture will make the blog more engaging; we'll see...

First Impressions of Blog World Expo

As I sit down to write this in room 7-11 of the Hilton (you'd think people request this room months in advance), my laptop says it's 3:53am, though it's three hours earlier here in Las Vegas for Blog World Expo.

For those who can't be here, or for those who can, here's a somewhat random and hopefully coherent collection of impressions from my first BWE:

I don't miss the lines of Vegas. My trips here have generally either been with family - and a car, or for Consumer Electronics Show (and Digital Hollywood), which a cab driver told me is the second largest conference held here (I think a construction event tops it). With all the time spent waiting around here, this has to be one of the least productive cities on the planet. Lines for transportation, checking in, drinks, dining, you name it. The only thing there's no line for: slots.

Should it be called Twitter World? Yes, most people here are bloggers or somehow connected to the blogosphere and blog economy, but so many people here really know each other through Twitter. The most notable such experience for me was when I met Shashi Bellamkonda, @shashib, who's earned a lot of Twitter cred largely thanks to how well he listens and then engages with the community in turn.

It's fun seeing Vegas from the eyes of someone here for the first time. I shared a cab from the hotel to Friday night's marquee Techset party with Mashable founder Pete Cashmore, and it was his first time in Vegas. He's not here long enough and he surely won't get to eat well enough in this quick conference-focused jaunt, but he was enamored with the artifice of it all. I told him to really enjoy the artifice, he should walk across the Brooklyn Bridge to the Eiffel Tower.

There are some great burgers. Before I left the party I made it to BLT Burger in the Mirage. If you're hungry for some red meat that isn't priced in the double digits per ounce here but isn't your standard fast food either, the $13 BLT burger is one of the best values I've found in this city.

There is a real community here. It's a lot of different communities. Some I'm a part of include the New York tech scene, social media strategists, agency guys, and others not as well defined, but it's like an incredibly complex Venn diagram. It does feel like no one is more than two degrees from each other, and everyone I met was either someone I knew virtually, someone I was familiar with for some reason or another, or knew someone I knew well.

My favorite moment so far: The cab driver from the party back to the hotel (the Hilton) spent most of the call speaking a language that didn't register with me. Toward the end, he apologized. I'm not sure who exactly he said he was on the phone with or what the person had to do with his story, but he told me that he's from Saudi Arabia where he heard (on the call, I think) about a Christian who was tortured with 2,000 lashes and thrown in jail for seven years just for their religion. He said six to eight others faced the same fate, all for their religion.

Then he told me that in America, that doesn't happen. Not only that, but his son who's 15 was able to come here and become a citizen because the driver was a citizen. The driver noted there's nowhere in the world where that can happen. The driver had told his son that outside of the job of President, every other position - 99.999% of all jobs here - are attainable to someone born abroad, and again, the United States is the only place where that can happen.

I told him I understood, and that I had a personal connection to his story. I told him my father was born in Poland (simplifying a long story a bit) and came to this country at age 11 speaking half a dozen languages, none of them English. His family set up a chicken farm. And this immigrant chicken farmer who spoke no English became a doctor, and his younger sister (my aunt) became successful in the music business. He thanked me because now he knew my story, and now he met another person who, although so unlike him in more ways than I can count, benefited in similar ways from this country.

So I'm left with two thoughts from all of this. On one hand, the more mundane, is that the experience is a dramatized reason of why thousands of people are here in Las Vegas for Blog World. We're all storytellers, or we're all helping others tell their stories, or we're helping people support themselves by sharing their stories, and we want to meet each other. Yes, we can all learn from each other's blogs and websites and tweets and Facebook pages and FriendFeed comments and YouTube videos and emails and all the rest, but almost all of us gain the most value from the real-world bonds that are forged.

And on the larger scale, leaving that cab that I didn't want to leave, that I wanted to just stay there to spend more time not even hearing more but soaking in that wonderfully inspired atmosphere, there was that moment where I felt so incredibly proud to be an American. That this man can come here and earn his keep and support his family and bring others here all to tell anyone he can, including strangers like me who could be voting for Obama or McCain or Ralph Nader or David Duke or David Duchovny, how much he loves this country.

To think, in the back of the cab to the party was a British web entrepreneur who has recently settled in San Francisco and came to Vegas for the first time, and on the way back I met a Saudi Arabian American who lives in this city of artifice but sees the greater beauty of where he lives. Both of them shared their stories with the son of an immigrant chicken farmer turned doctor who lives less than ten miles from the Statue of Liberty.

And now, from hotel room 7-11, I can blog these stories to share them globally.

But just as importantly, tomorrow I can share them in person with whoever I meet along the way.

How to Kick off a Blogger Day Right, via WhitePages.com

I'm writing this from Seattle, where I've just arrived to spend all of about 24 hours in one of my favorite cities. My official capacity here is as a blogger, which unofficially will help build relationships for my agency day job and any other hats I wind up wearing.

I'm the guest of WhitePages, invited via their public relations agency Edelman, and all travel is being comped (without that, I'll admit, I wouldn't have made it from New York). Lunch will be comped too (I would have sprung for lunch though). I flew economy class (on Delta, which is my favorite among the old stalwarts for its more comfortable seats, the TVs for every seat - even though they didn't work this time, and the shrimp caeser and fried chicken sandwiches for sale) (aside two: when you get the fried chicken, try mixing the barbecue and ranch sauces together - it's a surprisingly zesty, tasty combo).

The day hasn't started yet. As I write this, it's 10pm Pacific. While I plan to cover the extended Lunch 2.0 and presentations tomorrow from 11:30-4 PST, I'll also use this as an opportunity to review this case study on blogger relations. I've talked about this before on the blog, at events, and in numerous personal conversations, and digital word of mouth marketing is also a service of my agency, but I'm not sure if I've ever covered it on the receiving end.

By the way, the fact that I'm covering blogger relations from the receiving end is precisely what makes blogger relations or blog outreach so daunting. If Edelman or WhitePages.com screws up, they run the risk of me writing about it ad nauseum here, on Twitter, on Facebook, and anywhere else I participate. I could turn it into a presentation on Slideshare. 've done a bit of it myself and it's humbling, and while I still will call out any fouls in the process in the interest of furthering best practices, I have tremendous respect for those who engage in it - my colleagues especially (when a bunch of us went out for drinks the other night, I told one colleague how her job is probably the hardest of anyone at the agency, which maybe is why colleagues are not supposed to discuss work over drinks, and why I'm not always invited out).

SO... what are Edelman and WhitePages doing well so far? Here are a few starting points, intended especially for anyone who is thinking of putting together blogger events of their own:

1. The event itself combines Lunch 2.0 - a relatively new networking concept where a company generally puts together a panel and networking event for people largely involved with the social media space - and an event for bloggers with a WhitePages dog and pony show. One of the reasons I'm excited to be here is to meet a bunch of people from the Seattle digital scene, and then getting to meet the other bloggers who will be here will be another plus. I'll admit that I'm not here to hear about WhitePages.com, but I should be a captive audience.
2. The "shuttle" they reserved for me was a limo. I wish I got the driver's name, but the driver from Shuttle Express, a Hawaiian native who came to Seattle after 15 years in Las Vegas, was hospitable, engaging, and a good driver (I think - I was faced the other way in the limo as I sipped a glass of California Chardonnay).
3. The hotel has instantly become one of my favorite hotels, and I haven't been here an hour. It's Hotel 1000, a luxury boutique spot a couple blocks from Pike Place Market (and a couple blocks from WhitePages Headquarters). There was some great live music playing, every last fixture and detail screams modern elegance, and it's the kind of place I knew just from walking in - and especially when walking into my room - I could stay a week. One strange thing I hadn't seen: an open bathtub by the full-length windows (hopefully you can only see out) with no discernable faucet. I hesitantly turned the knob on the wall, and the water started pouring out of the ceiling (rather loudly at that; photo below).
4. On the desk there was a gift basket (photo below) with a WhitePages laptop bag, water, chocolates, a locally made salmon rub, a water bottle (very eco-friendly), a fold-out map, and an overview of the events ahead. [Updated: I forgot the $10 Starbucks gift card - remember, it's Seattle, and I'm staying a couple blocks from the first Starbucks.]
5. Here's the most important part of it all. The text in the intro letter reads, "WhitePages is excited to have you join our conversation and pleased to be able to cover your travel to Seattle. WhitePages and Edelman do request that in any post about WhitePages you disclose this financial arrangement. This, as you know, is standard practice among bloggers and being fully transparent insulates all parties from concerns about bias. Please let us know if you have any questions about this."

Copy and paste that if you ever need such a disclosure letter. I'm sure Edelman and WhitePages won't mind, even if you don't give them credit it for it.

 

What Could Summize Do for Twitter?

The following post originally ran on 360i's Digital Connections blog, which just launched today. There will be some cross-posting; entries from here will periodically make their way there, and I may well post a few things there that don't make it here. There will also be others posting at 360i's blog. My weekly columns will run on both places.

There are rumors going around that Twitter’s going to acquire Summize, the leading Twitter search engine (leading in terms of functionality, if not usage). What’s this going to do for Twitter?

Historically, Twitter has allowed almost all of the most important features and functionality to be developed by others. Outside of its bare bones messaging platform, it has few features, and there’s no search functionality to speak of. Summize, meanwhile, has allowed people to keep track of Twitter conversations. If it’s brought in-house, it’ll be a huge asset for Twitter, especially if Twitter lets Summize continue to develop its pet projects such as those in Summize Labs.

Today’s Twitter users are generally fine with needing to go to different sources for Twitter features, including Summize for Search, Twhirl for a desktop application, TweetBeep for email alerts, and Twitterfox for a Firefox plug-in. But that’s not going to scale. Twitter needs to start providing some of the core features on its own. It should also use Firefox as a model, where Firefox offers the plug-in gallery that users can sort by downloads and ratings. Twitter can create its own gallery where it lists all the applications, sites, and services in one place, and users can rate their favorites. This will make it much easier for new Twitter users to easily access the most popular and useful Twitter tools, whether or not Twitter offers them.

 

Five Reasons My Posting Has Lagged

1) Twitter. Quick links and short updates wind up going there. And it's easier to have conversations there. I've also found that on a lot of posts comments have dropped off because the discussion happens on Twitter. That's good and bad. Twitter comments are fleeting and ephemeral and they only benefit people on Twitter, but they also allow for other people there to join in and have an actual conversation. Maybe all this stuff will be integrated one day.

2) Events. Some of the events I've been to in NY this month include OMMA Social, Advertising 2.0 (Digital Hollywood), Digital Publishing & Advertising Conference, Internet Marketing Conference's mobile forum, and Mobile Marketing Forum. There have been other council meetings, breakfasts, and networking events. Then there have been some great events I've missed like Forrester Research's financial services event, the Advertising Research Foundation's Audience Measurement 3.0, Conversational Marketing Summit, Personal Democracy Forum, and others. Last Monday I had drinks and dinner with people who were attending four different major events that day. The good news: NY looks a lot quieter for July, though one I wanted to go to, IAB's mobile event, is when I'll be on the road at two others - Frost & Sullivan's marketing summit in Beaver Creek, CO and then SMX Local & Mobile event in San Francisco, the week of July 20.

3) Clients. They're awesome. I LOVE clients. But they also prevent me from doing other things sometimes, like talking to other clients at events, so clients are thus blamed for me not blogging, being inattentive at events, and ignoring other clients. I'll also blame them for global warming. I'm at an agency. It's my job to blame clients, when I'm not blaming my colleagues and throwing them under the bus (okay, the throwing-under-bus part isn't just at agencies).

4) Less Online Play Time. Okay, I'm on MouseHunt and Mob Wars as a couple quick distractions, but blogging requires playing with stuff and digesting it. Hopefully the event slowdown will make for more playtime, which means more blog time.

5) Email Overload. That hurts too, and I've been slow in responding to some people due to a lot of reasons already noted, but I try to address most of the email discussions before blogging since people won't think I'm a jerk if I'm slow to blog, but I do look like a jerk if I'm ignoring people who reach out to me personally.

In any case, I will aim to get back to blogging more regularly, since I find it a valuable use of time to try to process and digest a lot of what I'm seeing, and it's a good way to join in the myriad conversations out there.

Craigslist Scam Update: Six Months Later

The two posts on this blog with the most staying power, drawing comments week in and week out, come from an experience with Craigslist.

Like, oh, about a couple billion people, I'm a big fan of the site. I'm now living in the second of two apartments I've found through Craigslist. Soon after I first moved to Manhattan early this decade, I kept tabs on local event listings and went to a few where I met some great groups of people, like a couple who hosted a pickup kickball game in Central Park. When I've moved, Craigslist has been a great way to get rid of some furniture and other miscellany that I might have needed to toss otherwise.

Yet everything that's open about the web attracts people who try to abuse it. One such scam that came to my attention was the result of a fluke, where two people I knew were accosted by the same scammer (or group of scammers). They figured out it was a scam only after randomly mentioning it to each other, and then one of them told me. They then gave me permission to post it on my blog, leaving out their personal details, as a way to attract others.

The post that resulted was this Craigslist Real Estate Scam Alert, posted six months ago this week. It has since attracted about 70 comments, and it led to a second post, Craigslist Real Estate Scam Alert - Another Version, which has attracted even more people weighing in with their stories.

Most people who comment share some sort of information about the scam they received, and it provides this snowball effect, as the post now appears in search engine results for an ever-growing roster of scammers, along with their addresses and phone numbers. I've noticed that a number of visits to my blog come from people searching for one of those numbers. See the MediaPost column recap on How SEO Can Stop a Scammer for more.

I met Craig Newmark when he appeared at an event to launch the book Accidental Branding by David Vinjamuri (he's one of the entrepreneurs featured in the book - a great read, I might add). I asked him about the scam, and he's of course well aware of it; he's even worked with Federal authorities to try to combat it, but there's little the US can do about the Nigerian-based fraudsters.

There is something bloggers can do, and anyone who's sharing any kind of content online. We can share it with others, first to help it spread through word of mouth, and more importantly so it stays out there for when people need to find it.