How Brands Fail on Twitter - Twiagra Anyone?

I recently posted a query on Twitter searching for people from a certain company or two or three. I will protect the names here, though it would be easy enough to dig up that information, if you really wanted to look for it. The next morning (no problem there, I posted this in the evening East Coast time, didn't expect an immediate response) I received a tweet back from one of the target companies and two OTHER companies who said they were in the same space. All offered their help. Nice job, guys!

So, I responded to the two competitors outlining the need I have. I am requesting their business. I am describing my need. It's 140 characters, but hey, I'm doing what I can!

Meantime, later that same day, one of the other companies I mentioned in my original post starts to follow me on Twitter. "Hey", I think to myself, "this is good - they're the company that's offering the closest to what I want - can't wait to hear what they have to say!"

I wait and...........nothing. The company that followed me never sent me a message. So I thought, OK, I'll just reach out to them. I already tried emailing them through their web site (they don't list a phone number on their site) and never got a response. I'll try here. So I post three tweets explaining the situation.

The day gets away from me, like it always does, and I find myself checking TweetDeck at 5:30 or so. Lo and behold, of the four companies, all of whom are on Twitter, all of whom took some cursory action to reach out to me in response to a direct request, just one of them replied to my requests for information. And their answer? "Check out our site and let me know if it meets your needs." I asked for them by name. I've probably been to their web site before, no? Maybe it requires some engagement to really find out what I'm looking for.

This is a classic "failure to launch" moment. They're on the right platform, reacting to customers (sort of) but can't close the deal. Talk about Fail Whale!

The old cliche "it happens to everyone" just isn't true. Anyone have some industrial strength Twiagra?

Growing List of Twitter Resources

Here's a list of Twitter tools and fun things. It is, of course, incomplete, as there are only so many hours in the day, and I do have a day job!

One trend I have noticed is the compilation of tweets by category of tweeter or tweet - executives, expletives, followers, top #followfriday recommendations, etc., etc.

This will be updated!

Download the PDF here. Right-click to save as a file.

IE6

Here's a great article - and comments - about "The Slow, Lingering Death of IE6."

The first commenter notes that IE6 compatibility can add 25% to the coding budget. I have found this to be too true.

That said, I still use IE6 on one of my computers, so that I can test sites for clients. Only when IE6 is truly dead will I feel that I can move on. Catch-22: then I'm part of the stats saying it's still alive. I wonder how many developers are in the same boat?

So we will continue to advise our clients to upgrade to IE7 (and then 8) and hope that IE6 will soon be a thing of the past.

Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and all that

I've been diving deep into social networking in the past weeks and learning a lot.

Twitter. The key to Twitter is that to be followed, you have to be informative, helpful or entertaining. Sure, people use it to market themselves, but self-indulgence just leads to "unfollow." I follow Stephen Fry (@stephenfry), who is very witty and tech-savvy. Also Lance Armstrong (@lancearmstrong) because of his cancer survivorship and leadership. He's also witty and informative. My husband wonders why I follow them. Because I can!

Twitter is at its beginnings. So we have opportunities here that we may not have later. To follow celebrities, to be in at the ground floor of something - but most importantly, to shape the community. Already, there are certain standards - like # to signify a topic and @ to signify a tweeter - indeed, the word tweet to signify the 140-character tidbits that are published - that have been generated by the community and adopted by Twitter.

The requirement of being informative, helpful or entertaining is also community-generated. All generate value, as corporations have learned. Twitter is the next generation of customer service (as well as being an example of "flat-earthedness").

Facebook. Okay. I am a baby boomer, and I am on Facebook. I am enjoying it - I'm in touch with old friends, and I get to see what they're up to. We get to have conversations (asynchronous, to be sure), but we're in more communication than we were before we were all on Facebook.

But I, and all my friends, have made Facebook uncool. See Time Magazine's article "Why Facebook is for Old Fogies." As recently as August 2008, blogger Nick O'Neill wondered if Facebook would go the way of Friendster.

The answer is YES. My 16-year-old niece thinks MySpace (which enthralled her for years) and Facebook are booorrrrring. She's moved on to Tumblr.

Tumblr. I'm just starting on Tumblr. And it looks like it's been commodified already. Wine Library's Gary Vaynerchuk is on Tumblr - with an ad asking for followers! But it allows a lot of creativity - not as structured as MySpace or Facebook. You can mash up different media, and so, I think to teenagers, it's a way to creatively express themselves. My brother, who is an artist, has a Tumblr account, too. So even though he's an old fogie, it speaks to his creativity, too.

So it remains - the same as it ever was. People like their friends, they like helpful people, they like useful information, they like to be entertained, they like novelty, and they like to be creative. What a great time we live in, that we have so many avenues for all of this.

Aggregate & Identify Me, Please!

Remember way back when, when you had to sign up, register, fill out a profile, pick a user name and password and add "friends" and "link in" and.....over and over and over again at every site you visited? Whether a social networking site or an e-commerce site or just a web forum. Everywhere required unique identities and profiles. What a pain! Wait a second, that wasn't way back when, it's still like that now!

Well, OK, there are some solutions floating around out there that do a variety of things such as creating a single sign-on or aggregating your social media profiles or creating an "attention" profile that can be re-used. Here are some of the players:

OpenID
ClaimID
APML
Windows CardSpace
Higgins
Sxipper
FriendFeed
Profilactic
etc.
etc.
etc.

When will someone win this battle already? I need a single place to do my "social media'ing" and I need a single sign-on and a single profile to manage. Where is the innovation - or really, the perfect evolution - for this need? C'mon, it's 2009 already!

Now some of you may say, "OK, Bill, if it's such a need, why don't you fix it, tough guy? All talk and no action, you bum!" Well, that's fair. And all I can say is that we recognize there are some big players out there in the consolidated identity space (like OpenID) and the social media aggregation space (like FriendFeed) and we want ONE of them to win. Because then, our new big idea, which will be announced at a later date, will have a good partner to work with. Yes, this plea is totally self-serving - we have an identity/social media platform we're developing that will be SOOOOOO much better if someone can figure out the other stuff. And we're not interested in being that someone right now.

There you go - my rant for the day. Well, considering how often I write posts here, it could be my rant for the month.

Google Earth...or is it Google Ocean?

Google innovates. Yes, it's true. They create, or buy companies that have created, some of the coolest things in technology. In case you didn't know.

I first saw the precursor to Google Earth (or maybe it was another company's attempt at something similar) in Davos at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in 2001. Yes, long before Google Earth ever appeared, I saw a mind-blowing application that allowed you to see satellite photography from around the world and zoom in to view just about anyplace on earth at very low altitudes. It was, and remains, one of the most awe-inspiring applications in technology, in my opinion.

And now, with the release of Google Earth 5.0, we get to take a peek at the ocean's depths. It would be silly to try to describe the experience of "flying" along the Mariana Trench when you can just download it and try it yourself.

My company, Beehive Media, created the first-ever Flash integration using the Google Earth API, which incorporated Flash, video and all kinds of rich media and interactivity overlaid on top of AND controlling Google Earth. I can't wait to experiment with 5.0 and start playing in the water!

Picasa for Mac!!!

Beehive Media used to occupy space in the Boston office of IdeaLab! (the exclamation point was part of their logo - it's not that this sentence is so exciting.) IdeaLab! was an incubator, and one of its companies had created this great software program called Picasa. It was the best digital photo management software I had ever seen, by far. With incredibly intuitive interfaces, slick import management, fantastic and easy to use photo manipulation, for those who aren't Photoshop gods, etc., it blew away the competition.

At the time, I was primarily using PCs. But about three years ago I made the permanent switch to Mac (primarily because I can still run Parallels and run XP when I need to.) But I was so depressed to find that Picasa wasn't available on the Mac. So I tried other programs - free ones, paid ones, etc. I settled on iPhoto because it was free and didn't suck too bad. But I cursed it on a regular basis.

Lo and behold, the company was bought by Google a few years back. I figured, OK, now the Mac version HAS to come, but noooooooooo. But now, with the announcement at MacWorld, I can finally, thrillingly, use Picasa again. This product was an innovation (or an elegant evolution, I guess) at the time it came out and, amazingly, still owns the photo management space - kicking butt over anything I've seen. That is what I call a beenovation!

http://picasa.google.com