Listen to your customers

Everyone is always talking about listening to your customers, and so you should, but actually doing something based on their feedback is not as common (generally only when they are upset do companies act , take the recent Vegemite iSnack 2.0 "scandal"or new coke).

Anyway, rather then going on about the virtues of listening to customers, here are a few ways that you can actually monitor what people are saying.

- Set up a facebook "fan" page for you product, monitor what people who take the time to link up to you, have to say about your offering.

- Ensure you have a corporate twitter account, and follow people who follow you. Also set up search profiles for your company (search on name, industry keywords, etc).

- Set up a google search for your company, and key industry terms. This way you will also pick up on what is being said about you on the web and in blogs. I run my google searches into my RSS feed reader, but you can also set them up to Email on a regular basis the information they find.

- Network online with people who are key to your industry, LinkedIn, myspace, linkMe, where ever key people in your industry may spend time, you need to spend some time there also.

Oh, and by the way, do something with the information you gather!

Brave new world?

Here is an interesting presentation that I wanted to share (more fantastic TED presentations!). Clay Shirky talks about the changing media landscape with the introduction of ubiquitous mobile phones, twitter, and social web sites.

Its not completely a Twitter story (thankfully) however, as he mainly discusses how the internet is changing the landscape by allowing everyone to connect with everyone else, all the time, and what that means.

Who tweets the twitter?

Twitter is down at the moment, well I think it is down.

I am not quite sure, I assume its down for everyone, not just me, but I don't know how to find out, you see, I would normally go to twitter to find out if a service I use (such as Gmail) is down or not.

All I need to do is look at the trending topics, and bang! there it is, "Gmail" or what not, then have a look at a couple of tweets, and yep, Gmail is down.

But this morning I am lost, twitter itself is down (I think), and I don't know how to work out what is going on, am I the only one with problems? Who tweets about twitter when twitter is down!?!?!?!

Hang on, tweet deck just popped a message up, nah, false alarm I think its still bust.

What do you do when twitter is down? Where do you go for information?

Edit - Was just reminded of the twitter status page - http://status.twitter.com/ , its quite the same thing as getting real time updates from tweets, the info on the status page is a little general, and a little out of date....

The twitter secondary market

Twitter reminds me of a RSS feed reader. If you look the the stream of tweets in the same way you look at a RSS feed some things start to make sense to me.

Twitter is like a personal RSS feed. I currently subscribe to over 200 RSS feeds in my feed reader, it is impossible to work out what's important when you have well over 1000 items a day appear in your inbox. Twitter is the same, the more people you follow, the more noise there is in your feed, the more noise, the harder it is to work out what is important.

So to manage the RSS feeds you use a feedreader, automatically filter feeds, tag important ones, save items to read later, etc. Twitter needs to be managed the same way, hence the secondary market.

Applications such as tweet deck and web services such as peoplebrowsr.com take the twitter feed and let you manage it, these "secondary market" players have a fantastic opportunity, they make sense of twitter!

So what's the opportunity in the secondary market? Fundamentally it looks like the opportunity is in removing the noise from twitter, so you can receive the signal. What you do with the signal is then up to you. There are any number of articles that discuss the social networking, customer service, citizen news, marketing, presence indicator, take your pick.

How will secondary market players make money? Take the feed and filter it, the more intuitive the filter is, the more value it can provide, and hence, in the future can be charged for (primarily in the corporate space for marketing and customer service).

Have fun twittering, and good luck with the signal to noise ratio!

Time to take the blinkers off

I recently read and article from TechCrunch on Chinese social networking platforms. The article talks about the fact that many social networking sites in China are actually making a profit, more so then the best known site in the western world, Facebook.

I was interested in how these guys were making their money, as the question always asked of all social media today to is "wheres the business model?". What became more evident and striking to me however were the numbers of users on these platforms in China, the largest claiming 376,000,000.

China has a large population, of course there would be a large number of users. The platforms better meet the social norm's in China, better then say Facebook or Myspace. User numbers dont actually mean that much in the real world. Yes, I know, this all this makes sense, what I was interested with was the fact that 99% of the material I read had not mentioned the fact that the largest social networking site in the world was in China.

I was surprised with myself, that I was not aware of this small, but incredibly significant fact! While I daily get a flood of information with commentary asking how and when sites like Twitter will start making money, wondering on how much (if any) money Facebook is making, blah, blah, blah, there is a business model in China that has far eclipsed anything else happening.

I understand that the Chinese model may not work in the western world, the point is that I completely missed a major player in the market, time for me to take the blinkers off and have a good look around!

Twitter and Enterprise 2.0

Everyone needs to blog! was the call not so long ago in the enterprise, Microsoft even went as far as making it part of the job of senior managers to post to their blog sites about what they were up to. I suppose the rationale was about driving better communication within the business, and opening things up so customers and staff felt more engaged. It failed. It failed because it actually is not that easy to sit down and write a blog, not everyone is able to do it. It failed because people did not think what they were up to was always worthy of a blog posting, and it failed because people just forgot to do it.

So does twitter have a place in the enterprise? I mean, it is a "micro blogging" site, will it actually get used?

Yammer thinks there is a place for enterprise micro blogging. I think they may be right (but I dont know if you can make money from it).

Just as twitter has found a place with people who want to say something, but dont want to write a blog post, I think Yammer will find a place within the enterprise, filling that space that blogs have had difficulty filling with most managers.

From my own personal experience, engaging with colleagues and staff on twitter has increased the lines of communication, and developed better relationships, however, given the public nature of twitter of course some topics remain off limits. Yammer helps to remove some of these boundaries by being open to only people within your enterprise.

By having a walled micro blogging site we would be able to talk a bit more freely about work topics, and, engage people in other areas of the business who we may not even know exist at the moment.

I actually think micro blogging in the enterprise may have a future, changing the culture and the nature of how people work today however may be more difficult. Sharing information within the enterprise is not always in the best interests of the people sharing it (and thus it is not shared), or, some information should remain secret (and thus should not be shared). Withholding some information, and release some that should be withheld will also cause its own problems, managers need to alter the way they work today to take this into consideration also.

In sumary, I think twitter type applications do have a place in the enterprise, however the enterprise still needs to change and evelove to take advantage of this type of service and get value from it.

Salesforce.com loves twitter

Salesforce.com hit a billion dollars in revenue recently, the first SaaS provider to hit the milestone, so they must be doing something right.

They recently also announced their recent "service cloud" linking in with facebook and other social media platforms, and now, connecting with twitter.

What's the big deal about all of this? Salesforce.com is helping its users actually reachout to their customers, and help them before they complain, or at least, catch any problems before they blow up and get too large.

Monitoring twitter feeds is starting to become more mainstream (although there is a long way to go), in Australia we now have Bigpond monitoring twitter, and after a bit of a false start, now providing service that people are liking. The standout customer service provider on twitter must be comcast, with their @comcastcares account.

Comcast has 10 people managing proactive customer service via twitter (moving from just reacting to Emails for help, to proactively responding to calls for help on twitter). The twitter community now loves comcast, and their approach to providing service (for those that dont know, comcast is not always known for its fantastic customer service).

So now we see the melding of a few things are now coming together, salesforce.com, twitter and comcast, with the comcast guys working with salesforce to help them get their twitter service of the ground and running, cant wait to see the outcome!

more details here