Tag Archives: follow

5 Question Interview: Ken George of WBUR

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kengeorgeKen George, new media production manager for Boston-based public radio station WBUR, 90.9 F.M., (one of the largest NPR-affiliated stations in the country) was bitten by the social media bug early last year.

Prior to 90.9, Ken was production editor for Masslive.com, a regional web portal based in Western Massachusetts.

After reading Ken’s blog, a chronicle of 90.9’s “web 2.0” initiatives, and following his “Tweets,” I got a chance to finally meet him at the station’s first “Tweet-Up” held in July 2008. Since then Ken has taken to organizing and hosting these events on an almost monthly basis.

WBUR is embarking on some really cool experimentation in the social media space, demonstrating a level of engagement and transparency pretty unusual for a major market broadcaster. As Ken is the mover and shaker behind this, I asked him to share his perspectives on what he is trying to accomplish for the station.

Without further ado, here is our conversation:

Eric Guerin: What prompted WBUR to get involved with social media and what websites/applications are you active on?

Ken George: We had been marginally tooling around with various social media sites like Flickr, YouTube for a number of years now. While great channels to port our new media content into, we never used those spaces to “converse” with users or listeners.

My eureka moment is a direct result of my attending one of the social media breakfasts last May. What I heard blew my mind. I left with a steely resolve to engage far more transparently and consistently with listeners via social media tools.

Twitter proved instrumental to this end. Why? I think the way it enabled almost real-time conversations. The more I Tweeted, the more followers I accrued and the more I would Tweet. A real self-reinforcing positive feedback loop.

EG: According to the most recent statistics I heard for public radio, the average age of an NPR listener is 47 and continues to trend older year after year. How does this age demographic of WBUR listeners, affect your approach to social media engagement?

KG: You’ve identified a huge problem with that question. For the most part, the “traditional listeners” are not the ones responding to our social media outreach. And frankly, I am unconvinced there is much I can do to reach those listeners via social media.

I see my efforts as helping the station to reach new markets and position itself for the future characterized by a limitless supply of on-demand content. Community will be the one trump card we can play to distinguish us from all the other guys.

EG: What are the biggest challenges WBUR faces as the way people receive news is changing?

KG: The unparalleled access to information, content, news on demand presents a huge challenge. Public radio operates best in an environment of information scarcity. When locked in your car you choices are 90.9, some innovative college programming or boatloads of crap.

This completely breaks down on the Web, where you can get all kinds of radio programs and other compelling content ad infinitium.

And of course there is the issue of money, specifically the amount advertisers (underwriters in public broadcaster parlance) will fork over to get mentioned over the airwaves. That revenue helps cover the considerable costs associated with radio production. On the web, those analog advertising dollars become digital pennies.

EG: You’ve started a monthly “TweetUp” at your studios where anyone can show up, get a tour and engage in a round table discussion about many different topics. How did you come up with the idea for this and what was the driving force behind it?

KG: The “Tweet-Ups” where a natural outgrowth of our social media experimentation. NPR resident social media evangelist (oh that term again!) It was from Andy Carvin, who among other things is tasked with getting National Public Radio affiliated stations onto the social media bandwagon, that I learned about “Tweet-Ups.”

So I thought “What the hay, let’s give it a go and see what happens.” I was dubious folks would attend, and was very gratified to see my misgivings were unwarranted. And these events have been of tremendous value to the station. The core attendees (yourself included of course) serve as a brain trust of sorts that have in no small way helped guide 90.9’s digital media efforts.

I think my strong feelings about empowering the “public” in “public radio” is what has made me a fanatic about hosting these events monthly. You folks have supported us through thick and thin. It is only fair play that you be invited in to tell us what you think (even if at times it is not necessary something we want to hear). I think that is incredibly empowering for listeners.

Speaking of events, the next WBUR Social Media Meet-Up is February 5th at 7pm and at the end of February we are hosting an “Eat Up at WBUR” – making a concerted effort to reach out to local food bloggers as part of the station’s new community-based “Public Radio Kitchen.”

EG: Being public radio you need to do fund-raising to stay on the air, how have you used your social media connections to help promote and donate to your pledge drive?

KG: We are in the embryonic phrase of tying social media to pledging. The end of the year fund drive last December represented the first time we tried using social media to solicit pledges. I would remind folks (mostly via Twitter) that the fund drive was on and direct them to a specific landing page so we can quantify the results. Our overall take via social media was small, but then the initiative was rather last minute and haphazard.

The plan is that the next time we try this we are a little more organized and consistent. We may (“may” being the operative word) even deploy “micro-pledging” applications across the social media space.

EG: Thanks for taking the time Ken!

7 Things You Might Wish You Didn’t Know About Me

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Okay so Mike Langford (aka @MikeLangford) hates me as and selected me as a Twitter friend to take part in this 7 things list with his post. This little ditty has been going around though as Lyell Petersen (aka @93Octane) sent it to him and you can follow the train back from there…

If I deemed you worthy enough to pass this glorious honor on to you, and put its continued existence in your very hands (you! have! the! power!), please follow these care and feeding guidelines:

  • Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
  • Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
  • Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
  • Let them know they’ve been tagged

All right here we go…

  1. I split my head open jumping over hurdles – but not the way you may think. We had to do plyometric bounding drills over hurdles set closely together my freshman year of college (few people even know that I ran track in college). Well I clipped my heel on a hurdle and fell. So the first thing you do when you fall is jump back up and hope nobody saw you, right? Well what I didn’t realize is that when I fell on the hurdle it had sprung up and was spinning in the air…and I stoop up into it leaving a gash over my left eye near my temple. It took 7 internal stiches and 9 external stiches to close it up. Now I just have a barely noticeable scar line over my eyebrow.
  2. I was a history minor in college – when I started college I didn’t have a firm knowledge of what I wanted to do, but who really does? That’s the type A number crunching part of my personality. So I took a bunch of history classes as well as my art & design classes. Come senior year I learned I only needed to take a history survey class so I figured why not?
  3. I don’t like football – I know sacrilege to some. I actually played football in high school for a couple of years…just didn’t have the passion for it. I can sit & watch parts of a game, just not in a group with a bunch of people yelling at the TV. Also after watching Tim Krumrie’s leg get sickeningly crumpled over and over again during the Super Bowl XXIII in slow motion I stopped watching. The only sports I follow religiously now are baseball & cycling.
  4. eric_guerinI once had a giant dyed blond Mohawk haircut – That’s right. I also had my head shaved and my hair long & dyed black as well. What can I tell you…I was in art school! While no photos exist of the Mohawk here’s a funny one of me with my head shaved.
  5. Once I was stalked by a Nile Crocodile – I was doing a graphics installation at the New England Aquarium after they were closed on an African lake exhibit. While installing some information card turrets in front of the Nile Crocodile exhibit I noticed that the 16′ Nile Crocodile slipped into the water in his tank and was gliding toward me. When I turned to look at the crocodile…it stopped completely still. So then I turned back to my work and noticed out of the corner of my eye that the crocodile was gliding towards me again! Not trusting the 3″ thick Lexan to keep the crocodile away from me I sped through the rest of my installations and got the heck out of there.
  6. I developed photos for Ben Affleck before he was BEN AFFLECK – well he was still Ben Affleck and had been in a couple decent movies already but it was before Good Will Hunting was released. He used to go into a little boutique photo store I used to work at on Newbury Street and get his film developed. I also helped him find where to buy a Hasselblad Medium Format Camera and he invited us all to go to the Boston Premiere of Good Will Hunting which I unfortunately turned down.
  7. This is the first time I have ever returned a chain mail of any form – I normally get a bunch of these emails and prior to email actual snail mail letters which promise good luck or a horrible curse and they usually all get deleted. I thought this one sounded fun and Mike is a good egg so I decided to do this one for fun.

I hope you enjoyed this little bit of useless knowledge about me & my life and now the poor souls I am passing the baton to with their Twitter handles:

Nick Inglis (@nickinglis)
Ken George (@KenGeorge)
Josh Garner (@SEOFactor)
Adam Cohen (@adamcohen)
Tom Gastall (@tomgastall)
Danny Brown (@PressReleasePR)
Wahyd Vannoni (@manifest_mag)

Leave a comment below with the link to your 7 things post once you’ve written one.

 

 

5 Questions Interview: Mike Langford of Tweetworks

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One of the greatest and worst things about Twitter is the constant stream of conversation. It’s constantly changing. Yeah you can search to find posts you are interested in but I always thought there should be an easier way to connect with people who have like-minded interests and to follow a conversation that was threaded rather than searching for hashtags to follow the conversation. Hashtags are so MS-DOS, they’re like the mullet haircut – completely out of style and outdated even while it was popular. Which is why I was SO happy to find Tweetworks. I think Tweetworks will bring Twitter to the mass audience of internet users in a way that they can understand.

This 5 Question Interview is with Mike Langford who is the CEO, Founder and Funder of Tweetworks LLC. Mike is a serial entrepreneur with passion for making a difference in peoples lives. Something many people don’t know about Mike is he LOVES to talk. He claims it’s genetic and that if you meet his Grandmother, parents or his young son you’ll be left with no doubt that he’s a born talker. One on one or in front of a crowd, he thrives on conversation. (Tweetworks seems a natural fit now doesn’t it?)

Eric Guerin: Because Tweetworks is a new user interface for Twitter which uses 140 characters or less per update…can you describe what Tweetworks is in 140 characters or less?

Mike Langford: Tweetworks helps you talk with people who like to talk about the things you like to talk about.

EG: Threaded conversations on Tweetworks really make following conversations much easier. On Twitter you used to have to use a hashtag and then search for the conversation on a separate site which seemed like such an archaic way of having a conversation in this day and age. Can you explain how threaded conversations work on Tweetworks and how you came up with the concept for it?

ML: We capture, store and associate all posts made on Tweetworks in a relational database prior to passing them on to Twitter. What makes Tweetworks different than Twitter is the way we approach conversations. The way posts are presented on Twitter is as if each tweet were an independent and unrelated thought. In reality, a great deal of what is posted on Twitter is a reply to a previous statement. And in many cases you’ll find several different people replying to a single post made by one person.

I noticed early on that people like to crowd source on Twitter. It seems logical, you’ve got hundreds or in some cases thousands of people as a resource pool why not ask them stuff? The problem, as I found out, is that a Twitter user needs to be a social media celebrity like Chris Brogan or Guy Kawasaki to have a reasonable expectation of receiving a significant number of responses. Why? Think of it for a minute, Twitter only displays 20 posts at a time. And while you can click older, or use a desktop app like Tweetdeck or Twhirl which allow for easier scrolling the challenge remains, your followers are only seeing 10 to 20 tweets at a time. What this means for the average Twitter user is that he needs to hope that his followers just happen to be looking at the screen when his tweet hits. And with many people following hundreds of people that list of 20 tweets is refreshing pretty quickly. In short, the odds aren’t in your favor for a robust and inclusive discussion with Twitter’s current format.

So I thought, what if we created a way for people to start a discussion or ask a question and have the stream stay together? Then I thought, what if anyone, not just followers, could participate in the discussion? I mean, the only reason I have this weird follower/following thing going on is so I can have a reasonable prospect of having a conversation when I’m on Twitter right? So, we decided to remove the follower contingency and open it up. On Tweetworks conversation is king.

EG: One of the coolest features you have on Tweetworks are public and private “Groups”. Can you explain what the groups are and how they work?

ML: The randomness of Twitter is fun and super cool but it has it’s limitations. As human beings we tend to group things. Believe it or not it is this tendency that leads most people to follow the people they follow. You go to a conference on a certain topic like say a Pod Camp and you meet a bunch of new friends who like to talk about social media. So, you follow them because you had fun talking about social media. But, now your timeline is filled with tweets from these people on a whole bunch of other crap you have no interest in. At Tweetworks we thought a better approach would be to allow people to talk about what they like to talk about when they want to talk about it with other people who like to talk about the same stuff. To accomplish this we allow users to form or join whatever public group they’d like.

The private groups are a little different in that we add the ability to control the “who” part of the conversations that take place inside the group. Private groups are very useful for businesses, clubs, fantasy sports leagues, and sensitive topics.

EG: Unlike many social media tools I was impressed that you already have a plan & outline for eventual monetization, can you briefly discuss this?

ML: The point of starting a business is to earn money isn’t it? I’m not a software engineer with crazy coding skills that sat down one day and thought Tweetworks would be a cool mashup project. I found myself seeing a real problem that if solved would create real value. If Tweetworks is successful in creating value then we should put in place mechanisms to be compensated so we can continue to provide value to our users. I think it is a shame that people create these amazing tools and they eventually have to shut down because they simply could not afford to support the large number of users that adopted their creation. Look no further that Quotably, it was very popular but it is no more. While Ben Tucker cites Twitter’s pipe access as a reason for the shut down, I assume he would have found a work around if the venture were profitable.

Okay, enough pontificating on the why we have a revenue model let’s get to it. Tweetworks has two revenue sources, Pro Accounts and Group Sponsorship.

Pro Account: We rolled out unlimited private group access as our first Pro Account offering. For $24.95/yr a user will be able to have as many private Tweetworks groups as he would like.
Group Sponsorship: Tweetworks groups are available for sponsorship by businesses or individuals. We use the term sponsor because it carries a different weight and expectation than advertiser. On Tweetworks a sponsor will have its profile, or custom copy, displayed prominently in the Group Information Bar and their tweets will be highlighted when displayed in the group. This allows the sponsor to stand out in the crowd of tweets that are relevant to its business. It is our expectation that sponsors will be active and responsible participants in the community (group) in which they sponsor. For the other participants in the community having an active sponsor should feel much less intrusive than straight advertising. To start Sponsorship packages will be priced at 3 days for $45, 7 days at $84, and $150 for 15 days. The flat package pricing will make it simple and easy for a sponsor to jump in and get started.

EG: I know Tweetworks is only in its initial launch phase, what cool new features can we expect next?

ML: One of our next steps is to create and open up our API so that desktop, mobile and other third party applications can port into Tweetworks. We are walking that weird line of needing to include the early adopters of Twitter and staying true to our value proposition. Some people REALLY want us to bring the all of their followers’ activity into Tweetworks and we aren’t planning to do that. But, if we either partnered with an existing desktop application such as Twhirl or Tweetdeck, or develop our own we could make these people happy and still provide the robust Tweetworks experience. It is important to remember that there are millions of registered user names on Twitter but the majority of the population has no idea what it is and why they should consider using it. In the end, it is these new users that will make up the bulk of our customers.

Some other cool things we are working on are RSS feeds for groups and activity notification. We’ve had several requests from people who would like to post their group’s activity on an external website and we think that is a great idea. We’ve also noticed that some users come to the site, participate in a group and then we don’t see them for a while. The challenge with a new community is that it takes some time for the party to heat up. We need to work hard to get people to come to Tweetworks and revisit frequently enough so we build up momentum. We are getting there, I am very pleased with the success we are having so far.

EG: Thanks Mike!

To those of you reading who have been hesitant to check out Twitter or been intimidated by it, go check out Tweetworks. I highly recommend it.


How Twitter Can Save The World

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Or how the power of conversation can help you out in a bind

Okay so Twitter probably can’t save the world, but on one occasion I was involved with it saved one person’s afternoon. I often hear that “Twitter seems like a huge waste of time” from people who don’t get it or aren’t trying to get it. Here’s my argument why that is completely not the case.

Twitter can be as simple as following an interesting conversation between a few people, providing a link to a great article or video or maybe just some witty banter between friends. A great example of an engaging conversation on Twitter is posted by Adam Cohen (or @adamcohen on Twitter) on his blog called Twitter: The Value of Good Conversation where he takes a snapshot of a conversation between Scott Monty (@ScottMonty) and Christopher Penn (@cspenn) of a look at a big corporation’s struggles in the current economy. I didn’t see the original conversation between Scott and Christopher (although I do follow both of them) – but I found the link to the blog post by Adam on Twitter and really wanted to include it in this blog post as a great example of the quality dialogue on Twitter. I’ll admit reading this post made me want to finish my own blog post I’ve been talking about writing since it happened back in August.

The flip side to an interesting dialogue on Twitter is occasionally just getting stuck in a situation and throwing a question out to the world in the hopes that one of your followers in the Twitter stream might have an answer. So I was inspired to pull a thread of conversation out of Twitter I had with Alex Howard (@digiphile) to illustrate this point:

@digiphile: Where’s a good bikeshop near Boylston Street in Back Bay? Blew a tube hopping over a cobblestone curb. No spare. Whoops
August 28th 5:35PM

@eric_guerin: @digiphile I think the closest bike shop to where you are at is Back Bay Bicycles on Comm Ave http://backbaybicycles.com/
August 28th 5:38PM

@digiphile: @eric_guerin & @skalik Thanks! That might still leave time to get a tube, switch it & return to Cambridge & shower. Twitterific replies.
August 28th 5:40 PM

@eric_guerin: @digiphile Been there…almost the same spot too! Good luck & safe ride home!
August 28th 5:43 PM

@digiphile: FTW: http://backbaybicycles.com/ | These guys were awesome. Highly recommended. Self-service tube change, 10min. Loaned me a tool, too. A+
August 28th 6:51 PM

So within the span of 10 minutes Alex was able to find a bike shop less than a block away and get his bike back up and running. All because he asked his followers on Twitter. I used to work less than a block away on the Newbury Street side and frequently used to stop in to Back Bay Bicycles so I was very familiar with the bike shop and their great service. I’ve also been in Alex’ situation with a flat tire and had a LONG walk because I had no way of asking for help on a network like Twitter. By the way Sandy Kalik (@skalik), another of Alex’s followers also answered within those first 10 minutes to help him out.

This is my own experience of how I actually helped someone out of a bind by listening to the ongoing conversation on Twitter. On an everyday basis I get help and ideas from my Twitter followers for simpler things like figuring out a WordPress Plugin. I also give assistance, opinions and ideas where I think I can help people when they ask but this was an example of a time-sensitive situation I was able to help someone else out with.

How about your own experiences? Please consider sharing them either below, on Adam’s post or pingback with a post on your own blog.

Twitter Etiquette 101

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OR how following a new person on Twitter should be treated like a first date.

So, I’m a happily married guy and fully admit I’m not up on the latest trends of the dating scene. But somehow I doubt that walking up to someone you’ve never met and saying “Hey babe, what’s your sign?” or “I play the field, and it looks like I just hit a home run with you. ” is a way of charming someone and it probably won’t get you a second chance…maybe a drink in the face though. Don’t be that guy.

With that in mind I’ve recently noticed a really annoying trend occurring on Twitter where I will follow someone and I get a direct message back from them with some lame sales pitch or directing me to a “free gift” for following them. Why on earth would your first personal contact with me on Twitter be a direct sales pitch? Really? I hardly know you. What would ever possess you to think that this would work.

Twitter is all about building relationships and interacting with the community at large. If I follow you on Twitter and like what you have to say, I’ll start seeking out your tweets. If you continue to provide interesting conversation, content and ideas to the flow of Twitter…I’ll check out your profile on my own and if I want to learn more about what you do or the services you offer, I will contact you. OR if I pose a question on Twitter and your business has the solution…that is the perfect opportunity to engage me and tell me how your product or service is the answer to my dreams.

If I send a direct message to someone when they follow me it’s a casual “Hey thanks for following me! I look forward to reading your tweets!” Just something friendly to acknowledge that I do appreciate you following me because…well…I do appreciate everyone that follows me. Everyone uses Twitter differently, but I would have to guess that no one is logging on to Twitter to hear everyone’s “elevator sales pitch”.

So please…don’t be “that guy”. Like all those cheesy bar pick up lines that don’t work and are insulting to peoples intelligence – starting a conversation with someone using a sales pitch is a sure way to turn them off and get a virtual drink in the face in the form of an “unfollow”.