A Student's Guidebook to Efficiency in Social Media

Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish. R.I.P. Steve Jobs

boochikan — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 02:48:40 +0000

Today, we’ve lost a visionary, which has been surprisingly hard for me to say. If there was one thing that I could really thank Steve Jobs for is his steadfast dedication to making products for people and his ability to create products based on the human experience. His understanding for human interaction and simple product design is an inspiration to me.

As a tech guru, it’s no surprise that Steve was always in the spotlight, bringing Apple to the forefront of the technology age (on more than one occasion). But Steve was never jaded, only accepting interviews for Apple product releases and never drawing attention to himself. I’m sure it was largely attributed to his humble beginnings, being raised by a foster home that only wanted the best for him. This humbleness from a CEO of the second most valuable company only rivaling Exxon Mobil is a sight to be marveled by all.

In the months leading up to his death, it seemed like Steve was still in control. Perhaps finally believing that he’d helped built a company and culture that would live on in his absence – and he sure has. I truly believe that the impact he’s made on technology and on the world will continue to pervade in our everyday lives. Some have even compared Steve Jobs to the likes of Edison and Einstein. Though I can’t make the same parallels, I can certainly say he was a visionary and will be remembered for decades to come.

If you haven’t had the honor to take watch Steve Jobs’ commencement speech at Stanford University in 2005, I think it’s time. You can also get a transcribed version of his speech here.

I live by and will continue to live by some of his famous words:

Live on your own terms, don’t let others bring you down.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Trust your gut and follow your heart.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

Do what you love and don’t settle for less.

You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

In the words of the great: “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish.”

Rest in peace, Steve Jobs.

Posted via email from Welcome to GeorgeDy.com

Facebook On-Board with Inner “Circles”

boochikan — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 14:52:40 +0000

Just seeing the latest update on Facebook this morning, giving users the ability to customize share/privacy settings inline in status updates.

Logging in you’ll see three things:

1. A more obvious dialogue box bringing attention to adding friends. The description indicates that “tagging” friends allows them and their friends to see your posts.

2. Select location, which is something we’ve been hearing more about lately. Facebook is finally integrating location more in depth with their product offering. Tying location to everyday Facebook actions is important and that’s why locking your location for status updates is front and center.

3. Probably the most drastic change would be the ability to “Control privacy when you post – or after,” and what I’m calling Facebook Circles? Because really, where have we seen this if not Google+ Circles? Select the “Group” of people you’ve already curated on Facebook so that only THEY can see it.

Here’s what Facebook has to say on that:

“Use this to manage who can see and comment on posts you share, including ones with location, if you add it. When you change this setting, it will stay how you set it for future posts until you change it again. Posts (including check-ins) from old mobile Facebook apps will use your new default privacy setting.

Also, we’ve changed the label for “Everyone” to “Public,” but your posts will still reach the same people.”

What do you think? Will this catch on with the mainstream Facebook user and validate the Google+ circles use case?

My Beef Against Dropdown Menus

boochikan — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 05:19:12 +0000

I’d say, use it sparingly and use it wisely. When content really doesn’t require another click for the sake of the dropdown, don’t do it.

When you do it, be conscious of the placement of your selection choices. In Google Docs, selecting both text color and highlight color gives you options that are no longer sitting under the parent option. Now, when users go to select an option in the far right, the obvious move is in a direct line, which collapses the dropdown. Instead, the dropdown forces users to navigate the mouse down and to the right in an “L” shape.

No, bad user experience! Bad!

Jambox by Jawbone and the Benefit of Awesome Promo Videos

boochikan — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 05:43:58 +0000

Sharing the latest addition to my tech gadget wishlist: Jambox by Jawbone.

How, you might ask, did you find this? Well, I was invited to UXWeek 2011 by the guys over at Adaptive Path, an experience design consultancy. As a UI/UX designer, I’m thrilled to check out this 4-day conference dedicated to one of the things I’m most passionate about – making products more awesome by designing them to the way people work.

Anyway! Taking a look at the speaker list, you’ll quickly get down to Adam Lisagor, also known as “sandwich man.” He makes a TON of startup videos and is probably most famous for his monotone-style narration in such hits as Square Everywhere, This is My Flipboard, and Get Flow (not to mention all the others Adam has helped direct/produce. You can find them all here. So in the process of watching all his films, I run into the Jambox by Jawbone and think about how amazingly simple it is.

Bluetooth connection to your iOS device, which makes listening to music, taking conference calls, etc. all so easy. My only question is, when you take the conference call, do you have to use the iPhone as the mic? Oh whatever, this product rocks. Having a kickass video doesn’t hurt either.

Building Engagement on Facebook

boochikan — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 18:40:36 +0000

Introduction to Facebook Engagement

Facebook pages are an interesting beast. Unlike Twitter, it’s not likely that there will be any organic growth from “random” followers without external prompts – this is especially true if you don’t have a physical presence to help you advertise. As a topic in itself, Facebook is a much more private medium for conversation between people and brands. Whenever a person comments on a Facebook page using their account, other users following the same company will be able to see the information you make public. Case and point, in order to have people interact with your Facebook page, they need to be genuinely interested in having their person associated with your brand.

Kickstart Your Page, Give It A Fighting Chance

Fill out your page with as much content as you can (this means an address, phone #, websites, mission statement, products, email addresses). If you want people to trust your brand, give them something to work with.
Kickstart your # of likes and get a vanity URL for your page by doing the friends and family push. It’s important to get that vanity URL so you can start promoting your brand easier in passing.
Create valuable and rich content for your users, which could be anything from HD photos to videos, or basic polls for engagement.
Watch your language! Talk to your audience like you think they’d like to be spoken to. If that means courteous, be courteous, if it’s coarse, make it coarse. This is a page for you to interact with your unique audience.
Test keywords. Try to see what kind of action words will get comments and likes.
As a key practice, you might try using specific words (like, take, submit, watch, post, check, comment, click, etc.) to get people to like your posts. You might need to start using other words to get comments (post, comment, tell us, check, like, submit, share, click, take, etc.). At the end of the day it will matter largely on your demographic.
Check the competition, see what’s working for them and what’s not working. You can see this at face value by just visiting their page.
Don’t be inquisitive. Studies have shown that words like “how, why, what” attempt to prompt long responses from users and are too personal. Try words like “when, where, and should” to create questions that are softer but still garner response.
Don’t just post random updates happening in your company, if you don’t care, no one else will.

Analyze Your Users, Customize Your Presence

Use Facebook Insights, it’s invaluable to know your audience. Insights will tell you specifically what times people are interested, what they’re liking and commenting on, all of which you can optimize on and make an awesome customized forum for your people.
Analyze the peak hours of engagement through Insights and testing different time variables. This might mean having your marketing person post at times like before work, after work, and late night because research has shown this time to have the largest effect.
Analyze the days of peak engagement, which for some companies and brands might be the end of the week because their constituents are looking for something to procrastinate on.

Offline Engagement Is Necessary

We’ve all seen brands do this. They make sure they tie their Facebook campaign closely to all of their marketing materials – whether its commercials, printed materials, on their website, at parties, etc.
Don’t just put a Facebook logo on your website and especially “unclickable” material and expect people to convert through this. It won’t work. Try using conventions like QR codes to help bridge the digital to physical gap.
It goes without saying that engaging an audience online requires offline groundwork, so start talking to people and telling them to like your brand and give them something to remember that.

Third Party Applications

Use Facebook apps like Wildfire and Involver to drive interaction (if it works). These sites help convert viewers to “likers” by throwing up richer pages that prompt users for a “like” before they get access.

Always Remember To

Ask yourself “Why would they care?” because if you can’t answer this yourself, then chances are neither can they.
Check statistics in Facebook Insights like impressions, comments, likes, and analyze with trends in mind. There’s a reason those metrics are made available to you.
Promote your Facebook page online with things like email signatures, website headers and footers, through Twitter or other social networks, on your business cards (with URL), and any place that gets you impressions.

See the full gallery on Posterous

Building Engagement on Twitter

boochikan — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 20:58:37 +0000

Introduction to Twitter Engagement

There is an interesting balance that must be struck when you’re trying to build a strong following on Twitter. Obviously, certain people are more predisposed to getting Twitter followers up front (depending on your influence in reality), but there are several things to be done to build a follower based and retain them.

Baby Steps

Start by following the people that you want to influence and that influence you
Strike a unique balance of followers and following, 1follower:1.25following is a good practice, but early on having more followers is alright
Start using hashtags and try to associate your company/brand with said hashtag (“own” the hashtag if possible)
Reach out and converse with new people using hashtags that are relevant to you and them
Retweet popular articles and topics, so long as they appeal to your purpose
Keep your average numbers of tweets consistent so that you develop a schedule with your followers
Tweet at times that your followers would likely see your content
Don’t continuously offer products or free giveaways because your followers will likely follow you for the free and not for the brand
Don’t spam people with a canned message, it only makes them angry

Maturing

Keep following relevant people and influential people, a lot of people forget that they need to reciprocate on the following
It’s alright to start writing open ended questions once you’ve built up a user base, before it’s just noise sent to a select few people
Continue sharing resources and more importantly, your take on those topics, people follow you because you have value in your POV, they don’t need you to see RTed content
Connect people and bring people into conversations with other Twitter users, be a facilitator to connect people over like topics – this helps you build relationships
Use it sparingly to have conversations with people

Always

Reply to your followers if it is a relevant topic to you or something that is asking for your direct participation
Offer support (especially if you offer a product)
Be a human
Don’t rant if it’s counterproductive

Off-Site Twitter Engagement

It goes without saying that building a user base on ANY social network requires real groundwork. That means getting out of your seat and talking to people. Making it possible to follow or get engagement with your brand on Twitter outside of the site. Where?

email signatures
on your website
promote hashtag use at events you go to
on other social networks
on your business cards
anything that you do to gets impressions daily

Why Google Music is Going to Rock

boochikan — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 00:40:24 +0000

I’ve always been a big fan of Google, but let’s be honest, they haven’t really been knocking it out of the park with their latest products. Many seem half baked, if not just a quick attempt to steal market share wherever the masses are headed (queue Google Offers). Suffice it to say, I thought Wave was a complete disaster that could have been great, Voice is a giant that requires a little more refinement and execution, etc.

So when I heard about Music, yes, I was skeptical. But after playing with it a bit, I think it really has the potential to rock. Why?

Well, take a look at the success you see with Pandora and Grooveshark. Both are streaming music services that allow you to access your music from anywhere. For a while, I’ve been saving music files to Dropbox, which allows me to stream music from my Dropbox straight from my own library. I mean, it’s cool that Pandora curates music for you, but that’s more about discovery than accessing music. And Grooveshark? It’s cool, but I’d like to listen to my music without having to create whole new playlists, etc.

Enter Google Music.

This is a service that lets you stream music just like Grooveshark, but with all your the music in your computer. Once more, Google is launching complementary services on devices that allow you to stream that music onto your device. I think it’s great.

For Android users, Music will soon become a replacement for your default music player. I’ve been running music from DoubleTwist because of what they call “AirSync,” an amazing little app that allowed me to transfer music from my computer (dedicated folder) to my Android device without having to plugin. Music is a replacement for this and does it smoother. Once the music stores to your device (after being uploaded to the cloud via any desktop), you’re good to go.

What about if you’re not at your computer? This is cloud service remember? You can launch Google Music from any computer so you can retrieve your songs anywhere. So just like that, I think Google is going to disrupt the music environment in a way Apple hasn’t been able to. Access all your music all the time and never lift another cord. That’s the next step Apple needs to take. But as a solid Android and Google fan, I’m glad to have it at my disposal now.

Number 1 Rule for Startups (via Biz Stone on Howard Stern)

boochikan — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 18:57:07 +0000

“If you’re going to do a startup and you’re going to take that risk, you absolutely have to be emotionally invested.”

via Biz Stone’s Talk on Howard Stern

Infographic: History of Social Networking

boochikan — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 07:20:46 +0000

3 simple things I learned as a newbie exhibitor at SxSW 2011

boochikan — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 07:13:41 +0000

1. Launch with your MVP

MVP = minimum viable product. I've also heard the QoU (quantum of utility) variety or the straightforward version – "when you have something that one person wants to use badly." Thank you Paul Graham for that. Simply put, if you have a product, figure out your core competency and iterate on that. V1 is a good way to test and validate your concept and that's exactly what we did.

Our company GetContact.Info was lucky enough to get an exhibitors booth at the 2011 SxSW Trade Show. We had a unpolished stand with a taped together sign that sat atop a TV that wasn't able to loop our promotional video. We had no standing signs or fancy stands to place our brochures and cards, or one of the retractable TV stands that everyone else seemed to have. But what we did have was an interactive way to engage the attendees, show the utility of our service in a 15 second pitch, make registration optional and simple, and give them something to share both passively and actively (their QR stickers).

If they like your product, the state/aesthetic appeal of your stand will have little effect on the foot traffic and waits that you get.

Side note: It didn't hurt to have Justin Bieber's "Baby" in instrumental looping in our promo video. Haha!

2. Be friendly and genuine

This one is simple. If you're friendly and seem genuinely interested in what people do, they'll be more interested in what you do. So be nice, smile, and answer questions, it will pay off.

3. Offer (passive) promotional giveaways

Mentioned this one earlier, but if you give people things that they can walk around with that displays your brand, the better it is. Yes, brochures are nice, but we printed 1500 brochures and came back with more than half. In contrast, we brought about 2000 cards and came back with less than 500. Doesn't that say something?

People would rather take something small the demonstrates your brand so make sure you do your business cards right and build consistency in your brand. This includes logo, colors, font type, text, etc. It ALL matters.

We set people up with QR codes that were branded with our little logo and display stickers that reflected our logo and color. These are passive ways to display your brand and for us, it was THE way start organically sharing what our product could do in the wild.

Trust me, there were more takeaways from being a first time exhibitor. It was a tiring trade show, which is not over yet, so keep hydrated and eat when you can. This was the single most revitalizing and encouraging example of customer development and validation that we could have hoped for.

I encourage anyone with a consumer friendly product to go out and display your product. Bring it to a crowd that gets it and launch early.

My (harmless) plug: to create an account of your own, visit us at getcontact.info to start tracking your business card analytics today. thanks