Social Software Explored

I have to agree with Robert Scoble on the fact that “I love the noise”.  I am referring to Scobleizer’s post about Noise vs. News and why sites like Google News and Techmeme don’t have any noise:

First, let’s do a little definition of the difference between news and noise. The noise examples were pulled off of Twitter in the past few minutes.

NEWS: tens of thousands dead in China quake.
NOISE: BrianGreene: some pirate is playing old radio nova tapes on 92FM dublin, with old jingles and old ads. adverts for rent a 20″ TV 48p a day (48 pence!)

NEWS: Janitors go on strike.
NOISE: flawlesswalrus: @craigmod Iron Man’s fun times. Enjoy!

NEWS: Facebook blocks Google
NOISE: dmkanter: organizing my igoogle homepage

So, how come services like Twitter and FriendFeed have so much noise? Who likes the noise? Who likes the news?

Again - like news but I love the noise.  The noise on sites like Twitter allow you to make your own news or to read “news” before it happens.  Twitter is really the only place for people to break it open. It is a completely viral process and since it is a new medium it favors those people that can not only interpret the noise but those than can control it.

I have been listening to the noise for a long time - it helped me get into the Internet (which is pretty much filtered noise).  If you could look at all of the information flowing through the Internet at anytime you would first get a wicked headache - but you would then be the smartest person alive - but only if you can handle the noise.

Let’s take a few things that I have posted to Twitter recently:

Following the Star Wars movie up with Lego Star Wars the Complete Saga on the Wii reinforces the use of the force. Training young well I am

To an untrained eye this would seem like noise - clearly - who cares what movies I am watching - there are millions of people out there watching millions of movies every day.

But to a trained eye - this information may be interesting.  Look at this information from a different angle or compare this to what may be a trend.

Take this marketing issue for instance: How do we know that the video games that follow movie stories enhance the movies storyline and improve brand recognition.  Surely if they both make a lot of money you could make an inference but you may not know for real.

If you could comb all of the conversations on Twitter where people talk about movies and video games you could prove the theory.  Additionally, you could engage those users in conversations which will help enforce your theory.

This is the noise - and this is how you read it.  Robert is right - I love this!

Uncategorized Blogs, Robert Scoble, Social Networking, Twitter

Blogging for money may be a dangerous use of resources but what about ‘trolling’ for money.  Today I came across this awesome blog post by Jeremiah Owyang (Senior Analyst for Forrestor) - someone that I follow on Twitter and a blog that I enjoy reading.

The post (entitles CMS Horror Stories, and Your Soon-To-Be ‘Legacy’ Community Platform) is a real good read for anyone who is in the midst of a CMS selection.  In his post, Jeremiah asks to very key questions:

1) I’d love to hear from you about your CMS horror stories, feel free to leave a comment below, go ahead, vent away.

2) Are you deploying a community platform for your web strategy at your company? What are you doing to plan for the long term 5+ years impacts of this system in regards to the rest of the enterprise web strategy?

I work at PaperThin (makers of the CommonSpot Content Server) and I have to say that Jeremiah opened my eyes with this post to an amazing sales opportunity.  One that I am sure smart people are deploying (and we will be shortly as well) - and that is ‘Blog Trolling’.  A quick search on Technorati for CMS returns over 22K results.  Each search result a Blog with some information about Content Management Systems.

One of the most difficult thing to do in the world of sales is to find your target market.  What better way to find a customer interested in a CMS then on a blog post (an open communication channel) that is discussing pains or issues with their current CMS.  In solution selling this would give us the opportunity to “Recognize the pain” - for most of the people who post comments on Jeremiah’s post they are admitting their pain publicly.

Best thing about comments on a blog - since most people are constantly trying to sell their blog to readers of other blogs, they include the link in their comments (just click on the persons name).  Can’t fault a sales person from e-mailing or calling (most blogs extend contact information) you and saying:

“Hey, saw here that you were having difficulty with your current CMS and that you feel like it is ‘inflexible’.  Give me a half hour and I will show you how flexible our application is …”

In all honesty, when you post comments on a blog you are openly asking someone to contact you.  You are begging for it.

Note: More on his second question (about your Community Platform) a bit later.

Uncategorized Blogging, Blogs, CMS, CommonSpot, Content Management, Jeremiah Owyang