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The Great Debate on Comment Fragmentation

I just came across a really refreshing blog by Alexander van Elsas on new media and technologies and their effect on social behavior. He has a ton of really insightful posts, including a recent post where he states some great points on why "the conversation" needs to be kept open and free. In fact, van Elsas asks - Can we have more fragmentation, please! While some argue that "comment fragmentation" is hurting the the ability to keep a coherent conversation alive, van Elsas and others point out that the true essence of conversation cannot be restricted by time, place or community. It's open and once published should have a life of its own.

The fundamental argument over comment fragmentation needs to go back to the original concepts of social media and how "creating conversation" was key. Where it starts to get tricky though, is how do publishers keep the conversation going "attached" to the originator who started the thread. This can be a big issue for "brands" trying to use blogs and social networks to connect with their customers and create conversation in new ways a la Social Media Marketing and PR 2.0.

van Elsas writes:
"While the idea of being able to track and follow a conversation that you might have started sounds good, I personally believe that centralising discussion is not a good thing. Conversations are by definition not bounded by time or space. They happen here and there, now and then. It is an illusion to think we can centralize discussions...

Social media technology and services have ensured that the conversation can take place anywhere. That’s the power of social media. It isn’t about media, content or distribution. It is about being able to interact anywhere we want.

It helps us to move away from destinations. It helps the user and the conversation to be set free. It enables what I call the user centric web. The web where the user, and not the destination is important."

It may be a hard pill to swallow, but any time any one tries to "control" a conversation, it is always doomed to fail. I think van Elsas point on the large scale really show that as we talk about "creating conversation," we also have to be ready for it to change, spread, disconnect and take a life of its own.

At that point, the publisher, then has the opportunity (and perhaps) obligation if wanting to stay connected to the conversation to particpate and co-contribute to the conversations lifespan thereafter.

Related Posts:

• Who Owns All These Comments? - ReadWriteWeb
• Comments are not creative content - Get over it! - WinExtra
• FriendFeed Loving and Why Conversation Fragmentation is Your Friend, Not Your Enemy - Robert Seidman 
• Let's Get Serious About FriendFeed; the 1995 Message Board, the Smart Consolidator and the Stolen Conversation - Allen Stern, CenterWorks

Related Tools & Services:

• Shyftr
• Disqus
• IntenseDebate
• YackTrack
• FriendFeed
• Seesmic

Community Is Not a Tactic

There is a great article published in Adweek, "These Brands Build Community - How these Web 2.0 companies build good relationships to build their brands," that clearly and succinctly sums up what innovative (and successful) companies are doing, like Zappos, Threadless, Etsy, Craigslist and Yelp.

The key, the article clearly points to, is that these companies are "quietly building brands online on the strength of communities." While I would say there is nothing "quiet" about @Zappos interactive dialogue and "Tweet Evangelism" on Twitter or the "voice" of user-generated slogans and design and community ratings submitted for the latest and greatest Threadless T's slogans or the "raving fan base" of Etsy's marketplace, the article has a quote that is so worth stating over and over again...

"Community is not a tactic or marketing plan line item, but core to what [successful Web 2.0 brands] do. It means being hyper-responsive to customers, laser focused on usability, unapologetically human and OK with customers determining the course their businesses should take. The bonus: When they take off, these brands don't need to do much in the way of advertising, instead letting their customers spread the word."

This cannot be expressed enough in every aspect of your interactive/marketing plan. Community is so core to successful engagement today that it has got to be where your message becomes dialogue, your consumers become relationships and those relationships become inter-personal.

eMarketer Reports on User-Generated Content

In an April report by eMarketer, User-Generated Content: In Pursuit of Ad Dollars, U.S. Internet users are creating content in record numbers, and millions of other users are reading and looking at it. eMarketer studies this surge in user-generated content creation and provides answers to key questions:

• How many people are creating User-Generated Content in the US?
• How many people are consuming User-Generated Content?
• What are the demographics of content creators and consumers?
• Is User-Generated Content a fad?
• Can User-Generated Content be monetized?

The report also aggregates some interesting statistics on content creators and content consumers over the the next five years.

Still Not Sold on Twitter - Learn from Twistori

Twitter is still a big question mark in a lot of people's minds. How do I engage? Where do I jump in? How will it benefit me and my interests? Will anybody be interested? Why would I use this? What are the benefits? How do I measure its value?

Well, if you spend a couple minutes on Twistori, I think you'll begin to see very clearly what the voice of Twitter is capable of. I'll leave this post to Twistori to tell the Twitter story from here...

Sprint Gets Customer Approval

Apple Gets User Feedback

Zappos Makes a Brand Connection

Tweetscan Learns Users Have an Emotional Connection to Service

Twitter Gets Validated

Benny & Jerry's Free Ice Cream Cone Day Goes Viral

Twistori is...
is the first step in an ongoing social experiment, based on Twitter. inspired by wefeelfine and drawing data from summize, hand-crafted by amy hoy and thomas fuchs.

Obama Maximizes the Online Experience, Part I of II

Today is a monumental day. It's Super Tuesday and for the candidates who have been tirelessly campaigning, today is a very big day. I like to keep politics out of our business blog, but I have been smitten with how Barack Obama really gets "user experience" online.

In somewhat of a pictorial blog post today, I leave you with this... If you want to understand what an exceptionally executed user experience looks like today... use Obama for President's website as a roadmap for success.

From the emotive visual presentation of the human experience of this man, his family, his vision for America, you get...

Obama for President

 

From the elemental navigation, providing multiple paths to answers or action opportunities, you get inspiration and direction on how to engage...

From the well organized issue-based verticals of information, you get answers on topics to help you decide on matters important to you as a citizen...

To find video as your first opportunity to see, hear, and learn more. To have "Yes, We Can" looping in your mind hours after your visit, you get impact...

Next, you have the opportunity to read current updates and make comments on the Obama Blog to keep the conversation going...

To fully engage and retain your most loyal followers, Obama for President offers a way to stay connected, to personalize the experience, to store, share and stay completely connected with my.obama.com.

Obama for President puts every best practice in to play here. It is a website, which excels in everything fundamental and simplifies the progressive tactics to make engagement easy and compelling.

Obama for President is a checklist for all things in good user design. In Part II, we'll continue this post to show you how Obama leverages "free media" and understands the value of the Social Web.

Additional Resources:

• Obama Maximizes Reach on the Social Web, Part II of II

Mashable's Ultimate RSS Toolbox

We've covered several articles, posts and reviewed several products to help shed light on the power of RSS. Mashable has posted an extensive article on 120+ RSS resources to keep you up-to-date and in the know when it comes to using RSS to stay informed. Mashable's Ultimate RSS Toolbox reviews
RSS readers for various operating systems, including web-based and mobile readers, as well as feed validators, plug-ins and a plethora of tools, tips and hacks.

It's a great article that covers the latest and great for RSS today. If you need a good dose of "all things RSS" check Mashable's latest post by Stan Schroeder.

RSS Roundtable Dinner Recap

With the Direct Marketing Association's annual conference in full swing this week, some of the top leaders in the industry (Silverpop, Pheedo, SimpleFeed, PRWeb) sponsored a RSS Roundtable Dinner to discuss RSS as a direct marketing tool. Attending this event, we enjoyed the table conversation as well as the broader open discussion after dinner which covered the current state and evolving trends in RSS marketing. Looking for answers on how RSS can drive sales for direct marketers, the discussion also focused on some of the challenges of how to reach new targets, maximize adoption, and drive sales.

It was interesting to share in the discussion with folks from the publishing, travel, news/publishing and PR industries on what are both the opportunities and perceived business challenges regarding RSS.

Some Common Threads of Discussion

RSS...

• Allows consumers to self-select their information of choice.
• Starts the relationship with consumers interested in  your content, products, etc.
• Does not require an exchange of personal information in order to subscribe.
• Provides consumers the power of choice.
• Allows consumers to pick and choose feeds that are relevant to their needs and interests.
• Makes it easy to receive information at a self-selected destination (email, feed reader, mobile)
• Has become more readily adopted by mainstream consumers as the "technology" of RSS becomes more transparent in daily computing.
• Is not a mutually exclusive tool in your toolkit, but an additional "channel" to connect with consumers.
• Pings, alerts, and informs consumers as often as designed by the business.
• Compliments your other offerings, e-mail, e-newsletters, landing pages, print, web, etc.
• Extends an ongoing relationship with consumers.

As the RSS Roundtable Discussion winded down, it was well-understood that RSS, while still new to many (but no longer to most), the future of this highly-empowering tool in your integrated marketing plan is something definitely to be explored (and soon).

For more information, Silverpop offers an entire resource center dedicated to RSS issues, called RSSDirect.

RSS Gets an Oprah Makeover

There are some persistent memes I follow that make for great debate online. What should we call users? I mean customers -- or is it consumers? Then there's the conversation/debate - how do we get the mainstream to understand and embrace Really Simple Syndication or RSS.

In my opinion there has been somewhat of a white flag stance taken on this -- "Oh don't worry" RSS will become so transparent "users" won't even need to know it's RSS being used," or, my other favorite, "People didn't need to understand how Google works to know it helps them find stuff online."

Well, there's the issue. How do you get people to understand a vague term and seemingly complex concept like RSS. It's technical in nature. Really Simple / Syndication even sounds like an oxymoron. How can this irreplaceable tool (IMHO) be described and embraced by the regular Joe or Josephine? We saw in the beginning of the year that RSS usage was on the rise, but not everyone "gets it" yet.

Thanks to Steve Rubel's post today on MicroPersuasion, I came across Stephanie's Back In My Skinny Jeans blog which completely nails the concept. It stopped me dead in my tracks. I appreciated her concept like the get-out-of-your-seat-and-act-like-a-crazed-audience-member-at-the-Oprah-Show kind of appreciation.

What does RSS mean? Well, Stephanie uses The Oprah Definition to create the perfect mainstream description that will even pass the "mom" test! If I tell this to my mom, she'll get it too.  What is it?

RSS: [I'm] Ready for Some Stories

Stephanie - Thank you! Your concept and visual model are BRILLIANT!

RSS - Really Simple Syndication, But Rarely Used

It may be called Really Simple Syndication, but RSS has not yet caught on with a vast majority of US employees. According to a recent eMarketer article based on research conducted by Media Buyer Planner and Workplace Print Media, only 2% of US employees subscribe to RSS feeds and only 9% no what RSS feeds are. Why the slow adoption I wonder.

Is it really simple? Or is RSS, at this point, still just for us "geeks"? Well, in answering this question to our clients, at some point, "long tail" is usually mentioned. But as RSS feed readers/aggregators become incorporated in operating systems and day-to-day productivity tools (Outlook, etc.), one would expect the knowledge and usage of RSS to increase. It will be interesting to compare these statistics on RSS usage after the latest versions of Microsoft Windows and Apple OS are released as both will incorporate RSS reader/aggregators.

Read RSS – I Get It for other trends/thoughts on RSS usage.

By Avery

I overloaded My Yahoo! Moving on to Omea!

As an info junkie, I officially overloaded My Yahoo! as a RSS aggregator. Not sure what the tipping point was, but the page no longer likes to load and when it does I might as well go get a sandwich before I get to scan the headlines. (Note -- System is fast and browser is good.)

At Viaspire, we put to the test several RSS aggregators to evaluate the experience and try out new ways to control the "information avalanche" we ride every day. Avery has been using IntraVnews Outlook plug-in which allows him to access his mail, calendar and news feeds all from one source. I have resisted pushing more information to my Outlook -- fearful that I will be drawn to my email and my mobile mail -- the always there, always more in my in-box makes me a little resistant.

As far a aggregators go, I feel like none (that I have come across) do everything I need or would like it to do as an "info junkie." Bloglines, Yahoo, and Google all do the job, but given the amount of feeds, podcasts, bookmarks and other collections, I need something that is seemless and easy to organize many information sources. I also need it to be something I "go to" so I can access it on my time and with the quick scanning capability I need to give it to view headlines, then drill in more.

Doing a little research into new entrants in this space, I came across the Omea Reader, by Jet Brains, which has a pretty compelling feature set. I'm going to test it out and do a product review in a follow up post.

For now, if anyone else has any comments or suggestions on feed readers, let us know. We are in search for the perfect productivity tool when it comes to riding ahead of the information avalanche to avoid getting consumed by it.

Other aggregators on our radar (to be tried and tested):

• BlogBridge - "The Ultimate Info Junkie System" (sounds appealing!)
• Newsgator for MS Outlook & Yahoo Messenger (ooh, that could be dangerous)

Stay Tuned!