Family Learning Center

Posts Tagged ‘Commenters’

What Do Social Media Marketers Know About Tech? SURVEY RESULTS

First, we’d like to thank all 596 survey respondents and the many Open Thread commenters who gave such interesting and valuable feedback in our recent post “Should Social Media Experts Be Required to Know Their Tech?“

Over the past couple days, we’ve been able to put together a decent picture and identify some knowledge gaps and points of confusion for many would-be social media experts. But first, let’s address why some of the RWW staff – and many of our readers, some of whom must hire social media experts – feel it’s important for even the most marketing-oriented of consultants to have a rudimentary understanding of the workings of the Web, including its ecosystem of companies and applications.

Sponsor

You will always need to know more about the Web.

Konqueror is a popular browser among Linux users. The browser Mozilla hasn’t been supported since 2006, having been replaced by Firefox and, to a lesser extent SeaMonkey, both products of the Mozilla Foundation.

The Web does a lot more and a lot less than the average bear would think.

For the most part, we humans have a hard time admitting that we’re “average bears,” though. Before you earn the moniker of “guru” or “expert” or even “professional/consultant,” you need to be far above average in your knowledge of the Web, not just how to get a few thousand Twitter followers or how to increase sales by X percent through Facebook promotions. Those things can come down to common sense or secondhand advice from true pioneers in social media.

Generally speaking, a social media expert will have been around the block long enough to know a CMS from a CPU, to know a bit about servers and DDoS attacks, to know what kinds of operating systems and browsers and even hardware the tech elite prefer to use (or debate over). And the good ones will remain humble enough to keep learning and will always admit there’s more to know. Some of the wisest social media advisors I’ve know will ask to not be called experts, in fact, for how can any one person truly be an expert on something as vast as the Internet?

Flip Side of the Coin: Imagine someone telling you he was a broadcast media expert. That includes television – national, local, cable, satellite, you name it – and all kinds of AM/FM and satellite radio. It might also include pre-show advertisements in movie theaters. That also includes media spend, account management and metrics for all kinds of ads, from branding to direct response. Essentially, the person is claiming to be a one-man ad agency – an impossible claim at best and a fraudulent one at worst.

How to Fill the Knowledge Gap: Start listening to people who disagree with you. Search the farthest corners of the Web for new people and new ideas. Stop hanging out in echo chambers and start telling yourself every day, “I know that I know nothing.” That phrase seems to have done Socrates some good; chances are it could help you, too.

You need to communicate with developers.

Haskell is a rare and complicated programming language. .NET sounds more familiar, but it’s a framework, not a language.

In almost every social media project that doesn’t involve something as simple as setting up a Twitter account, you’ll have to work with and rely on the expertise of developers.

You might not want to learn a programming language yourself – it can take a lot of time, which is a precious commodity. But if you don’t know the basics of what programming languages can and cannot do, as well as what languages your developer colleagues use, you’ll end up frustrated and inefficient. And the aforementioned developer colleagues might feel disrespected as well; being asked to deliver fantastical products or results from someone with no understanding of your work isn’t a fun experience.

Flip Side of the Coin: Imagine a CTO telling you, an interactive marketer, to run a direct mail campaign and get 500,000 new registrations. It could be done, perhaps, but it’s not efficient or a good way to use your skills. Even if he told you he wanted 500,000 new signups, is that a realistic goal? Is it based on current adoption trends? Does this guy have any idea what he’s asking for?

How to Fill the Knowledge Gap: Read up on the basics of programming languages; spend a few hours here and there on Wikipedia and O’Reilly books. Then, ask questions of developers you trust. Don’t be afraid to “sounds dumb” or be inquisitive.

You need to rely on hard data and facts, not gut feelings.

It may seem to be the ad-free fluffy bunny of the social networking world, but Twitter turned a profit through search deals in 2009.

On occasion, we social media folks make intuitive choices that turn out to be dead wrong. While there’s a lot to be said for making bold choices for your users and clients, there’s much more value in making solid choices based on observed trends, analyzed data and tested outcomes. In fact, it’s plain irresponsible to make recommendations to clients based on feelings rather than facts.

Always challenge yourself to make sure your opinions and advice line up with facts, not the other way around. As a wise man once wrote, “You don’t use science to prove that you’re right, you use science to become right.”

Flip Side of the Coin: Rather than looking at marketing budgets or user traffic, your CEO tells you to spend $1 million on an AdWords campaign because “Google and advertising are where’s the money’s at online, right?” It seems like a ridiculous gamble with no logical reason of rhyme.

How to Fill the Knowledge Gap: Test everything you might suggest. Test it over a reasonable period of time, making sure to take peak times into account, and get a reasonable data sample. Learn about A/B and multivariate testing, website analytics, SEO and all the dirty details of traffic and user responses. Most of all, never, ever assume.

You need to know about the finance and investment market to identify competitors, potential partners and pitching opportunities.

Friends and family (and fools) will always be the first to invest in any startup.

Especially if you’re communicating with or about startups, you need to understand a little bit about venture capital, if for no other reason than to understand an app or company’s place in the market. VCs can sometimes be good barometers of a startup’s health or the likelyhood of future success.

Likewise, with regard to our survey question about profitable social media apps and companies, knowing about various stages of development can help you know when to suggest key partnerships. Collaboration between two entities can give a boost to both.

As a strategist, a consultant or any kind of expert, you need to be able to spot a sure bet just as quickly as a sinking ship. And in the startup-filled world of social media, few are better at this all-important task than those with an understanding of tech investment.

Flip Side of the Coin: Your CEO informs you that the company is about to start a marketing campaign on a website that, through your social and industry connections, you know is about to go out of business. In fact, every website of its kind if flailing; you’re surprised he wasn’t aware of the situation.

How to Fill the Knowledge Gap: Read ReadWriteStart, of course! We recommend (and frequently interview and comment on) various brilliant VCs, angels and experienced entrepreneurs on this channel.

We hope you’ve found this information entertaining and informative. The remaining questions on the poll were, by and large, answered correctly. There still seems to be some confusion on the definition of the word “hacker,” but I’m convinced that one will simply take more soapboxing on my part.

What words of advice do you have to share with your less technical colleagues in social media? How can we all improve our game online while making the Internet a better, smarter place? Let us know in the comments.

Discuss

Read the whole story…

Dell issues Alienware M17x stuttering audio fix, will it stick?

About a week after we ran an update on the Alienware M17x stuttering audio problem, Dell’s community manager John B. has written in to let us know that the company has posted a fix. It entails using a particular BIOS revision, dropping to the Windows native mass storage driver, and installing the latest Alienware wireless card driver, all of which are available for download at the source link below. In Dell’s testing this has removed the latency spikes that have caused the rather undesirable audio st-st-stuttering issues, but many commenters over at Direct2Dell aren’t so sure, indicating that this targeted fix is actually a miss and that things are no better. If you’re affected, give this fix a shot and let us know whether you have success. If not, perhaps the registry tweak we posted before will do the trick.

Dell issues Alienware M17x stuttering audio fix, will it stick? originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 21 Feb 2010 00:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  Direct2Dell  | Email this | Comments
Read the whole story…

How The Internet Can Impede Democracy

Yesterday I asked the question: does China really feel threatened by U.S. social media services such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube? As usual, I got an education in the comments to the post. While it’s true that the Chinese government blocks Twitter, Facebook and all of the main American social media sites, several commenters pointed out they are blocked not because of their popularity (because they aren’t, in fact, very popular in China), but due to their degree of freedom. In other words, the more open a social media service is, the more likely it will be blocked in China.

However, perhaps authoritarian governments shouldn’t block social media – it may actually be helpful to them!

Sponsor

Evgeny Morozov, a Belarus-born researcher and blogger, presented at TED last year on the topic of How the Net aids dictatorships. In his presentation (embedded below), Morozov makes the contrarian argument that the Internet is actually helping authoritarian governments – more so than being a challenge to them. Moronov asserted that governments like China’s have "mastered the use of cyberspace for propaganda purposes."

Morozov noted that in the Iran Twitter protests of June of 2009, services such as Twitter, Facebook and blogs were actually operational and being used by activists. According to Morozov, this was great for the Iranian government – as it enabled them to "gather open source intelligence." The government could identify how Iranian activists connect to each other, by looking at their Facebook pages or Twitter connections.

Kaiser Kuo commented in yesterday’s post about the same issue in China:

"…it’s astonishing how cavalier some critics of the CCP [China Communist Party] are on Twitter, making no effort to disguise their identities, making their network of friends totally transparent (you can use any of a number of Twitter tools to see the extent of interconnectedness, friend overlap, number of @ messages back and forth, etc) and leaving a completely searchable history. Anyone with a serious anti-CCP agenda would be an idiot to use Twitter."

Also worth noting: Moronov said in his TED talk that cyber-activism may be offset by what he termed "cyber-hedonism." He claimed that people are becoming passive due to the Internet. He said that we often assume that the Internet is going to be the catalyst of change, but it may actually be "the new opium for the masses."

Moronov’s theories were challenged in the comments to that TED video. One commenter claimed that "we focus on the obvious totalitarian regimes while our so called democracies use propaganda on a daily basis."

Regardless, Moronov raises some very valid points. While the Web promotes freedom of expression, at the same time it enables authoritarian regimes to monitor their citizens and identify troublemakers.

Let us know your thoughts on this in the comments.

Photo: harrystaab

Discuss

Read the whole story…

Open Thread: The Internet Is Hard

Earlier today, we had a runaway hit of a post that went viral within a few hours, getting unbelievable pageviews and hundreds of retweets and comments.

The trouble was, it wasn’t because of the post’s content. Due to some interesting SEO magic, the post was one of the first search results for the term “Facebook login.” As a result, hundreds of confused readers bombed us with angry comments about how much they hated the “new Facebook,” a.k.a. our Facebook Connect comment login.

We could laugh (and we did), but we could also consider that these are our customers and users – the people we make the Web for.

How can we balance making the Web simple enough for all users while still creating tech cool enough to satisfy geeks like us? And who says either group – nerds or users – is “normal,” anyway?

Sponsor

Here are some valuable lessons we were taught today by the commenters on the thread. We’ll employ the term “user” here to indicate the non-geeky, average person who uses the Web primarily as a way to navigate his or her real life. Feel free to disagree with this terminology or suggest new nomenclature in the comments.

1. Users don’t care about what you care about.

This quote from another RWW post pretty much sums it up:

“Especially in Silicon Valley, where it’s easy for entrepreneurs to isolate themselves in circles with like-minded techies and fellow entrepreneurs, I feel that a huge amount of startup CEOs and designers… make product decisions that appeal to their own interaction behaviour with such applications or what they think their friends will find cool.

“Building for geeks makes for great customer immersion if you’re building something like (the wonderfully useful) GitHub, but that same process doesn’t work so hot if you’re building a site for middle-aged moms.”

You and your geek friends != middle aged moms. And your users are often statistically more likely to be middle-aged moms.

2. Users don’t read your copy or look at your branding.

Banners, logos, carefully crafted wordsmithery – this is all filler, we’ve found out. Users have been calloused by 15 or so years of surfing through bad ads and marketing babble, and they are unconsciously tuning out everything but the one thing they came to find.

For example, none of the 200 or so confused Facebook users who commented on our earlier post read the post itself, the huge logo at the top of the page, the many links to non-Facebook-related content or the huge, all-bold paragraph about how ReadWriteWeb is not, in fact, some ill-conceived redesign of Facebook. They simply searched for “Facebook login” and, upon navigating to our site, scrolled until they found the one button they wanted to click. Which brings us to our third assertion.

3. Users gravitate toward the simple and the familiar.

A ton of the confused commenters scrolled down far enough to find the Facebook Connect button for logging into the comments section – as evinced by the fact that their Facebook profiles were then linked to their comments.

I’ve often criticized the ripped-off look of social media UIs, but once a UI becomes familiar, is it not a service to certain types of end users to continue in that vein? Two hackneyed expressions will back me up, one about reinventing wheels and the other about not needing to fix things that aren’t broken.

As a tech geek of the 12-hours-a-day-online variety, I appreciate innovative and intuitive web interfaces. But a lot of users don’t. Even if it’s simple, it needs to be familiar. Why do you suppose some of our current, deeply entrenched web design elements – from buttons to text blocks – even exist?

4. Users rule the Internet.

Finally, this is the reason we’ve stopped mocking the poor folks who left those comments long enough to write this post.

400 million people now use Facebook, and they don’t all have CS Master’s degrees from Stanford. But if you work in the IT/tech/Internet/online media industries, they do manage to pay your bills. They’re the ones who open emails, click ads, make purchases, sign up for subscriptions and generally take the majority of actions that make our whole ecosystem work.

And most of them have no idea what a web browser is or how it differs from a search engine or a social network. They’ve chosen to be smart about other things, like building cars or making art or raising families. I’ll bet some of them are terrific dancers. We have to build the Web for them, too.

As a user, a developer, a designer, a marketer, a startup dude or lady, whatever you happen to be, how do you balance the need to find or create cool tech and apps with the need to build with these kinds of users in mind? Do you get frustrated? Do you get feedback? Do you kill features and make buttons bigger?

What have been your successes and failures, or where have you learned lessons? We’d love to know, so please tell us in the comments.

Discuss

Read the whole story…

Achtung! Motorola Milestone now free on contract in Germany, sort of

Filed under: Cellphones

Achtung! Motorola Milestone now free on contract in Germany, sort of originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 17 Nov 2009 17:03:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments
Read the whole story…

Free music and a chance to win more from Tap Tap Revenge 3

Filed under: Gaming, Software, Odds and ends, Freeware, Developer, iPhone, App Store

Tap Tap Revenge 3 is apparently going gangbusters over on the App Store — Tapulous has gotten in touch with us to let us know about two different free promotions they’re doing lately, as well as give you readers a chance to win their entire catalog for free.

First up, the free stuff for everybody. Today, October 22, they’re giving away the great song “Fireflies” by one of my favorite new music acts, Owl City. It just happens to also be the number one song in iTunes today as well, which is a pretty big deal for Tapulous — it’s the first time they’ve been able to pair up a TTR track release with a #1 on the download charts.

To get that free song, just sign in to the application and pick it up. Additionally, if you don’t have the app yet, buying the app before this Friday can get you a free premium two-pack — all you have to do for that is email your iTunes reciept (or a screenshot of it) to “freemusic AT tapulous DOT com” and put your TTR3 username (and only your username) in the email subject line.

And hey, if that’s not enough free stuff, keep reading — here at TUAW, we’re giving away licenses to TTR3’s entire premium catalog (the whole thing, from A Perfect Circle to Robbie Williams) to three lucky commenters.

Continue reading Free music and a chance to win more from Tap Tap Revenge 3

TUAWFree music and a chance to win more from Tap Tap Revenge 3 originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 22 Oct 2009 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Read the whole story…

Google Figured Out Where New Zealand Is

Last week we wrote about Google’s odd habit of putting the Google New Zealand web site as the top result for a ton of queries like Google Ireland and Google Egypt (and the commenters found many more).

I wondered how long it would take for them to make the change. If they did it right away it would be too obvious. They’d probably wait until the middle of the weekend to fix it.

Today, in the middle of the weekend, they fixed it. And now we can link to a clip from The Chaser’s War On Everything (which is even better than Flight of the Conchords):

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Read the whole story…

Want California Data In Your Sex Offender App? There’s A Lawyer For That.

If you haven’t been following the whole story of Offender Locator, the iPhone app for locating sexual predators around you based on location, let me quickly run it down. ThinAir Wireless released the app, and it immediately became very popular, a top 10 paid app. Then it vanished from the App Store. The issue that Apple apparently had with it, was something we mentioned in our initial post on it after several commenters had, the legality of selling data about sex offenders.

Specifically, the issue was the selling of this data in California, so ThinAir removed the California data from the paid version of the app (it’s still available on the free version), and Apple let it back in the store. But ThinAir wasn’t sure that it had to actually do that, so it contacted a privacy lawyer. His conclusion: “I know of no law in California which states that criminal information made public by the state of California that is compiled into a database cannot be sold to the public for profit.”

ThinAir Wireless has submitted an 11 page letter of opinion to Apple written by the attorney on the topic. Included in it are many comments from our original post, including this hilarious one. We’ve embedded the entire document below.

To be clear: This is just an opinion letter at this point, there is no threat of a lawsuit. But it has now been over a week since ThinAir submitted the letter to Apple and it has yet to hear a response. Meanwhile, Offender Locator remains for sale in the App Store [iTunes link], minus the California data. Obviously, it’s ThinAir’s opinion that it should be allowed to reinstate that data, and clearly the application is hampered without it.

While ThinAir seems to believe our post on the matter (and specifically the comments about it) forced Apple’s hand in pulling down the app, several other outlets covered this angle as well, and we’d have to believe that Apple would have its own legal team review such an action before it took any.

Still, we continue to watch this story with interest — particularly if an iPhone app and the comments on this blog help to set some kind of legal precedent.

Predator Opinion Letter –

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Read the whole story…