Portals and KM

Knowledge Management Twitterers

I discovered Stan Garfield’s list of knowledge management Twitterers recently. There were 47 at the time and I was pleased to be included. About a third were new ones for me and I decided to follow most of them after checking out their recent tweets. Stan also has an excellent list of knowledge management bloggers.

Stan links to several other lists of knowledge management Twitters including David Gurteen’s KM Twitter list and Patrick DiDomenico's KM Twitter List.

Stan also provided other KM Twitter groups to join: Twitter Groups Knowledge Management (KM) Practitioners and Flocks/KM. These can be added to the We Follow lists I posted on yesterday.

Twitter on.

We Follow: Twitter, Knowledge Management, and Enterprise 2.0

I discovered an interesting Twitter app – WeFollow. You can add your Twiter feed and place three tags. You can also search by these tags to help decide what to choose and see who else is using these tags. I tried the tag, KM, and found 7,557 Twitterers sorted by popularity. The others I tried are listed below with the Twitters at the time of discovery. You seem to be able to go back and register again and add more tags. However, they wipe out the old tags so you are limited to three. I ended up picking KM, knowledgemanagement, and enterprise 20 on my third try.

e20 - 748 sorted by popularity

enterprise20 – 10,021

KM – 7,557

knowledgemanagement - 2,688

social media - 8,834,366

blogs – 1,678,425

This is another way to find relevant KM and enterprise 2.0 twitters. There is also the enterprise 2.0 Twitter list started by Susan Scrupski that I have mentioned before.

Allman Brothers Anthology on YouTube

Now you can find a stable collection of Allman Brothers videos on YouTube. Just search for Moogis within YouTube and you will find these videos along with Moogis promotions. There are many interviews and great live videos including Highway 61 Revisited" Allman Brothers Band w/ Johnny Winter 3/10/09 and Allman Brothers Band live @ Beacon - Red House w/guest Johnny Winter - 3/11/2009, NYC. They do covers nicely along with their original works.

Moogis is a social networking that includes live streaming concerts of the Allman Brothers, and new upcoming jam bands. Wyndstorm helped Moogis put the site up. They also convinced the Allman Brothers band members to release some of their music videos for free exposure on YouTube and similar venues.

I like their quote from Butch Trucks, founding member and drummer of the Allman Brothers Band. “For years, I had a vision of how the Internet could bring the live concert experience into people's homes, dramatically expanding the audience and the experience, and finally, with the help of Wyndstorm, technology has caught up with this dream. The fans of the bands we have lined up understand two things about jam concerts: it’s about the music, and it’s about the social experience.”

Here are some more from Moogis that should stay up on YouTube.

"The Weight" – Allman Brothers w/ Levon Helm

"One Way Out" Allman Brothers w/Los Lobos

"Smokestack Lightning" - Allman Brothers Band w/Bruce Willis

"Loan Me A Dime" PT 1 - Allman Brothers w/Boz Scaggs

"You Don't Love Me" Allman Brothers w/ Buddy Guy

"Turn On Your Lovelight" Allman Brothers w/ Robt. Randolph

Reza Speaks at London's Frontline Club

I posted a review of Reza's War and Peace book. Earlier this month, he spoke at the Frontline Club, 13 Norfolk Place London Tel: +44 (0)20 7479 895. The live discussion is available below. Thanks to Grahmam Holliday for alerting me about this event and the link.

Here is another prior event at the front Line that I found interesting - Philip Jones Griffiths: Vietnam Trilogy.

Tom Davenport on Improving Management Decisions

My former colleague, Tom Davenport, is working on a new book on decision making. My friend Andrew Snider of Athenium recently spent some time with him to talk about the leverage that an organization can get by improving micro-decisions using systematic behavior measurement. Tom reflected on this conversation as part of his blog post, Microdecisions for Macro Impact.

Tom starts with the premise that “what many companies don't realize is that microdecisions — small decisions made many times by many workers at the customer interface — can have a major impact on the business.” I have seen this over and over again, both the “don’t realize” part and the major impact part. One insurance company in the early 90s laid off many of their supervisors to cut costs and effectively removed their company’s intelligence for making microdecisions. The subsequently began losing over 600 million a year. Sound familiar?

One of the solutions for this firm was to build a knowledge management system to capture the wisdom of the few remaining supervisors and place in at the right points in the business process to affect microdecisions. It was my introduction to knowledge management and this help lead to the company becoming profitable again.

Tom adds in his post that until we “start to measure micro-decision makers at the individual level, we aren't likely to improve their performance much. This is the approach of a company called Athenium, which applies it regularly to insurance, health care, and legal processes.” Athenium's offers its teamthink® web-based performance measurement solutions to address this issue. Their Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) measures the workforce behaviors that directly impact the alignment of operations with strategic goals and best practices.

Tom concludes with the idea that one of the simplest approaches to improving micro-decisions is to give those who make them a checklist to make sure they didn't forget any key steps or issues. He mentions a recent New England Journal of Medicine article concluding that a 19-item checklist reduced deaths during surgeries by almost half.

I can believe this also. In the mid 80s, I was involved in developing a checklist for loan officers of a major US bank that recently got a lot of bailout money. In this case they were losing tons of money on loans to South America. The solution was a checklist. I still have my copy. I should offer it on eBay or perhaps to bank so they could reuse the concept to help get out of the mess that they created.

McKinsey on Making Good Business Decisions

This McKinsey survey on making good business decisions suggests several actions that are strongly associated with good financial and operational outcomes. In their survey, they asked executives from many countries about a capital or human-resources decision their companies made. The results highlight the real business benefits—such as increased profits and rapid implementation—of several decision-making disciplines. It seems to me that in three of the four social media can play a useful role. Although in the end it is the people and what they might do with the technology, not the technology, that matter.

Here are the four approaches McKinsey mentioned and some comments on hoe enterprise 2.0 tools relate to each.

First, ensure that people with the right skills and experience are included in decision making - Social media can be very helpful in finding the right people with the right skills within a large organization, or even a small one. Tools like Connectbeam that help you find the right people can address this. I recently spoke with Johan Rosius from Novell Teaming, who shared with me a related example of a significant return on an enterprise 2.0 investment. The engineering group at Shell has a diverse set of skills and is scattered around the globe. When one of their plants goes down, it can very expense for each day it does not get back up and running. Shell found that the key was getting people with the right prior experience to work on these down plants.

So they created a community of practice with Novel Teaming. It has enabled Shell to better share best practices and to get the right resource applied to down plants. The result is hundreds of millions in cost savings. I can believe this as I was involved with a similar effort with global chemical company using older KM technology in the early 90s and similar results were achieved. However, now we have much better tools to address these issues.

Second, make decisions based on transparent criteria and a robust fact base – The necessary robust fact base can be augmented by the many eDiscovery tools (e.g., Attivio, Recommind MindServer, Exalead CloudView) that go beyond standard search criteria. For example, the new iQuest tool, Blue Ant, has helped some pharma companies find missing data in their terabytes of content located in different tools with different metadata. In the past it was easier to rebuild a compound that find an existing one.

Third, ensure that the person who will be responsible for implementing a decision is involved in making that decision – This is critical and the one of the four that social media will not play a direct role. However, the many enterprise 2.0 platforms for managing efforts (e.g., Traction, Central Desktop, QuickBase, Wrike) can certainly help the person and team implement the decisions.

Fourth, some types of consensus-building and alliances apparently can help create good outcomes – Social media tools can be very helpful in building consensus and support alliances through enhanced collaboration. The list is long here (e.g. Awareness, Tomoye, Lotus Connections).

I think the capabilities supported by most enterprise 2.0 tools are aligned with the basic principles of good decision making. This is one reason for their adoption. See another McKinsey report for the related report on six ways to make Web 2.0 work.

2009 KMWorld Conference Call for Papers

The 13th annual KMWorld Conference and Exhibition will be held on November 17 – 19, 2009 at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center, in San Jose, California. The theme is Resetting the Enterprise: Focusing on People, Talent & Knowledge. Their site is up and they have issued their call for papers. The deadline is April 15.

I have presented here five times (see for example, "Thinking for a Living" -Thomas Davenport at KM World and KM World 2006 – San Jose). I look forward to being part of this upcoming session. It is great location and important conference. It is nice to see it still going strong as a symbol of knowledge management’s longevity. Their is now a KM World blog. Hope to see you there.

IDNTITI Open Ups Reputation Management

Here is a new reputation management service that provides users with a platform to rate people, companies, and products in a social networking environment by ranking their identity and reputation. I spoke with Sreedhar (Sree) Unnamatla, CEO and Founder of IDNTITI. Sree said that IDNTITI is pronounced “identity”. There are many reputation monitoring tools (see Ten Ways to Track Your Online Reputation) and many rating sites, as well as many other sites that have a rating component.

The biggest differentiation in IDNTITI from other rating sites is that the parameters being rated are user generated. Therefore, it becomes a highly democratic rating system with no custodian restricting feedback that user wishes to provide. Sree said within the new web “you are (on the web) what people say you are” and not “what you think you are,” despite the positioning you might do.

On IDNTITI, anyone can start a rating page for a company, a product, a movie, a restaurant, etc. You do have to identify your relationship to the organization or subject you are rating. A suggested set of attributes are offered, depending on what is being rated, but you can add more attributes. Here is sample page rating Intel. You see many one to ten ratings which helps with the analytics.

I asked Sree about how they handled the potential for rater fraud. He said they have a user authenticity module that catches and deletes all unauthenticated users. The data used in the analytics is from authentic users only and therefore the possibility of fraud and fictitious user data is reduced. Authentication of a user happens using multiple filters – both technology & process based. You have 60 days to be authenticated or your ratings will be removed.

The pages allow for customized analytics as you can choose a subset of attributes to use for your own evaluation. You can also look at the demographics of the raters and sort the ratings by these demographics, looking at any subset of raters. Users can re-compute scores of an entity, based on the selected demographics or ratings by their community members (people similar to the user who the user selects). All ratings can be seen through graphs and charts.

They have started a series of templates for different types of things to rate such as the restaurant template below.

IDNTITI also allows you to start a rating page for yourself. In this case the ratings are only accessible to yourself and to those that you give access. The ratings of companies and products are always public. The personal rating page allows you to get ratings on both personal and business issues. Here is a sample personal rating page.

The service is free to research on ratings, but registration and sign in is required to contribute which is all for free and drilling deeper into self reputation data requires a $1 a month fee. IDNTITI scores are sharable (with a custom widget) among friends on today’s leading social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. They have also started an IDNTITI blog to provide more context. I think they have a good niche here.

KM World Expands Its Own Blog

KM World now has a blog organized by Jane Dysart. A number of knowledge management bloggers have now committed to provide posts. There are posts from Dave Snowden and Dave Pollard up already. Here is my first contribution, Memories of Early KM Brought Back with McKinsey Report on Making Enterprise 2.0 Work. It is a cross post from this blog as a starter but I look to provide some original content going forward with a few cross posts sprinkled in when I think they are especially relevant.

I am looking forward to the upcoming KM World 09 on November 17-19 as I plan to attend and do a workshop this year. Details to follow. I hope to see you there.

Mothers and Children – A National Geographic Photo Book Gem

I recently received a review copy of Mothers and Children by National Geographic. It is a wonderful small book full of pictures of mothers with their children from all over the world. The contributors include Annie Griffiths Belt, Sam Abell, Jodi Cobb, Joel Sartore, and more (see my earlier interview Sam Abell Talks about Photography and Life and my review - The Life of a Photographer – Sam Abell). The book contains 120 pages with 100 beautiful photographs.

The book is divided in four sections: the north, the south, the east, and the west. These refer to parts of the globe rather than a country. I like the Jewish proverb quoted, “God could not be everywhere so he created mothers.” The diversity of people and dress is striking but the common qualities of the mother-child relationship come through. There are mothers and daughters of all ages.

Not surprisingly, I especially liked the total context and qualities in Sam Abel’s picture of a mother and three children in Northwest Australia. A. W. Cullers’ beach shot in Wales is a picture I could look at for a long time and continue to see new things. Gordon Gahan’s shot of mother and newborn finger play in Rostock Germany captures some of the joy and wonder of that moment in life.

There is an introduction from mother and writer Lynne Perri and three lyrical essays, co-written by Craig Wilson, about work, play, and life at home are sandwiched between the four sections. They have their own illustrations. This is the perfect Mother’s Day gift but one that does not lose its relevancy year round. I hope they now do a Fathers and Children book.

Rhode Island Fried Clams - Evelyn's Drive In

Thanks to Greg Lloyd of Traction Software for referring to my post on Massachusetts fried clams, Searching for the Perfect Fried Clam in a post I just discovered, Searching for the Perfect Fried Clam | Rhode Island.

Greg then nominates Evelyn's Drive Inn in Tiverton RI for the Clam of Honor. He said that not only do they have great fried clams, but they're also his top choice for Rhode Island style (clear) clam chowder and traditional Rhode Island stuffies ("Fresh local quahogs halved and filled with our spicy blend of chopped clams and chourico"). This latter option is an exciting combination.

I will have to check out Evelyn’s the next time I am in Rhode Island. They have a nice web site with a YouTube video. It seems to be open on a seasonal basis.

Intuit QuickBase Moving Desktop Database Users into Enterprise 2.0

I have written about QuickBase's moves in the enterprise 2.0 space on this blog before (see - Changing Organization Behavior at XM Radio through Enterprise 2.0). QuickBase is an Enterprise 2.0 shareable database that lets you select ready-made online workgroup applications or templates designed to solve common business problems, customize them to suit individual processes, and share within a team or an enterprise. Recently, I had a chance to talk with Peter Fearey and Liz McCann about some of their latest initiatives, as well as their progress over 2008. Peter began with some of Intuit’s moves across the product line.

Brad Smith CEO at Intuit, has set a focus on “connected services.” There is both an increase in cloud offerings to enhance connectivity and an increased connectivity between desktop applications and web services. In addition, Intuit is promoting ways for customers to be connected with each other as well as the many experts within the broader Intuit community. This provides greater access to professional services for Intuit users by Intuit users.

Within QuickBase they are building on this broader theme by reaching out to users of siloed desktop databases and spreadsheets to bring them into the increased connectivity that the QuickBase SaaS platform provides. Last year they did a user survey that indicated their happiest and most supportive users were ones who migrated from desktop databases and spreadsheets to QuickBase. Liz mentioned one non-profit that kept track of their events on a desktop database hosted on a single laptop. This laptop was hand carried to events. When there were two or more events on the same night the extra sessions were covered through pen and paper. Then the notes were added to the laptop later. The multi-channel access that a hosted solution, such as QuickBase, offers eliminated this bottleneck.

Here is a more extensive example reported earlier on this blog, Out of this Galaxy – Delivering Premium Customer Service Has Never Been So Easy. For the first two years, they used Excel to manage their customer information. It didn’t scale and Luke nearly lost his mind trying to keep track of it all. Since January 2008 they have been using QuickBase for their customer service management needs – tracking customer status, their inventory status and location, what product they carry, as well as other associated activities like in-store demo schedules and staffing. Recently Galaxy has moved their Purchase Order management to the QuickBase platform. They also have a solution that can scale to their rapid growth projections.

Encouraged by the survey results, QuickBase has gone after more desktop database users to bring them into Enterprise 2.0. They focused their product to meet both the needs of individual users, project teams, IT, and senior management. Most enterprises have thousands of critical databases siloed on individual computers, out of sight from IT and senior management, and difficult for team members to share efficiently. With QuickBase now everyone who needs to have access can see what is happening in thousands of operations critical to the business. With this enterprise strategy, QuickBase has seen significant growth both in the number and size of accounts. Like Galaxy Granola, and the famous potato chip commercial, once you try it, you cannot resist more. One client has 50,000 users. Here is a view of a workgroup administration screen. You can see that multiple databases can be managed through one interface.

You can also easily manage users as shown below.

…and manage groups through a consistent interface.

The press has been receptive. PC Magazine named them as an Editors’ Choice. The review said that “QuickBase puts your company's database applications online, so that anyone in your organization can get customized, secure Web access to anything from inventory to contact lists to product management.” This choice selection was literally the case as the editor says that the PC Magazine editors use QuickBase to keep track of previews, reviews, and other features.

I think QuickBase is an excellent example of how Enterprise 2.0 can open up the organization. The market has looked favorably on this group of applications. Like many others in this niche I have interviewed for AppGap, QuickBase has seen significant growth despite a down market. Companies are seeing this class of applications as a way to both cut costs and increase productivity.

As we have discussed, SaaS is an important component of this move to Enterprise 2.0 and IDC recently issued the report, Software as a Service Market Will Expand Rather than Contract Despite the Economic Crisis. They projected that by the end of 2009, 76% of U.S. organizations will use at least one SaaS-delivered application for business use. SaaS applications are also getting an increasing percentage of IT budgets. With experiences like those reported by QuickBase, I can see why this is happening.

The QuickBase Team Collaboration Blog is carrying more of these stories, as well as ways to get increased productivity from the application.

Networks and Communities Connection by TechEmpower

At the suggestion of Tony Karrer and the invitation of Nancy White, I recently joined Networks and Communities Connection. It is a content hub started by Nancy that collects and organizes information around communities and networks. Tony runs a similar content hub, elearnng learning. His firm, TechEmpower, supplies the platform for both hubs and a number of others.

I spoke with Tony recently. He said that the goal is to provide a vetted source for content around a topic for the benefit of the readers and the writers. The contributors are selected and monitored by the site leader. This gives readers a trusted resource to explore new content on the topic in an organized way as it emerges.

These topic hubs go beyond the typical content aggregation sites as they also provide additional benefits to the contributors. The site can generate greater exposure through its key word optimization, bring in new readers and help organize the content. This last feature is what is especially unique.

If you click on a blog on the site it goes to a page that provides content from that specific blog nicely organized along a number of dimensions. There is the latest and the best according the site algorithms. In the key word column, the content on the blog is organized according to keywords grouped by concepts, tools type, and year. So you and your readers can see your content key words exposed and organized. Clicking on any one will take you to the blog posts relevant to the key word. This same listing of key words is also displayed on the individual contributors blog. You can see mine if you scroll down the left column, along with a link to the Networks and Communities Connection site and the ability to search the site.

The same format is carried up a level on the home page to organize the content of all the contributors. When I looked last week, the post selected at the top of the best post list from my blog was Business Blogs Trump Social Networking Sites as New Business Drivers. There is confirming evidence on this rating as this post was also the most popular of my posts syndicated at Social Media Magazine.

At the moment, you will only see a limited number of the most recent blog posts from my blog on Networks and Communities Connection as Typepad does not currently allow access beyond these. WordPress also limits access but Blogger is more generous and provides all historical data. Tony is working to expand this coverage.

I think these content hubs offer a great service connecting reader and bloggers. I look forward to participation.

McKinsey on Making Enterprise 2.0 Work is Reminder of Process Centric KM in Early 90s.

I recently read the McKinsey report on six ways to make Web 2.0 work. They were primarily speaking about Web 2.0 inside the enterprise so I will rename the topic enterprise 2.0 for clarity in my own mind. They “studied more than 50 early adopters to garner insights into successful efforts to use Web 2.0 as a way of unlocking participation…surveyed, independently, a range of executives on Web 2.0 adoption.” They found that “unless a number of success factors are present, Web 2.0 efforts often fail to launch or to reach expected heights of usage.” They also said that enterprise 2.0 might end up having a greater impact that such recent enterprise approaches as ERP and CRM. So far I agree with them.

Then I looked at their six success factors. Not only did I agree with them, but these six were some of the exact same success factors we found for process centric KM in the early 90s, at least at the headline level. Now some of the details are a little different to no surprise but the essence is the same. I am not saying that KM and enterprise 2.0 are the same but I think their success factors are similar so we can learn from the past. In addition, there is an historic continuity of the early process-centric KM and enterprise 2.0 when it is applied to business processes. I touched on these factors a bit in this series on early KM (see KM Stories: Lessons from Six Implementations). I recently found a 2004 reference to this KM series and a few related ones by ReadWriteWeb . Belated thanks to Richard MacManus who writes and manages a great blog.

Here are the six success factors McKinsey found for enterprise 2.0 and why they were essential for process-centric KM, and still are. I will let you go to the McKinsey report for the details of what they provide to enterprise 2.0.

One: The transformation to a bottom-up culture needs help from the top. I called this: Gain and Enlist Top Down Support to Overcome Turf Issues. I could have subtitled it in the early 90s as “creating a culture of knowledge sharing from the bottom up.” I also think that with process-oriented enterprise 2.0 you also need to overcome turf issues and top down support is needed for this effort. .

Two: The best uses come from users—but they require help to scale. “our research shows the applications that drive the most value through participatory technologies often aren’t those that management expects.” I referred to this as Listen to the Users – success is directly proportionate to the amount of user involvement. We turned to the process experts to build the KM supported need for these processes. In the past many firms had enterprise software that dictated process steps imposed on the users. Many of them resisted this top down approach. So the involvement of users not only got the software right, it helped with adoption.

Three: What’s in the workflow is what gets used. For KM this was called - Align Knowledge Applications to Key Business Goals and Process as well as Design Measures Aligned to Business Processes. I have long thought that process centric KM is much more valuable than library centric KM. The later was what gave KM a bad name. The process centric approach was my introduction to KM and the better tools in enterprise 2.0 are a way to realize this approach.

Four: Appeal to the participants’ egos and needs—not just their wallets - traditional “methods tend to fall short when applied to unlocking participation.” One way to do this is to address the daily business needs of the users or Design Performance Measures Aligned to Business Processes. If you put the tools into the work flow you will generally achieve this objective. Financial incentives that for things that do not directly support work are domed to failure or gaming or both.

Five: The right solution comes from the right participants “select users who will help drive a self-sustaining effort (often enthusiastic early technology adopters who have rich personal networks and will thus share knowledge and exchange ideas).” We always looked to the evangelists to aid in the spread of KM. It is no different here.

Six: Balance the top-down and self-management of risk “Numerous executives we interviewed said that participatory initiatives had been stalled by legal and HR concerns.” One why to avoid these obstacles is to involve all the key stakeholders from the start, another KM best practice. I remember when the legal department at one firm said they wanted to review everything that went into the KM system before it was placed there. That bottleneck would have killed the system. The legal department had not been involved from the start, a lesson learned. We were able to negotiate a compromise approach that allowed the project to move forward.

In summary, when you attempting to get people to embrace a new technology and business approach such as enterprise 2.0 that involved greater participation, lessons can be learned from the relevant past. I also think the similarity helps validate the six factors that McKinsey found.

MyVenturePad – Comprehensive Resource for Growing Businesses

I discovered another resource for entrepreneurs. The Social Media Today people also operate MyVenturePad. It is a “moderated online business community for people who manage growing companies and the professionals that advise them.” There are a wealth of resources.

Like Social Media Today as “a registered member you can create your own profile and view the profiles of others. You can leave comments, rate posts, and directly connect with other members. You can add your existing blog feed to the content flow or blog here directly.” Scanning the blog posts, you can see high quality. I found quite a few useful such as Twitter is this year's Second Life.

I found out about this because Jerry Bowles asked me to join and the opening to my Enterprise 2.0 for an Enterprise series was featured as the top post on March 11. This was appreciated as this community represented a target audience for that series. Last week it was number five on the most read posts list. I was pleased to learn about this community.

BlogBridge Integrates Twitter with Its Latest Release

Recently I caught up with Pito Salas, founder of my favorite RSS reader, BlogBridge. I have written about BlogBridge before (see Filtering RSS Feeds: BlogBridge BlogStarz and BlogBridge's Support for Reading Lists). Pito said that the latest release, BlogBridge 6.6, comes with Twitter support. This makes a lot of sense as Twitter is often used to share blog links. After all, what can you do in 140 characters? Now I like Twitter but see it primarily as a way to point to things. I find interesting stuff through Twitter. A RSS reader is another way to discovery stuff that you can then share through twitter. Here is a screen shot of the Twitter function in action sending out a Tweet with a short form link and a message.

Pito provides two scenarios on how Twitter and BlogBridge can work together.

In the first case, a person gets the news from blogs and likes to keep a presence on Twitter. One of the things people tend to often want to Tweet about is an interesting article or bit of information that they saw in one of the many blogs they follow. If they are using BlogBridge 6.6, they simply choose ‘Tweet This’ while reading the blog, and up pops a box, with the shortened url pre-populated. They type in their comment and press OK and away goes the Tweet.

In the second case, a product manager, PR person, techie, or any kind of info-junkie will want to know whenever their product or topic is mentioned in any blog. So they use BlogBridge and have standing searches through the BlogBridge SmartFeeds feature for the topic of interest. Today, if their topic of choice is mentioned on Twitter, they would also like to know this. With BlogBridge 6.6, they can simply create a Twitter SmartFeed, and find the mention.

SmartFeeds came out in a prior release. They allow you to define any number of criteria and tell BlogBridge to keep an eye out for certain information and collect it together in your SmartFeed. Criteria include: article, feed or guide, title, text, date, pinned, read/unread, rating and others. You can create as many SmartFeeds as you like. Below is a screen shot of the Smart Feed set up window.

Other recent features include the ability to add a post that comes up through Blogbridge to your own blog. You can display feeds from a photo site like Flickr in a photo album format. There is also the ability to tag a post with del.icio.us without moving out of BlogBridge. Here is a screen shot of this feature.

BlogBridge is both Open Source and free. There are some paid premium features for the real information junkie but most people, me included, do well on the free version. It runs on Windows, Linux, and the Mac (my version). It has scored as best RSS reader for Linux on some recent surveys.

Here’s an “Introduction to Twitter” video that Pito recorded that will give you a visual introduction to the new stuff. This is smart move to integrate two content discovery tools as they did with del.icio.us. Pito also writes a great blog that covered my Twitter week posts ☺

Photos of Las Vegas 2009 - Part Two

More from my February trip to Las Vegas.

Photos of Las Vegas 2009 - Part One

I was just in Las Vegas for FastForward 09. I last went to Las Vegas in 1967 when I played black jack all night and walked away with enough winnings to buy breakfast. This time I stayed away form the tables and machines to keep my winning record intact. If I thought LA was an alternative universe (see last weekend), this is beyond that. The architecture is a down market Epcot but it only gets stranger inside. Here are some random shots and there will be more tomorrow. This is the Italian version with scenes from the Venetian, Cesar's Place and the Bellagio.

Enterprise 2.0 for an Enterprise of One – Part Five - Content Publishing and Archiving

This is the final part of a five part series on how enterprise 2.0 tools can work for an enterprise of one, myself in this case. To start the process I mapped out my business workflow. Then I looked at the tools I currently use for each major step before thinking about any further moves into the enterprise 2.0 space. Since I write for multiple blogs and provide blog consulting services to businesses, my work flow in very content heavy. I also enlisted the help of Gil Yehuda, former analyst at Forrester Research. When I first spoke with Gil, he was the analyst at Forrester focused on Enterprise 2.0. And now as this is being published he’s his own “Enterprise of One”, like me. But I’ll note that he was generous with his time and very knowledgeable about this topic.

I decided the three main sections are one: content monitoring, two: content collecting, assembling, and creation, and three: content publishing and archiving. Step two then reaches into both step one and step three for new content.

This step brings me back to Web 2.0 as my blogs are my personal knowledge management system. I do have a desktop backup through Word and iPhoto and my desktop is backed up through Mac’s Time Machine. However, there are truly backups and the blog platforms serve as the active, searchable archive.

I have Google Site Search on my blogs and go there often. I also set up categories and browse them at times. My main blog, Portals and KM, is approaching its fifth anniversary and I find it a valuable record for me, even if no one else reads it. I only wish I had started it even sooner so I could have the same rich content store for prior years. If there is anything I truly want to save and have access to, I put it on my blog.

I use Typepad for my own blog and recommend it to clients unless they are very technical. I also use Word Press for several of the group blogs that I write, including the AppGap and FastForward. The Wordpress admin is easy to use but I found the setup to be largely undocumented and required more technical knowledge than I am interested in fooling with.

I publish my blog consulting content in Word. I archive my content in Word and iPhoto, as well as the other Office applications. I have not yet seen a reason to shift to a cloud solution now that I have the Time Machine hard drive backup. I can also search and/or examine Twitter, Techrigy, Filtrbox, Feedburner, Typepad, and Google Analytics for historical data related to my work and web presence. In addition, I store content in Mac mail folders as I did in the past with other email systems. I think this covers the essentials. So there is a mix of cloud and desktop solutions here but I try to keep the numbers of tools to a minimum. I am reminded of what Tom Davenport said about knowledge workers. They were more effective by being power users of a few tools trying out many different tools for different functions.

This concludes the five part series on how enterprise 2.0 tools can work for an enterprise of one. Here are links to the four prior posts. Please let me know if you have any additions and suggestions.

Enterprise 2.0 for an Enterprise of One – Introduction Enterprise 2.0 for an Enterprise of One – Part Two - Content Monitoring

Enterprise 2.0 for an Enterprise of One – Part Three - Content Collecting, Assembling, and Creation – Current Approach

Enterprise 2.0 for an Enterprise of One – Part Four - Content Collecting, Assembling, and Creation – Potential New Approaches

Enterprise 2.0 for an Enterprise of One – Part Four - Content Collecting, Assembling, and Creation – Potential New Approaches

This is the fourth part of a five part series on how enterprise 2.0 tools can work for an enterprise of one, myself in this case. To start the process I mapped out my business workflow. I decided the three main sections are one: content monitoring, two: content collecting, assembling, and creation, and three: content publishing and archiving. Step two then reaches into both step one and step three for new content. I also enlisted the help of Gil Yehuda, former analyst at Forrester Research. Here are some potential new school approaches to content collecting, assembling, and creation that I discussed with Gil. They include desktop and online options

Gil first suggested OneNote, another Microsoft desktop tool that is a lightweight word processor optimized for taking and organizing notes. The most current version is OneNote 2007. It can be purchased separately or part of a 2007 Office Suite. The Microsoft site describes it as a “digital notebook that provides people one place to gather their notes and information, powerful search to find what they are looking for quickly, and easy-to-use shared notebooks so that they can manage information overload and work together more effectively.”

This is consistent with what Gil mentioned. One important tissue here is that it does not embed as much html as Word. It is also optimized for taking notes. This can be a good thing with interviews and other content collection. Unfortunately, I am not a fast nor good enough typist to take notes during an interview. However, I do use Word for notes during a presentation.

Microsoft goes on to say, “Unlike paper-based systems, word processing programs, e-mail systems, or other productivity programs, Office OneNote 2007 delivers the flexibility to gather and organize text, pictures, digital handwriting, audio and video recordings, and more — all in one digital notebook on your computer.” It is also a part of the overall Office 2007 system that I already have. It says that you can “keep all your information all in one place — including freeform notes, images, documents, files from other Microsoft Office system programs, and rich media — and organize it in the way that works best for you.” This is a possibility but it is not part of what came with my version of Office for the Mac so I will have to obtain it.

Gil next went to the topic of online solutions. First he mentioned Google docs, but I’ll admit that I am not comfortable with their security for most information. Google docs may be fine for public content, but I’m not sure I want to put pre-publication material there. Perhaps I am being overly concerned. This is a reason that I never did Google desktop search. I also do not tend to lose things on my desktop by keeping it organized and simple. However, I find Google site search on my blog to be invaluable, even if it is not perfect.

So Gil offered another option, Adobe Buzzword, an online word processer that is elegant and quite easy to use. Moreover, it works with Adobe Connect, so you can collaboratively edit and share documents in real-time. The Adobe site says “It looks and behaves like your normal desktop word processor, but it operates inside a web browser, so there's no installation required. It's free.” This is tempting.

It says that all your documents are online, so there's no need to e-mail attachments back and forth. It adds that you can write, edit, and comment on documents with only the people you choose. You control access levels and track edits by contributor. I would have to see how this controlled access works with multiple documents. It does say that you can “allow anyone to view your document without the need for an Acrobat.com account. If viewers want to comment on it, they just need to sign in.” You can also see and access the various versions of a document.

Buzzword also imports and exports plain text (TXT), rich text format (RTF), Microsoft Word (DOC and DOCX), Word 2003 XML, and OpenOffice (ODT) files. It also exports to Adobe PDF and HTML. So I can convert to .txt files and .doc files when needed, as well as bring them in. This is essential.

With both of these solutions, the big question is whether the pain is big enough to overcome the inertia and the pain of the transformation. This is a classic old world to new world issue, whether it is changing software or home countries. The good news is that both alternatives offer compelling advantages to what I’m doing now. OneNote would keep my on the desktop, which I prefer, and is simply easier to use than opening multiple Word files. Buzzword would take me off the desktop, but give me a writing environment that is very intuitive to learn and supports my need to collaborate with others. So I thank Gil for these suggestions.

In the next and final post of this series I look at how I publish and archive material. Here I am more aligned with enterprise 2.0 with an old school backup.

Enterprise 2.0 for an Enterprise of One – Part Three - Content Collecting, Assembling, and Creation – Current Approach

This is the third part of a five part series on how enterprise 2.0 tools can work for an enterprise of one, myself in this case. I decided the three main sections are one: content monitoring, two: content collecting, assembling, and creation, and three: content publishing and archiving. Step two then reaches into both step one and step three for new content. I also enlisted the help of Gil Yehuda, former analyst at Forrester Research. Here is my current approach to step three - Content Collecting, Assembling, and Creation.

This is where I am certainly more old-school. If a content source is something I want to comment on or save for my blog consulting work, I open a Word doc, copy the title and link and sometimes the entire text. I may title the doc with the proposed title for the related blog post. Then I put it in a to-do folder for one of the four main blogs I write or a new ideas folder for the consulting work. Of course, I sometimes use the content for both purposes. This gets the material saved and in the queue. I can then delete the original email or newsletter to keep my inbox and desktop from becoming overwhelmed. Some content just dies here but the good stuff gets passed on to become a post or some other published content.

I will next create the actual blog post or other content piece using Word. If it is content based on an interview, I can easily send the post through email for fact checking to the interviewee. This is a courtesy I always do to make sure I took good notes. However, I retain control over the final version of the content.

Once I am finished I have to do a “save as” to a plain text .txt file to strip out much of the unwanted html code that Word adds to a document. I also have to take extra steps in Typepad to limit any html import as it can do a number of bad things such as mess the RSS feed. I always save the plain text doc once it is posted as a desktop back up to what gets put in the cloud through the blog platform. If then are multiple materials such as illustrations, I will create a folder for the piece.

I think that Microsoft should create away for content to be easily exported from Word to blogs. There are a lot of people out there writing blogs and this would give these blog writers fewer reasons to move away from Word. I have even mentioned this to Microsoft on occasion.

Now this process is adequate, but not ideal. The pain is not enough to push me into a more enterprise 2.0 solution but there is some pain. I also wanted to potentially be more consistent with what I write about so this step is where I enlisted the majority of Gil Yehuda’s help. He offered a desktop alternative and a cloud alternative. I will cover them in the next post.

Enterprise 2.0 for an Enterprise of One – Part Two - Content Monitoring

This is the second part of a five part series on how enterprise 2.0 tools can work for an enterprise of one, myself in this case. To start the process I mapped out my business workflow. Then I looked at the tools I currently use for each major step before thinking about any further moves into the enterprise 2.0 space. Since I write for multiple blogs and provide blog consulting services to businesses, my work flow in very content heavy.

I decided the three main sections are one: content monitoring, two: content collecting, assembling, and creation, and three: content publishing and archiving. Step two then reaches into both steps one and step three for new content. I also enlisted the help of Gil Yehuda, former analyst at Forrester Research, who helped me think through the issues and, for this step, pointed me to the last three four tools below.

RSS feeds, Twitter search, and Google Alerts are all excellent free resources. I also get a lot of good ideas from the people I follow on Twitter and my Facebook friends. In addition, because many friends know about my interests they send me links to good stuff, acting as a human RSS filter. Listed below are some resources for when you want to go beyond these options.

Techrigy is designed to address brand monitoring with a balance of comprehensive analytics, simplicity of use, and a modest price point. There is a limited free version as mentioned above and I am using it now. So far I am very pleased with the variety of reports and the ability to focus searches to reduce false positives. Here is my review - Techrigy Provides Comprehensive Social Media Monitoring and Reporting.

Filtrbox is another web monitoring tool that I am using and pleased with. You can set up filtrs (filters) with a number of qualifiers. It sorts sources by blogs, mainstream media, and Twitter. You can set up 5 filers with the free version. However, the unlimited version is only $10 a month and offers more analytics. Here is my review - Filtrbox Offers Market Intelligence for a Broad Audience.

Yasni.com is a German social search tool that does a nice breakdown of sources (e.g. LinkedIn, Google News, Facebook, Google Blogs Search, general web, etc.) I tried it briefly and it looks useful.

Pipl is a people search tool. It seems to be more a people finder, as well as a resource to check on people who contact you or you otherwise connected with. However, it does show your own web presence broken into categories (e.g., photos, publications, professional and business, web pages, new articles, blog posts, documents).

Socialwhois describes itself as a service to determine who you should follow and why. Here is a Mashable post, Who Is That New Follower? Ask Socialwhois, on this tool where they say it is useful for checking out people who request to follow or friend you that you do not know, a similar function to Pipl. You can also find people with similar interests, which might help in finding bloggers in your niche.

Nathan Gilliatt also offers useful summary post, Monitoring Social Media Before You Have a Budget, that provides additional resources for those of us on limited budgets.

The other major sources of content are the free newsletters and community sites, as well as my free New York Times online subscription. In each case, if they come into my inbox, I always scan them before I delete them. My next post in this series describes what I do if I find something useful. Here are the newsletters and community sites I use the most.

Alltop is an “online magazine rack” of popular topics and is much broader than the other sources listed here. They update the stories every hour. Pick a topic by searching, news category, or name.

Content Management Connection is an “online community for technology practitioners, software companies, and end users to share thoughts and ideas on the changing landscape of content management and collaboration.” It is managed by George Dearing. In addition, it has features like most read posts, ability to comment on posts, quick surveys with instant results, most discussed authors, most active authors, most highly rated posts, etc.

Knowledge Plaza is a new Web-based platform for enterprise search, social bookmarking, knowledge management, information brokerage and expert identification. Here is my post on them.

PSFK was, until recently, called Marktd and before that IF! It provides creative ideas around marketing and often goes into social media. Some of the stuff is simply fun for when you want a change of pace.

Smart Brief Series are email newsletters that cover a number of topics. I subscribe to the social media one that almost always has at least one article that provides an idea for a post.

Social Computing Magazine provides comprehensive news on enterprise 2.0, including a “hot stories of the week” feature, and it syndicates blog posts. They have syndicated a few of my posts, e.g, Deloitte Survey Finds We Are in a 'Media Democracy,' Unexpected Benefits of Phonetic Alphabet Keep Appearing and Predictions on How Twitter Will Change Blogs in 2009.

E20portal.com brings together Enterprise 2.0 news, articles, case studies, events and other useful resources into a single, easily accessible place. I was pleased that they included this blog as one of their first featured blogs.

socialmediaBiz, provides social media tools, info, & strategies for business. They have links for articles/blog posts and data and charts/graphs from analyst and market research firms, as well as news on SMM/SMO-related technologies and services. They have listed at some of my blog posts (e.g., Blogs Are Climbing The Gartner Slope Of Enlightenment.

Social Media Today is a network of bloggers who write about enterprise social media. There is a weekly newsletter with the Blogger of the Week and a listing of the most poplar posts.

There are also a number of other IT magazine feeds that I get but I find they are mostly vendor centric and less useful. I might look at an interesting title but the frequency of finding content I use is much lower. If I am rushed, I just delete them (but don’t tell anyone :).

So this stage involves a mix of old school Web, email newsletters, and Web 2.0 tools. As I review all this content I figure out what to save and them determine how to organize it so it is available for the next steps in my workflow. That will be covered in the next post

Enterprise 2.0 for an Enterprise of One – Introduction

I write about Enterprise 2.0 for several blogs but I am an enterprise of one so many of the tools do not apply to me. However, there are many that do seem useful. So I decided to look at the possibilities in a more systematic way. This week I am doing a five part series that offers the results. First, I followed my own advice and mapped out my business workflow. Then I looked at the tools I currently use for each major step before thinking about any further moves into the enterprise 2.0 space.

Since I write for multiple blogs and provide blog consulting services to businesses, my work flow in very content heavy. I decided the three main sections are one: content monitoring, two: content collecting, assembling, and creation, and three: content publishing and archiving. Step two then reaches into both step one and step three for new content.

At the suggestion of my friend, Kate Pugh, I enlisted the help of Gil Yehuda, former analyst at Forrester Research. He wrote the excellent report, Forrester TechRadar™ For I&KM Pros: Enterprise Web 2.0 For Collaboration, that I reviewed here, see - Forrester on Enterprise 2.0 for KM Professionals. Gil was generous to provide some excellent advice, as well as a sounding board for my initial ideas. The most complex step is the second one that was where we had most of our discussion. Gil also altered me to some excellent free tools for the first step. Tomorrow I start there.

Social Computing Magazine has started to run this series. The logo on the left came from their posting. I hope this series is useful to all the other one-person enterprises, as well as those in larger firms who still need to manage their own content. I welcome additions and approaches that you have found useful.

Photos of Los Angeles 2009

I went to LA for the weekend prior to FastForward 09. You can find my dining experiences at Los Angeles Dining Update – February 2009. This is a random collection of impressions. LA is an alternative universe. You can click on the images to enlarge them.

Ken Cohn’s Request for More Responsive Health Insurance

My friend Ken Cohn recently posted about the troubles he is having with his health insurance provider (see Uncollaborative Insurance). I wanted to share his thoughts as I agree with them completely. Ken is paying an amazingly large amount of money for his health insurance as an individual yet his coverage is limited and the health insurance company refuses to look at his individual situation. I have found health insurance companies to be very unresponsive over the years. I have had frequent struggles over coverage were bureaucratic rules got in the way of common sense.

In one instance a family member required service from someone who knew the history of the patient. That was a critical nature of the service. However, the insurance company would not allow for coverage because the right doctor with the right experience was not one of their doctors. So they said we would have to go to a brand new doctor on their list because that was what the rules said. It would have been a waste of time to do this because the service required a prior base line understanding. The insurance company never seemed to understand this despite letters from our primary doctor. So we never got the service.

In another case I was placed into a potentially critical situation because my doctor did not want to perform an expensive diagnostic procedure that would have uncovered this condition before it advanced to the more critical condition. I could go on and on. We have one of the most expensive health care systems in the world but we do not get the value out of it. Part of the high cost goes to the large profits the insurance companies take out of the system, as well as the unnecessary bureaucracy. I understand the need to spread risk but the insurance companies have too much power over our health care. I do not know anyone who has good things to say about their health insurance provider when they need to talk with them. I wish Ken luck in his struggles.

My App Gap Posts for February 2009

Here are my App Gap posts for February. In addition to the Fast Forward blog (see side bar for links), I am writing in another Corante blog, the App Gap, sponsored by QuickBase, The posts began toward the end of January 2008. In this case, I am primarily doing product commentaries with a few other things thrown in. Below are the ones for February. There will be more in March.

PBwiki Enhances Its Document Management Capabilities

iQuest: Making The Enterprise More Transparent

Shareable Databases: Intuit QuickBase Bringing Desktop Database Users into Enterprise 2.0

Techrigy Provides Comprehensive Social Media Monitoring

Intuit QuickBase Offers to Help Coghead Customers, Partners and Employees

Recommind's MindServer Search: 6.0 Addresses need for More Effective eDiscovery

Shareable Databases: Zoho Integrates Creater with DB to Combine Ease of Use with Power

Filtrbox Provides Market Intelligence for the Rest of Us

Filtrbox Offers Market Intelligence for a Broad Audience

Here is another cross post from AppGap on a tool I have started to use. I last spoke to Ari Newman, CEO at Filtrbox shortly after their launch (see Create Web Monitoring Filters with Filtrbox). Now they have launched the second major iteration of this product, G2, built on lessons learned in the months since they first appeared. Filtrbox has redone the core platform to increase performance, simplified the user experience, and are more sharply focusing their marketplace positioning. Filtrbox is targeted at the business professional in any department who wants to control their own market intelligence and needs more than basic, free services as Google Alerts. They have priced G2 to fit an individual budget and even their group version would likely fit easily into a department budget.

Ari outlined several scenarios on how business professionals might want to use Filtrbox. Individual sales people can follow their prospects, customers and competitors. They can find reasons to call customers about their latest moves or changes in the market. They can track the problems their business addresses to stay current in the market and more intelligently engage with their prospects, as well as see the moves their competition are making. Executives can track what their competitors are doing as soon they make a move in the market, or even before through such channels as Twitter. Product management and marketing professionals can monitor the conversation around their brand. Investors can hear the market buzz on their portfolio companies directly from the early adopters. In difficult times it becomes even more important to be smarter about what is happening in whatever you are doing. I would agree.

To address these issues Filtrbox monitors millions of online sources based on user specified business logic. You can set up search terms and tell it what not to look at and block domains to keep the noise down. For example, I do not need to see what my blog is doing as I already know that. The FiltrRank algorithm qualifies and scores results prior to delivery. The system aggregates results for multiple searches in a single interface, and features historical analysis of results over time demonstrating trends. The results are identified as either: mainstream news outlets, blogs, or social networks like Twitter, but delivered in a single interface. Here is a sample Filtrbox dashboard of results.

Here is sample of reporting by source.

Here is a sample of trend analysis on several filtrs.

Filtrbox also delivers a well-formatted email every morning containing new articles. They call this the Daily Briefing, and Ari says many of their customers have become addicted to reading first thing in the morning. I can see why as I look these types of briefings every morning myself. Additionally, the service provides custom RSS feeds so you can read your Filtrbox articles in a portal or RSS reader on your computer or mobile phone. Here is a sample create feeds screen.

Filtrbox G2 also adds team collaboration features that allow managers to provide a shared knowledgebase of continuously updated intelligence on their company, competition or industry. FiltrRank scoring allows you to control the volume of your results by providing a qualified score for each article; allowing you to set thresholds to manage the volume of results and dial the noise down. You are able to set an unlimited number of searches or filtrs and get a six month history for each. Ari said they overhauled the platform to handle this increased offering. This allows you to do simple brand monitoring and look at any issues that seem worthwhile, even your favorite sports team. They also provide a Filtrbox blog to offer more context to what they are doing.

I also asked Ari how he is using Twitter, a current interest of mine. He said they are using it in three ways and they use Fltrbox to better filter the tweets for their areas of interest. First, they look for conversations around issues that they can address. Then they send out @ messages to those who seem like they would be receptive to engaging in conversations about these issues. If tweets are directed at Filtrbox, they use the company Twitter account to respond. If it is indirect, Ari will use his own Twitter account to engage. Second, they use Twitter for customer support. People can send public @ or private DMs to the company Twitter feed to ask for help. Third, they use it to communicate what is happening at Filtrbox, announcing new features, blog posts, tips, and other information that might be useful to their followers.

I signed up and gave it a try. I was impressed that I did not have to ask for help, as is often the case for me with new software. It was indeed completely intuitive. You also get reports of trends in the search topics you select. I found information that I had not seen in other resources and very few false positives. I could easily delete those to keep the trend data clean. I like the icons for the three sources types: mainstream news outlets, blogs, or social networks. I recommend giving it a try. It is now part of my tool kit. There is a free version but the paid version has a 14-day free trial and more features.

Business Blogs Trump Social Networking Sites as New Business Drivers

Sally Falkow reports in Blogs are Better Business Drivers Than Social Networking Sites that a recent study “Harnessing the Power of Blogs,” (sponsored research by BuzzLogic and conducted by JupiterResearch, a Forrester Research company) found that blogs can have more impact on purchase decisions than social networks. The study went on to conclude that while social networks help people connect, but blogs create a conversation and become a trusted resource that influences purchase decisions. They also said that blog readership has jumped 300 percent in the last four years.

This is consistent with the recent Gartner study that concluded, “Blogs have grown from a novelty to a mainstream platform for content distribution. Therefore, it is time to align IT and business forces to develop a blogging strategy for corporate and public-facing opportunities. Enterprises must define clear strategic objectives for blogging, and support them with policies to encourage executives and employees to maintain regular entries and to identify and discourage harmful blogging practices… Increasingly, any public-facing media company or enterprise must have a blogging strategy.”

All of this is welcome news to business bloggers and confirms what I have been seeing informally in conversations with my clients and others. A blog allows you to go beyond the sound bytes in Twitter and Facebook status fields. They allow for the development of a complete thought and then the ongoing elaboration of that thought through subsequent posts. Comments are also not limited in their length and allow for the exchange of ideas, moving beyond simply being pointers to more comprehensive content. They become destinations in their own right. At the same time Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn status can be useful pointers to your blog content and others. I often find useful links to blogs through both Twitter and Facebook. These tools complement each other when used in manner that is consistent with their features.

My Fast Forward Posts for February 2008

Here is the monthly listing of my Fast Forward blog posts. I find it helps me with an archive and hopefully is also useful to you. There is a separate category for these summaries in my right side column on this blog. There will be more in March.

What Does Computer Use Really Do to Our Minds?

Phonetic Alphabet: the Information Technology That Keeps On Giving

The Don Tapscott Show at FastFoward 09

Orion Corporation's One Search Experience

Charlene Li on Social Technologies

Who is the Smartest or Dumbest Generation? - Follow on to Tapscott at Fast Forward 09

The Airport Waiting Area Syndrome Goes Global with Twitter

Humana Opens Up Their Boardroom via Twitter

Techrigy Brings Comprehensive Social Media Monitoring and Reporting

I am crossing posting this from AppGap as I am now using the free version of this tool and find it quite helpful. The new Web offers great transparency if you are able to find what is being said on a topic in the maze of information. I recently commented on ten reputation management tools see - Ten Ways to Track Your Online Reputation. A few days ago, I spoke with Aaron Newman, CEO of Techrigy about their offering in this space. As we started the conversation I realized I had his book, Enterprise 2.0 Implementations, on my desk. The review copy was given to me after I interviewed Aaron Fulkerson of MindTouch, the book’s technical editor. I have only read a few chapters so far but it looks like a great resource.

As we discussed, people are turning increasingly to the Web to help with decisions, including purchasing products. Companies and individuals are also becoming more aware of the need to monitor what is being said about them on the Web and to take action to respond to both positive and negative mentions. Techrigy is designed to address this need with a balance of comprehensive analytics, simplicity of use, and a modest price point. From what I have seen they have accomplished all three goals with their SM2 product.

They are building a warehouse of online conversation, adding ten million a day and have reached the one billion mark. With each conversation, they have added up to 35 fields of associated meta-data including profile information, sentiment and tone, demographics, links and more. This storage allows for more rapid search results that have associated demographics. I found it interesting that 800 million of these conversations come from blogs and 140 million come from Twitter feeds but they are not limited to these channels.

The SM2 analytics sit on top of this warehouse. SM2 has 2 types of searches: Basic and Advanced. A basic search is the preferred method, but only supports the AND operator. For example: “Obama” and “President”. From time to there is a need for other operators such as OR, NOT, NEAR, etc.

The advanced search feature has the ability to support these searches. For example: “(Obama or Bush) and “President”. SM2 searches also have the ability to exclude phrases from a search. Adding an exclude word will cause a result to not appear if it contains one or more of the phrases configured in the exclude phrases. “Obama” and “President” with an exclude word of “Inauguration” will exclude all postings with the word respectively.

SM2 produces a variety of reports and allows for extensive filtering of these reports. Below you can see a daily report with some of the possible filters indicated in the drop down menu. The left column also shows some of the many ways to look at the data by daily volume, themes, demographics, map overlay, sentiment, etc.

Sentiment was one of the views that caught my attention. You can see an example of the reports of positive and negative sentiment for brand below. You can drill down on each mention to see what was said whom and their demographics and also change the computer generated rating to correct any incorrect assumptions (e.g. pain might be positive or negative for a mention of aspirin depending on what else is said). This way you can fine tune the results.

In addition to looking at the perceived expressions sentiment you can look at the overall tone of the mention on a five point scale as seen below.

You can also sort the mentions by their channel to see where the conversations are occurring. The screen shot below shows an example where Twitter leads the pack for this brand with 190 mentions. Following are a number of blog tools (LiveJournal, Word Press, Blogger, Typepad that in aggregate total more than Twitter. Next in order are: Ning, Wikipedia, Flickr, MySpace, YouTube, and Facebook. This gives you are idea of the variety of channels covered. You can also sort results by the demographics of the conversation author, such as age or gender, as well as by the relative popularity of the site where the mention occurred.

In addition to looking at the channels mentioned above and others you can set up a custom search to look at any website that contains an RSS feed can be added to Custom Sources. Upon configuration, SM2 will run a full archive and pull posts from the entire site. After the full index a daily retrieval will pull data from the RSS feed, searching from the last point of collection to the current search time.

When you set up a search, you can filter by language, country, time range, and other factors. After the results come back you can mark unwanted sources as spam to avoid getting them again. You can also filter out results by key words that shown up a lot on false positives to more quickly clear out the irrelevant results. You can get email alerts on a daily basis or even a real time basis for especially sensitive monitoring.

There is a free version that allows you to play with Techrigy but it is limited to 1000 results that you can quickly use up. However, this version does serve as a nice introduction to the tool at no risk. As I mentioned above, I set up a free account and explored it after talking with Aaron. While the free version has a reduced feature set, it does give you a good feel for the power and depth of SM2. It is very addictive and it was hard for me to stop playing with tool to write this review. The Professional version provides the full power discussed here.

There is a Techrigy blog. Among other topics, it covers ways to use Techrigy. A recent post, Twitter lead generation workflow with SM2 Alerts, discussed how Techrigy, itself, uses use Twitter in conjunction with SM2’s Alerts function to generate interest, book demos and communicate with people in the social media marketing community. They are able to set up the SM2 search filters to only look at people who are likely to be interested and then get real time alerts. Techrigy finds that they are now booking many sales meetings daily via Twitter. This targeted marketing makes use of the transparency of the Web and is a good proof of concept for Techrigy.

Jefferson Airplane – The YouTube Anthology

I recently found a link via Twitter to a live video of Jefferson Airplane doing White Rabbit in the 60s. It came from my fellow Fast Forward blogger and Twitter friend, Rob Paterson. As often happens with YouTube music videos, Rob’s link inspired me to look for more Jefferson Airplane live performances on YouTube. Like the Chambers Brothers, there were a not that many live versions from the early days. The best are presented below. Let me know if you have found others. There were also a lot of covers and a number of videos that showed still pictures with a sound track. There were also many live versions of White Rabbit. Rob’s link remained one of the best. Here is their official Jefferson Airplane Website and link to their best album "Surrealistic Pillow."

somebody to love- jefferson airplane – another live video that flips back and forth to some street scenes from San Francisco summer of 1967 at the Panhandle. I was there for a number of weeks that summer and helped with the free lunch project on the Panhandle. Later, I was surprised to find a photo in a Look magazine article on Haight Ashbury where I was included along with some others standing around a soup pot.

Jefferson Airplane with Signe Anderson recorded at the Fillmore in 1966. I have their first album, Jefferson Airplane 'Takes Off, with Signe who got replaced with Grace Slick. Signe was gone by the time I saw the Airplane in San Francisco in 67 at the free concerts at Golden Gate Park.

Jefferson Airplane - Today (Live At Montereypop 1967) – This is one of my favorite JA songs and I think it is in my top ten list of ballads by anyone. I got to San Francisco just after Monterey Pop but it was still a strong topic of discussion in the Haight. I have watched the Monterey Pop video many times.

Jefferson Airplane Live at Monterey Pop 1967 doing an intense version of high flying bird.

Coming Back To Me - Jefferson Airplane - 1967 This is an audio only with great stills - starts with a poster I had in my room in 1970-71 in NYC (see start of this post). I rank this second to Today as their best ballads.

Jefferson Airplane - Ballad of You & Me & Pooneil (Live 1970) - Live performance from "A Night at the Family Dog" (1970). Not one of their best songs but it captures some of the chaos as 67 moved to 70.

Wooden Ships (1970) - Jefferson Airplane live studio version with breaking surf - Wooden Ships, written by David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Paul Kantner, originally recorded for the JA Volunteers LP. This is a "live" studio performance filmed April 2, 1970 with breaking surf in the background. My friend Don Lesser said that Crosby Stills and Nash did the sailboat version of Wooden Ships and the Jefferson Airplane did the motorboat version.

Wooden Ships - Crosby, Stills & Nash – Here is the sail boat version for contrast. It was recorded live in 1977 in Houston.