Shaping the Caffeinated Future

So without muche delay, post numero uno in 2009! Let’s get going. So I am reading through some examples of corporate media social network usage. Today I took a little look at MyStarbucksIdea, a site that wants customers to post their ideas for improvements and vote on them. I posted a few ideas and comments, based on clover-ordering flop yesterday in Boston. But I was also prompted to post given my read of the Starbucks customer service business case I just read as well. (It’s HBS 9-504-016 “Starbucks: Delivering Customer Service” in case you are interested.)

Some observations on Starbucks particular use of social media to capture ideas:

• Good, they have some divisions of ideation: Products; Experience; Involvement. There are subcategories within these.
• The site also links to the Starbucks idea blog, where they comment on implementation. Yes, make it easy for customers to see exactly what you are doing on our behalf. Will they also comment on any commentary where they have decided not to implement the suggestion? Without reading all the updates in detail, I’m not sure yet.
• Of course, there is a huge volume of postings. I did some searches to see if some topics I would post on are already covered by other posters and many of them were.
• I wish there was a tagging capability for the posts. The subcategories are just not enough.
• For hardcore users, some might like an RSS feed to follow certain subcategories.
• With the multitude of postings on particular topics, you can clearly see where sentiment runs high – i.e. just don’t discontinue decaf in the afternoon, you heard me! Please bring back using SILK soymilk in the drinks, the new soy milk brand you are using is just gross.
• Random, Odd – I can’t seem to click on the names of the folks in the comments leaderboard. JavaOcha, who are you?
• Starbucks says they can’t read and/or act on every post. Ok. But it might help to review them if they were organized better. The commentary form could also ask customers to provide some optional demographic data. In that case, I can comment on others comments more appropriately if I know more about them as a customer. And you know, Starbucks could mine that data that folks want to offer.
• Fun – perhaps I’ll post more once I get my Clover small batch cup soon. Cheers!

The Art of Brevity

As with most people, I have a hard time staying on top of the volume of email I receive, especially when most emails require action on my part. How can we cut down on the amount of email sent to free up time for other activities? As noted by many, enter Twitter and like services as your tool of choice. I was reading this NYTimes article on the topic: Now, Brevity is the Soul of Office Interaction. I don’t know that I’d say brevity is the soul yet, but perhaps that most of us might like it to be the soul of office interaction. Here are some benefits I see to this approach in my own worklife.

• We no longer need to send those emails wherein the subject line is the email itself. The body is blank. You know these emails. The short update emails that are seriously just a FYI. You probably have them directed to a specific email folder, but if not, then these can be eliminated as a source of clutter on your inbox and purposed through a service like Twitter.
• We can ask a question to our colleagues without guessing “hey, do you know X…?” when it’s really someone who is not on the email thread who is in the know on the topic. Then someone on the thread forwards the question to the individual that might know the answer, and so on. Instead, you could send on a quick question to an entire group and seek a response.
• Twitter and like services also deliver an improved reputation awareness view. With the entire group or company viewing questions, responses, and perhaps musings, it becomes more apparent who knows what. This is especially helpful for new employees trying to get a pulse on who is in the know on what topics in what groups.
• Beyond reputation awareness, we each carry on our own area of expertise. Sometimes these areas are related to our work and if colleagues are aware of these pockets of expertise, they will certainly try to leverage you for a project where your name was not even mentioned in the past. You can become the “known expert” through your quick postings on areas of expertise.
• When your colleagues are dispersed, it may certainly be easier to read the Twitter question on your mobile device and respond quickly in the few minutes you have between meetings.
• We can make new and stronger connections. Few companies go through formal social network analysis. Great idea, but who has the time and deep pockets for this? Perhaps we can make stronger connections, on a grass-roots level, between people in the organization through this transparency and always awareness tool. In some roles in the organization, it is difficult to always know who you need to know.
• During a time of role expansion, it’s also difficult to know what are the new sources of information that you might need to be aware of. If your company is using Twitter, you can easily pick-up and hone in on the new sources of relevant info on the Twitter feeds if this is a true mechanism for information delivery in your organization. It makes the task of “getting in the know” much easier.
• It’s easier to quickly scan through Twitter posts than email. It’s a real time-saver. You can stay tuned to the info that you need to be tuned into and bypass the rest.
• I also see Twitter as a tool to reduce redundancy. In a large company, it’s impossible to stay on top of all possible overlapping ideas and needs across groups and departments. When you see ideas that have bearing on your own work, it’s easy to speak up, much sooner, and offer yourself and your thoughts as a collaborator in the effort.
• Of course, as mentioned, there is the true social use. We can blend our work posts with some personal posts to break up the stress of the day and share more of ourselves, likes and dislikes. E.g. Hey, did you know Zumi’s is now making the peppermint mocha! Go get one!
• If Twitter and like services are used in the above fashion, then email can be a vehicle used to serve its best intentions: for sharing more detailed information that must be more detailed. And for that, I think we’d all be thankful

Social Media Laws

So according to Zuckerberg, he’s thinking that folks will share twice as much information next year as they shared this year. Or perhaps another way to say it, in part, is that the more we share, the more comfortable we are sharing, and hence share more. It seems to me like a big “it depends” on who you are, your age, and what you get out of sharing info on the web.

• Who you are – Given the super-social nature of FB, some folks will never jump in and of those who are part of certain professions where public image is more important, will maintain a select view of self. So more people might jump in, but jump into FB to a certain degree. In a few years, perhaps the idea of drunk college photos won’t matter on FB, as we’ve seen enough of that, what’s new? I think reading between the lines, for the data mongers out there, will prove to be more useful with a tool like this, e.g. creating a profile of what I might buy based on my status updates.
• Your age – It always seems that we read younger folks are more into sharely info freely. I’ve seen it both ways. Some twenty-somethings are afraid to be indulge in the ecosystem and its apps, some thirty-somethings are key users, perhaps accessing it more often than email.
• What you get from sharing – It’s a nice way to stay in touch, but I don’t put all my eggs in one basket. For me, it’s just fun and enjoying updates and sharing info with others. If folks are using the FB tools more and more, then I would imagine some groups on FB would be more populated than they are. Shouldn’t the Web 2.0 summit group have more than 617 fans? but true, based on all the updating I’ve done on FB, I’d be frightened what a detailed profile, although based on limited kinds of information I’ve provided, might say about potential actions I may take.

Excuse Me, Do You Know Me?

I think we’ve all thought about this topic as the web opened up and we threw up pics, taglines, widgets defining our personalities and everything else. Can you figure out who I am based on participatory and collaborative web life and my passive moves too? As a data geek, sure, I find this asbsolutely fascinating. I must read this book. But until I get the time, here are some wonderings:

• I have many “web lives.” I know, certain marketing folks want to know just a segment of “me.” Does she like to bake? Well, if you could mine my Facebook profile, you might see that yes, I like to, but I don’t have much time to do so lately. This is true. But some expressions of my life and the “me” that you want to know in all my passive and participatory web movements are not “me.” Can these be separated? For example, sometimes in my baking and cooking, I seek meat recipes. However, I don’t eat meat and I haven’t for 15 years. Can you figure out the patterns in my life to determine how and why I am still driven to seek rack of lamb recipes on Cook’s Illustrated?
• If you can separate these, will you try to confirm the likes of folks I associate with? How accurate would they be? Would you be able to link these “extensions” of me to the people I know to create a fuller profile of them? In my example above, you must figure that I cook for a meat-eater. But how often? If frequently, I must live with this meat-eater. If infrequently, I am making stuffing for a turkey at a family Thanksgiving. Can you link this info to the location where I buy the meat to see how often I buy it for this meat-eater? I prefer to pay for groceries with cash and no reward program card, so I hope not. If you know what I’m doing, I’d love to hear.
• But there is also the “off the radar” me. Despite my online shopping, web 2.0 profiles, and such, much of me is still unexpressed. I know, we all want to think this: I am so special, you cannot reduce me to a dataset and run a regression analysis, please! Is this true anymore? What me is solely my own me? Can I preserve any of this me? I won’t divulge “me” here, but I still do keep some paper and pen notes about my life just for myself. In this digital life, that actually causes my hand to cramp up, as I write with a pen so infrequently.

It’s all pretty scary. Because I like Halloween and wear odd outfits that can be very scary, will you profile me with a lower responsibility score? Ha, I’m severely responsible. Except for the cleanliness of my home right now, since I’m blogging!

Categorization of Social Tools, But Not in the Librarian Sort of Way

I can’t recall where I came upon this post today, as I have about 15 tabs open in Firefox right now (thank goodness for browser tabs), but it basically lists social media categories. If I’ve counted right, it lists 14 categories, like aggregators, microblogging, and such. Take a look. So what other categories could be added? Here are my suggestions below.

• Open Source, Collaborative Databases – In some cases these are massive, explicit projects begun with core group of folks and in other cases they are more distributed with a more individualized building block approach. I think of Open Library and Freebase as examples.
• I’m not sure what to call this category, but an example I think of is postcrossing. This is a site where the joys of old, in this case sending snail mail postcards, are more easily enabled in the web-world. You can sign-up and send snail-mail postcards to users all over the world and receive postcards as well. Personally, I started doing this periodically a few months ago. I like it for a few reasons. One, it’s a simple, fun thing to do. Two, I like postcards. Three, I’m just overjoyed to realize so many others out there share in this social community. My favorite postcard I received was from a seven-year old girl in the Ukraine who has beautiful handwriting. She told me that she also likes to dance. And I love her heart stencil on the card. No worries, her mom made the profile and helps her daughter send the cards.
• Crowdsourcing – I think these kind of sites, niche and otherwise, deserve their own category. Some of these examples that I use are springspotters and BzzAgent,  and SheSpeaks. In fact, I am still enjoying my free $80 electric toothbrush from SheSpeaks and other goodies. Good, I just updated some stuff on my BzzAgent profile, maybe I’ll get a new campaign invite soon.
• Experience Influencing – The blog post I reference above had “Experience Reporting” as a category. By experience influencing, I’m thinking of social sites like the point, in which users can create a campaign and try to influence other like-minded individuals, in a certain niche or just anyone, to do something. In that way, it’s an embodiment of the Nike slogan “just do it.”

These are just a few categories I came up with more for now. I’d definitely like to entertain more future posts with more categories. Stay tuned…