•
Here it is 2010, and I'm still sitting through godawful, text-heavy PowerPoint presentations with cheesy transitions, pointless clip-art and (pause, Rob, and try to stop hyperventilating)... Comic Sans . Speakers often focus on what it's like to be giving a presentation, but it's easy to forget what it's like to sit through one - especially the fifth or sixth presentation of the third day of a conference. Sponsor You're sitting in an uncomfortable chair (comfortable conference seating has yet to be invented), probably wired on a combination of carbs and caffeine, quite possibly sleep-deprived from all that late-night networking, and trying to stay alert while passively listening to someone droning on at the front of the room about "paradigms". Fortunately, I'm not seeing as many as I did three or four years ago. Word counts are often way down; diagrams are simpler and more effective; and slides, mercifully, take a back seat to the speaker and their story. Maybe that's because so many people saw An Inconvenient Truth and were blown away by what Jill Martin and Duarte did... or because of books like Presentation Zen , Beyond Bullet Points and Why Bad Presentations Happen to Good Causes ... or just because enough people have been to Beth Kanter 's presentations. Whatever the reason, I'm grateful, and so, I suspect, are a whole lot of audience members. (Of course, the state of the art is constantly in flux. And if you want to see where presentations are going, especially in an era of Twitter-enabled audiences who aren't feeling so passive any more, you could do far worse than reading Cliff Atkinson's The Backchannel .) More Noise to Signal. Discuss
Read more from the original source:
Cartoon: Captive Audiences
Tags:
beyond-bullet,
cartoons,
Cliff Atkinson,
comic-sans,
inconvenient,
more-effective,
power,
presentations,
probably-wired,
sitting-through,
someone-droning,
speaker,
three-or-four,
twitter-enabled
•
I love to sit on the beach. One of the coolest things about the beach is the number of layers of visual depth. Look at the sand and it's beautiful, but zoom your eyes in closer and you'll see a whole layer of life running around on the sand that you didn't see before. Look even closer and you can see individual grains of sand, water and light dancing between them. Look closer still and you see that each grain of sand is a unique object with its own texture. If your eyes are strong enough, or you have a machine to help you, you can see even more layers by looking closer still. That's what Twitter is going to be like with the launch of Twitter Annotations this Summer. It's a beautiful vision, with huge potential, but there's another way to look at this analogy: you don't build on the beach sand because it shifts too much. Will Annotations live up to its incredible promise? Sponsor What Annotations Are Last week Twitter announced a forthcoming feature called Twitter Annotations: it's a system for almost any metadata to be connected to any Twitter message when it's published. Inside every Tweet is now a space where you could put or find anything, including links out to further instructions or larger bodies of information. That's always been the case with the 140 characters of content - but now we're talking about systematic metadata intended for machines, to augment the content. The idea is dripping with potential, but also some risk. Isn't much of life's meaning found in the play between limits and the infinite? Twitter has been considering adding Annotations for at least two years, according to Platform Team member Raffi Krikorian. That's a relatively large portion of the company's young life. Every time a new bit of metadata was added to Tweets, like geolocation information was last Fall, the company would ask itself "should we be doing this, or should we just open up the platform for and and all metadata?" Now the company has decided to do just that. Twitter publishing tools can now add a description to any tweet their users publish, not as a part of the 140 character message, but as a small machine-readable metadata field that travels along with the content. What might this look like? We could see Annotations fields like: Link to a media file, like podcast enclosures, photos linked to, etc. Context about the Tweet like where was the author when it was published, maybe what the weather was like there at the time. Your Twitter publishing interface could offer you a special option to write reviews of movies, books, or links you're sharing. The ISBN of the book, a link to a preview of the movie and the number of stars in your rating could be included in the Tweet Annotations. Any way you can classify, describe, append or otherwise enrich a Tweet with words or numbers can be included in Annotations. You Tweet, you attach a characteristic or quality, you define the characteristic and then you provide a value of how or what that Tweet did relative to the quality being referenced. Twitter clients like Seesmic, Tweetdeck and more will make it easy for users to add these annotations. Yes, this is meaningful in large part because of the 140 character limit on Twitter messages themselves, but isn't much of life's meaning found in the play between limits and the infinite? From Annotations Come Analysis Annotating a single Tweet is uninteresting, it's when you hit the Twitter databases and gather together all the Tweets that share a characteristic that thinks get exciting. When those selected Tweets can then be cross-referenced with other sets of data from outside Twitter - that's when the word fecund starts feeling inadequate. Show me all the Tweets from my friends that have links to music and play me those songs. Twitter clients like Seesmic, Tweetdeck and others are going to make viewing that kind of data a whole lot easier. Tweetmeme's Nick Halstead believes that Annotations will be used most extensively to communicate webhooks, links to instructions for a Twitter client to follow. He thinks it will enable game play and help Twitter start acquiring more users again. "Because of the size of the data you can put in the annotations, I think people will come up with links to offsite resources. Seesmic is building their own platform for Windows to support plug-ins, but this reaches much further, but this lets Twitter clients augment a tweet with other services. Sf you were Stocktweets, you could attach a link in the namespace that's in stocktweets, Seesmic could follow that link back to Stocktweets and ask it how to render it. So you could put a chart and any other associated information. It's like FBML [Facebook Markup Language], the ability to embed applications inside the Twitter clients. Maybe threaded conversations. A game of Scrabble where the link points at a currently rendered scrabble board, so other people could look at the board and join in playing it. Annotations and webhooks would allow gaming to start happening on Twitter." Halstead believes an Alpha version of Annotations could be made available to developers in a month. How about showing me all the Tweets from anyone that are referencing the President of the United States (subject: POTUS?), analyze the sentiment in the messages, show me where those Twitter users were located and tell me how those local sentiments change over time. Send me an alert when one of those starts to shift radically. Show me all the Tweets by people in their 20's and in their 50's (imagine an author age tag in Annotations, why not?), living near the site of a disastrous event. How do those discussions differ? There are all kinds of interesting questions that could be tackled when the developer world's imagination runs wild on the terms of description applied to our messages. Of course it will be tempting to draw all kinds of conclusions from this rich data. We'll surely be able to draw a whole lot of value from it. "You can learn something from almost anything," Big Data cruncher and 80Legs CEO Shion Deysarkar says. "Just give me enough data, I'll figure out something." But let's keep in mind the words of social network scientist danah boyd, who wrote the following on her blog this morning: Time and time again, I see computational scientists mistake behavioral traces for cultural logic...Big Data creates tremendous opportunities for those who know how to assess the context of the data and ask the right questions into it. But mucking with Big Data alone is not research. And seeing patterns in Big Data is not the same as hypothesis testing. Patterns invite more questions than they answer. Tweet Power Politics Twitter's Krikorian says the site will probably list "trending annotations" just like it lists trending topics today. There will probably be a wiki where anyone can find out what namespaces are being used for what purposes. Really though, the classification system is going to be determined by the market. That's something that worries a lot of people. "People who believe in building standards are conerned about our blase attitude about how we want to run annotations," Krikorian says. He believes that the developer community will work things out for itself, just as it has in the past. "There has been a lot of emergent behavior around how to relate to tweets anyway, without our imposing much structure around it. The Twitter platform is continuously evolving - the developers will figure it out. Twitter developers iterate in public." That's likely to be cold comfort for people focused on the power of structured data standards. Many people are calling for Twitter to embrace the well-built efforts of the Semantic Web community. Krikorian says that 90% of Twitter developers don't know what the Semantic Web is but that there's certainly room for standards lovers to work within the Annotations scheme. Still, the absence of standard terminology could really be a problem. Annotations can't be changed retroactively, either. Krikorian says that major players will dominate the obvious use cases for Annotations and the company will monitor and highlight really innovative Annotations developed by people on the margins. We'll see how well that will work. Imagination will make the sky the limit for this publishing platform used easily by more than 100 million people around the world. But a shortage of forethought, planning and agreed-upon standards may bring that platform's aspirations back down to earth quickly in the future. Time will tell. Discuss
More here:
What Twitter Annotations Mean
Tags:
analysis,
Annotations,
data,
forthcoming feature,
grains of sand,
movie,
Nick Halstead,
people,
platform team,
power,
semantic,
summer,
tweet,
Twitter,
United States,
windows,
words
•
There is a phenomenon among consumers that is evidenced by the rise in popularity of sites that allow users to share information about the products they buy or want to buy with friends and other shoppers like them. These sites exist because consumers inherently trust the opinions of their friends and their peers when it comes to purchasing and business related decisions, and they trust them a whole lot more than they trust most marketing campaigns. Author John Jantsch , who previously penned the book Duct Tape Marketing is a few weeks away from publishing his second book which focuses specifically on the power of referrals. Sponsor The book, titled The Referral Engine: Teaching Your Business to Market Itself , hits bookshelves in mid-May, and could be an excellent resource for early-stage startups and entrepreneurs-to-be. Jantsch's first book did so well that it lead to the creation of the Duct Tape Marketing System and the Duct Tape Marketing Coach Network, while additionally earning accolades for both Jantsch's blog and his podcast on small business marketing which continues to release episodes today . In his new book, Jantsch explores how companies can strategically market their products to take advantage of the referral and peer review phenomenon of consumer buying habits. As Jantsch points out in a video explaining his motives behind the book (embedded below), he discovered that most successful small business which are thriving off referrals didn't do so by including some special sauce into their recipe. Instead, he says that these companies are, by their very nature, "more referable" than others. Some of Jantsch's suggestions for being more referable include making and effort to communicate personally with customers via social media and other means, being sure your customers know who they should be referring to, and getting your sales team on board with referral strategies. Early anticipatory praise of the book is already coming in from the likes of author Chris Brogan, Silicon Valley investor Guy Kawasaki, and Zappos founder Tony Hsieh whose upcoming book we previewed a few weeks ago . A free download of the first chapter is also available on the book's homepage, and the full book, coming in around 250 pages, will be available on May 13 according to Amazon . Check back here next month after the book publishes for a more in-depth review, and in the meantime, keep an eye out for ways to boost your company's referral engine. Discuss
Read this article:
Weekend Reading: The Referral Engine, by John Jantsch (Preview)
Tags:
amazon,
Business,
friends,
network,
podcast,
power,
products,
small-business,
Social Media
•
Google's CEO Eric Schmidt addressed the American Society of News Editors yesterday in D.C. As part of an apparent strategy of mollifying the media, he insulted the integrity and professionalism of bloggers and the quality of blogs. You know. Like this one. "There is an art to what you do," he said to the real journalists. "And if you're ever confused as to the value of newspaper editors, look at the blog world. That's all you need to see. So we understand how fundamental tradition and the things you care about are." Sponsor My hand to G-d, I'm not even sure where to begin with this one. First, I am a journalist. I mean an I-worked-for-a-newspaper, I-was-a-stringer-for-Reuters, I-was-a-host-for-NPR, I-freelanced-for-Newsweek type journalist, the sort of journalist our CEO friend was presumably talking about. But I've also been a blogger since 2004. This blog I now write for is in the top ten of blogs for readership and has a sterling rep for...can you guess? JOURNALISM, you blowhard. How many journalists blog? How many bloggers are journalists? How many blogs are chockablock with journalism? This motif of the whirly-eyed blogger in his pajamas was getting stale before I started my blog. (And for the record, I haven't owned pajamas since I was old enough to shave.) "We have goals in common," Schmidt oozed. "Google believes in the power of information. We believe that it's better to have more information than less." Well. It's funny he should mention that. Schmidt, if you've been rusticating outside the Kuiper belt, first attracted journalistic attention, for more than his balliwick as head bean-counter at Google, when he blackballed all CNET journalists . This was a reaction to a journalist doing her job. In response to his pooh-poohing privacy questions, Elinor Mills Googled him and then published what she found. How...dare she? He's also gained some WTF-points by trying to silence his alleged former mistress, Kate Bohmer. She had what appeared to be a fictionalized portrait of him on her blog until he marshaled a horde of lawyer-bots and sicced them on her. But being creepy is not enough to warrant coverage, not on this blog anyway. The problem is, Schmidt's actions create a pattern of hypocrisy in relationship to the information and privacy issues on which he has so frequently pontificated. If Schmidt were the CEO of the world's largest culvert manufacturer, it would hardly matter. But he isn't and it does. Schmidt is a man who guides one of the world's largest online information chaebols . He sets, or influences, policy that affects millions of people. And his Byronesque declamations of Google's position in the moral vanguard of the Internet age seem difficult to countenance when they are set off at every turn with actions that contravene the company's public values. Maybe Google needs some sort of guiding trope, a first-principal that all of its people could refer to; something that, if Google employees found themselves unable to harmonize with it, would oblige them to give notice and maybe run off to develop more efficient well-poisoning systems for orphanages. Something like... DON'T BE EVIL. Discuss
More:
Google's Schmidt to Bloggers: Drop Dead!
Tags:
elinor mills,
internet,
issues-on-which,
kuiper,
maybe-google,
media,
power,
schmidt,
World
•
Soon, Twitter users will be in a better position to get satisfaction with the companies that they do business with. This morning, SalesForce.com is announcing that the Chatter beta developer preview has grown to 500 companies and is integrated with its popular Service Cloud offering. The company has shown its ability to leverage the disruption of social media - rather than be disrupted by it. We had a chance to review the new tools and experience what an end-to-end social media driven customer experience looks like. It was eye-opening for us - and is coming soon to the 70,000-plus customers of SalesForce platform. Sponsor The first thing we learned in our briefing with SalesForce is that the company has fully digested the reality of the new web. The company talks about how it started on a mission to bring the power of great web applications like Amazon.com to enterprise customers. Now, ten years later, the web and the company have moved on towards the new dominant engagement model on the web, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Here is a graph the SalesForce team shared with us on the emerging trend of Internet usage, a key driver in how the Chatter product has been considered. SalesForce makes a case that a fundamental shift is underway and its completely re-factoring the engagement model. The company calls it the "Facebook Imperitive", which we interpret as "be as social and easy to use as Facebook, or whither". Reminiscent of the Wired Magazine's "Wired: Tired" lists SalesForce shares its observations of the fundamental shifts in the industry. We see Amazon.com as the old incumbent leader of the Internet being replaced by Facebook. Also series of observations that show the landscape change dominated by mobile, location, and web standards. Here, we see a Chatter enabled service desk, where we can easily see the different channels that have opened tickets for customer service. A case that has been opened via Twitter is seen in the dashboard here. It can be shared among team members, or escalated. We think this is an interesting evolution of the "follower" mechanic borrowed from Twitter. In this case, you can be assigned a topic to follow, since in the enterprise there is a job to be done. Here, we see the familiar Twitter interface as the origination point of the case being managed internally. From what we learned, several marquee customers such as Bank of America plan on rolling out Chatter plus Service Cloud. Shown here is the Bofa Twitter feed responding to individuals in the public forum. Some of the productivity benefits offered by Chatter plus Service Cloud offered by the company are listed here: "Monitoring Priority Cases: Service agents can stay on top of high priority cases, updates to critical knowledge articles, and the latest product updates Locating Expertise: Service agents can follow experts across their organization and instantly get help from other agents, other departments, or from across the company Real-Time Case Collaboration: For high priority cases, service supervisors can assemble the best expertise and information to close complex cases faster SLA Management: Salesforce Chatter proactively can alert service agents of upcoming service level agreement milestones that they must meet Sales-Service Alignment: Service agents and sales reps can share the latest case and opportunity updates for their customer to ensure good service means good business" We think there could be several big winners with SalesForce Chatter release. SalesForce may have found its way into the entire enterprise, where it becomes essential to connect departments and individuals together in the best collaboration model possible. Twitter seems like a big winner here, where it is now being demonstrated as the front end to customer service relationships. This pattern has been developing for several years with leaders like Comcast servicing customers with Twitter . Now, its moving to the next level where when you Tweet an issue, you'll essentially be opening a ticket. And, where tickets are opened, you can be sure that it is someone's job to close them. It seems that Twitter being cemented into enterprise processes just like the telephone of yesteryear. Consumers win by getting faster answers with less searching in document bases, or waiting in call center queues. Consumers also win by bringing speed and transparency to the process. No longer, will we wait on hold all alone, as we're bringing our followers with us with every Tweet. IT departments that have invested in document management and other solutions will now be able to extend their reach Customer service departments that have the job of closing tickets and meeting SLAs (Service Level Agreements) Welcome to the future of customer service, no telephone required, but your smart mobile device is definitely invited. Do you believe SalesForce.com onto the next big shift in enterprise computing with the upcoming launch of Chatter? Photo credits: Salesforce.com Discuss
More here:
This Tweet is Priority 1: SalesForce.com's Chatter is Transactional Social Media
Tags:
america,
Business,
collaboration,
facebook,
fundamental shifts,
internet,
landscape,
landscape change,
power,
sales,
salesforce,
service,
smart,
Twitter