Dave Evans on Twitter & the Metrics Panel at SXSW

I am posting a short video below that I took over dinner at Truluck's in Austin with Dave Evans' version of the Metrics Panel at SXSW. Apparently, the panel members were taking a little too long to get to the point for many audience members, who were communicating via Twitter. Read some actual quotes from the back channel audience conversations.

It's graphic evidence of how fast and dramatically the balance of power is being re-weighted in favor of the recipients of information as compared to the disseminators. Heck, we are all busy; it's not hard to understand the "just get to the facts" attitude that is prevalent at least at tech conferences.

Audiences are Messy Too

Yesterday I wrote about customers being messy, and that it is our job to work with, rather than expect them to use our products and services only as the engineers intended.

Well, audiences can be the same! The Sarah Lacy keynote interview of Mark Zuckerberg yesterday was a very educational event. As a public speaker with 20 years experience, I shared the audience's impatience with her style and also felt her pain as the session eventually erupted in loud shouting protest. A lot of blame is being dispensed, and I think SXSW has some responsibility on the table too. Seems that people who weren't there are being more forgiving however the energy in the room was very hard to dispute.

For me, it's a great opportunity to take some notes to serve as reminders for events in the future. Jeff Jarvis has some examples. I've condensed the collective ideas into a pocket-handy bullet list.

1. The larger the audience, the more it makes sense to plan for contingencies. Once you are in process, the titanic effect kicks in and it is not easy to know if things are going south, and then be able to act on it.
2. Know when to use the old rules and the new rules.
3. Use the best practices of Speaking 1.0:
   • Have a more formal introduction so the audience are informed about the speaker's expertise.
   • Event organizer should prep the speakers and remind them to repeat questions from audience if not captured by the microphone, for the recording and more importantly to keep all in the audience part of the conversation.
   • Have chairs that are comfortable and complementary to the speakers. Do everything you can to help them be at ease and look good so their knowledge can shine through. The chairs were too low to the floor at this keynote, which may have contributed to Sarah Lacy's body language problems and also made it harder to see them on stage.
   • The interviewer's job is to shine a light on the featured guest. It is not to draw attention to oneself.
   • The specific venue will dictate how much of your flashlight has the inquisitive and honoring bulb (the Lannan interviews are superb when people come to hear insights from someone they love) or the probing and investigative bulb (as the Columbia University event with Iran's President Ahmadinejad).
   • If there are pre-arranged questions, and you have been honored with a scoop, don't blow it! (Sarah announced that Facebook was launching a French version and stole the thunder away from Mark Zuckerberg.)
   • Interviewer's job is to ask questions, not make statements. The guest's job is to answer questions, not repeat PR taglines (paragraph 6).
4. Use the best practices of Speaking 2.0:
   • Engage your audience in advance to find out what they want to know from this person who is so private and inaccessible.
   • Being casual does not equal being flip or disrespectful. I thought the comment about his dripping wet t-shirt (from nervousness on a previous interview) was out of place.
   • Bring the audience in to your past experiences with the guest, don't use them to exclude people. This translated as unpleasantly coy, superior, and lacking the highly valued transparency of 2.0.
   • Listen to your customers. When things are not going well, own up to it (don't blame the audience) and take a minute to re-adjust. Ask for help. Apologize. There are numerous 2.0 behaviors that can have haters turn into fan boys if you know about and are willing to use them. I'm not saying this is easy because it isn't. But opportunity exists to help us all become stronger, clearer, and more competent.

Things happen and Sarah, to her credit, is holding up against the barrage of criticism Here's her point of view. Learn, laugh, and move on.

Reporting Standards Bloggers v Journalists

This is an ongoing discussion, and @astrout, one of the people I follow on Twitter, is putting together a summary of this debate. Please read his post (I'll update this one with a link after it's published next week) for the full monty! No links here as this is a Rox Opinion Piece.

While I understand that people really like to frame discussions in the "either-or" mode, I am almost always going to see them as "either-and." Here's the general perspective I have on journalists and bloggers.

Journalists

• Journalists have training that is relatively unique to them, and at the least, there are entire academic curricula defining the rules of engagement.
• They have access to key people and places that is cultivated over the years both by personal means and by being a member of certain clubs. (The journalists club, the employee of ___News Co club, the pool reporters club, etc.)
• Because of where they are published (an established, already vetted, news source) they have implied credibility of the mainstream and traditional kind.
• And this presumed authority also allows them to get away with using the term "anonymous sources" and still maintain a level of cred. Let's call this cred by association.
• This credibility is generally challenged remotely, in broad sweeping terms, by people who are promoting a different agenda aka a different news business entity. The battle of the corporate titans.
• They get paychecks, some of them "obscene" (as told to me directly by more than one leading TV news personalities).
• These paychecks are an incentive to get out a story, not necessarily find the most accurate or well-rounded story. Let's say "the man" is their ultimate master.

Bloggers

• Have more interest and passion in their topic than formal training in many cases.
• Have less access to people in power on average but more access to the opinions on the street precisely because they are having conversations there. And they hang out there.
• Because of where they are published (an independent media source online) they have to first build credibility by creating an audience, then sustain it.
• Most credible bloggers will cite their posts with numerous, verifiable sources. This is called link love and it bears so much influence and good will. (I am resisting the urge to go find links to support each of my points, but I am in a hurry to draft my next blog post and I am trusting Aaron Strout.)
• Their all-volunteer army err I mean audience either confirms the experience or disputes it. And it happens right there on the blog post, back and forth, in real time.
• Most bloggers do it for love not money.
• That independence gives them freedom to explore the farther reaches of the truth, and the audience becomes the ultimate master.

IMO the audience is not always right, so just as paid journalists are vulnerable to the man's paycheck, so are bloggers vulnerable to inflaming the story to whip up the passions of their fans. At the end of the day, each is contributing something of value the other doesn't have and the only thing that isn't happening that much yet is a mutual respect for the work each does.

As more and more people understand the power of word-of-mouth communication, I suspect we will see bloggers continue to rise as being sources of influence and information. IMO, neither bloggers nor journalists have a lock on the truth, as the truth is a very personal and complex thing.

Twitter Joins Us on Verio

Let me start by saying, I'm dropping in on a conversation taking place at Techcrunch, Twitter and on the Joyent blog regarding the continue server outages at Twitter. I use Twitter but have been too busy this past week to even notice their recent round of outages. I found out today they had been hosting with Joyent and last night made the switch to Verio.

We've been a Verio reseller for over 10 years and all our client websites, and our personal sites, are hosted at Verio. A few years back we put some personal sites on a couple servers at TextDrive and everything was fine for a while. Then TextDrive was acquired by Joyent and we started having more and more downtime. It wasn't too much of a problem as these were just personal blogs. But when Beach Walks started taking off, which we initially hosted at TextDrive, we could no longer accept the outages and moved everything off the Joyent servers and terminated all our accounts.

It's a PITA (pain in the ass) managing servers. I've been doing it for 12 years now. We started way back in 1996 hosting all our own servers in our little office in Santa Fe, New Mexico. When the count of servers grew to 10, and I started sleeping in the office to make sure they stayed online, I knew it was time to look for a datacenter.

I did a lot of research over a three month period, looked at all the big datacenters, some of which are no longer around, and finally decided on Verio. Verio is more expensive and very stingy on hard drive space. But the support it top notch, their bandwidth reliable, and most important, in the past 12 years our sites have never been down for more than an hour in the worst cases. Usually if there is an outage the servers are back up before we even knew about the problem.

Obviously we don't require the resources that Twitter does. And there's a lot of technical discussions and general agreement that Ruby On Rails (RoR), on which Twitter is built, has a very difficult time scaling for applications the size of Twitter. I tend to agree and would love to see Twitter re-tooled on a more stable platform such as PHP. But application server preferences aside, the first thing any company should do is not skimp on their hosting provider. You definitely get what you pay for when it comes to hosting in my experience.

So, we wanted to take this opportunity to welcome Twitter to the Verio family. I'm still not convinced RoR is the platform on which to build a heavily trafficked service such as Twitter. But it is definitely going to help now that Twitter is housed in a world class data center such as Verio.

Pep Talk and Talk Prep for HAF

I'll be speaking this morning at the Hawaii Advertising Federation's annual "university." This is a day when the ad pros come together to network and open minds to new ideas.

First off, I say congrats. There is this sticky wicket in that the more a person becomes an expert, the more confusing it is to find space for new information. If you are like me, you can hear the echo of a client somewhere saying, "But you're the expert - why didn't you know that already or why are you going to this seminar?"

Of course, true experts and wise people understand that with information being created at an inconceivably fast pace, no one can be an expert for more than a few moments in time. I prefer to think of myself as a lover of knowledge, and that inspires me to learn as much as I can, plus I am interested in sharing it with others. That is my time-saving gift - I will do the research and make some of the silly learning mistakes so I can fast track you with a new tool.

This session is a tour of the deep parts of the tubes. The internet truly is a culture of its own, and I will be your tour guide making the trip inside fun and informative and safe. It will be a living example of how the net works these days, so please expect some interaction, some social networking, some gossip 2.0, and some key takeaways for how this can impact your business and those you serve.

Old Media and New Media Working Together

I just love it when this happens.

We do a daily video podcast aka internet TV show called Beach Walks with Rox. Last weekend, YouTube featured us on their Travel channel page. We had over 80,000 views in less than three days. (We will eventually be rotated off this page...)

The episode was about a tree and mulch blessing (or oli in Hawaiian) the was conducted by the Lani-Kailua Branch branch of one of our clients, The Outdoor Circle. It featured awesome chanting by Haunani and ʻIlima Stern of Aloha Blessings.

And a circle it is, as I then sent out a few press releases to local media. Erika Engle, author of "The Buzz" column in the Star-Bulletin Business section, called me for an interview and wrote a really terrific article, ostensibly because of the YouTube story but she delved deeper and we got into an interesting (IMO) discussion about how businesses, especially Hawaiian tourism businesses, can use these new media and social networking online tools.

After I gave her a boat load of examples, she asked, "Why doesn't every business upload their stuff to YouTube?" Great question, dontcha think?

What I don't get is why the online version of the article does not have links to our business website and the the Beach Walks site being discussed. It's easy to do, but traditional print media seem to be "link averse" as if they will lose a site visitor. More importantly, they provide an even better resource by including the link (which creates more customer loyalty) and they always code it easily enough to open in a new window - keeping the main media site alive and well on the viewer's computer.

Oh, and I sure wish I could have left a comment on Erika's page to thank her and add to the conversation. I wonder, does it get lonesome writing without response?? Leave your comment here for Erika and I will send her the link to this page.

But in any case, the article was written well, accurate, and managed to mentioned the many people involved. Mahalo Erika! And mahalo to Mary Steiner, CEO (and blogger) for The Outdoor Circle who emailed this morning after having read the article. Hmm, I wonder if she has a Google Alert that notifies her whenever "outdoor circle" gets mentioned online??

Surfing Tip: Right-click (or control-click) on all of the links in this article if you want them to open in a new window. It's a web surfing power tip that comes in handy frequently.

How Not to Have Your Company Do Social Networking

I read this post on Gawker quoting a memo from the boss at Gawker:

Along with Scott's push to update the staff directory, we're asking for a new form of contact information for you, too. We want you to create a Facebook page.
(This request is actually a non-negotiable demand for everyone at Gawker Media, so do read on. This should take you about three minutes to complete.)

This web site had made fun of the publisher Little, Brown earlier for the "decision to make all his Hachette imprint's editors post online profiles on Publishers Marketplace."

I wouldn't think it would have to be said, but listen up peeps! Wanting your employees to blog and network and create online profiles may be an admirable goal, but requiring them to do so is completely counter to the point, or as my colleagues would say, "totally lame." It is a sure sign you do not get it.

This space lives by independent thought and action, not by top-down requirements by extroverted bosses. I appreciate the urge - I consider myself an extroverted boss. But this forced friending will not get you dates at the social networking parties. You turn people off, you invite flaming, and IMO, you're wasting time too.

How to Apologize & Acknowledge Good Customer Service

People who work in technology get tons of requests from clueless customers - legions of funny lists have been posted. Rarely do you get an inside look though into an example of someone who can admit to "user error."

Hence the internet is often an unfiltered (though understandable) space full of exasperation morphing into meanness and plenty of "it's not my fault." We at Bare Feet Studios like to lobby for a little consciousness and kindness too.

I was really impressed with how my super geeeky super smart business partner replied to our email provider after bugging them for help, and wanted to share it with you.

OMG....!!!

Here's one for your Knowledge Base or in case you start to receive similar problems reported.

I upgraded to Mac OS X 10.5, Leopard, last night. Apple Mail in Leopard doesn't support some third party plugins and so reported an error and disabled those plugins. All good stuff.

But I had Rules based on those plugins. Because those plugins were now disabled, those Mail Rules grabbed every message coming in to the Inbox and placed them in random folders in Apple Mail.

I am very sorry for all your time I wasted this morning and humbled by my lack of insight that my Mail Rules could be messing with ALL incoming messages.

Webmail.us customer service continues to be top notch even when it's my fault and I don't have a clue it's my fault.

Much Mahalo (thanks)
-shane

I also found these tips for tech support you can use as needed.

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