I want a different way to post updates about my blog to the social web directly from WordPress.
The universally accepted “send an update to Twitter using the headline via the one allowed account tied to my blog when I hit publish” option just ain’t cutting it for me anymore.
Can we be smarter about this? A headline is not always the best status update message. I may want to hit publish and send a message out to Twitter or Facebook at a later time or to each one at different times. I may want to make sure a second or third update gets sent out later in the day or the following week. I might want those to highlight the post from a different angle.
And I’d like to do all of those things at the same time that I’m writing the post, so I don’t have to think about it or remember to do it later. Let me choose from several different Twitter accounts. Let me publish to those different Twitter accounts at different times, with different messages, suited for their specific audiences. Is this too much to ask?
One more thing… add this same functionality to the Press This bookmarklet. This would make me happy. For now.
If you know of a plug-in that will make this happen right now, let me know.
We knew there was a reason the Facebook personal profile API was so limited.
A few months ago we were approached to build a Facebook app that would collect data about the conversations taking place in a persons personal Facebook stream. The goal of the app was to help someone identify who they were having conversations with and who they were not. It would alert the user to communicate with someone if they hadn’t poked, commented, like or messaged them in a period of days or months. It was something we had talked about internally and at conferences many times, so we set out to create it.
Not so fast. I’ll reserve comment on the sketchy documentation in the Facebook API, that only slowed the process. But after several attempts, it quickly became apparent that Facebook was purposefully limiting access to certain actions in the personal stream. We could not track, for example, we could not successfully pull back the correct number of “likes” on videos and photos. And we found this reported by many in the developer forums. While those are seemingly insignificant actions, the simple press of a button, not being able to get to that kind of data made creating an accurate picture of interaction impossible. So we stopped trying.
Listening As A Strategy
I’ve been speaking a great deal recently at various conferences about listening in the social media space and writing about the need for better listening tools. I try to make the best use of what’s available. Example: I use Facebook’s friends list feature extensively. It helps me segment conversations and listen with intent. When I ask audiences if they use it, the vast majority answer “no.” Mark Zuckerberg confirms my anecdotal findings in the video below.
Tell me who my friends really are.
Last week I spoke in Virginia and related our Facebook app story to the audience. I said at that time that an effective form of social CRM would be a killer app. In truth, no matter how many “friends” you have on Facebook, you only communicate with a small subset of those friends. Who do I pay the most attention to? Who pays the most attention to me? Who pays no attention to me at all? This is valuable information, especially if I’m attempting to be somewhat purposeful in my networking.
The value of identifying the connections in the social graph has not been lost on the Facebook team. They want to control the social graph. They’ve been mapping our conversations without the limitations of their API all along and have created “an index for each relationship.” And they are now ready to tell us who our friends really are.
I’m actually looking forward to seeing what they’ve come up with, whether I like it or not. Are you?
This BBC video above questions the benefits of how Starbucks is engaging with its 14 million Facebook “friends.”
My favorite segment: reporter, Rory Cellan-Jones asks, “Aren’t companies which try to engage with their customers on social networks almost as sad as people who obsess about how many Facebook friends they have?” “People become absolutely transfixed by this stuff,” says Lucy Kellaway of The Financial Times. “Just as people who monitor their own reputation on Google. And what are they really learning about their business that they couldn’t learn better from actually looking at the business itself, rather than looking at the second order thing of what people actually think about it?”
Both are interesting questions, for many reasons. I think some balance is in order. What do you think?
Caught off guard? Yes. To say we were caught off guard by the response to our Phraze Frenzy portfolio page would be an understatement. We knew the game was extremely popular, but had no idea just how much the game community wanted it to return. You certainly made that very clear.
So, we have decided to revive it under a new name, built on a completely new platform and we plan to launch it in Facebook. We added this to our production schedule just over two weeks ago and we’ve made significant progress, working it in among the other projects on our plate. We have made a ton of progress on the backend of the site, the stuff that is invisible to the user. We have a lobby, chat and some game functions working already. So, we’re well on our way.
Now, what should we call it?
We received some excellent suggestions in the comments and we want to get some of the ones we liked in front of you here.
Word War
Word Fury
Word Herd
Pop Phrase
WhirlWords
Frenetic Phrases
Frantic Phrase
Phrase Flow
Word Whirlwind
Phrase Craze
Super Phrase
Thanks for lighting our fire! We’d love to hear your thoughts.
“Share your Y2K story” jumped out at me as I panned through one of my Twitter lists this morning. Jeremiah Owyang wrote a great post asking his readers to share their personal memories of the Y2K scare. Ten years later, I remember it like it was yesterday.
At that time I was CEO of a company called AdOut. AdOut was responsible for 100% of the ads created by the Los Angeles Times, LA Daily News, and the Torrance Daily Breeze. Thousands of ads per night were created by our dedicated team of graphic designers. And those three newspapers depended on us, exclusively, to meet their deadlines each and every day. It was a truly a nightly miracle.
So, although we were running a 100% Macintosh office and had no worries at all about our systems being impacted by Y2K, the newspapers were very concerned about the power company and required that we rent a LARGE generator to kick in when the lights went out at 12:01 am on January 1, 2000. Of course, that never happened. And, truth be told, none of us at AdOut ever thought it would.
Insert Nostalgic Y2K Photos Here
So, we laughed about it at our offices. We all took photos by the generator, which was the size of a semi truck. I’m sure I have those photos stored somewhere, but I’m not about to try to find them this morning. And that’s what strikes me most about what has transpired in the last 10 years.
If Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube had existed in 1999, I’d have those photos available for this post right now. I’d know exactly where to find them. This post would be filled with images, and embedded videos. The story would contain links to tweets that illustrated perfectly how silly we all were. We could laugh as we read the archived posts from the onslaught of Y2K consultants that surfaced in the months leading up the the new millenium. This post would be so much better if the social media tools available to us now were available to us then.
Last week I received a direct message on Twitter from Matt Stigliano, aka @rerockstar. He was writing a post about Mothers Fighting For Others and wanted to automatically place specific text into his readers’ Twitter status window to help spread the word about the cause.
He asked if I knew how to create that kind of link and I said I did, but that it would take more than 140 characters to explain. So, he sent me the text he wanted and I created the link for him. You can see how he used it on the link to “@realhughjackman” near the end of Matt’s post about MFFO.
In making the link, it occurred to me that there should be an easy way for anyone to do this.
So, today I passed the objectives on to Steve, gave him some links to a couple of API’s, and he built a simple tool that allows you to quickly and easily create a status update URL for Twitter. How simple is it? In the form window on the page, just type in the message you want OTHERS to send via Twitter, then hit submit. We then generate a TinyURL link that you can use in blog posts, or simply include in a tweet or direct message. You can use it anywhere you can place a link.
If your reader is logged into Twitter, clicking on the TinyURL link will automatically place your words into their Twitter status update window. They can then review the message and hit send. It makes it easy for someone to help you spread your message and gives you more control over that message.
Shortly after we created the tool, I used it to try to get the attention of Hugh Jackman again. This time via a Facebook. As you can see in the image below, I placed this URL – http://tinyurl.com/cw7o5j - in my Facebook status window.
Because it was so simple to do – click on a link, hit send – the single status message created a slew of updates on Twitter. Each update contained the exact message we wanted delivered to Hugh. Real people sending a real message.
The easier it is for your readers to do something for you, the more likely they are to do it. Create a status update URL and your readers will be more likely to help you spread your message.
The universally accepted “send an update to Twitter using the headline via the one allowed account tied to my blog when I hit publish” option just ain’t cutting it for me anymore.
We received some excellent suggestions in the comments and we want to get some of the ones we liked in front of you here.
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My Y2K Story Would Be Better With A Few Photos
“Share your Y2K story” jumped out at me as I panned through one of my Twitter lists this morning. Jeremiah Owyang wrote a great post asking his readers to share their personal memories of the Y2K scare. Ten years later, I remember it like it was yesterday.
At that time I was CEO of a company called AdOut. AdOut was responsible for 100% of the ads created by the Los Angeles Times, LA Daily News, and the Torrance Daily Breeze. Thousands of ads per night were created by our dedicated team of graphic designers. And those three newspapers depended on us, exclusively, to meet their deadlines each and every day. It was a truly a nightly miracle.
Insert Nostalgic Y2K Photos Here
So, we laughed about it at our offices. We all took photos by the generator, which was the size of a semi truck. I’m sure I have those photos stored somewhere, but I’m not about to try to find them this morning. And that’s what strikes me most about what has transpired in the last 10 years.
If Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube had existed in 1999, I’d have those photos available for this post right now. I’d know exactly where to find them. This post would be filled with images, and embedded videos. The story would contain links to tweets that illustrated perfectly how silly we all were. We could laugh as we read the archived posts from the onslaught of Y2K consultants that surfaced in the months leading up the the new millenium. This post would be so much better if the social media tools available to us now were available to us then.
Boy has the world has changed in ten years.
Tags: daily breeze, daily news, facebook, flickr, los angeles times, newspapers, Social Media, Twitter, y2k, youtube
Posted in Blog, Commentary, Social Media | 1 Comment »