Disruptive Conversations

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http://datasift.net/

Right now the service is in "Alpha" only and will be launched, per the news post, in Q3 2011.

The intriguing element here is that instead of dealing with the entire Twitter firehose through, for instance, the service that Gnip provides, with DataSift you will be able to filter the feed down based on keywords... or even Klout scores (or PeerIndex scores) and/or sentiment analysis.

This is where it could get interesting. You could then set up monitoring for tweets mentioning your brand name that had a negative sentiment and were from someone with a certain "authority" (remembering the issues with any such system). You could then act on those tweets in some fashion (sending out an alert, responding via Twitter, pinging someone via SMS). The key is that the filtering is done in MediaSift's cloud and you get to interact with an already filtered and merged feed.

Pricing was not disclosed in the announcement, although it was said that you only have to pay for the tweets with which you interact - and could also do that on a time-driven basis (i.e. for an hour). On the DataSift web site, there is a pricing page with little detail, but a pricing calculator may give some view into the pricing (if that price there is in US dollars. I can't tell from the symbol).

All in all it sounds like an intriguing service... now we just have to wait for it to actually be launched and publicly available.

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If you haven't seen this video that has been circulating around some parts of the Twittersphere, it's well worth a watch. As the abstract says:

MIT researcher Deb Roy wanted to understand how his infant son learned language -- so he wired up his house with videocameras to catch every moment (with exceptions) of his son's life, then parsed 90,000 hours of home video to watch "gaaaa" slowly turn into "water." Astonishing, data-rich research with deep implications for how we learn.

What is also interesting is the part after his son's word where Deb Roy looks at how they applied their techniques to analyzing social interactions online...

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... and immediately you are transported back into a time of grainy, sepia-toned silent films where someone played ragtime piano music while you viewed the film.

Now in the case of my video, the effect is also completely useless, because you can't hear a word of what the person is saying.

Still, it's a fun hack to see for a moment, anyway. Kudos to the YouTube team for coming up with something fun.

P.S. YouTube has a blog post up about 1911...

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On Thursday, April 7, 2011, we at Voxeo will be hosting a free webinar called Social CRM and Building Apps to Monitor Social Channels where we will talk about how our platform and services can assist companies and organizations with scaling and supporting their customer interaction over social channels. The abstract of the session is:

Two thirds of today’s Internet users actively engage with social networks such as Twitter or Facebook. They use it mainly for personal communication, but often share feedback and thoughts about product or service experiences. Companies need to contribute to this conversation to protect their brands, enhance customer service or provide proactive customer care. They are or will soon be faced both with a staffing problem and the technical challenge of having to integrate with their more traditional customer interaction channels.

Learn how Voxeo can help you automate communication over social channels and bridge the gap between social networks and traditional channels such as IVR or direct agent interaction.

We'll have a demo as part of the session and will leave plenty of time for Q&A. We'll also show the analytics that are available for social channels... and how those channels can be integrated in with the other tools we have to create and manage "multi-channel" applications that interact with customers across voice, SMS, IM, mobile web and social channels like Twitter.

It should be a great session and the main presenter is my colleague Tobias Göbel who is quite excellent. Registration is free and we'd love to have you join us.

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Here are my 2 favorite things:

On a site like the Voxeo blog site, I literally working with 20 blogs. The ability to rapidly switch between those sites using the "My Sites" menu on the admin bar is HUGE. Further, I love that you can switch not just to the admin backend for the sites, but also to just view the site or to quickly create a new post:

My second favorite thing is the "Edit Post" button (which becomes "Edit Page" on a WordPress "Page"). This is wonderful because if you are looking at a post or a page and see something that needs to be fixed, you are just one click away from fixing it. Sure, you could always do this in the past in most themes from a "Edit post" link in the footer... but first you had to scroll down and find it.

These two features alone have made me incredibly happy to have upgraded my sites to WordPress 3.1. The third favorite feature would be the ability to manage comments very easily from the admin bar... which is also very cool.

If you haven't upgraded WordPress to 3.1 yet, I'd definitely encourage you to consider it. Well worth it, in my opinion.

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We had a great idea: Get all 80 Automatticians from 62 cities to run/walk a 5k on the same day! This way we can get some exercise together as a company even though we’re apart (though we won’t rule out a softball or Texas scramble at our next meetup).

We want to invite you to join us, WordPress.com users (and self-hosted WP users, too!), in the Worldwide WP 5k – the 5k blogged around the world! The date is approaching, so read on to find out how to participate.

And so they are encouraging people to run (or walk or skip or roll) on Sunday, April 10, 2011... or anytime in the week prior to that. And, of course, blog about it or otherwise tell the world about it.

Naturally, I'm in. :-)

Of course, since I just ran a 5K loop around Keene, NH, this morning the distance will no longer be a challenge for me... I'll just make sure that that Sunday is one of my "run" days. (I run every other day.)

[1] And if I can now be a "runner", I think pretty much any of you can be one, too... as my post says, I didn't set out to become one, and never pictured myself as one... it was just the natural evolution of deciding to start exercising every day originally in the form of walking...

The coverage is predictably everywhere... and climbing up Techmeme right now. Some stories:

• TechCrunch and Mashable both pointed out recent acquisitions by Salesforce.com
• Business Insider points out the conflict with Seesmic
• All Things D points out the existing relationship between the two companies
• ZDNet wonders about whether the cultures can mesh

For my part, I'm intrigued to see how they will further integrate Radian6's extensive social media monitoring into SalesForce.com's already powerful CRM environment. Some hints are in the news release:

• Sales and Service Cloud: Social media monitoring and engagement has emerged as the requirement for any brand and customer engagement strategy, helping companies join conversations about their brands and stay connected to their customers and prospects. By combining Radian6’s social media monitoring and engagement platform with Sales Cloud and Service Cloud, companies will be able to keep customer success at the center of their business with real-time social intelligence.
  
  
• Salesforce Chatter: Radian6 and salesforce.com will create the bridge between public social networks, like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs and online communities, and Salesforce Chatter, the private, secure social network for the enterprise. Chatter feeds will no longer just contain the activity happening within the walls of a company, but will be filled with real time insights from fans on Facebook pages, followers on Twitter, comments on blog posts and more.
  
  
• Force.com Platform: Developers will be able to build apps that tap into the power of Radian6, putting the social web into everything they build. In such a dynamic market, this acquisition will present a huge opportunity for salesforce.com to extend its developer and partner ecosystem with technology not available anywhere else.

Done well, it could truly provide a powerful means for building "Social CRM" applications. I'm looking forward to seeing what happens next!

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Despite all that, I was proceeding on good faith, assuming that at some point someone in Facebook might see the request I file back in December and act on it.

Someone eventually did.

They DENIED my request.

And in typical Facebook style, there was no word of an appeal and instead a pointer to a useless FAQ page that had no info that I could find about community pages.

Here's the email I received today:

As text:

Unfortunately, after further review, you did not meet the requirements to take over the Page in question. At this time we will not be able to provide you admin rights to this Page. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

For more information about this feature, as well as answers to frequently asked questions, please visit Facebook's Help Center by clicking the link below:

http://www.facebook.com/help/?page=175

Follow that link, please, and see if you can find mention of "Community Pages" anywhere? I couldn't... but maybe I was just too tired. Can you find a mention? (In the links on that page... not by going into the search box.)

Backing Up For Some Context

To review the issue here, which I covered in my December post, Facebook for some reason rolled out "community pages" back in April 2010 and created a "community page" for companies and brands, even those that already had invested time and resources in creating their own Facebook page.

The impact of this is that on places like my own Facebook profile page the link to my employer, Voxeo, does NOT go to the page that Voxeo has create at:

http://www.facebook.com/voxeo

but instead to the "community page" that Facebook created at:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Voxeo/112160428800521

Which is simply an import of the Wikipedia page for Voxeo. That's it. (And there's no way to edit a community page.)

Now obviously in an ideal world, as one of the people responsible for Voxeo's online presence, and specifically the one doing most all the admin for Voxeo's Facebook Page, I'd like to either merge the pages together or replace the community page with our page.

At the very least I'd like to update the community page with a link over to the Facebook page that we maintain.

So when the opportunity appeared back in December to "claim" a community page, I naturally went ahead and submitted a request.

Not Authorized?

Fast forward to today... almost four months have gone by without a peep out of Facebook... and it's with a denial. I "did not meet the requirements to take over the Page in question".

So please, dear Facebook, kindly explain to us...

What precisely ARE the requirements to take over a Community Page?

Is the requirement to take over a company page that you NOT be affiliated with the company?

That's about the only reason I can come up with for why you wouldn't authorize my request.

Because, Facebook, if you do allow a company representative to claim a "community page" in the name of the company, well, let me count the ways I'm authorized on Voxeo's behalf:

• I head up Voxeo's social media efforts, including being the primary blogger on our many blogs and being in the prime on our @Voxeo Twitter account.
  
  
• I'm an admin on Voxeo's own Facebook Page!
  
  
• I'm our prime spokesperson to media, industry analysts and others.

I could go on... but you get the point. I'm not the CEO (or any CxO), but from a brand management point-of-view, that's what I am employed to do for the company.

If *I* don't meet the requirements to take over a community page for a company, who does?

(And if the point is that Facebook wants someone "neutral", fine... I can understand that (even if I don't agree)... just tell us!)

Back To The Original Issue...

The larger issue here, though, comes back to simply this:

I WANT TO CONTROL WHERE I LINK TO FROM MY FACEBOOK PROFILE!

On my Facebook profile, I cannot control the fact that the link on the name of my employer goes NOT to the page I want it to go to (Voxeo's own page) but rather to this community page that Facebook created.

Why, Facebook?

Why can't I control which pages I want to link to?

If we had that control, this whole "community page" issue would be a moot point. I - and other Voxeons - could simply choose to link to the "real" page that we maintain and that shows what Voxeo is up to today.

But I can't control the links on my Profile. I'm locked in to Facebook's walled garden and the rules that they make. If I don't like them, I can of course leave Facebook (and I know some who have).

So it goes.

Perhaps in the next profile redesign that Facebook will do to make our info even smaller so that they display even more ads in our faces... perhaps then maybe, just maybe, they might change their linking policy.

But I'm not holding my breath...

Meanwhile, I'd really just like someone from Facebook to offer a clear explanation of who would meet the requirements to take over a company Community Page. That's it. How about it, Facebook?

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Behind the TEDTalk 2010 from m ss ng p eces on Vimeo.

Kudos to the TED team for producing this look behind the scenes...

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