This is #6 on Chris Brogan’s 100 Blog Topics list, and is part of the 100 Topics Challenge.
This is #5 on Chris Brogan’s 100 Blog Topics list, and is part of the 100 Topics Challenge.
Twenty years ago, you wouldn’t be reading this.
Thirteen or fourteen years ago, I had a blog (I called it a web diary) that had about three irregular readers. All of them knew me. There weren’t really any search engines (yeah you can haggle with me on this one, but really there weren’t!), and there was no possible way anyone could have found me.
Today anyone with a big of imagination and some free time can post up a blog, cross reference their feed in a bunch of places, crow about it on Twitter, comment on a few other blogs – and within a few hours (if they have anything useful and interesting to say!), they have an audience. Not just people they know – people anywhere.
If that isn’t empowering, I don’t know what is.
If you are looking for an example of a social media site that really works hard at building a relationship with its “customers”, check out DandyId.
I found the site via a plugin for WordPress by Neil Simon.
DandyId allows you to put in links to all of your public profiles in a single place, which is useful when you have a large number of them. The plugin, in turn, allows you to list them all on your blog.
I happened to note on this site that there were a few social media sites that I had profiles for that were not available on DandyId. Within minutes, Neil had contacted me to ask for a list, which he then forwarded along to DandyId. The next day, they were all incorporated into their system.
Impressive.
If you are in the business of dealing with customers, I hope that you a) listen, b) care, c) respond as well as Neil and DandyId. I hope that I can relate to my customers that well.
This is #4 on Chris Brogan’s 100 Blog Topics list, and is part of the 100 Topics Challenge.
Alas, this post is a lament.
Way back when, there used to be a website called Askme.com. A friend of mine introduced me to Askme, which filled a niche similar to Yahoo! Answers today. Unlike Answers, people needed to specifically register to answer questions in a particular category, and in doing so indicate how they were expert in the topic. Users of the site rated answers in the standard manner, and experts were ranked both overall and in their categories of expertice.
The Askme community is probably the most vibrant of all of the online communities that I have been involved with over the years. In every category in which I was active, there were users who I truly got to know – both experts and people asking questions. People stuck around for years, and got involved in maintaining their categories.
Unfortunately the company decided that running a free website to showcase their technology was too expensive, so they shut it down in order to focus on selling their software to Fortune 500 companies instead. The hundreds of thousands of committed experts floated away along the internet’s pipes, and so far I have yet to find another site that I truly felt at home participating in to the same extent. From what I’ve heard, I’m not the only one.
This is #3 on Chris Brogan’s 100 Blog Topics list, and is part of the 100 Topics Challenge.
I’ve seen this a lot lately: some little flyspec place a million miles away from anything decides that they need to be bleeding edge. So they build a virtual world that duplicates the whole town and everything in it, and then try to provide municipal services through it.
My chief question is whether they have virtualized garbage collection and property taxes. I’d love to be able to pay my property taxes in Linden Dollars.
I don’t see anything wrong really with the notion that municipalities need to find more ways to connect to residents (as long as they do it right). I think the critical factor is that they need to realize that Social Media provides a different set of features and opportunities to other, older ways of “interfacing”. If their goal is to give their residents a way to contribute to the community then good for them. If they think that throwing up a 3d VR version of City Hall and then hoping that people will vote them in again next time around, then they should understand up front that they are wasting taxpayer’s money.