Marketing Monster

I’m pleased to announce the launch of DeathAndDigitalLegacy.com.

Since first starting to explore this subject more than two years ago, I’ve realized that it stretches wider than I ever could have imagined. As I delved deeper, questions surrounding law, security, privacy, bereavement, preservation, development, and even immortality came to the forefront.

Speaking at PodCamp Montreal last September proved to me that digital legacy issues can be a revelation to people when they stop to consider it. That session really ramped up interest in this topic and led to interviews with the New York Times and others, additional speaking opportunities, and people stepping forward to share their stories with me about death, the digital world and its personal impact on them.

I plan on continuing to research, write and speak about this important topic. But, I am sensitive to the fact that people who come to this blog looking for marketing and technology related posts may not always appreciate hearing about death or the issues surrounding it. It’s not a subject for all moods or all people.

So, if you have an interest in digital legacy, digital afterlife, digital immortality or related issues, and wonder about what you need to consider for the future, I welcome your perspective at DeathAndDigitalLegacy.com. To get you started, there are two new posts over there:

What is a Digital Executor?
HOW TO: Use Gmail For Digital Executor Instructions and Access

And  now we’ll return to our regularly scheduled programming.

Don’t know Google Sidewiki? Google released this feature just over a month ago as part of their Google Toolbar. Sidewiki allows you to add comments to any page on the web within your browser (IE and Firefox) by way of a fly-out tab and comment box. It is indexable by Google, and users can grade comments as useful or not, as well as report abuse. For more information on the ins-and-outs of Google Sidewiki, check out these posts from ReadWriteWeb and Digital Inspiration (with work arounds if you don’t use Internet Explorer or Firefox.)

UPDATE 10/29/30 - Google releases Sidewiki bookmarklet - “utilize Google Sidewiki on any browser, even if you don’t have the Google Toolbar installed.”

Tonight I came across Ed Lee’s post about Google Sidewiki, along with his recommendations. In it, he calls attention to Dave Jones, VP Digital Communications at Hill & Knowlton who doesn’t care much for Google Sidewiki. He says, “Sidewiki is like a bunch of people walking through that virtual front door and helping themselves to a boardroom to have a noisy chat about all the things they love and hate about the organization.”

To try to get people to leave comments on his blog rather than in Sidewiki, Dave Jones has posted his position and his request to the Sidewiki on his home page of DaveJones.ca.

Now, whether you like Sidewiki or not, I think it’s a good idea to post a welcome message there for your own site. Maybe you want to encourage people to comment right on your site, or, maybe you want to tell them why you don’t allow commenting and explain your position. Whatever you post, be aware that:

• you have no control over what people will post to the Sidewiki
• the comments are indexable by Google, including your own message
• comments are not physically contained on your site, but within Google
• commenters can highlight text on the page and comment upon it in Sidewiki
• every page of your site has its own Sidewiki

This last point is particularly important for implementing your welcome message. Be sure that you are posting the message to the home page of your site. But, also be aware that people may come to your site via a link to a blog post or may land on an interior page of your site. Where warranted, you may want to add a message to additional pages where comments may have been turned off for a specific reason. But, I would resist the urge to post to every page in your site as it might be viewed as company-generated spam.

As a site owner, Google Sidewiki will “pin” your post to the top of the Sidewiki and highlight it in green. After you’ve downloaded Google Toolbar and clicked open your Sidewiki, you’ll see this:

If you have not yet verified your site with Google’s Webmaster Tools and linked the site to your Google Account, you’ll need to go through those steps. The whole process is outlined here.

You can’t control what people will write on your pages’ Sidewikis, but perhaps you can help to set the tone and maybe even direct people to site resources where they are equally free to express themselves.

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Photo: Jerome Paradis

Last week, I spoke at webcom Montreal 09 along with Shel Holtz, Sean Moffitt and a host of other great speakers. This bi-annual conference features topics aimed at decision-makers and professionals in marketing, internal and external communications and those who want to understand and master the Internet.

I delivered my session, Twitter Tools for Strategic Marketing, with the aim of helping marketers who represent brands to get more out of their Twitter experience. It highlighted which 3rd party applications they could use to add real value and market intelligence to their Twitter efforts.

Because having the right tools to do your job is essential to success, I presented applications that were a selection of what is available to help manage corporate tweets, analyze sentiment, track opinions, conduct market research, find influencers, monitor brand mentions, track trends in real-time and more.

Shel Holtz gave the keynote Tactical Transparency: The Value of Access to Information and then followed up with a second  session on how Your Employees are Your Brand. Here’s a brief excerpt (apologies for the itty bitty jiggy cam):

One of my favourite sessions of the day was Sylvain Grand’Maison’s rapid-fire presentation The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Traditional Media’s Web Experience. In it, he highlighted how francophone mainstream media in Quebec are failing to deliver a good online experience.

Another highlight of the day was discovering WebCamp. In its 4th year, it was held upstairs from web  com and got back to basics. The concept of Praized co-founder, and well-known Montreal developer, Sylvain Carle, the un-conference was a circle discussion of issues important to the community. I was only able to stay for a short time but was excited by a concept that Sylvain had – a networking event similar to speed dating, but for Marketers and business people to meet developers and programmers. (Coincidentally, I’d had this very thought several days earlier!) This led into a discussion about self-branding for techies and IdentityCamp. I’m always impressed with the level of creativity and commitment to innovation that the Montreal development community has. If you want to view some of the discussions (mostly in French), they are here on Laurent Lasalle’s Qik. <link to Laurent’s Qik>

My thanks to Claude Malaison for inviting me to speak at webcom 09 and congratulations to him for holding another successful conference.

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Yesterday The New York Times ran the interview I did about The Digital Afterlife and the need to appoint a digital executor:

Internet Protocol is Jenna Wortham’s advice column for technology. The question was:

Not to be morbid, but I have a lot of private information and details stored on my computer — in various Google Chat logs, e-mail and social networking accounts — that I wouldn’t want to be revealed when I log off for good. Who should I consult or what do I need to do to ensure my cache is cleared and e-mail and social networking sites accounts are deleted when I die?

This person wants to keep private things quiet. Perhaps they have another online persona or have made some online indiscretions or simply don’t want their family to know about certain dealings?

Things become much more complicated in attempting to keep this secret after they pass. Although there are automated services to notify your friends on social networks or selected individuals of your passing, in the case above, you’d still have to rely on someone to access your computer if you want your cache or sensitive files deleted. Yes, you’d need the digital equivalent of a “porn buddy” to wipe your computer clean of sensitive information, from financial information to, well, porn.

You can read my advice on appointing a digital executor here. What would you advise?

Have you appointed a digital executor to keep your online digital legacy alive? What about someone to delete private information from your computer or from online? Have you thought about it at all?

Let me know what you think.

This is Part 2 of a 3-part 4-part series. Read Part 1: What Are Twitter Lists?

Unfortunately, if you are not part of the Beta roll out, Twitter will not allow you to see the URLs of lists, even if they’ve been tagged as public. For the benefit of everyone, I will include screen shots, where practical, in addition to the link.

WHY DID TWITTER LISTS LEAVE DEVELOPERS OUT?

In the September 30th blog announcement. Nick Kallen, the project lead on Lists stated on the Twitter blog that there will be a Lists API. “This will allow developers to add support for Lists into your favorite Twitter apps.”

It seems that developers were an afterthought on this Twitter Feature. Normally, developers are notified of major feature roll outs such as this well in advance and are afforded the opportunity to work with the API in before the launch. However, the development community weren’t even informed that Twitter Lists was on the development roadmap until September 30th, likely well after Twitter would have started working on it.

When the feature was released yesterday, the vast majority of developers (but interestingly, not all) didn’t even have access to the Lists API documentation until last night. When users like Robert Scoble started building lists and tweeting about them, the dev community cried foul and a draft of the API documentation was quickly made available, sending developers scrambling to integrate Lists into their offerings throughout the wee hours of last night.

HOW WILL TWITTER LISTS IMPACT DESKTOP CLIENTS?

Many original users of TweetDeck or Seesmic Desktop were drawn to the services because of the list/group functionality that they offered. Those services have now evolved to offer a host of additional features, but, for many the list/group function remains the primary benefit. With the Lists API, TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop will face a whole slew of Twitter client competition who didn’t previously have a lists or a grouping function.

Now you may be thinking, yes, but I use TweetDeck/Seesmic and so using Twitter Lists doesn’t bring me any extra value. Consider that TweetDeck’s groups are confined to TweetDeck . Twitter Lists, once the developers set to work on it, will start popping up in all sorts of different apps and locations that have been built specifically to add value to the user experience. Twitter Lists will not be confined to the client that you’re running. And that reality will surely cut into established client applications’ market share.

WHAT WILL TWITTER LISTS DO TO “FOLLOW” DIRECTORIES?

The inclusion of a Lists API will threaten recommendation applications like WeFollow, Twellow, Mr. Tweet or Twibes. The categorization of people on these types of services are usually self-submitted, or in some cases, chosen by an algorithm. The resulting recommendations may not always be vetted according to your personal standards. And let’s face it, following people based on their own self-categorization is just not the same as having a personal recommendation from someone you know. Personal referrals are the preferred way that people make purchasing decisions and deciding who to invest your time with on Twitter is not much different.

Rather than taking random recommendations from Follow Directories, you could easily visit the profile of someone who’s opinion you trust and select from their lists. Let’s say you want to learn more about the players in venture capital. By clicking on his lists counter from the profile page, I can examine which lists that Guy Kawasaki has been included on. This netted me a great starter list from Christine Lu: http://twitter.com/christinelu/vc-and-angels.

As it’s possible to subscribe to lists without actually following each individual in the group, I can simply click “Follow List” from the main list page and follow the tweets of a great subset of Twitter, chosen by someone I know.

Twitter Lists also goes head-to-head with other applications which allow you to follow groups with a single click. Take TweepML for example. The developers launched their one-click group app on September 9th, exactly 3 weeks before Twitter announced Lists. Had the developers known what laid ahead on the Twitter features road map,  I wonder if they’d have developed the same product. As it stands, TweepML was quick off the mark and explained on their blog last night that it was easy to import your Twitter Lists to their service.

Thousands of applications currently exist that work with the Twitter API, from desktop and mobile clients to statistics and search properties. Smart developers should follow the lead of TweepML and integrate Twitter Lists into their products. By finding ways to use Twitter Lists to add value to existing applications, they’ll be in a better position to survive the inevitable surge of new offerings that have surely sprouted in the last 16 days.

Next up: Part 3: Popularity

Read Part 1: What Are Twitter Lists?

Part 4 will look at the opportunities that brands will have with Twitter Lists.

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