webcom Montreal

The of the highlight for me this coming week is webcom Montreal (May 26), where I’ll be speaking on Death and Digtial Legacy. Just look at the incredible line-up of speakers at this semi-annual event:

• Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia)
• Tara Hunt (Whuffie Factor)
• Julien Smith (Trust Agents)
• Jeff Pulver (Vivox)
• Seam Power (Complete Web Monitoring)
• Clara Shih (The Facebook Era)
• Chris Heuer (Social Media Club)
• Kristie Wells (Social Media Club)
• Connie Benson (Alterian)
• Shonali Burke (Shonali Burke Consulting)
• Sylvain Carle (Praized Media)
• Kim Vallée (At Home With Kim Vallée)

And a whole lot more…

Concurrent to webcom in the same venue, are two other conferences on May 26:

• WebTweet – inspired by 140 Conference
• WebCamp – unconference for web developers

The night before webcom:

• YulBiz meetup – May 25 – webcom special edition

Open Source Week

This is  also Montreal Open Source Week, a.k.a. MonDev. In addition to WebCamp, there are events happening throughout the week:

• Demo Camp – May 25 – Ignite!-style
• WebCamp – May 26 – concurrent with webcom
• Startup Drinks – May 26
• Make Web Not War – May 27 – Cross-platform conference

I can’t wait! See you there!

I could take this opportunity to rant about how much I despise the stranglehold that Canada’s 3 cellular infrastructure providers (of which Rogers is one) has on it’s population, or prattle on about how we pay the 3rd highest mobile data rates in the world, or of how we have no unlimited mobile data plans, or talk about how this is hurting innovation and business in this country.

But, I won’t just now. That’s a post for another day.

This time I’m going to indulge some geeky marketing interests and delve into my fascination for stats. Especially stats about the growth of digital communication within a Canadian context. This video fits the bill.

One thing I love is that the source citations for the stats are included in the additional information for the video when you view it in YouTube. As a marketer, you never know when you might need a stat, and as a viewer it’s good to know that they’re backing up what they’re claiming. I’ll save you the clicks and reproduce it here.

SOURCES
Facts in Next is Now are calculated based on data from the following sources:
[0:10] Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Information Week
[0:18] 24 hours of video uploaded per minute, The Official YouTube Blog
[0:25] Facebakers, Facebook Statistics Canada
[0:32] Normalized, averaged Facebook growth (Facebook Press Room milestones)
[0:49] iTunes download of The Godfather vs 56kbps
[0:55] Speeds of 50mbps and up in Canada
[1:16] Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association
[1:21] Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association
[1:29] Ipsos Reid Interactive Group
[1:39] Amazon Kindle capacity
[1:43] Bedford Public Library collection: nearly 12,000 books
[1:52] Android: Androlib / iPhone: Apple
[1:55] Match.com iPhone App
[2:32] OTX, 2008 Longitudinal Media Experience Study
[2:36] SRG, Digital Life Canada, November 2009
[2:40] SRG, Digital Life Canada, November 2009
[2:56] AmDocs, The Connected World Vision
[3:16] TweeSpeed
[3:20] 15 million in U.S. alone. CTIA-The Wireless Association, Wireless Industry Survey
[3:24] Symantec, 2000-2009: The Spam Explosion

Nice job to the team at Thornley Fallis and 76design, and Keith McArthur at Rogers.

Now, if Rogers really wants to see the growth of digital communications in Canada, they’ll be the first company to bring an unlimited mobile data plan to this country, and make it comparably affordable to our U.S. cousins. Whadd’ya say?

Watching the Chirp conference live stream on Justin.tv and reading the back channel #chirp tweets, conveniently brought together in one page on  TweetChat, it was difficult to keep up with the flood of information that was being made available. Twitter is so notoriously poor at communicating with their developer community and their users, that when they’ve seemingly turned on the fire hose of information, it’s a little overwhelming.

Here are some highlights:

Stats:
Registered users = 105.8 million
Monthly uniques=180 million
Daily signups=300,000
Posts per day = 55 million
Search queries per day = 600 million (the vast majority through the API)
Over 100,000 registered Twitter applications.

Geolocation:
Twitter is releasing Points of Interest, a geolocation tool tied to places. Instead of latitude and longitude, you’d have actual place names. They say that it will complement Foursquare and Gowalla, not compete with them.

Favorites:
A new API for Favorites will unlock interesting opportunities to manipulate more data. Will it be about influence? Will it be about topics and keywords? Who knows? Hackers will have 2 days to play with it during the conference.

Annotations:
This one is big. Twitter’s API will soon allow developers to add meta data to anything. The possibilities for applications to extract and manipulate data in new and interesting ways is huge. This will be opened up in the next quarter.

Resonance Score:
Marketers, PR folk, SEO/SEM practitioners and anyone else who’s in the business of increasing influence had best listen up. A Resonance Score is the Twitter equivalent of Google’s Page Rank. It examines tweets, favorites, retweets, link clicks, avatar clicks, hashtag reuse, etc. They have theories about how this will play out, but Twitter is going to roll this out slowly while they tinker with what it really means.

Promoted Tweets:
Announced yesterday this is Twitter’s long awaited revenue model. To start, Promoted Tweets is being implemented by Starbucks, Bravo and Virgin America. They offer the brands the opportunity to pin a tweet to the top of keyword search results. The Tweet is shaded to make it stand apart from the regular stream. The length of time it will stay in that position and the value of the tweet will be  tied to Resonance Score. At the start the costing is based on CPM but will evolve into ROI once Twitter understands Resonance Score better.

On Thursday, Starbucks is starting a campaign using Promoted Tweets that will involve giving free coffee to people who come in with a reusable tumbler. They addressed the difficulty of running promotions where they are speaking to an international audience. Starbucks stated that when geolocation can be applied, they will be able to refine their  messaging.

Twitter will be offering a 50/50 revenue split with application developers who opt-in to Promoted Tweets. Participation is not mandatory and 3rd-parties are allowed to have their own advertising models. However, Twitter is working on a policy that will prohibit the ecosystem from certain types of advertising that  would damage the brand integrity, for instance, having ads that were indistinguishable from regular tweets.

Now that Twitter will allow developers access to all that meta data through annotations, how will our data be used for targeted promoted tweets?

Mobile Apps:
The RIM partnered Blackberry app, released this week has resulted in 100,000 new users in 3 days; yesterday the Blackberry app was used on 1.7% of all Tweets. Twitter is also developing an Android app. These join the iPhone app that they released this week. These releases have caused their partners in the ecosystem to question their intentions in competing against 3rd-party development and the future stability of creating apps for Twitter.

User Streams:
Real time information being fed directly to you. No polling the system, no waiting, no rate limits. The API for this is being made available to developers for 48 hours to play with. (There’s a 2 day Twitter hacker event concurrent with Chirp.) Here’s a 3-minute clip from Ryan Sarver @rsarver detailing User Streams:

Watch live video from Bwana.TV on Justin.tv

Home for Devs:
During the conference, Twitter launched dev.twitter.com, the new home for developers to centralize and streamline availability of information and API documentation that will grow to replace the wiki and Google Docs. Documentation will now be generated directly from the code, rather than Twitter creating it manually (resulting in errors and a slow time to post.) The audience showed their relief and appreciation with the loudest applause of the day.

@Anywhere:
Also live today, the @anywere API will allow Twitter to be embedded into media outlets in an interactive way. The Guardian is incorporating @anywhere in their coverage of the UK elections as a way for people to connect directly with politicians.

Notes From the Executive:

• Evan Williams (@Ev) said Twitter was not a social network platform, but a “public interest graph” (as opposed to Facebook’s “private social graph”).
• Dick Costolo (@dickc) stated that Twitter is working on having syndication by the end of this year “or people back stage won’t be working at Twitter any more … including me.”
• @dickc also said that they’d release the number of active accounts from the 105 million registered accounts. But, he stressed that Twitter is often consumed on other sites by people without accounts.
• @Ev says Twitter will be releasing an integrated link shortener. They’ve been using one internally in their own DMs. (Uh oh Bit.ly!)

Misc:

• The Library of Congress has acquired every public tweet since Twitter started 4 years ago. They will continue to archive all public tweets.
• 30% – 40% of the audience indicated that they were hiring.
• Great quotes from Aaron Gotwalt of CoTweet: “Think big. Iterate violently.” and  “Central Pennsylvania: Silicon pasture”
• will.i.am from the Black Eyed Peas took the stage to talk about how musicians will be developers, aggregators of people and content.
• @KaraSwisher did a great job moderating a panel of Twitter application investors, injecting humour and forthrightness into the afternoon. (She was the only woman guest on the stage today.)

Developers: The Power Behind Twitter

I’ve said it many times before: Twitter gets it’s real power from 3rd-party applications. Twitter application developers are the ones who are building the tools that add value to our experience and fuel the intelligence that we’re demanding from this otherwise simplistic platform.

So, show developers a little respect and love for all that they do for Twitter users. Coding takes fuel. Find out what kind of boost your favorite app needs. Is it vocal support? If they’re fledgling, maybe they just need to pay the rent, so pay for an app or give them a donation.

Lastly, please take a few minutes to visit oneforty.com. Started by my buddy Laura Fitton (@pistachio), it’s a tremendous resource for all things Twitter (and is one of the few female-founded start-ups around Twitter.) It’s like an app store where you can search for applications, read and leave reviews, and find just what you need from one of the 100,000 registered developers in the Twitter ecosystem.

10 Things PodCamp Is:

1. not just about podcasting
2. an unconference for new and social media
3. free (in most cities)
4. a great place to learn
5. open to anyone to present – just sign up
6. relaxed in attitude
7. just as exciting in the hallways and at meet-ups
8. wonderful for bringing avatars to life
9. filled with interesting folks
10. inspiring

Rule of Two Feet:

• This rule of PodCamp is that you are free to leave any session at any time if  you are not learning anything from it. Don’t stay in one spot if you’d rather be somewhere else. It’s OK. No one will be offended. Off you go!

5 Essential Things to Bring to Podcamp:

1. Business cards – you’ll be meeting a lot of people
2. Breath mints – see #1
3. An open mind
4. Comfortable shoes
5. A smile

5 Optional Things to Bring to Podcamp:

1. Media creation devices: camera / video camera / audio recorder
2. Laptop / smart phone
3. Water bottle
4. Knowledge to share freely
5. Courage to talk to strangers

More Info:

• My session: Saturday, February 20 @ 3:30 PM in room RCC 201 & brief podcast about it here.
• List of all the sessions at Podcamp Toronto
• Podcamp Toronto 2010 schedule
• Check out podcamp.org for more information about Podcamp, including upcoming and previous cities,
• Check out my video interview about the history of Podcamp with it’s co-founder, Chris Brogan.

See you there!

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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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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WHAT IS IT?

Back on September 30th, Twitter announced on their blog that they would be launching their new Lists feature to a small group of users to Beta test. Lists allow Twitter users to organize the people they follow into groups. By segmenting your following list into groups, you can then filter tweets from your main stream and just view the tweets originating from a selected list. You can also subscribe to other people’s lists.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

There is a new section in the right-hand sidebar for List management. Create a new list by clicking on New List the sidebar. Give the list a name and it will become a URL that you can use wherever, for example, http://twitter.com/adelemcalear/montrealers. Decide if you want the list public or private.

There is a new Lists drop down menu located beside the Tools menu. From the Lists drop down you can add people to any of your groups from their profile page or from your following list.

If you’ve been added to a list it will show up in a new Lists counter beside the number of following and followers you have. If you’ve added someone to a private list, it will not register on their counter.

When you click on the URL to someone’s list, you are given the single click option to “Follow This List.” According to How Twitter Lists Work, when you follow a list your following count does not increase, because “you don’t have to be following someone to add them to a list.”

When visiting someone’s profile page, you can click on their list counter under their bio to see which lists they have been included on and which they follow. (The Twitter url ends in /lists/membership.)

The Lists membership dashboard shows two tabs: Lists following you and Lists your are following. The Twitter user and name of list on the left side. On this page Following refers to how many people are included on the list. Followers refers to how many people have subscribed to the list.

If you want to view the lists that someone has created themselves, you will see a list of them in the right-hand side bar on that person’s profile page, right underneath their Favorites link. The lists  I followed showed up hear as well.

LIMITATIONS

While merrily starting out making my lists, it occurred to me that I might hit a limit. So I sought out the person I knew who would be trying his best to break the new feature, Robert Scoble. Sure enough, he’d found limits already.

It’s not yet clear if the limit of 20 lists includes created and subscribed to, or created only.

There were some  annoyances that came up in my brief test prior to writing this post.

At this time, you must add people individually to your lists, which could be quite time consuming if you follow a lot of people. It would be much faster if you could select multiple people from your following page and add them in bunches to lists.

There is no way of organizing the order in which your lists appear, either in the drop down menu when adding people or in the right-hand side bar of your profile page. The newest list is always on top, with the oldest at the bottom.

Also, and this has nothing to do with functionality, but the font style used on the individual list pages doesn’t match anything else in the Twitter brand. What can I say? I’m a marketer and for years I’ve worked with companies to build brands through consistency. I find it irritating and unprofessional for a company with $155 million in funding  to launch a new feature that doesn’t  seamlessly blend with the rest of their look and feel.

In Part 2 of this series I’ll look at the impact of Twitter Lists on desktop client applications, followers services and popularity ratings. Read Part 2: Twitter Lists: Developers and Applications

Part 3 will examine the effect of Twitter Lists on popularity.

Part 3 Part 4 will look at the opportunities that brands will have with Twitter Lists.

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1. everyone in Quebec speaks French as their first language
2. everyone in the rest of Canada speaks English as their first language
3. everyone in Canada speaks both languages  fluently (if at all)

Yesterday, I sent a customer support question to Air Miles, a Canadian loyalty/rewards program. As is the case with national companies in Canada, there are two mirrored sites: one in French, one in English. I visited the English site and sent my question in English. Here is the automated email I received acknowledging my request:

Bonjour,
Nous desirons seulement confirmer la reception de votre courriel. Votre question est dans nos systemes et un Specialiste du service a la clientele AIR MILESmd vous repondra personnellement d’ici 5-7 jours ouvrable.
A bientot,

Programme de recompense AIR MILES(md)

Hey, gee. Thanks.

The site likely detected that my IP address was in Quebec. The form didn’t ask my location or language, so the people who programmed and approved the Air Miles site must have thought it would be clever to respond to inquiries according to geographically-based language assumptions.

Although, I do speak some French and know enough to be able to read and understand the message, rather than being helpful, this type of response totally misses the mark.

The politics of language in Canada aside, what if I didn’t understand French at all? What if I was only in Quebec on business when I sent the email? Shouldn’t their web site programming be intelligent enough to know that I was sending the inquiry from the English site, and therefore it’s a safe bet to respond in English?

Same goes for the reverse. If my first language was French and I lived in Brandon, Manitoba, or in the officially bilingual province of New Brunswick, or anywhere else in Canada for that matter, and I sent my inquiry from the French site, shouldn’t I be served in that language?

Rather than feeling like Air Miles wants to help me, I know that they’re simply not paying attention to their customers.

It’s very simple. If you have a web site that is available in multiple languages, whatever they are – French, Spanish or Urdu – ensure that your infrastructure is designed to respond to people in the browsing language of your visitors. Ignoring such a fundamental component of communication will only serve to tell your customers that you are not listening to them. That may be the only part of the message that they will understand.

(And don’t even get me started on why it will take Air Miles 5 to 7 business days to respond to a simple query.)

UPDATE 10/07/09: I received a response to my inquiry. In English.

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This morning, news spread of the murder of Montreal blogger Renée Wathelet (@endirectdesiles). A fixture in the community, Renée fell in love with Mexico’s Isla Mujeres and moved there last year March. Although, we spoke on Twitter a few times, I only met her once, when she was in town for a visit last February and* came to Twestival.

So many people here loved Renée and were close to her. Many of those same people may be attending PodCamp Montreal. And so, I questioned whether I should cancel my session out of respect to her grieving friends. But, after consideration, I’m going ahead with the session in honour of all that Renée has created and her own digital legacy.

So, if you are interested in the topic of Death and Digital Legacy, I encourage you to attend my session. It will be a round table discussion and participation is encouraged. I will not be making a formal presentation, but instead will share stories that illustrate different discussion points. Some of these may include:

• how do communities mourn online?
• what are the policies of online social sites for families to access loved ones’ accounts?
• do you need a digital trustee named in your will?
• what are some of the new services that have started to manage digital legacy?
• what are the hazards of dormant accounts, whether the user is deceased or not?

I hope to see you there.

Saturday, September 19, 2009
2:30 PM
DE3225
UQAM Design Centre
1440 rue Sanguinet
Montreal

*UPDATE 9/21/09: For more about Renée Wathelet, her friend and YulBiz founder Philippe Martin was interviewed about her on Montreal radio (in French) on 9/21. Listen here.

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