Archive for April, 2008

Where’s the Twitter-based event meetup application? I’ve not seen one, but until then here is a work-around that does some of the goodness. If you’re using Twitter on a mobile device and have a mobile feedreader, this is for you.

Even though many people I follow on twitter will be at the same events as me, there are always lots of folks who will be at conferences and meet ups I don’t know. I have found that Summize’s new Twitter search is a great way to get those folks into my Twitter stream - or at least follow them during (or after) the event using my mobile - provided they’ve tweeted at least once about the show or plans to attend.

The process couldn’t be easier.

1. Hit Summize.com and click on the “Twitter Search” link.

2. Add keywords related to your event. For SMX Social Media I added “SMX” because it was a nice short acronym I felt would capture most action related to this event. If anyone were tweeting about it, they’d include this. If you didn’t have such a convenient one, you may need to include the venue name, etc. (curious that there is no SMX Social twitter user we could all follow and send @’s to “where’s the party at?”. this would at least make backchatter more fun.)

3. After you search Summize, click on the upper-right side link for “Feed for this Query” link. For SMX Social Media I used this.

4. Drop that into your favorite mobile feedreader, such as google reader or newsgator go.

5. When you see people tweeting about the event, but haven’t yet met them, you can head over to twitter and follow them. This serves to get you into their Twitter stream and to let them know that you’re interested in meeting them.

Now, as event-related stuff happens, you’ll be in the loop and it’ll make socializing that much easier.

I will be heading out to SMX Social Media and SMX Advanced this year, and would love to catch up. I will not be liveblogging, rather will be hoping to gather ideas from those of you in the business.

I will not be waring my hat. But come shake my hand - meeting folks is the best part of the event.

If you’re going, fire over a Tweet [scottclark] or comment and be sure to say hi at the show.

Photo (me, Bruce and Cristine) from last year’s shows.

This was a lot of fun this week, and I was thrilled to be chatting (yelling - the bar was a bit noisy) with folks about blogging, social media and search at Social Media Club Louisville. This group was especially (and refreshingly) straightforward about what works - no bull. It gets tiresome hearing blog-cheerleaders go on all day without any real direction. Also some great advice about writing evergreen content versus news, about post frequency, and link building. Here are the best videos from the event, which you can hear just fine :-) On the video.  Also check out the photos from the gathering.

• Chris Pearson - Personified.com (Best Damn Blog On The Planet)
• Rob May - Coconut Headsets.com (formerly of BusinessPundit.com)
• Michelle Jones - ConsumingLouisville.com
• David Finch - DavidSFinch.com, BusinessPundit.com
• Moderated by - Jason Falls, SocialMediaExplorer.com

My email to the client representative for a $10k portal software said:

“The edit RSS page for the portal is giving a page not found error for [I entered url] - what do you think would cause that? Thanks, Scott”

The reply from their customer service email:

“We don’t answer questions like that here, and don’t forward things to the support team as a policy. You need to fill in a support ticket for this. [link]”

The link was to a form that had 54 fields. I felt compelled to let them know who the customer was and went on with my day, pissed. It was all I could think of when we had a budget meeting about whether we should continue using the portal.  We didn’t renew.

Was this kind of behavior the reason we cancelled a $12k/year support arrangement? Not sure, but I certainly wasn’t in the best mood when it came time for me to voice my recommendation for the renewal.

I know support ticket systems pretty well in the small-enterprise variety. I have had a few when I was doing hosting and have interacted with probably 20 different ones. My company has since moved to basecamp to give things a more human touch, and basecamp has recently followed some of the advice in this post. I am guilty of the things in the past. But to you, beloved reader, I will say I see the errors of my ways.

Let me be the first to say that if you have 100s of clients, selling a commodity item such as hosting, I recognize the workflow issues you’re facing. We all need to move support issues through the system as fast as possible when margins are razor thin. But if the support systems creators were a little more aware of the non-tech and/or busy customer community, perhaps things could improve.

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The expansions continue at Google Transit with the addition of several more cities.

USA

Davis, CA - Unitrans (and their wonderful double-deck buses)
Rio Vista CA - Rio Vista Delta Breeze
Lubbock TX - CitiBus

Walla Walla WA - Valley Transit and Grapevine
Los Angeles, CA - coming soon!

France:

Bordeaux, France - Tram et Bus de la CUB services 27 municipalities via over 90 lines in Aquitaine, France.

top photo: Unitrans - City of Davis, CA,
Bordeaux Tram Photo by Baptiste Lafontaine used under Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic

I just put together a new business card for this years’ conference season. I stuck with the steam-theme this time, but made it feel more like an antique club card. They’re nice and glossy.

I hope they’re here by SMX Social Media. If not my old card will do, and Sphinncon or SMX Advanced will be the first time I use them. Signature blurred.

If you’d like one of these, and you’re not in search marketing, let me know and I’ll share the photoshop template. You’ll need the oldtype typewriter truetype font.

ps: on real version my signature is filled in.

What do you think?