Glue Yourself to Your Friends

I found Get Glue by way of a mention on Jeremiah Owyang’s blog—thanks, Jeremiah! It’s an interesting concept, and I did a bit of exploring.

The basic idea is that you can share reviews, opinions etc. with your friends without interrupting your web browsing. Here’s what they say:

Developed by AdaptiveBlue, Glue enables you to connect with your friends on the web around the things you visit online. Glue is powered by semantic recognition technology that automatically identifies books, music, movies, wines, stocks, movie stars, recording artists, and more. Glue works hard to make it easy for you to find out what your friends think about things you're visiting online.

They have a brief video on their home page that says what they do, but not much about how it actually works. I explored as much as I could without signing up. What I found is interesting. Here’s a capture of the Glue Stream. As you can see by the pull-down, you can get streams specifically for books, movies or music. You can just let the stream scroll by or you can pause it, presumably to follow follow the link in the stream item.

I found the most interesting function to be the spider. It has the same choices—books, movies and music and adds specific users. I choose books because the new book Free by Chris Anderson, which I’m thinking about buying, was there. When I clicked on it, I was shown the users who had commented on it, and where. That’s useful if I want to find reviews beyond the ones I normally look at on Amazon. When I clicked on a specific user I was taken to a view of that person’s reviews, comments, etc. Cool! I went to the “popular users,” clicked on Glue Classic, and one of them turned out to be a restaurant I know. Four people had reviewed the restaurant. Hum—this is beginning to sound both interesting and useful!

I couldn’t get into any of the specific reviews because I haven’t signed up yet. However, I’m fascinated. It looks like a user can get a lot of useful peer reviews and comments here. We’re well aware that peer reviews are a prerequisite for purchasing for a lot of us these days, so that’s good.

Is it also a way for monitoring content about your own book, restaurant, whatever? It seems obvious that it is. It also looks like you’d have to do that manually for now, but it’s easy to do, and the reach of Get Glue seems to make it worth the effort.

This is Web 3.0 stuff, in that it’s based on semantic technologies. They’re searching quantitative data and making it easy to follow things or people you’re interested in. As I understand it, the service follows the user around the web, so it indexes your activity without effort on your part. If that creeps you out, then Get Glue isn’t for you. If you do this sort of commenting/reviewing to provide info to other people (isn’t that the main reason?), then maybe you want an easy way to share what you do, making it more readily visible to more people.

Yes, definitely interesting!

GM--Cautious Use of Social Media in Brand Reinvention

My early morning multitasking included listening to an interview with the GM CEO on CNBC and reading the article about their new campaign in Ad Age, so I’m not sure where I heard it first. I’m reasonably sure that I heard Fritz Henderson say they had already posted the ad on YouTube although it will not be aired until tomorrow.

I was curious to see how many people had viewed it in advance of the TV campaign. I found more than I anticipated. As I thought, only 314 people had viewed it since it was posted yesterday. More interesting is the fact that there are two PPC ads on the YouTube page when you search “general motors.” One leads to the GM Reinvention site.

The site is slick and professional and hits all the right notes. It links to their Flickr, Twitter and Facebook pages. I also note that Bob Lutz’s groundbreaking Fast Lane blog now includes posts by many other GM executives in advance of Lutz’s retirement at the end of this year. Point is that the site is totally devoted to GM’s message, but it offers social media opportunities for people who want to talk.
And I’m always interested in the conversation. The first comments I looked at were on the YouTube page. There were 7 comments at the time I looked. Two were from the same foul-mouthed lout, two were clearly cheering GM on, 1 was about the ad itself, and 2 were commenting on the comments. About what you’d expect—or did you expect worse?

The (9, at the time I looked) comments on the Ad Age article were also predictable. They discuss the ad itself, the historical vision and strategy (or lack thereof) of GM—all about the message, not about cars.

The Facebook page is the most interesting of all. (Note: there’s a careful/good disclaimer that the viewer is leaving the GM site for an open site.) There are lots of “likes” of the GM material and many comments. There are many positive comments about the cars and about the importance of “buy American.” What’s even more interesting is the people who are heatedly refuting negative comments about the cars and about the importance of buying cars manufactured in North America.

It’s interesting to watch and to recognize the level of support for GM that exists among the consuming public. It’s even more interesting to wonder if GM will find a way to mobilize this support to its advantage over the coming months.

Right now it’s slick and professional and relatively controlled. Will GM find a way to put consumers in the driver’s seat—something like Ford did, perhaps? Since we’re all now shareholders, we should hope so!