Robust Microblogging Tool

I don’t often write about microblogging. I’m not a road warrior and I have a strong preference for my desktop with its big keyboard and monitor. The limitations of microblogging also don’t fit my concept for this blog.

Ok, so it’s not for me. In spite of that, I see the potential usefulness to some people or in some situations. So I was interested when a colleague brought this site to my attention. It had been sent to her by Dr. Paul Levy, the CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital, whose blog I know. His use of the site suggested it was worth checking out.
The first thing I found was that you can post to many other platforms from Utterli. If you can recognize the icons on the home page, they include all the major blogging services, Twitter, YouTube and others. You can also follow friends on Utterli as you can on other sites like Twitter.

When I looked a little further I found an interview with Dr. Levy himself. He’s talking with WBUR about everything from preventing medical errors to the impact on philanthropy of the Bernard Maddof financial scandal. As a radio station, WBUR is essentially producing podcasts, and they have posted many of them on Utterli. Interesting.

Hear the interview
Visit Dr. Levy's blog

So I learned a couple of good things. I found another useful social media tool—always a happy discovery. I also got a chance to listen to a thoughtful CEO talking about how he is using blogging in running one of Boston’s most prestigious hospitals. I’ve pointed out before that relatively few CEOs blog, and I think he sets a wonderful example of using this communications tool to do something very important within his organization. Check it out, and you’ll see what I mean. That’s a good thought to take into the new year!

Wishing You a Wonderful 2009!

An Interactive Social Media Map

Overdrive Marketing has developed a social media map that's as comprehensive as something like this can be. They've indexed it by websites and tools, which is also useful.


I lost the links by posting it, but you can get a version with live links on their website. Let them know if you have additional sites to propose.

Thanks, Overdrive!

Wishing You Happiest Holidays!

Send your own ElfYourself eCards

A similar campaign with more personalization options (and an interesting voice-over)
Ace Your Face

Have a Wonderful Holiday Season!

Customers Rate Experiences

Forrester has released its 2008 customer experience index report, based on consumer ratings of their experiences at firms covered in the study. Bruce Tempkin has posted some data on his blog and has a link there to the full report.

Forrester has 3 basic experience criteria—usefulness, ease of use, and enjoyability. The report gives a brief overview of their methodology. There are interesting comments on the blog and in response to one, he has given a little more detail on the methodology.
















The results are interesting. Retailers and hotels rank highest of the industries studied. Health insurance and TV service providers are at the bottom. The large range of experience ratings given to ISPs is interesting.

In some ways, I’d say the top-performing firms are the usual suspects. Have you ever sat down in a comfy chair and browsed through some books at Barnes and Noble? The one I go to doesn’t have its own coffee shop; that would add even more to the experience. USAA is always near the top on satisfaction studies; one assumes that their superb customer service is a huge factor in the overall experience rating. When you look at other high-performing firms, they’ve worked hard on customer service, so it seems reasonable to me that the basic blocking and tackling matters. Then if you add a coffee shop or a pizza parlor on top, you can offer great customer experience. But you can’t buy great customer experience with only coffee or pizza, no matter how good they are! If customer service stinks, nothing else really matters.

It’s good to choose one or more of the high-performing firms to study and observe. For instance, there’s not a Cosco near me; I don’t shop there and was surprised by a student analysis of just how good their customer service was a few semesters ago. It also helps to follow one or more firms outside your own industry; that may open up new ideas.

Customer experience is the focus at the moment—on the web and off. It’s worth developing a vision and a strategy and devoting time and effort to offering great customer experience. It pays off, perhaps in sustainable competitive advantage.

Monitoring Community

For those of us who work in social media environments where the traffic is manageable (that probably can be translated that we wish it were higher!) monitoring is an ongoing but not huge job. Yes, it’s labor-intensive, but we know the issues and the values involved. Judgments can be made and unacceptable contributions can be removed or banned.

However, when you have a large vision and are willing to invest resources, you need more structure. All firms—large or small, experienced social media user or newbie—can learn from best practices of organizations that monitor their communities for the greater good.

I’ve written before about the Pickens Plan. It was launched in late summer and, in the run-up to the inauguration, is aiming for 2 million members. The plan wants them to be active, and that’s a lot of participation to monitor. My sense is that their district leaders are volunteers, but as I’ve noted before, Pickens and his people are not forthcoming about organizational details. But the leader in my district is an activist and has said some interesting things about the community lately.

What piqued my interest was an email in late November. It hit the right tone as a “friendly reminder.” It directed the reader to a blog post and that, in turn, to the Pickens Community Guidelines. If you follow links there, you see that the community is hosted on Ning and uses its terms of service but the guidelines seem to be specific to the Pickens Plan.

The guidelines are long but very much worth reading and thinking about. Let me highlight a few issues of interest:

• “Be Polite” is the first rule, and it has specifics.

• There are a lot of rules, all of which make sense to me, about proper use of the individual’s account on the Pickens Plan

• There are many rules that can be summarized as “no commercial activities”

• There are fraudulent or unethical activities that will result in account suspension.

and finally, to quote directly:

• We welcome constructive feedback, but will not tolerate excessive public posts criticizing Pickens Plan staff (including Site Administrators and Regional Leaders).

• Public posts debating these rules and/or moderators' enforcement of such will be removed without comment. We do encourage feedback and invite you to contact us if you have any questions or concerns.

So there’s a lot of effort here. I get the sense that they may be using some filtering software also, but again they aren’t forthcoming (in this case quite understandable) about tools and techniques.

Ok, so this is a huge public effort. What about large corporations, especially on the B2B side? I looked at IBM and easily found a values statement and a set of guidelines for a community of current and former IBMers. There may be other communities and sets of guidelines. This particular one is hosted on Xing, a global networking service, with its own guidelines. IBM added guidelines for its own employees on top of those.

Adobe makes a big effort to get customers to offer content that will be helpful to other customers. The guidelines for the Adobe Forums are specific to that purpose and, again, make a lot of sense.

What are the key take-aways on monitoring communities? I’d suggest:

1. Communities must be monitored in terms of acceptability and relevance.
2. They need rules of the road. The rules need to be tailored to the nature of the community.
3. The rules must be enforced. That requires individual judgment and action, and that is fine. If moderators don’t perform effectively—whether it’s an employee, a PR agency, or a volunteer—the organization should replace them, quickly and decisively.

This is a conversation. If it’s not civil, there will be many of us who do not wish to take part. Those who want to form a community should carefully think through its objectives and the guidelines and activities that will be necessary in moving toward those objectives.