Yesterday we talked about how funny shows like The Office and Better Off Ted were/are – until they’re a mirror into our own business lives.

And I wanted to take a closer look at the idea that business is missing several essential elements of social media. Because of how critical human interaction is to the process businesses that are purposely set up with mechanized glory in mind fail.

(For more on this, you have to read Humanize, and at least listen to Welcome to the Fifth Estate.)

For some the answer to a social media’s bad fit is to just skip social media, or put it off for another day.

But for years now, we’ve needed social media to enhance our search results, and its importance is underscored dramatically in light of Google’s most recent updates.

Be it the solo entrepreneur operating a Kindle publishing mini-empire, a family-owned pizzeria, or a nationwide insurance company chain, you can’t afford to wait until it’s too late to start using social media to help circulate your content – and you simply must have content to be in the conversation, not to mention the fact that it’s the most proactive form of reputation management. 

To simply ignore social media is to do so at your own peril.

People don’t read the newspaper anymore, they log in to Facebook, and let their friends lead them to news web sites or applications. This shift can be seen as a lost opportunity or as an entirely new way to directly reach your customers, and to develop a relationship before they need you. Then you can be the obvious choice when they’re ready to buy.

Which brings us back to the hard part – there’s an extreme disconnect between

• the way companies traditionally work,
• the content most enjoyed by pivotal groups in social media, and,
• how people typically use their various social media tools.

I’m sure you’ve heard this next part before but it’s important enough to repeat.

We Humans Have Built a Machine That Could Destroy Our Livelihoods

Social media is shaped and driven by the things that make us fundamentally human. Forming, operating, and marketing corporations are actions traditionally shaped by the notion that companies are best run as efficient machines.

And yet there are people inside these machines – and it is those people, not the mechanized, politicized, organizational structure, that people will connect to on some level.  So you’ll need people inside the company to connect with the people outside the company via social media.

Here’s where the problems then come – who owns what?

Who is allowed to speak and who isn’t?

When there’s a crisis, what’s the response procedure?

What are the 25 things we have to check off on the list before we can make a blog comment on another blog using the company URL?

In the age of the old media, this was fine. Press releases were mailed or faxed. Showing up in print or television news gave much more lead time to plan all these things out, and put processes in place that we relied on.

Advertising wasn’t subject to the opinions of people because most offended parties were not upset enough to write a letter, which then had to find its way to someone with influence. By that time the commercial in question may have been old news, and a new one in production.

But Twitter is happening

… ten minutes ago.

There’s already a Facebook group somewhere discussing the problem they have with how your company (or one like it) responded to that national crisis yesterday, and how they hope you’ll solve it.

People are acting, moving, and your company is getting left behind.

Why?

There’s a strategic issue at hand here. Because social media is so human and companies are so mechanical, the instinctive urge to slap social media on top of whatever we’re doing often fails. It’s like putting a band-aid on a broken leg- though the attempt at some repair may be appreciated, in practical terms, it’s completely ineffective, and as such, useless. Proper implementation is key.

And the social aspect of the tools are not the only issue – it is the impact the way the new media is being used and changing so many things, so rapidly.

Can We Put Our Companies Back on Track By Cutting Off Our Robotic Arms?

There’s a much bigger wave just underneath the surface of social media that is the threat to any stagnant company. We must change our companies from the inside out in some very key ways.

1. To succeed in social media, we must be people-centered.
2. Once we’re centered on the people inside and outside our company, we will want to listen to what their concerns are, because…
3. … We’ll have to get their attention in a way that’s a bit different than the way people related one on one. To woo them, we’ll have to produce content they find relevant, so that there’s a reason for dialogue since…
4. Dialogue starts the key conversations/connection that lead to subscriptions, clicks, and/or sales. And then?
5. We have to maintain that attention, not merely through content, but through connection, since that’s largely how the web is re-orienting.

I realize that I haven’t proven a single one of these hypothesis, nor am I linking to places where they are demonstrated. There are multiple sources that help bear these examples out that we’ll be discussing in future days.

First up will be our next few discussions, which will rest on a discussion on what being people-centric means in practical terms. How will we need to change? IS your company truly getting there, or is it just paying lip service to the idea? What are the key areas where we need to improve if we are truly centering around people?

This discussion will include some pretty fun embarrassing situations I’ve found myself in. Until then, try this visual exercise.

Imagine a hug. Warm arms that envelop you, the almost palpable wave of emotion migrating from another person to you. Who can truthfully argue that hugs suck?

Not most emotionally stable people.<

And while our mission is certainly not to hug our customers, we often have the intention of embracing technology that helps us serve our clientele. But picture that hug again - only this time imagine that you have the arms of a super-strong robot, who isn't programmed to understand how much pressure to apply.

In your imagination, I'm willing to bet that you either crushed your hug-ee into jelly, or gave them one of those butt-out, barely touching non-hugs. Even in our minds, robots can't quite do the jobs that we can as humans, though they are suited for certain things.

Your robotic arms represent your company, and the person you're hugging represents social media.

Feel me now?
 

Day 285 © by Alan / Falcon

“The Revolution introduced me to art, and in turn, art introduced me to the Revolution!” Albert Einstein

There’s a reason why I use or create examples in art and pop culture to express ideas about social media.

I can’t say it better than Einstein but here goes – the art societies create often illustrates where that society is going, sometimes decades before change shows up in society. Think about how many seasons Arrested Development would make it to today, almost ten years after it debuted versus when it came out, confusing half its intended audience with the absence of a laugh track, and the documentary-style presentation.

The show was ahead of its time. Tap your neighbor if you watched this fine show when it was on TV, or on Amazon Prime Instant Video, Hulu, or Netflix now.

(“NO TOUCHING.”)

Inside jokes aside, some of these parallels are very revealing. Among my favorites examples in observing how many companies react to technology from a marketing perspective are also The Office, and a less popular show that was at least as brilliant, Better Off Ted.

In Better Off Ted, the company the protagonist Ted works for was constantly coming out with commercials that openly mocked the type of ads General Electric is still running (see the General Electric Super Bowl Ads, on several worst ad lists, though they are getting better by introducing the people aspect in the one about beer). One of my favorite examples of the VD mockery follows.

Of course the joke is that to Veridian Dynamics, these commercials were Not jokes. They were serious with the image they wanted to project, one often completely at odds with reality, as we saw when we followed Ted in his daily adventures.

Then there’s The Office of course, best summed up in the words of  the then-boss of the Scranton branch, Micheal, as a conclusion to his version of the Dundlin Mifflin commercial he was absolutely not asked to make, “limitless paper in a paperless world”. (But ironically, inept as he is at so many things, his commercial was much better than the one the corporate office version. Yes, I know way too much about this show.)

It’s nuts, isn’t it?

The thought that a paper company would stick to its initial business model for so many years after the advent of the web, the global trend of greening, and the rise of superstores like Office Depot, Amazon, and to a lesser extent, Walmart. Layoffs were always looming overhead – at least until they joined forces with a printer company.

Seeing those two examples of companies failing to keep up with the digital marketing age and the resurgence of the people-centric organization, week after week, often has me wondering about the sobering reality so many companies small and large are facing.

Namely, how do companies adapt and thrive in this new business environment that is changing so rapidly?

Doesn’t it seem sometimes that the instant you change course to keep up, something else changes? It did to me until I figured out how to get ahead of the stream of change. It takes a fluid strategy and constant study to stay on top of both the day to day changes as well as the over-arching trend that is driving it all.

On the one hand the answer is in being more socially adept. Yep, all those skills we’re supposed to have gotten from humanities majors are as valuable, or even more valuable, than we thought.

Social media, an active Facebook and Twitter account specifically, could have worked to keep  Veridian Dynamics out of their constant reputation management issues, in concert with a capable public relations and marketing team. They could work together to solve internal issues, make some changes in strategy both internally and externally, instead of just trying to paper over the busted plaster of their public image.

A little video blogging, hopefully resulting in some YouTube hits, and some LinkedIn network on the part of the executive team could have hooked Dunder Mifflin up with Sabre much sooner, perhaps before more branches were eliminated and all those imaginary people lost their imaginary positions.

Yes, I’m mocking myself as I return to reality – this is all fake. It’s just a bunch of TV shows I have to whisper to my fix-it self.

True. But they’re also things some of the resources I’ll be talking about this week can help you with.

Dunder Mifflin’s issues were specific to smaller companies as most of them manifested at the branch level – we can see this during our weekly observation of their company, in both their triumphs and failures. Veridian Dynamic had problems that were closer to the enterprise level, and perhaps because of how big they are, the problems are more clearly visible (and comedic).

But the thing is, social media isn’t the whole answer to the question of how to adapt a 20th century company to the present day on its own. The changes that need to be made are much deeper. To implement social media, better search strategies, a proactive reputation management strategy, even basic web marketing, we need deeper changes in our companies. We can’t make the same mistakes we laugh at on these TV shows and in some movies, or we’ll share their fates, only with a lot less laughter, and a lot more pain.

How did we get here? Why did we create companies to be the way they are if this model doesn’t work? These are questions I’d like to explore as well- after all if we don’t observe our history aren’t we doomed to repeat it? My quick theory after reading books like Humanize, The Social Media Strategist and Welcome to the Fifth Estate is that these things worked once. And organizations got stuck in those developmental stages, but we’re not sure what to do next as this is new territory for most of us. (We’ll be peering at specific examples from those books and The Like Economy in days to come as well.)

This week, I’ll take some examples from these and other fictional organizations – and with links to some successful case studies from the real world — show steps small business can take to keep from suffering the fates that plague the real-life Dunders and Veridians.

John Cusack © by Gudlyf

John Cusack: A Mild Obsession

I love John Cusack (as an actor/writer). I will see every movie he’s ever in, forever. I don’t care what the reviews are,  I’ve seen enough of his films to know that he is one of my favorite actors and anyone who disagrees with me can suck it. He works for me.

What works for you?

What this has to do with blogging: micro-fanaticism. Everyone has their fascinations that for business or personal reasons, they want to keep reading about, seeing images about or hearing conversations about. You have something that, if someone gets you going talking about it, you won’t shut up, and you’re probably the smartest person in the room on that subject.

If you aren’t the person that people have decided to fixate on, you can be the curator of best of the topic that  certain people are fixated on. If you’re really good, you can turn the things that go with that into a career, or leverage your knowledge on a related topic into a boost for your current career.

What this has to do with Google rankings: as we will discuss shortly, consistency is often a key element to recovering a slipping ranking. Obsessive consistency to be exact. Think about it – is there anything you used to do that you aren’t doing now? Why?

Have you made changes to your site that might be the culprit? Even design changes may be responsible for a change in results. I once had a very lovely client who sold timeshare resales. At the time we met, he didn’t know the difference between a page view and a hit.

After he changed his web design, hits went down. I pointed out that page views were consistent and that hits were down because technically, a hit is any request for an element on the page, including images.

A page view is what it sounds like – a view of a page. So since the new design had fewer images, of course hits were down.

Of course, hits were as irrelevant then as page views are becoming now. But he didn’t know that.

The point is: for all you know you might not have a problem at all. One ranking may be down while another is up, leaving you with more targeted visitors. If your rankings go down and sales go up, do you really have a problem? Consider all the elements.

GIGO: No One Is Obsessed with Crap (Well. No One Sane.)

Oscar the Grouch Graffiti © by bixentro

I learned this one when I was first learning about computers. GIGO stands for Garbage in, Garbage Out.

The relevance to our discussion is that in order to be knowledgeable enough on a topic that people want to listen to you, you must be consuming the cream of the crop of thinking on the topic or at least a related one. Success in the blogosphere and social media is as much about consuming content as it is creating it.

You have to know how to pore through the yawn of empty, senseless, pointless random yammering to find the sweet golden nuggets.

So many elements are attached to the quality of your content.

Whether anyone will link to it, talk to friends, come back again, bounce back to the search engines – and some of these end up impacting search, particularly in the case of Google.

Now, you don’t need a Bieber-sized fan club to make it online, or for your business to get a steady stream of leads from the web. But a few hundred or thousand coming back every month and buying/subscribing won’t hurt your bottom line. That core repeat business group can also be referred to as a group of fans.

Name ten fans of garbage.

(Oscar the Grouch doesn’t count.)

Blogging:  A Bit More Important All of A Sudden (again)

will write for chocolate © by caparica

If you’ve been watching Google’s last few algorithm changes, you may have noticed that it’s not only the frequency of updates that seems to have saved certain blogs from a dismal fate. It’s the perceived quality of updates, partly the fact that they’re attached to known authors.

For now, I won’t say more than that on this topic. Let’s go back to what that means to you and your Google strategy: content production. Not just in quantity but in quality.

The smart bloggers, writers and authors know that they can’t necessarily spin gold out of straw every day. That is: most of the time, there’s no remarkable news, discovery or observation for you to draw on that’s relevant to what you want to talk about, even when the other content on the web in your area is absolutely stunning. And yet, your job, each day, will be to create this constant stream of readable, actionable, consumable content, day in and day out.

One of the many things bloggers who have either recovered (or never lost) their rankings have had in common has been consistency of quality content, on a tightly structured topic. (Yes, if you have a copy of my Evergreen Traffic System or Rescue Your Blog, I’m repeating myself.)

So if you’ve lost your rankings and you’re already blogging, think about those three things:

1. What’s your John Cusack as it relates to business blogging? Are you still talking about him/her/it or have you wandered off topic too much?
2. How much can you reduce the garbage that’s coming in to your brain on the topic and simultaneously expand the amount of quality content you consume?
3. Can going back to basics fix your ranking problem?

Now, keep in mind this isn’t the only possible solution to recovering a good ranking, nor are these the only possible set of problems you have with your rankings. An algorithm is merely an extremely complex formula when you break it down – so there must be a way to reverse engineer, from positive outcomes, how to fix your rankings.

However, remember that there are hundreds of variables going into this equation, and that what fixed another site may not fix yours. At the same time, re-committing to what worked before is not to be discounted as a solution to a re-occuring problem.

When I wake up each morning, my breath is not exactly fresh as a spring breeze. So I brush my teeth. It fixes the problem. If I stopped brushing my teeth, I wouldn’t be surprised that my breath stopped being fresh.

Sometimes the simplest thing is the solution.

And if it’s not? Come on back and talk to me, and we’ll see if we can avoid jumping off that bridge.

Happy Martin Luther King Day

I made the conscious decision to take today as a true holiday. Usually I would volunteer for a local cause, or work to zip ahead of the crowd. But instead, I decided to take a leisurely stroll around these intertubes.

And here’s a clip from an article I read from our good friend, Doug Haslam, giving his opinion on some of the new best things in social media:

The truth is, I am aways suspicious of new platforms being declared “The Next XXX ” before it has had a chance to mature a little and give users enough chance to figure out how the platform is going to work for them. Google Plus has been a prime example, making some folks giddy before most people – especially businesses – we’re able to use it, a direct before it was even complete. Not that I don’t think it will make a huge impact, but if the train is leaving the station, say, in eight months, don’t line us up on the platform today.

I have seen several tools vying for “next big thing” status lately, but rather than fitting these for crowns, I see them – and others – fitting into a larger trend, whether they succeed or not.

Emphasis mine, because I agree with this long view. Everything I ever opine as a big step is not just because I think that company has something good that will succeed, it’s because I see a larger picture of the web going in that direction, and a possible relevance for business.

Doug’s Point Helps Discern Whether Objects are Less Shiny Than They Appear

It’s a good article. It talks about Pinterest, Path, Instagram, and Storify, 4 new social media resources that have been getting a lot of attention, some of which are worth watching. If you haven’t come across them, read Doug articles before you finish mine.

These were my thoughts on the article;

I don’t really pay attention to what anyone says is the next big thing. And I rarely get caught in arguments over stuff like this – everyone thinks what they think for the most part, and it’s almost never mere discussion or a single article that changes their mind.

I strongly agree with your assessment of these tools being part of a larger trend. Even when I focus on what could be a great new tool, it’s because even if they screwed up, something along those lines could be very successful.

 

What I’ve observed is that when people truly get turned on by social media, it’s not because of the site or resource itself. It’s usually an experience they have with it.

My Take on the Social Media Tools and Trends

I had an experience with a friend featuring me on Instagram that got my attention. Quite frankly I like how quiet and slow it can be at Instagram due to it limited availability. I love that it’s only available to Apple users, a point that Doug took exception to in his article.

Path I inexplicably hate.

It’s not just the limit of connections, though I’m a big proponent of connecting with different groups of people in my various circles as my mood/circumstances change. I can’t put my finger on what I don’t like about it. I doubt I’d join even if it had business uses, except to be knowledgeable about how it works for people who would ask me.

But that’s my opinion today. It may change. And I’m not in love with hammers, but if I need to drive in a nail, I’d still use one. My issue now is that Path isn’t solving a problem I have. Yes, I have a lot of followers and follow a lot of people, but I’ve picked or allowed each one to be connected for a very specific reason.

When it comes to these shiny new tools, sometimes I lurk and tell all of you what I think will happen next, based on my own research and experiences. Usually it’s that something fits into a larger trend, as Doug was talking about.

2012: The Year the Firehose is Tamed?

The one thing all three of the tools have in common is that they tame the firehose of information to an extent. Pinterest lets you categorize photos very easily with the boards feature, as you’re saving them. Flickr has this capability, but I find the whole thing about sets very annoying.

I also love being able to attribute/link to the source in a very Tumblr-like style.

Despite all the bliss that comes with discovering new tools, I stil think it’s most comfortable for me to be at the trailing edge of early adoption. Part of what I seek to provide is advice about what you should be using next before the world hops on the bandwagon – and more importantly, what may be a waste of time.

What’s your experience with Pinterest, Instagram, Path and Storify? Are you with the crowd? Did you have a strong experience that would get me excited about them?

An Exaggeration of How Much I Love This Book. But Not Far From the Truth

Human beings may have been creating organizations for thousands of years but that does not necessarily make these organizations particularly human.

Remember we’ve also been creating machines for thousands of years …. machines have been integral to our growth as a species as well in fact may have maybe they have been a little too integral.

From Humanize: How People-Centric Organizations Succeed in a Social World, by Jamie Notter & Maddie Grant

In the science fiction television series, Battlestar Galatica, the Cylons are a race of humanoid machines, initially created by humans as intelligent machines built to serve humanity. A running theme throughout the show was that these new Cylons were so close to human that some sleepers lived as humans, and didn’t even know their true nature themselves.

We’re, of course, nowhere close to suffering this particular danger. Even in new media, it’s apparent which people are interacting with you in real time, which accounts are being run by an entity functioning as a team, and which ones are a mix of people and software updates spread out over time.

Though people don’t seem to mind whether a Twitter account is run by a company, a person, or a person assisted by software, we all like to know who we’re dealing with in this age of transparency.

One thing is clear though: people don’t mind getting their news headlines from a bot, but they want to interact with people. Seems simple enough, right?

But if it were, social media ROI (return on investment) wouldn’t be such a hot topic – the return on investment would be obvious, despite the fact that some of it isn’t measurable.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5

An Exaggeration of How Much I Love This Book. But Not Far From the Truth

Human beings may have been creating organizations for thousands of years but that does not necessarily make these organizations particularly human.

Remember we’ve also been creating machines for thousands of years …. machines have been integral to our growth as a species as well in fact may have maybe they have been a little too integral.

From Humanize: How People-Centric Organizations Succeed in a Social World, by Jamie Notter & Maddie Grant

In the science fiction television series, Battlestar Galatica, the Cylons are a race of humanoid machines, initially created by humans as intelligent machines built to serve humanity. A running theme throughout the show was that these new Cylons were so close to human that some sleepers lived as humans, and didn’t even know their true nature themselves.

We’re, of course, nowhere close to suffering this particular danger. Even in new media, it’s apparent which people are interacting with you in real time, which accounts are being run by an entity functioning as a team, and which ones are a mix of people and software updates spread out over time.

Though people don’t seem to mind whether a Twitter account is run by a company, a person, or a person assisted by software, we all like to know who we’re dealing with in this age of transparency.

One thing is clear though: people don’t mind getting their news headlines from a bot, but they want to interact with people. Seems simple enough, right?

But if it were, social media ROI (return on investment) wouldn’t be such a hot topic – the return on investment would be obvious, despite the fact that some of it isn’t measurable.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5

MIrror.me helps you visualize what topics you talk the most about on Twitter, with a word cloud based on your tweets. I use it to monitor how much I’m talking about things my customers are interested in, rather than just the things that interest me.

It’s also a discovery tool as it will help you find other people in your network who are of like mind. I’ll demonstrate how in the following video, as well as how to test it out without needing to log in.

You can find the Mirror.com folks on Twitter too (@MirrorDotMe). When you do tell them I said hello, and that I enjoy using their tool.

© by Marion Doss

… Yeah. Not Bottlenose like a dolphin.

Bottlenose is a social media curation tool. It helps you zero in on just the content you want in the daily deluge of information from social media. You can even set it up to push content to you from accounts you’re not following.

I don’t much care to say there’s a wrong or a right way to use Twitter. I like to focus on what’s effective for a particular business. And if you’re following more than 25 people, especially for business purposes, it’s hard to keep that information organized.

Bottlenose has come closest to doing just that. It’s almost a substitute for some of the other Twitter clients out there, including the new web version of Twitter.

Have a peek at the video, and I’ll tell you some more of my likes and dislikes.

Pros and Cons of Bottlenose (The Short List)

In my pros column:

• As of today I’m able to post to Twitter using it.
• You can use it to spot trends at a glance
• You can use it to zero in on just the part of your stream you want to see at the moment – very useful if you want to see just breaking news, or are drilling down to find intelligence on a specific topic.
• It can push silos of content to you by type as well as topic from ALL of Twitter, not just your stream
• You can also see how popular certain content is with one quick look
• SONAR. I forgot to include a better example in the video. But it’s like being able to see your relationship to the content you discuss in an animated word cloud format that you can zero in on.

In the con/dislike section:

• It’s still in Beta – even after 5 takes, there was one thing in each take of the video that wasn’t working or was buggy.
• Little features of most Twitter clients that you may love aren’t all live (like the option to reply to everyone in a conversation or just one person)
• It’s overkill for people using Twitter to do just one thing
• You can’t untie Klout – it’s not a plugin, it’s part of the system
• Though the Mashable announcement mentioned Facebook, and the sign up page , the tie to Twitter is more prominent – not a huge con but Facebook drives more overall traffic.
• To get in, you either need a high Klout score or an invitation.
• There’s a few too many automated options for my tastes, like the ability to auto-like a post on Facebook using a custom filter. But that’s just because I think the whole like thing is too three-years-ago already.

Of course, many of those cons could get cleared up as the tool moves out of Beta or gains request for the addition or removal of certain features.

In Venture Beat, Nova Spivack, one of the creators of Bottlenose is quoted as saying:

“The stream is the next big problem after the cloud…”

You’d better believe it. As social media gains more user numbers, some of those folks are going to fall into your network. You may want to connect to more people, businesses and sources of information than before. And the problem with the stream of information we’re constantly having thrust toward us is how to manage it – how do we extract just the information we want that day without having to change who we’re monitoring so often?

Bottlenose may just be the answer.

Right now, you may not be able to gain access if you don’t have an invite or a high Klout score. No, I don’t have any, and I don’t know what constitutes a high enough Klout score. But try Mashable for invites, or tweeting  – people using Bottlenose to monitor for requests on Twitter  are sure to find you now.

© by Marion Doss

… Yeah. Not Bottlenose like a dolphin.

Bottlenose is a social media curation tool. It helps you zero in on just the content you want in the daily deluge of information from social media. You can even set it up to push content to you from accounts you’re not following.

I don’t much care to say there’s a wrong or a right way to use Twitter. I like to focus on what’s effective for a particular business. And if you’re following more than 25 people, especially for business purposes, it’s hard to keep that information organized.

Bottlenose has come closest to doing just that. It’s almost a substitute for some of the other Twitter clients out there, including the new web version of Twitter.

Have a peek at the video, and I’ll tell you some more of my likes and dislikes.

Pros and Cons of Bottlenose (The Short List)

In my pros column:

• As of today I’m able to post to Twitter using it.
• You can use it to spot trends at a glance
• You can use it to zero in on just the part of your stream you want to see at the moment – very useful if you want to see just breaking news, or are drilling down to find intelligence on a specific topic.
• It can push silos of content to you by type as well as topic from ALL of Twitter, not just your stream
• You can also see how popular certain content is with one quick look
• SONAR. I forgot to include a better example in the video. But it’s like being able to see your relationship to the content you discuss in an animated word cloud format that you can zero in on.

In the con/dislike section:

• It’s still in Beta – even after 5 takes, there was one thing in each take of the video that wasn’t working or was buggy.
• Little features of most Twitter clients that you may love aren’t all live (like the option to reply to everyone in a conversation or just one person)
• It’s overkill for people using Twitter to do just one thing
• You can’t untie Klout – it’s not a plugin, it’s part of the system
• Though the Mashable announcement mentioned Facebook, and the sign up page , the tie to Twitter is more prominent – not a huge con but Facebook drives more overall traffic.
• To get in, you either need a high Klout score or an invitation.
• There’s a few too many automated options for my tastes, like the ability to auto-like a post on Facebook using a custom filter. But that’s just because I think the whole like thing is too three-years-ago already.

Of course, many of those cons could get cleared up as the tool moves out of Beta or gains request for the addition or removal of certain features.

In Venture Beat, Nova Spivack, one of the creators of Bottlenose is quoted as saying:

“The stream is the next big problem after the cloud…”

You’d better believe it. As social media gains more user numbers, some of those folks are going to fall into your network. You may want to connect to more people, businesses and sources of information than before. And the problem with the stream of information we’re constantly having thrust toward us is how to manage it – how do we extract just the information we want that day without having to change who we’re monitoring so often?

Bottlenose may just be the answer.

Right now, you may not be able to gain access if you don’t have an invite or a high Klout score. No, I don’t have any, and I don’t know what constitutes a high enough Klout score. But try Mashable for invites, or tweeting  – people using Bottlenose to monitor for requests on Twitter  are sure to find you now.

© by Marion Doss

… Yeah. Not Bottlenose like a dolphin.

Bottlenose is a social media curation tool. It helps you zero in on just the content you want in the daily deluge of information from social media. You can even set it up to push content to you from accounts you’re not following.

I don’t much care to say there’s a wrong or a right way to use Twitter. I like to focus on what’s effective for a particular business. And if you’re following more than 25 people, especially for business purposes, it’s hard to keep that information organized.

Bottlenose has come closest to doing just that. It’s almost a substitute for some of the other Twitter clients out there, including the new web version of Twitter.

Have a peek at the video, and I’ll tell you some more of my likes and dislikes.

Pros and Cons of Bottlenose (The Short List)

In my pros column:

• As of today I’m able to post to Twitter using it.
• You can use it to spot trends at a glance
• You can use it to zero in on just the part of your stream you want to see at the moment – very useful if you want to see just breaking news, or are drilling down to find intelligence on a specific topic.
• It can push silos of content to you by type as well as topic from ALL of Twitter, not just your stream
• You can also see how popular certain content is with one quick look
• SONAR. I forgot to include a better example in the video. But it’s like being able to see your relationship to the content you discuss in an animated word cloud format that you can zero in on.

In the con/dislike section:

• It’s still in Beta – even after 5 takes, there was one thing in each take of the video that wasn’t working or was buggy.
• Little features of most Twitter clients that you may love aren’t all live (like the option to reply to everyone in a conversation or just one person)
• It’s overkill for people using Twitter to do just one thing
• You can’t untie Klout – it’s not a plugin, it’s part of the system
• Though the Mashable announcement mentioned Facebook, and the sign up page , the tie to Twitter is more prominent – not a huge con but Facebook drives more overall traffic.
• To get in, you either need a high Klout score or an invitation.
• There’s a few too many automated options for my tastes, like the ability to auto-like a post on Facebook using a custom filter. But that’s just because I think the whole like thing is too three-years-ago already.

Of course, many of those cons could get cleared up as the tool moves out of Beta or gains request for the addition or removal of certain features.

In Venture Beat, Nova Spivack, one of the creators of Bottlenose is quoted as saying:

“The stream is the next big problem after the cloud…”

You’d better believe it. As social media gains more user numbers, some of those folks are going to fall into your network. You may want to connect to more people, businesses and sources of information than before. And the problem with the stream of information we’re constantly having thrust toward us is how to manage it – how do we extract just the information we want that day without having to change who we’re monitoring so often?

Bottlenose may just be the answer.

Right now, you may not be able to gain access if you don’t have an invite or a high Klout score. No, I don’t have any, and I don’t know what constitutes a high enough Klout score. But try Mashable for invites, or tweeting  – people using Bottlenose to monitor for requests on Twitter  are sure to find you now.

© by Marion Doss

… Yeah. Not Bottlenose like a dolphin.

Bottlenose is a social media curation tool. It helps you zero in on just the content you want in the daily deluge of information from social media. You can even set it up to push content to you from accounts you’re not following.

I don’t much care to say there’s a wrong or a right way to use Twitter. I like to focus on what’s effective for a particular business. And if you’re following more than 25 people, especially for business purposes, it’s hard to keep that information organized.

Bottlenose has come closest to doing just that. It’s almost a substitute for some of the other Twitter clients out there, including the new web version of Twitter.

Have a peek at the video, and I’ll tell you some more of my likes and dislikes.

Pros and Cons of Bottlenose (The Short List)

In my pros column:

• As of today I’m able to post to Twitter using it.
• You can use it to spot trends at a glance
• You can use it to zero in on just the part of your stream you want to see at the moment – very useful if you want to see just breaking news, or are drilling down to find intelligence on a specific topic.
• It can push silos of content to you by type as well as topic from ALL of Twitter, not just your stream
• You can also see how popular certain content is with one quick look
• SONAR. I forgot to include a better example in the video. But it’s like being able to see your relationship to the content you discuss in an animated word cloud format that you can zero in on.

In the con/dislike section:

• It’s still in Beta – even after 5 takes, there was one thing in each take of the video that wasn’t working or was buggy.
• Little features of most Twitter clients that you may love aren’t all live (like the option to reply to everyone in a conversation or just one person)
• It’s overkill for people using Twitter to do just one thing
• You can’t untie Klout – it’s not a plugin, it’s part of the system
• Though the Mashable announcement mentioned Facebook, and the sign up page , the tie to Twitter is more prominent – not a huge con but Facebook drives more overall traffic.
• To get in, you either need a high Klout score or an invitation.
• There’s a few too many automated options for my tastes, like the ability to auto-like a post on Facebook using a custom filter. But that’s just because I think the whole like thing is too three-years-ago already.

Of course, many of those cons could get cleared up as the tool moves out of Beta or gains request for the addition or removal of certain features.

In Venture Beat, Nova Spivack, one of the creators of Bottlenose is quoted as saying:

“The stream is the next big problem after the cloud…”

You’d better believe it. As social media gains more user numbers, some of those folks are going to fall into your network. You may want to connect to more people, businesses and sources of information than before. And the problem with the stream of information we’re constantly having thrust toward us is how to manage it – how do we extract just the information we want that day without having to change who we’re monitoring so often?

Bottlenose may just be the answer.

Right now, you may not be able to gain access if you don’t have an invite or a high Klout score. No, I don’t have any, and I don’t know what constitutes a high enough Klout score. But try Mashable for invites, or tweeting  – people using Bottlenose to monitor for requests on Twitter  are sure to find you now.