Getting Started in Social Media: Twitter for Business

Jan 15, 2010 By Brian Scates in Business, Tech 1 Comment Tags: Business, cloudprofile, conversation, engagement, marketing, social media, twitter, web

After one of our clients recently set up a twitter account for her company and we connected, she sent me an email that read “OK, seriously – how did you manage to get 439 people to follow you? I mean, I’m sure you’re an interesting guy, but 439? The race is on!”

I had to admit that 400 wasn’t really that many compared to a lot of the people I follow, and we continued a conversation about how twitter and other social networks could fit into their marketing plan. In keeping with my new years resolution to blog more for clients than creatives, I thought this topic would make a good blog post – so here we go: how to use social media for your business (an introduction). More

Don’t define your customers, let your customers define you.

Jul 22, 2009 By Brian Scates in Business, Design No Comments Tags: cloudprofile, entrepreneur, startup, twitter, web app

Never underestimate the creativity of your customers. You may think you have a great product, but don’t get married to your intended purpose for it. It’s quite possible that customers will find alternative uses you may not have even thought of, maybe even better uses. If you’re launching a new product, particularly a web app, be prepared to adapt it to the way your customers actually use it, and not necessarily the way you designed it.

Original sketch of what would become Twitter

The most recent, and high profile example of this is Twitter. Twitter was originally designed as a “what are you doing/thinking/status” feed for friends. 140 character limits forced you to keep it short and sweet, and post more often. At first, this is how people used it, but after a while we all grew bored reading about how so and so was heading to the mall, or feeling a bit down today, or enjoying the rain.

Looking at twitter today, I think celebrities are the only ones left posting the mundane details of their daily activities. The rest of us have re-purposed Twitter for other uses. We have conversations, we share the latest news with shortened URLs, we plug our latest blog posts and company announcements, and then we ‘retweet’ anything we think our followers would think is interesting. Twitter is being used as a gauge for measuring hot topics, and for insight into consumer opinion and behavior. Brands are engaging with customers, providing technical support, hawking their wares, and turning their customer service reps loose. Then there are those who use Twitter as an alternative to RSS. And on the dark side, some users are trying to establish a Twitter beachhead for their “make money from home” affiliate businesses.

The reason there isn’t a plan for monetizing Twitter is that the primary use of Twitter has not really been established yet – it’s in constant flux.

Twitter has done a good job at adapting to these new uses. They have adopted the @user nomenclature for mentions, added top 10 trending lists, and opened up an API for data mining, spawning a whole industry of satellite businesses built around the information in the Twitter network. A new Twitter app shows up about every 3 days. Twitter would be nowhere if they had insisted that their service just be used for stream of conscious updates from teenagers.

At Mural, we’re close to officially launching a new site called CloudProfile, with sister company SMBLive. We’ve designed it with a specific purpose in mind – connecting small businesses with customers on the web, and in particular with social networks. But we’re already thinking of alternative uses, just for ourselves. Instead of setting up a central company blog, for example, we’re planning to simply give every employee their own CloudProfile, and then setting up a page on our site that aggregates the collective wisdom of all of our employees. It means everyone is connected to their own networks, as well as the corporate network, and upkeep of the blog doesn’t fall to one person or become a laborious task.

I love the idea of building tools that can be used in a myriad of new ways, and can’t wait to see what the world does with CloudProfile. As you build your apps, make sure that you’re building tools that empower users, not restrict them. Don’t spend forever building the perfect feature-complete app, but get an initial version out early and watch what people do with it. It may be used in ways you didn’t expect, and you should be nimble enough to assign development resources to supporting those unexpected uses. Connect your users together so they can share how they use it and allow good ideas to spread. The more uses your app has, the more valuable it becomes to more customers, so embrace it!

Why IE6 isn’t dead yet, and how you can twist the knife.

Jul 18, 2009 By Brian Scates in Business, Design, Tech 14 Comments Tags: browser, development, ie6, ie7, microsoft, twitter, web design

The web is abuzz lately with mounting campaigns against IE6. Web designers and producers have been moaning about it for years, but the reality has been that 20%+ of internet users have still used the old browser, avoiding the upgrade to 7 for whatever reason. There’s a reason it’s stuck around so long, even now, 8 years later, and a twitter campaign is not going to kill it. I do have a suggestion for easing development pain, though, and ultimately ending the bane of IE6.

"IE6 Must Die"

Before we can kill IE6, we need to understand why it’s still alive. Your mother already upgraded, she’s not the problem anymore. The problem is IT managers at really big companies. For the sake of personification, we’ll call them ‘Chet.’ Many years ago when IE6 was released, Microsoft added a lot of proprietary features that turned the browser into a development platform. Netscape had been defeated, and IE had over 90% browsershare. A lot of IT departments took great advantage of this, building custom software for their companies, intranets, and so on. But then we had a bit of a revolution on the internet – a huge shift toward open source and standards based development practices that would work across all browsers. The rise of alternative browsers like Firefox and Safari has fueled this trend, forcing developers to take other browsers into consideration. Even Microsoft has joined the game, abandoning their proprietary code in favor of standards.

The remaining IE6 users are not voluntary IE6 users, but shackled IE6 users. Thanks, Chet.

Unfortunately, Chet has been a bit oblivious to this trend. Chet is old-school, and he expects the software that his team developed to last a long time. It’s expensive to rebuild these things, especially after they have years of additional code stacked on top of them. Chet wasn’t really forward looking, and didn’t expect the browser world to leave him behind. No problem though – as long as we mandate IE6 for all users in the company and never upgrade, nothing breaks. Nice thinking, Chet.

I have first hand experience with these companies, and there’s more of them than you think. And they’re really big ones, with tens of thousands of employees, all using outdated legacy software built on top of archaic software, virtualized and VPN’d. The remaining IE6 users are not voluntary IE6 users, but shackled IE6 users (as Digg recently discovered). Thanks, Chet.

So what can we do about it?

At Mural, we would love to drop support for IE6, but when your clients are companies where Chet works, you can’t build a site for them that nobody at their office can use. I was working on a proposal today in fact for a certain giant internet retailer, and of course we get to estimating production and have to start thinking about how much time we expect we’ll need for IE6 debugging. We had been toying with the idea of leaving IE6 out of our SOW, thinking that the main audience for this site probably would be on IE7 or greater. But instead of just leaving it out and having the inevitable conversation about it later when they insist they need it, we decided to take another approach: make it a line item.

Instead of a line item for all development/production, make another line item for ‘legacy IE6 compatibility.’… For clients, it forces them to consider exactly how much that 5-10% is worth.

The reason most clients insist they want their sites to cater to the remaining 5-10% of users using IE6 is that they don’t really know how much development time that adds to their project. So make it real for them. Instead of a line item for all development/production, make another line item for ‘legacy IE6 compatibility.’ If you’re anything like us, that line item probably adds 30% or more to the cost. For clients, it forces them to consider exactly how much that 5-10% is worth. More importantly, it creates awareness inside those companies that Chet is costing them money, and is going to continue to cost them money as long as his systems are dependent on IE6. It helps build an ROI case for updating their systems.

So complain all you want on blogs. Add an anti-IE icon to your twitter avatar. But if you really want to help make a difference in the campaign against IE6, it’s up to you (agencies, designers, developers) to make the case to your clients to move forward, and it’s up to you (clients and employees at large companies) to go tell Chet how much he’s costing you.

Update: TechCrunch points out a new campaign pointed at IT managers, Hey IT!