Casman Blog

I did a short, informal talk yesterday with a government group interested in finding out more about social media. Should their agency should be taking advantage of social media? I’ve been caught up in how and how often for so long, it was refreshing to re-examine the why. It was a wide-ranging discussion and this post reflects that.

I roughly defined social media as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and blogs. I acknowledge this as clearly over-simplified.

Why should a company utilize social media?

1. “Just doing” social media to look up-to-date is NOT a good enough reason to start. However, creating a corporate social media presence online is so common it is almost required. Almost. Can you imagine a company without a webpage? We’re close to that with social media. One important caveat: My clients are high-tech companies. If you’re in government, agriculture, or other more conservative sectors this obviously varies.

2. “Old PR” (keeping an announcement secret until the last moment, trying to create a big bang of coverage) still works. Suprise! Print is dying, and the traditional press release may go the way of the dodo (Raphus cucullatus) at some point. But old PR still drives significant coverage. However, the COMBINATION of old PR and social media has a bigger effect for clients. SourceForge, in a lead-up to its annual Open Source Awards event, released multiple press releases which helped attract news and blog attention. Twitter was used to promote related items like a tattoo giveaway program. And YouTube was leveraged to push out interviews from well-known open source technologists. The result was more than a 10x increase in interest from 2007 to 2008. Do BOTH.

3. Twitter has at least three audiences built in. First, your potential customers. Second, and very important, media that pays attention to your sector. And, third, your current customers who have support issues. It’s rare when you can contact disparate audiences in one place.

4. Twitter, in particular, is “lightweight” and allows a company to have a constant conversation that does not require major research or editing skills.

Part of assessing why is assessing risk. What are the potential problems and pitfalls with creating a corporate social media presence online?

1. If you don’t have something interesting to say, it doesn’t matter how social media-ized you are. No story, no interest. I cannot emphasize this enough.

2. Your young employees will ALL be comfortable being online, sharing information with friends, using Facebook and YouTube. These are valuable skills, but managing a private account is different from running a corporate one. Corporate accounts do best when they are focused around specific activities over a defined time period. Plat’Home, a maker of small, eco-friendly Linux computers, staged a month-long contest to test their hardware in strange and challenging environments. Announcements and a countdown atmosphere helped to stoke interest and coverage.

3. A constant conversation has to be, well, constant. Letting a corporate blog fade — not updating it for extended periods — is painful public proof that your company is not active. Low-level, steady activity is better than long silences.

4. What’s your appropriate “voice”? In other words, how will your company present itself? Stiff, one-way communication is best avoided; open and honest and interactive is expected. If your corporate voice tends towards stiffer, consider utilizing employee accounts to handle more human interactions. SourceForge has used this to great effect on Twitter. The main account put out information and announcements while the community manager responded to complaints or other smaller issues. Extremely positive outcomes from the community manager engagements almost always ended in a positive result. And the official corporate account could focus on being informative.

Let’s say you’ve evaluated the above items and you still think your organization should use social media. How do you gather followers and supporters?

1. Most important, bar none, is having something interesting to say. And I mean interesting to OTHER PEOPLE. Your customers, your investors, heck, even your competitors. Is your organization doing something that someone cares about? Is it unique? Is it helpful? Think about what you will say, how it connects to hot trends, how timely it is, how insightful it is. Get that right and building followers will be much easier.

2. Use “elbow grease.” You need to spend some time actually using the service. You need to find people who share the same interests. Competitors, well-known reporters and bloggers who cover the space, enthusiasts. Start interacting with them. Give them some good info, ask them some real questions. How to find them? Some suggestions on Twitter search tools are here.

3. If you want to be the news you have to read the news. PR companies build Media Lists of contacts appropriate for a certain company or announcement. A big part of the list may come from previous connections. But at least some are brand new. The best PR firms will spend time and effort READING and getting familiar with new reporter and blogger targets. Does it appear that they would even care about your company? Have they written on related trends? Competitors? Send them information on something that they care about and would want to find out more about, and guess what? You might get written up. Send them a template press release without even knowing if it’s something they cover… well, your results will reflect your lack of understanding.

4. Quality is, in most cases, much more important than quantity. For the average Silicon Valley startup, the Media List should have 50 - 70 targets, probably. And you’ll really care about 10 - 15 of them. But those pubs you’ll know a lot about, read often, comment on, maybe, and hopefully you’ll build a relationship with them over time. Do that, and you’ll get coverage and followers.

Thanks very much to the team yesterday in bringing up these topics and asking great questions! Good luck with your social media decisions in 2010 and beyond.

Originally posted in the Page One PR blog on Oct 19, 2009.

Selling into the US market has always been the ultimate challenge for Japanese software companies. Make it here and you’re for real. It’s the only legitimate way to claim success. Succeeding only in Japan — ask Just Systems and their long-forgotten Ichitaro word processor — is not enough.

But the US market is big and geographically diverse, and linguistic and cultural barriers make it expensive and time-consuming. What can a Japanese software startup do?

Leverage social media.

The landscape is constantly changing, but as of mid 2009, there are three main services you should be using: Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.

Twitter

In Japan, Twitter is known as the “mumbling blog (つぶやきブログ)” which is an unfortunate translation. Thinking of Twitter as unimportant things you’d say under your breath is misleading. In the US, because it is a fast, quick way to get news, hints and links — in real-time — it is quickly overtaking blogging as a preferred way to communicate with users and the media. It grew 3712% in April 2009, and it has become a major source of news and information for millions of users.

Twitter has several major advantages for Japanese companies:

1. It’s short. The 140 character limit helps non-native English speakers.

2. It’s lightweight. You are not allowed to write a full blog post. Just a thought, a link, or a quick answer. This makes Twitter easy to continue. Corporate blogs always end up being too much work.

3. The US media reads it. Twitter has two important audiences: The US media and your potential users. Even just one would be good enough.

Case Study: Japanese software company Lunascape

Lunascape, an unknown commodity in the US through the end of 2008, was developing a “triple rendering engine” web browser. Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Chrome have virtually unassailable market share. However, Page One PR helped Lunascape announce their alpha version, which garnered coverage in Tier 1 technology blogs like TechCrunch, Slashdot, Wired and many others. Traffic spiked 30,000%. (No joke.) We then set up the Lunascape Twitter account. Lunascape was able to attract over 150 followers, many of whom regularly talk up Lunascape, ask support questions, and recommend Lunascape to others. As an important bonus, Lunascape is able to ask questions directly to its main users this way as well. Even more valuable, several important bloggers and journalists now follow Lunascape and have established very direct channels of communication with the company. This has helped keep Lunascape web traffic elevated long after the initial “big bang” press release.

Facebook

Facebook is the way to connect into a growing audience with a mix of static corporate information and live updates. It is the largest social networking site, growing 700% over the past year. It has a bigger and more professional audience than MySpace. Automatically bringing your Twitter updates to Facebook requires no extra effort to keep your Facebook page up-to-date and interesting.

YouTube

Owned by Google, YouTube is the biggest video site in the US by far. For explaining complicated software to the media, there is nothing better than a short, clear video. Don’t think HD and clear lighting. No, it’s “down and dirty,” just screenshots of the most interesting functionality. Videos like this can explain complicated software clearly and catch viewers’ attention.

Will all of these social media sites be active and popular in a year or two? Probably not. The landscape is changing quickly. But why wait? You can gain access to US media and potential customers very quickly and easily. Social media can be an important stepping stone to making it in the US.

It’s been one year. This time last year, I was playing in my second men’s league soccer game in a long time, feeling better than the week before, ever hopeful that this time I’d stick with it. That is, get in shape, eat well, play hockeysoccerhikesailingmarathoningultimatelacrosse regularly. You get the idea.

The pace of the game was slower, I was more confident. I do love soccer after all. We were ahead. Middle field and I’m sprinting for the ball. I hear — or feel — this deep, sickening pop in my left ankle. No one near me. I had just been leaning deep into the sprint trying to push forward quickly.

Getting injured never really occurred to me.

Turns out, it’s a 100% rupture of the Achilles. Sometimes, with some people, it “just happens.” Fighting back feelings of failure and decrepitude, I did surgery April 24th, 2008. I had a black boot to wear for protection, but couldn’t even put any weight on the foot for a solid two months, limited walking with crutches for another two months after that. Rehabilitation was helped by extremely sexy trainers but progress was incremental.

But this was a re-start. A clean slate. No more voice in the back of my head that I should be in better shape, that a real man would already be out there doing things, conquering the world. No, the injury completely silenced those painfully and unhelpful thoughts. In its place, I was able to feel great about each little victory, each little improvement. I built on them.

I faced facts. As embarrassing as it was, I wanted to lose weight. Yea, I wanted to run another marathon, and yea I wanted to play a lot of hockey, maybe on some sort of competitive level, and, and… But I really wanted to be lean and mean. And I knew the formula. Run four times a week. Anything over three miles per means that I would steadily lose weight. I pulled out the calendar at the end of August. 211lbs.

All you have to do it set yourself up to win. Small sized goals feed into medium sized goals which lead into big ones. Do the four runs a week. Lose one pound a week. Measure on Saturdays. Repeat.

It’s one year later. Nine months of running, eating well, and not giving up. I’m 164lbs and none of my clothes fit. I’m in such a groove it’s hard to imagine. 47lbs lost? That’s a whole suitcase of weight. That’s 22% of my body weight. That’s… hard to believe, that’s what that is.

A new start is worth a lot. A year later and I can hardly believe how much.

Originally published in the Page One PR blog on April 22, 2009

Here are seven golden rules to keep in mind as you prepare to tweet your next tech event:

1) Establish a hashtag, and start using it before the event in all Twitter communications. Without doing this, you may find yourself in a “hashtag war” where your company suggests one but users use another. This is not a disaster. But it can be sloppy. One reason users will pick a different hashtag: yours is too long. Because hashtags will be appended to all related tweets, they should be short, to take up as little room as possible. Consider changing #mycompanyevent to #mce. You lose a little in obvious branding but gain a lot in Twitter usefulness. Searching for this hashtag at any point gives readers a quick summary of all tweets related to your event.

2) You’ll tweet a little bit about your event leading up to the day, and then you’ll turn on the fire hose of tweets as the event unfolds, in real-time. If you’re worried about how the big change in the number of tweets coming from your account will be received, don’t be. In general, in Twitter, more information is welcomed, not criticized. By all means, in the days leading up to the event, give your followers some warnings: “Event coming up, we’re trying something different, live-tweeting it.”

3) Make sure your tweets are short enough to be easily retweeted. 140 characters MINUS “RT @yourcompany” means that others reading your tweets can retweet them without any editing. At a live event, this is a major advantage.

4) Not all issues are technology related. Don’t forget politics. Live tweeting panels, even though it’s a public forum, requires taking into account participants’ opinions as well, and can be a bit tricky. If you have someone running the Twitter feed who can take political considerations into account real-time, you’ll be better off. Too sharp of comments and there are potential participant issues. Too bland and your Twitter feed is useless. Most likely, other Twitter feeds will fill in with sharper criticism.

5) In one case, Page One PR’s client was very open source centric, so giving a nod to Identi.ca, built on open source software, was important. All tweets were initiated through Identi.ca. You can easily configure Identi.ca to automatically post to Twitter. All tweets are then signed “half a minute ago from Identica,” marking you as an open source supporter. (As you should be!)

6) Timing is of the essence. With other people enthusiastically tweeting, five minutes late looks really late. Preparing informative tweets ahead of time helps. In a separate document, if you know, for instance, 3-4 panels that the company will be tweeting about, line up 3-4 tweets that announce “XYZ panel with John and Jane Doe, just getting started…” Interspersing prepared tweets with live ones will help significantly with your real-time workload. Bonus rule for the expert Tweeters to consider:

7) How to work with panels. Soliciting questions for a panel may feel like a good idea — real democracy! — but there are several important things to consider. Are you confident you can get enough questions live? If not, soliciting questions ahead of time is smart. How do you transmit them up to the podium? IMing them is possible, but whoever is receiving them needs to both scan and summarize real-time. They can not be actively participating in the panel. Summarizing and reporting the answers? Not possible with one person running the Twitter feed. Ideally, you need two people to properly handle: one who is monitoring the Twitter feed, one who is listening to the panel and summarizing and condensing answers into tweets. (Not easy!) Tweeting back answers? Again, not possible with one person.

Originally posted to the Linuxologist blog, a free software enthusiasts site.

Doing some shopping for your technical friends this year? Or just following the Golden Rule of Giving? That is, Give Something That You Yourself Would Like In Case They Don’t Get Around To Using It. Either way, we’ve shifted through a wide range of gifts to come up with suggestions and ideas in hopes that we can help you expand your range of gift giving. Yes, a lot of peoples’ companies and salaries have been hit this year. If that’s the case, as you know, some of the best Linux products are free or very inexpensive. So we’ve split up this guide roughly based on price.

We think you’re smarter than we are. We want your ideas. We’d like to know what you’re going to give this year. Or… just buy for yourself. (Just keeping it real here folks.) Vote, and we’ll include your ideas with updates on the blog post. Drop me a note on Twitter. Include the tweettag #linuxgifts .

Inexpensive Gifts

LINUX Sticker (Oval) $3.99 Well, here’s your chance to be cheap and cool at the same time. Any Linux lover has one of these on her laptop or in the back of his car. You really can’t go wrong.

“Just For Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary” (2001) $12.99

Yep, it’s the Linus Torvalds biography! What? You haven’t read it yet? Books are good that way, read it first, then give it as a gift… Torvalds comes off as relaxed, super cool, and just doing what anyone would do. An interesting book with tons of anecdotes and a fascinating take on computer history in the 1990s. A must read for any Linux aficionado.

“Linux in a Nutshell” $29.67 Think giving a dead tree manual is old-school? Think again. Linux in a Nutshell has been around a long time, and has tons of examples of commands along with explanations. When your desktop has disappeared and you can’t remember the command to restart it, nice to have something sitting on your shelf that helps out, with zero bootup time, if you know what I mean. O’Reilly’s books are always solid. Back in my TurboLinux days, we included these in the box with the desktop version. Most people appreciated that more than the TurboLinux distribution itself. (Ouch. Painful, but true.)

Free install of [Name of Linux Distribution here] $0.00 Well, I’d certainly be remiss if I didn’t include the idea of installing Linux for free. But here’s the deal. As a gift? Really? I’m just guessing, but probably sending the URL to your favorite distribution is going to be viewed as a little less than real effort on your part. Installing off a CD/DVD probably saves some pain and effort for your intended recipient. Pulling down an ISO image or doing a network install is fun, but I’m suggesting that should be saved for your lucky recipient’s second or third install, farther down the road. I’m just saying! Places to get cheap Linux CD/DVDs? Tons. Frozen Tech, LinuxCD, LiveCD List, Distro Watch, many others. I don’t have a fav, so dig around a little.

Medium Range Gifts

Leatherman Wave [BROKEN LINK] $74.95 Ok, not strickly Linux related. Well, not software related at all, of course. Except that every self respecting Do-It-Yourself hacker who plays a little with hardware has one of these on her hip. Seriously. Attach it to your belt, feel instantly cool. More importantly, you don’t have to go running off to find the right tool when you’re on your knees, under the desk, just hoping not to unplug the main email server. Great for prying open uncooperative hardware. More details here.

Neuros OSD Linux Media Recorder [BROKEN LINK] $179.99 Ok, this completely breaks my rule of actually owning or testing myself or at least having a good buddy own items that I recommend. I’ve never used this directly. But it’s on my to-buy list — not as a gift, no! for me — it’s sold by ThinkGeek, and Ars Technica recommends it as well. It plays wide range of audio (ogg vorbis, even) and video formats. Connects to external hard drives or various types of compact sticks and flash drives for serious expandability. You can add 3rd party apps. Want, want, want.

Basic Product Features

* Standalone Linux Based Media Player connects to your TV
* Record from any external analog audio/video source such as a DVD player or Cable box
* Automatically encode video/audio for playback on mobile devices such as PSP and mobile phones
* Playback a variety of media formats on your TV including MP4, AVI, ASF, MP3, OGG, WMA, AC3
* Timed recording feature allows scheduled recordings in advance
* Storage via media cards (SD/MMC and CF) or external USB hard drive
* Browse and watch YouTube videos on your TV
* Display your Photos and Play Music Files
* IR Remote Learning and Playback
* Network Attached Storage functionality
* Updateable Open Source Firmware

Chumby $199.95 So the idea is to wrap up the main Internet apps that someone would like, put them into a box that sits on your counter, and sit back and enjoy streaming music, news, weather and what have you. It’s an “always-on” Internet device with over 1000 widgets, 3.5″ color touch-screen LCD monitor, leather and plastic exterior, and comes in three different colors. If you’re a Flash wiz, why not make a custom Flash app as part of the gift? Pretty slick. (Royal HeHe2-ness has reviewed Chumby in its early days)

Expensive Gifts

Ubuntu with Annual 24×7 Support $900 Hey, Linux is great with all its community support, and it’s awesome if you find all your answers through Google. But you want to show how much you care, just pay for the support, will you?

Asus Eee PC S101 $699.00 Oh, go ahead. Get the latest version of the diminutive Eee PCs running Linux. You’ve heard about them for a while. Well, they’ve put out a new, “sexy” version that will be perfect as a gift. The flash solid state drive up to 64GB is limited, but the 10.2″ monitor and nicely thin enclosure at less than 1″ high weighs in at at very portable 2.2 lbs.

Dell Mini 9 [BROKEN LINK] $1239.00 You can get a Dell Mini 9 for a lot less than this. I loaded it to the gills. Ubuntu, of course, plus a 3 year limited warranty with 1GB memory, 32GB solid state drive plus 160GB external HD, integrated Webcam, and a second 19″ flat panel monitor. Your friend is worth it.

A Word On Prices

Ok, in these tough times, be sure to double- and triple-check pricing and sourcing for all your gifts. Take a gander at BeatMyPrice.com and BeatThat! at the very least. There are also a ton of price-watching sites like ShoppingNotes.com and ZingSale. Just as an example, I just plugged in the Neuros OSD Linux Media Recorder which I list here as $179.99. ZingSale came up with at least 2 good entries in Amazon starting at $129.99 and going down. Nice.

Other Holiday Gift Guides

We looked around for other Linux gift guides and surprisingly couldn’t find many good ones. Not none, though. There are a handful of great open source gift guides, and we’d be remiss to not mention them. Ars Technica in particular is an excellent tech blog and the Ars Technica Holiday Gift Guide 2008 is a fabulous source of information and ideas. Don’t miss it. Also, looking a little dated, but still with great info is the Hack It Linux 2007 gift guide.

So… go forth, spread the Linux holiday cheer. And before or after, please let me know what you like and what was a big hit. I’ll add updates here.