Came across yet another site that is playing around with what you can do with Twitter. This site is simple aggregating all tweets that include  the phrase, I love, I hate, I think, I feel or I wish in it. So if you want to waste a couple of minutes and see what people are thinking about go here.

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This video is reiterating a point that I’m continuously trying to make in conversions related to brand. Many of the large enterprise companies have gotten comfortable with the idea, that somehow they do not need to really engage with there customers or potential customers anymore.

Here are the top 3 weapons of choice for a traditional enterprise company.

1. Position of Strength
By hiding behind your advertising and make it actually hard for your audience to interact with you, you project an image of strength. What brands basically are saying is; We are so big, powerful and influential that you might not be able to talk to us (we are just to important), but “Trust Us”, we know what we are doing. That is why everybody else is our customer already(customer success stories).
Engaging could be precived as a position of weakness. Leading is strong, listening is weak!

2. You can buy perception
Just make sure that the controlled “message” is everywhere. The more eyeballs we can get, the more people will buy our message. Or if people see the same message over and over and over again, then at some point the people will take it as “the truth”.  So why bother to engage and show emotions, if you can just buy the sentiment. 
I’m sure you truly believe that McDonald’s is serving healthy food. After all, you can clearly see a salad or a piece of lettuce in most McDonald advertisements. 

3. Policies to ensure Consistence
Be consistent, don’t leave any room for interpretation. The message needs to clearly identified as coming from the brand. After all we have been doing this for decades. Let’s build on the past, so that we can continue to control or future.

Wrong! By focusing entirely on consistence, you kill all potential of creativity or individuality. You basically suck the emotion out of your brand and you become predictable. At some point being predictable will become the same as irrelevant. Do you really want to hear your customer say: “Same old, same old…” when you have a conversation about your company? (I guess maybe you do, that is sort of my point here).

Some companies will get it, other will not. Some will be Kmart, others Target

I came across Matt J McDonald blog talking about the value of a homepage this days. Got me thinking about the time we spend on the design of the homepage and the first level pages, almost ignoring all the content that lives beyond that those levels.

If you think about it, from a Social Media perspective, we want all our pages to be syndicated no matter what level they are at, so why don’t we spend more time on the long tail of the content? Every page should have an easy way for syndication. At least a “Tweet This” button on the top right or a “share this” option.

An interesting way to measure page relevance would be to track how many times a page has been re-tweeted rather then how many page hits it got. I think bloggers have learned the value syndication, why do corporate website don’t understand it.

Once you have you story entered, your friends can add comments, let others know about the event and network with everybody.

You might say that you can do that with twitter already, simple add an hash-tag and start the conversation.  However Whrrl makes this process much easier for you. 

1. Whrrl knows your location. This creates a unique identifier.
2. Whrrl lets you interact with the story, even though you do not know the person that started the story.
3. You can easly see who else is at the event or involved in the story. Great real-time network opportunity

Now the question is; Will Whrrl make it? My guess is, probably not. This is not because Whrrl is not good, it is just we are oversaturated with social apps at the moment. I personally can only deal with Twitter and Facebook, building up a new network is just to time consuming. I will keep Whrrl on my iPhone for the next 3 month or so, just to see if maybe over time Whrrl can gain critical mass and became useful, if not I probably going to end up deleting it. So download it today and prove me wrong, I would like see Whrrl succeed. Would have made it easier for me to find good parties at SXSW!

Sort of like Chess

Played an interesting flash game called Quadradius. It is not unlike chess. It is turn based and each side starts with the same number of game pieces. Unlike chess, all game pieces are the same value and can do the same thing. Move up/down or right/left. The objective is to move your piece on top your opponent piece and take it. If you take all of your opponents pieces you win. So far it sounds pretty simple. To make the game interesting there are also Orbs. Orbs give you the special super powers to your pieces, which can be used when ever you see fit. Using this powers is the key to winning this game. Give it a try. If you like chess or interactive strategy games. You will like this!

Last week at SXSW I attended a very good session hosted by the guy behind @JetBlue, Morgan Johnston. The session happened to be in a one of the smaller rooms and unfortunately it reached full capacity about 15 minutes prior to the session even starting.  Sorry for the guys that could not make it, but I hear there was an equally good spontaneous session that formed outside the room. 

It was great to see a how @JetBlue totally gets IMO how to use Twitter to provide a service and create value for there customer. He understands that a brand on Twitter is very different then your personal twitter account, you set the expectation that the content you provide (Tweets) will be in context of JetBlue and relevant to everybody following the account. Twitter is not just like RSS, people can interact with you and the interaction is what makes the experience personal.

On the other hand I got pretty annoyed how @SouthwestAir is using Twitter. For what ever reason, the person behind @SouthWestAir thinks that they are some sort of rock star. Her Tweets are full of personal experiences, that in her mind project a human face to the account. After all planes can’t twitter, as she claims on her bio.  Wrong, I probably would care more about planes twittering then having a twitter account simply waste my time. Why do I care what the person behind @SouthwestAir does? Is that not what personal connection are for? Do I really need a brand to add to the already existing twitter noise? I say no. As I said before, if I decide to follow a brand on twitter, I have the expectations to receive something in return. When I follow #delloutlet, I would want to see offers for cheap computers. I follow @OokongDeals to see deals on amazon.com that might interest me. I follow @JetBlue, because it provides me with the opportunity to ask for help as well as monitor deals and special promotions. I will un-follow @SouthwestAir, because it is just wasting my time with personal information I never asked for. This must be the best part about Twitter, it is so easy to opt in and opt out of the conversation.

Flying over Bay Area

So I got SXSW with JetBlue getting a direct flight from SFO to Austin. The 3 hour flight was pretty quick. JetBlue is not quite as cool as I thought and for being the most expensive option I saw, I would have wanted something more then crackers.

However I’m happy to be in Austin, Texas.