Social Signal: Latest Blog Posts

Tickets on sale for March 25 Twestival: Twitter-organized fundraising in hundreds of cities

Rob Cottingham — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 23:05:03 +0000

Twestival - the Twitter-organized fundraising evening that happens the same evening in hundreds of cities worldwide - is coming again to Vancouver, this time in support of Concern Worldwide. And Rob will be there once again, doing standup comedy about social media.

Get your tickets here... and we'll see you at the CBC's Audience Lounge, at their Georgia and Hamilton studios!

March 25, 2010 – 6:00 pm - 9:00 pm

CPAWS seeks Ottawa web intern

Rob Cottingham — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 21:28:49 +0000

Tell me this isn't someone's dream internship:

Our friends (and The Big Wild clients) at the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Committee are looking for an intern to help them make their web, email and social media presence a thing of grace and beauty. If that sounds like someone you know, do pass along the details:

Deadline: March 30, 2010
Start date: May 10, 2010
Length and type: Full-time, for 3 months
Salary: $14/hour
This position will play a role in improving, updating and analyze CPAWS' web activities.

Responsibilities may include

Making updates to CPAWS-managed sites as directed, using our CMS
Using public domain image repositories to find appropriate images for projects
Coding HTML emails
Suggesting ways to improve existing sites
Assembling statistics on our email blasts, websites and social media accounts for analysis
Organizing and tag images from our collection
Using services like Google maps, Twitter, etc. to create interactive tools for our sites
Researching and compare online service providers.
Working with our chapters to improve their websites
Writing and editing text for the web

The complete posting is here.

Open sourcing our project estimates at SXSW

Alexandra Samuel — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 05:49:04 +0000

Go directly to the latest Open SoSi release, How to create budget estimates for proposals and project management. >>

I'm hosting a conversation today at SXSW, Breaking it Open: Open Source Consulting Models. So this seemed like the right moment to return to the job of open sourcing our consulting materials.

As it turns out, the biggest challenge of open sourcing is actually organizing our materials in a form that is useful to share. Any programmer can tell you that documentation is often the most onerous part of sharing code, and we've found the same thing is true in our own open sourcing process. We could just dump a pile of documents onto the Internet, but we want to release them in a form other people can make sense of and apply to their own work. That takes time.

But time isn't the only obstacle: there's fear to battle, too. The attached materials were mostly ready in late October, so I suspect that the main thing holding me back is the prospect of people scrutinizing our bottom line. Releasing the behind-the-scenes cost estimating process for the Concept Jam isn't as much disclosure as open book accounting, but it is a lot of information about how we handle the financial side of our business.

And the financial side of the business has definitely been the most challenging piece. Strangely, Harvard's Political Science Ph.D. program did not include an explanation of terms like P&L, or instructions on how to structure consulting engagements. We've largely made it up as we go, learning from our (ample) early mistakes, and finally arriving at a formula that ensures our clients get good value on a model that is financially sustainable for us, our employees and our suppliers.

It's precisely because this part of the business has been so hard for us to figure out that we feel it's so important to share it. Every consultant and service company we've talked to about estimating has confessed to facing the same struggle: finding a way to do cost estimates that are competitive but still profitable. Our numbers and methodology won't work for everyone, but we hope that others can borrow from pieces of what we've done.

In particular, I'd like to recommend the fusion of cost estimating and project management. If you typically work on a fixed-cost estimate model -- where you give your client a proposal specifying a final cost of delivery, and have to stay within that budget -- then your solvency hinges on your ability to estimate effectively. Come in too high, and your proposal will be rejected. Come in too low, and you'll lose money on the project. You're bearing the risk if you estimate wrong, but you also reap the benefit if you beat your estimate while delivering to (or as we aim to, beyond) the client's expectations.

As you'll see from the spreadsheet and screencast we've released today, our cost estimates are based on a task-by-task breakdown of each project phase. This takes a lot more work than our old, largely gut-based approach -- and interestingly, the numbers aren't that different from what we used to do by gut.

But the payoff comes when you get to work on your project. We used to have a really hard time staying on schedule and on budget. Now we can see the specific hours we've planned for each task in a project, and our tasks start running longer than the anticipated time, we can identify that quickly, and develop a strategy for getting back on track.

How to create budget estimates for proposals and project management

Alexandra Samuel — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 04:59:46 +0000

Today we're releasing the budget estimating template we use to generate cost estimates and project plans for The Concept Jam. We use similar templates for all our budgeting processes, so we expect that the attached template will be relevant to a wide range of budget, estimating and project planning needs. Whether you're a social media agency (like us) or in an entirely different sector and service industry, these files and notes can help you define or refine your estimating and project management system.

To help you understand our process we are releasing:

The Concept Jam: Internal Budget Estimate spreadsheet. This is an annotated version of the spreadsheet we use ourselves. It includes four worksheets: A title page, our internal estimating spreadsheet, the client version and our project timeline (generated once the proposal is accepted.) Be sure to click the cells with red corners to view the annotations. You can view this spreadsheet as a Google Doc or you can download the XLS version. If you plan to work with it we highly recommend downloading the file.
Screencast: Open SoSi Project Estimating Worksheet. This 17-minute screencast explains our worksheet -- the information it contains parallels what's in the spreadsheet annotations but you may find the walkthrough helpful.

Task-by-task budgeting makes for accurate estimates and proposals

Here's how we use the attached budget estimating worksheet to generate project proposals for clients:

We break the project down into phases, which correspond roughly to deliverables, though some phases include multiple deliverables.
We break each phase into individual tasks, estimating the hours each staff member or contractor will spend on that task.
We add an additional line item to each phase to cover project management hours -- all the e-mails, phone calls etc. that inevitably pop up during a project. We take the total hours each staff member is expected to spend on that phase and add 15% more time to cover their project management tasks. You'll note that our estimates do not include a contingency. We've found that building those project management hours into our budget means we don't need a contingency.
We add a section to the spreadsheet tabulating the business development costs of the project. Typically when we do the estimate we've already logged some hours talking through the project with the client -- often, a lot of the strategy work happens before we've even delivered a proposal. So we add up the costs of all that time up to the moment of proposal delivery, plus whatever time we anticipate we'll log before the proposal is approved (typically, another client call and internal strategy meeting) and come up with a dollar figure representing our total up-front cost on the project. We then take this number and distribute it proportionally across all the other phases of the project, adding the appropriate portion to the total for each phase. This allows us to deliver projects at a lower cost to clients who come to us with a clear sense of what they need, and to pay for the time it takes to work with a client to develop a clear set of requirements or project strategy if they need to do that before proceeding to proposal.
We take the total budget and copy-paste as values (so that we can delete rows and columns) into another worksheet, where we delete the task-by-task breakdown and the person-by-person breakdown. That leaves us with column A (phase) and column O (total cost). We then round the total cost for each phase to the nearest $250, taking care that the final total isn't more than a few dollars away from the original total (before rounding).
We copy & paste the cost for each phase, and the final total, into the Word doc we give to the client as a proposal.

A detailed estimate drives tight project management

Once the client approves the proposal, we continue to use the spreadsheet to guide our work. Here's how:

At our kick-off meeting, we review the proposal and the spreadsheet as a team, making sure everyone knows who is doing what and how it all fits together. We take the tasks outlined in the estimate and turn them into a project timeline (see the "Timeline" worksheet), specifying which tasks will happen during which week, and when we have to meet key milestones.
We give the client a distilled version of the timeline (focusing on meetings, deliverables, and anything they need to get to us at key points along the way) and schedule all internal and external meetings that are called for in the timeline, putting them in the calendars of anyone on our team who needs to participate (so we don't get 3 weeks in and then stall because we can't find a time when everyone is available for a key meeting).
We enter each phase of the project in Harvest, our time tracking system, as a separate task. We find this is much more useful than using tasks to cover types of work -- meetings, writing, etc -- because it helps us track our time by phase.
When we check in as a team during docket or project meetings, we check the total hours logged on the project in Harvest against the running total of hours in the spreadsheet. If we're running much over or under our anticipated hours -- where we thought we'd be on the project by the time we completed a task in the estimate -- we can see it right away, and drill down within Harvest to see whether the whole team is off our projections or whether there are just one or two people who need to adjust how they're spending their time.
At the end of a project, we use Harvest to generate the total cost of our project in billable hours. We add that to our up-front business development costs, and assess whether we met, exceeded or beat our original cost estimate.

Reflections

How well does this estimating process work in practice? The very first time we used it to generate an estimate, I was flabbergasted to check in on our costs at the end of the project, and see that our original estimate was within a few hundred dollars of our final billable hours. There was just one problem: the estimate had come in way over the client's budget, so I trimmed it down by about 40%. The difference came out of our pocket.

But that experience forced me to make a resolution: I was going to stop delivering quotes that were below the actual cost to deliver a project. The next week, I submitted a proposal to a client based on our line-by-line spreadsheet estimate. It scared the heck out of me, but the client accepted our proposal. We delivered the whole project on time, to the client's whole-hearted satisfaction, and beat our estimate by a few hundred dollars.

We're now religious about delivering proposals that are always based on line-by-line estimates. And while it looks like a lot of work, it gets easier over time: once you've done a line-by-line estimate for each of your major types of projects, it only takes a few hours of tweaking to adapt your estimate to each future project. But it is worth tweaking each time, so that you're forced to think through any variables that might have changed (for example, increases in your contractors' rates), learn from past engagements (maybe you can offer to meet with your client once every two weeks instead of weekly) and adapt to this particular client's needs (for example with one more deliverable).

Best of all, we find that we are more flexible with pricing, instead of less. Because we know exactly how our estimates break down, we are able to scale a project to a client's budget by trimming scope. We can think through the implications of each item we trim ("if we eliminate this deliverable, is the client still going to understand our recommendations?") and be clear with the client about the implications of different budget scenarios. Wherever possible, we identify phases that are not mutually dependent, so that we can suggest options like contracting for one deliverable but not its successor.

Today, our estimating system is a core part of how we manage our projects, plan our business, and select which projects to bid on. But it's the result of a lot of painful trial and error. We hope that what we've learned can help other companies and consultants refine their own estimating and project management approach.

Learn more about our experience developing this budget process and our decision to release it.

Combining social and selfish reasons to share and contribute

Alexandra Samuel — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 07:35:50 +0000

Rob and I have been together for 12 years this month, but I still remember what it's like to get over a previous love. Back in the day when there was a little more turnover in my love life, I found that moving on to a new relationship wasn't enough to cure the heartache of a breakup. It wasn't until I was two breakups removed that I'd really get over a previous love and stop thinking about him altogether. I'm wondering if the same might be true of social web sites. I've loved delicious, the social bookmarking site, for almost five years now. It was the first social web site to win my heart: my first bookmarks are as old as my first blog posts. We've been together since "social media" was "web 2.0"; since the days when Yahoo's delicious was simply Josh Schacter's del.icio.us. Delicious has seen me through hacktivism and e-democracy, basecamp and yoga, CarShopping and decorating. But a recent comment on my year-old blog post about delicious-twitter integration made me realize how we've grown apart. Twitter is my new boyfriend: the one I hang out with all the time. When I find a web site or blog post I want to preserve for future reference, I usually Twitter it -- knowing that the tweecious extension will cross-post any URL I tweet to my delicious collection. Delicious is now the old boyfriend: the one I rarely see but can't get out of my heart. While I documented several options for integrating Twitter and delicious, I never use delicious to cross-post to Twitter via Twitterfeed, and since a rarely use Firefox I've stopped using FireStatus to post simultaneously to Twitter and delicious. My delicious bookmarks are there for me (like the boyfriend you know will always take you back if you call) but my primary URL-capture relationship is with Twitter. Yet I can't extricate delicious from my emotional attachment to the social web, largely because my exploration of delicious helped form my perspective and understanding of social media. The 2005 article I wrote for the Toronto Star focused on delicious as a window on the then-new phenomenon of tagging, explaining that "it offers users a great amount of additional value in return for only a little bit of extra work." What interested me was the social impact of delicious-ing: that the selfish act of storing a bookmark would elide into the socially constructive act of sharing that bookmark with others. And the social experience of sharing (easily, effortlessly) on delicious would build the sharing muscles that turn me into a good social media contributor. If that argument was correct, then Twitter's success proves that delicious did indeed school us in the joys of sharing. We stored our bookmarks, discovered the value of making them social...and then found that the sharing was worth more than the storage. Twitter focuses on the sharing, not the organizing and retrieval -- and now, it's where we put our attention and find our links. Or maybe delicious and I had it wrong from the beginning. Maybe sharing isn't that big an ask: maybe people are wiling to share, waiting only for the opportunity. Maybe we're naturally generous, or predisposed to vie for the attention we get by sharing what we know. Using tags to organize a record of what we've shared -- as delicious does so well for bookmarks, and Twitter does less well via hashtags, largely due to that 140-character limit -- is a nice bonus, but hardly the main point. The obvious answer is that different people have different motivations. The genius of delicious was -- and is -- its dual value as a private organizational tool and as a way of sharing and publishing. Yahoo doesn't care whether you're using delicious so you can find your bookmarks across multiple computers, or as a way of establishing yourself as the definitive curator of Ikea hacking resources: they just want you to keep storing those bookmarks. Twitter, on the other hand, still skews social. It's great for those who like to chronicle their lives, build their reputations, or connect with friends. It's at least as useful as a personal information tool -- I use it to log hours into my time tracking software, track the latest news headlines, and maintain a private diary of my kids' cutest remarks -- but most people are surprised when I suggest that they might like using Twitter even if they never post a single public tweet. Appealing to the productivity geeks as well as to the social networkers is a terrific way to build users for a platform. But I'm still happiest to see web applications that drive people in one direction: towards social, and towards sharing. Maybe the next one will be the new boyfriend that helps me finally get over delicious.

Three ways I get value from LinkedIn

Rob Cottingham — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 18:43:27 +0000

Vancouver blogger and friend-of-SoSi Dr. Raul Pacheco has a post today explaining why he's been skeptical about LinkedIn, the business-focused social network. And on Twitter, he asked for suggestions "if you believe in this social network, or can give me some insight on its value".

If you've been wondering about LinkedIn, too, here's what I suggested to Raul:

I'm completely onside with being picky about where you devote your online attention, and LinkedIn can be especially thorny: the fact that there's an implied endorsement when you connect to someone can make it awkward to decline an invitation. (Not to mention what it can do to your ego when someone declines yours!)

That said, just off the top of my head, here are three ways I've found LinkedIn hugely useful:

LinkedIn Groups: Because these birds-of-a-feather communities are professional in nature, I've found the conversations there tend to be conducted at a more business-like level than what I'd get on, say, Facebook. And I'm discovering some people doing fascinating work whom I might never otherwise have come across.

Network diving: This is something Alex has shown me, and good lord, it's handy. When I'm travelling out of town, I search my network on the destination. Now I have folks to look up when I'm in town, as well as second-degree connections who might well be worth meeting while I'm there. I ask for a few introductions, and we're off to the races.

LinkedIn Answers: This underused (IMHO) LinkedIn feature lets you draw on your community's expertise, as well as giving you a chance to share your knowledge and, perhaps, come to the attention of people you'd like to connect to.

Do any of those sound potentially compelling to you?

Rob on what 2010 will bring for social media

Rob Cottingham — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 19:44:25 +0000

I missed passing this along when it first came out, because I didn't know those nice CBC people had put it on YouTube. It's their segment on what to expect in 2010 for social media, based on an interview they did with me in their stunning new Vancouver studios.

The key point for me is that I'm finding people are becoming more deliberate and discerning about where they direct their attention, whether it's in who they friend, what they watch or which applications they install on Facebook. (That doesn't mean I'll always agree with the choices they make: witness the rise of FarmVille. [shudder])

And in the background, yes, you'll see VanTrash on my screen.

Enjoy... and see what you think of how my predictions are turning out one month in.

Finding and Keeping Love Online: A video Valentine

Alex and Rob — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 09:41:26 +0000

Social Signal's 2010 Valentine is a celebration of how the Internet can help you find love and keep it alive.

Book Review: "The Backchannel"

Rob Cottingham — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 22:58:53 +0000

Just as newspapers are scrambling to adjust to a world of blogs and YouTube, speakers are suddenly discovering they're not the only ones in the room who have a microphone. Tools like Twitter and wireless connectivity have broken the monopoly of the speech on, well, speech.

While a presenter is at the front of the room clicking through PowerPoint slides, audience members are talking back - and talking to each other. Speeches are becoming conversations, with the emergence of what's become known as the backchannel.

That's also the title of a new book by Cliff Atkinson. His previous book, Beyond Bullet Points, helped power a movement away from text-heavy slideshows where the speaker served mainly as a narrator, and toward more engaging presentations supported, not governed, by PowerPoint.

That positions him well to help speakers cope with this new, digitally-enabled virtual note-passing, and The Backchannel does that well. He blends well-told stories (and a few cautionary tales) from key moments in the backchannel's development with solid, practical advice for speakers who want to join the conversation - as well as event organizers who want to make that conversation as productive as possible. And the technical know-how Atkinson offers - such as an introduction to Twitter and a discussion of tools for monitoring backchannel conversations - is solid.

More importantly, this isn't an evangelical tract. While Atkinson is certainly preaching from the gospel of conversation, he isn't religious about the technology. He does a good job of honestly portraying the backchannel's warts as well as its wonders, and doesn't shy away from stories of notorious trainwrecks. He recommends against the increasingly-common practice of projecting the backchannel onscreen during a presentation, with rare exceptions; It distracts from the presentation, and interferes with the speaker's rapport with the audience. Better instead to have someone monitoring the backchannel and pulling out questions for the speaker to answer during periodic Twitter breaks.

But for a book of relatively few pages, he has some larger ambitions - and that's where The Backchannel really soars. Atkinson is trying to do much more than just help you keep your head above water. He wants to transform you as a speaker, just as audiences are changing: from his call to solicit audience input before the event, to his suggestions for ongoing relationships with your audience.

The single most valuable part of The Backchannel, for my money, is Atkinson's concept of a presentation home page: a conversational hub to house your slides (if any), video or audio recordings, relevant blog posts, links to supporting material, supplements and elaborations on your speech's content, and of course the transcript of the backchannel itself. He delivers not just a description of each section but a wireframe that any moderately skilled web-head should be able to implement - and that wireframe alone is worth the purchase price.

Early in the book, Atkinson suggests you should see your presentation as just one piece of a larger picture: the comprehensive message you want to bring to the world. With his presentation home page, you can begin to see that picture take shape - and for any speaker who wants to make an impact in the world, that's an exciting prospect.

And that puts the rest of the book into perspective. Some of Atkinson's advice, like making your presentation Twitter-friendly by boiling it down to a few pithy key messages, might seem at first like a call to dumb down speeches. (Given the rap on Twitter as an empty, meaningless medium, that charge is probably inevitable.) But simple messages make for better speeches, period; a complicated, lengthy argument just doesn't fly in the spoken word. If that doesn't work for your speech, you have to ask yourself if you've picked the right medium.

The conversational nature of the backchannel tends to enforce a discipline that makes us better speakers. What's more, as speeches become conversations, their success no longer rests solely on the shoulders of whoever's behind the mike; the medium is becoming collaborative. Maybe that can go some way to making public speaking less scary - both for the speakers who have to deliver presentations, and the audiences that have to sit through them.

Speaking is already changing, driven by the same forces that gave rise to the social media revolution. The traditional model of a few voices broadcasting to the multitude - whether from a printing press or a podium - is falling apart.

The Backchannel's model may not be the one that ultimately emerges from the tacit negotiation now underway between audiences and speakers. But it's a great starting point - and a huge advance on the current state of the art, at a time when speakers and audiences alike badly need it.

Show your users you've heard their feedback

Rob Cottingham — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 01:25:24 +0000

If you use Facebook, you've almost certainly noticed the ads on the right-hand side of most pages. And chances are you've also noticed the little "x" in the upper right-hand corner of each ad.

It's the "I don't like this" link (the opposite of that little thumbs-up icon under each ad), and I use it regularly. I let most Facebook ads slide, but some either offend me (usually with a gratuitously sexist photo, or a clearly misleading come-on) or are just so clearly not intended for me (thanks, but I'm not in the market for a condo) that I end up clicking - more to alert Facebook than for any other reason.

Click it, and up pops a dialog box saying "Tell us what you think. Why didn't you like this ad?" You can then choose from a range of reasons, such as "Irrelevant", "Offensive", "Misleading", "Repetitive" or "I DON'T WANT TO PLAY #@$&ING FARMVILLE OR MAFIA WARS!" (Actually, that last one isn't an option. It desperately, desperately should be.)

Click "Okay", and then... what?

Truth is, we don't know. Facebook says that "over time, this information helps us deliver more relevant ads to our users." But they won't tell you how... and it isn't unusual to see the same ad you've just dissed pop up again in a minute or two - complete with the little "x" link.

Which is just so last century.

Asking people for their input, and then sucking their suggestions into a black box and never letting them know what happened to them - that isn't going to fly much longer. Not for governments that conduct "consultations" around issues they've already decided, and not for businesses that want to get valuable targeting information from their audience and customers without giving them any value in return.

That goes for organizations large and small. If your web site invites input from the public, you want to be doing something more than just nodding politely while they talk; this is an opportunity for interaction that looks less like the old suggestion box and more like conversation.

What if your users could see the list 20, 50 or 100 items they've liked or disliked? What if they could meet people who've liked and disliked similar things? What if they could talk about what they like or dislike, make it part of their profile, and tell advertisers how they do and don't like to be approached?

At the very least, what if they could click a button that means they would never see that particular ad again?

If you're going to ask your users a question, you need to be able to show them you've actually heard their answer. It's perhaps the most basic skill in conversation - and so far, Facebook hasn't learned it. Has your site?