GigaOM » conversations

Branch rolls out Groups to organize conversation parties

Ryan Kim — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 23:31:15 +0000

Branch, a recently launched conversation startup funded by two Twitter founders, is now introducing a new feature called Groups that allows a set of people to establish a little community for discussions. Instead of inviting individuals into Branches over and over again, a host can set up a group that can conduct future conversations or can be added en masse to any other discussion.

A host can invite group members one time through a link and members of a group can start a conversation within the group at any time. The group will have its own web page that can attract followers, who can ask to join the group or just follow the conversation. A follower can also track any new conversations started by the group, just like a Twitter user can follow tweets from someone after following their account.

The goal is to recreate the small conversations that sprout up at a dinner party, said Josh Miller, the CEO and founder who dropped out of Princeton to start the company. Each group can serve as a little dinner party, which can create new conversations.

We’ve been looking at publishing more of own internal staff conversations here at GigaOM, which normally take place on Socialcast. We recently posted one discussion about tweeting during a disaster. That worked out well, but in the future, we might look at something like Branch to record and publish those discussions. The problem is, it’s hard to know when a conversations will turn into anything worth sharing.

It’s unclear how many people are using Branch at this point. The service, which has been funded by Twitter founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone, is part of a new generation of publishing tools along with Medium, another project from Williams and Stone, that is aimed at helping people collaborate and publish to the web.

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ShareFlow: Have Conversations Instead of Email Overload

Darrell Etherington — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 18:00:17 +0000

Email is a great tool for office communication, but is it really the best way to keep track of discussions? There are other choices, like communicating via IM or using wikis. Yet another option is ShareFlow, a new app from Zenbe, the people behind the popular Zenbe Lists iPhone app and web service.

ShareFlow is basically a threaded comments system for your business. And it just so happens that a threaded comments system is exactly what most office communication needs. It’s also free for an entry-level account, so is priced perfectly for my budget. The best part? Each plan includes access for unlimited users, so organization size is immaterial when it comes time to picking a plan.

Registration and Initial Setup

The second-best part? It takes all of about 10 seconds to sign up, which regular WWD readers will know is a huge benefit in the opinion of this registration-weary reviewer. Once you’ve signed up, you’ll see that ShareFlow most closely resembles Facebook’s redesigned home screen, minus the interminable stream of annoying surveys.

Once you’ve been invited to partake in a “flow” (a conversation), or created one yourself, you can post comments, files, emails, events or maps to the ShareFlow stream. You can add other users to your flow by clicking the “Invite” link, at which point they’ll receive an email from which they can view the flow (and easily sign up, if they don’t yet have an account, without being redirected to another page).

Posting and Content

Users will have to keep their ShareFlow window open, or subscribe to an RSS feed for the flow in order to receive updates, since emails are only sent for invitations, and not for subsequent additions/changes made by flow contributors. At first this seemed puzzling, but when I considered that ShareFlow is meant to be an email alternative, it made much more sense. Plus, with RSS support built in, there’s absolutely no reason to ever miss any updates.

The ability to post other things, like files, emails, events and maps is a huge bonus, and Zenbe implements all of these features very well in the app. It doesn’t overwhelm you with options; it just asks for exactly the right amount of information required to complete the associated function. Clicking on “files” instantly opens a file browser window and upload dialog box, for instance, and “map” allows you to type in an address and then automatically retrieves the best-guess Google Map for whatever entry you make. This is all achieved without leaving the main dashboard window.

If you’re unable to access the ShareFlow web interface, you can also add updates via email, thanks to a unique email address created for each individual flow. When I tried this out, ShareFlow recognized and posted the emailed update to the flow almost instantaneously.

Filtering and Organization

Some nice extras are the ability to flag any post in your flow with a variety of icons, which provide great visual shortcuts for finding specific kinds of content. If you’re not crazy about a manual approach, you can also apply filters using a drop-down menu in the upper left-hand corner of the ShareFlow interface, which allows you to view only emails, pictures, movies, etc. Like every other feature in the web app’s arsenal, the filters here manage to be simple without sacrificing usefulness.

Conclusion and Pricing Options

With a free account, the only limits you’ll encounter are file storage space and the number of active flows you can have at any one time (five as of this writing). If you find the service handy, you might quickly find yourself reaching that cap. Tiered pricing plans ranging from $20 to $80 per month will get you between 25 and 200 flows, and a lot more storage, too. This is definitely one time I can see myself springing for the expense sometime down the road, so long as I can actually corral team members into switching from email to a much more conversational flow communications setup.

What’s your current team communication tool of choice?

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How Well Do You Listen and Respond?

Dawn Foster — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 20:00:01 +0000

Listening has always been important, but now in the world of social media where conversations are amplified, repeated and spread at a much faster rate than ever before, listening has become even more critical. Many of us, particularly freelancers, don’t have teams of people responsible for customer service and support to help make sure that we are listening to our customers, potential customers and industry experts. We have to find the time to listen to what people are saying about us and react appropriately.

Photo by Flickr User Orange_Beard under Creative Commons

Josh Bernoff wrote about the modern listening problem and compares it to those speaker phones where you can’t talk and listen at the same time. On those not-full-duplex speaker phones, you are either talking or listening, but not doing both at the same time. In the social media age, we need to be both listening and talking, but many people are only doing one or the other. On Twitter and other social web sites, we talk about what we are doing and listen to other people talk, and we do it simultaneously.

Listening

I tend to automate as much of my listening as I can using various monitoring tools. These are two of my favorite ways to monitor and listen to what people are saying, and we’ve covered both of them in more depth in previous blog posts.

TweetDeck: I have several different searches that are set up in TweetDeck, and I get real-time notifications when someone mentions my name or several of the projects that I’m involved in.
Yahoo Pipes: More sophisticated monitoring with Yahoo Pipes looks for mentions of a list of keywords across many different social media sites, blogs, Twitter and more.

Responding

Now that you can find the conversations and have started listening, the hard part begins: finding the time to respond. Depending on the volume, this could be a small task or a huge effort. I do a pretty good job of finding and listening to feedback, but when I get busy, I sometimes find it difficult to carve out the time to respond. If I respond right away, I won’t forget to respond, but responding immediately can really disrupt my work flow. If I put the responses off and do them in batches, I am probably more productive, but I run the risk of missing opportunities or forgetting to respond. The key for me is finding the right balance to respond quickly, but without disrupting my ability to be productive and efficient in my other work.

How well do you listen and respond?

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Make a Monitoring Dashboard to Track Online Conversations

Dawn Foster — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 14:00:26 +0000

Quite a few people seemed to enjoy last week’s post about How To Monitor Online Conversations, so I thought it would be a good idea to explain how to make a monitoring dashboard to make it easy to track what’s being said online about you, your company, your competitors and anything else you need to keep an eye on. The key to monitoring dashboards is to set them up in a way that you can check them frequently, quickly and easily.

When I talk about monitoring “dashboards,” I use the term very loosely. In some cases, I set clients up with RSS readers that have a typical dashboard look and feel for monitoring feeds, while in other cases the “dashboard” is really a monitoring section in an existing RSS reader with the feeds delivered as an OPML file.

In my experience, people who are new to RSS readers tend to do better with a reader that looks more like a dashboard than the a tree or folder structure. This is particularly true for monitoring because a dashboard lets you see more information at a glance. Netvibes and iGoogle are both good choices for new users. However, I think that the Netvibes layout tends to work slightly better for this purpose. Here’s an example of a monitoring dashboard built using Netvibes:

However, I personally use NetNewsWire for my RSS reader. I have my monitoring dashboards set up in folders that don’t in any way resemble a typical dashboard. Try out a few different readers to find the one that works best for your style and usage. The tool that you select isn’t the critical element. The real magic is in the content that you are monitoring.

I monitor three primary types of content in my dashboards: vanity mentions, competition and industry analysis.

Vanity mentions are the conversations that people are having about you, your company, your products and your employees. Keep a close eye on these mentions so you can respond quickly to questions and concerns. A proactive approach to monitoring and responding to discussions can help you avoid potential issues before they get out of hand and can show people that you are responsive to your customers. I track vanity mentions for companies that I am involved with across Twitter, blog searches, Flickr, various video sites, FriendFeed and more.

You can get interesting insights about your competition and their activities by proactively monitoring their communications and what other people say about them online. I often monitor competitors blogs, press releases, support forums, job postings and personal blogs or social media accounts of key employees, in addition to monitoring mentions of the competition on various sources.

Industry analysis should also be part of your monitoring dashboard. Monitor blogs written by thought leaders within your industry along with tracking for mentions of keywords that are important to your organization or your interests. I often use this section of the monitoring dashboard as a way to find content for blog posts. It can be a great way to see what other people are talking about in your industry and give you an opportunity to respond to, disagree with or build on interesting ideas from other people.

In addition to the dashboard technology, I use tools like Yahoo Pipes and PostRank to help me find relevant content and filter it down to the pieces that are the most important for my purposes. If you have never used Yahoo Pipes, I have several two-minute Yahoo Pipes video demos that can help you learn what you need to get started.

How do you monitor online conversations? What kind of monitoring dashboards do you use?

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United States of Tara‘s Many Faces (And Online Distribution Platforms)

Liz Shannon Miller — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 20:30:12 +0000

If you’re trying to build the kind of sexy buzz that only reaches the ears of the linked in and wired — say, the tech-savvy affluent folk with Showtime subscriptions — maybe the kind of blitz currently being enjoyed by The United States of Tara isn’t such an awful idea.

The new Showtime series starring Toni Collette (who’s been nominated for Oscars) and executive produced by Diablo Cody (who won an Oscar for writing Juno) and Steven Spielberg (who has won a bunch of Oscars, too) has an incredible pedigree and the digital push to match. According to Rob Hayes, the senior VP and general manager for Showtime, the full Tara pilot has been distributed during the past two weeks to more than 100 different partners. Every possible service, from iTunes to AOL to Netflix to Joost to Veoh to cable providers to mobile platforms, seems to have been given free access to the series.

When the show debuted on YouTube this Monday, it racked up more than 500,000 views in the first 24 hours, which Hayes claims is the most successful YouTube premiere of a full-length episode of TV. While he was reluctant to give specific numbers as to viewer drop-off, he did say that “the majority of viewers watched more than 50 percent of the episode” — which means people watched at least 15 minutes of the half-hour debut. Given that 15 minutes in the world of online video is an eternity, that’s pretty impressive.

As one of the 500,000 who checked Tara out on Monday, I was pleased that, for the most part, the show lived up to the talent behind it. Collette (who I will forever love based on her performance in Muriel’s Wedding alone) is as engaging as ever as a career woman and mother struggling with multiple personality disorder; she does an amazing job of portraying the different “characters” that complicate her family life.

However, the characters, even on a small screen, seem cartoonish. Rosemarie DeWitt oversells her role as the jealous sister, and Brie Larson, as Tara’s teenage daughter, is less believable as teenager than Collette is as Tara’s adolescent girl personality. While the choice to launch the show with Tara’s family well-aware of her condition means that the storytelling is efficient and relatively free of unnecessary exposition, there’s not a lot of narrative thrust to the first episode, and the plot essentially stalls out at the 15-minute mark.

The hook of the series — gawking at the extreme personalities, both those inside Tara and those surrounding her — is definitely intriguing, but it may not be enough to engage new viewers, especially new viewers without Showtime subscriptions.

Although the choice to open the pilot with a three-minute vlog is a nice touch — and makes the show fit neatly into the little YouTube screen — I highly doubt that was Diablo Cody’s intentions from the beginning. I also doubt that the narrative device will continue on for future episodes. Not that it matters, as the pilot’s appearance on the Internet is a one-time deal for the series — one that Hayes doesn’t expect will affect the performance of the episode when it premieres on Showtime next week. “Even if they’ve already seen it, people are going to want to watch it on their TVs. We don’t think that it will be cannibalistic.” But since this is the only episode that will be distributed online, the issue isn’t so much cannibalism as it is hoping that the cannibals will come back for seconds.

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Can the FCC Offer Up Some Real Reform?

Stacey Higginbotham — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 21:00:58 +0000

Last week, when the FCC published an order aimed at halting the collection of and reporting on the quality of telephone service on a nationwide basis, we were pretty disappointed, as it came off like the agency was just throwing in the towel on real regulation and reform. Since one of the reasons behind the FCC decision is that the data is available at state utility commissions, I surfed and called around to the commissions at the five most populous states to see how difficult it is to compile and compare quality of service data.

My conclusion? It’s no picnic. Beginning with my home state of Texas, it took a phone call to get a basic report faxed over (they can’t email it). The report offers the total complaints registered against telecommunications companies vs. those lodged against electrical companies and lists the top offenders in each category. More details require a Freedom of Information Act request and a wait of up to 10 business days. California required a phone call and some back and forth to get some information, which includes data on the number of repairs and the amount of time a customer waits for refunds. A week later, I’m still waiting to hear back from the commission in New York.

Illinois publishes its quarterly quality reports on its web site, and tracks information ranging from length of time services were out and whether credits were issued for no service to the amount of time it took to get an operator on the line. Florida also published the reports on its web site, but the most recent one for AT&T (the company I was trying to track) is from 2007. Florida tracks a lot of stuff (their reports are about 24 pages compared to one in other states) from the timeliness of repairs and to how long it takes to get a number listed in directory assistance.

So compiling and comparing these reports to get a measure of how network quality and customer service complaints are settled is not all that easy and may not even be doable, since the information might be old and may not match across all states. At the least, it would at least take multiple FOIA requests and weeks rather than days. My research covered five states where about 36 percent of the population lives, but an apples-to-apples comparison on a nationwide basis seems to be impossible.

Another FCC objection to collecting this data is that it only covers access lines, the wireline telephone service rapidly going out of style in many households. I agree with the FCC that this data is bordering on obsolete, but instead of ditching it, the federal government should really expand the regulatory oversight of other voice services, from wireless to cable VoIP.

The difference between regulation of various broadband delivered services from video to voice should be eliminated, and it should be done at the federal level. Cable companies and telecommunications firms should not be held to different standards when it comes to reporting quality data, getting local franchise agreements for deploying television services or even requirements to serve rural areas. There will be plenty of fights over which questions to ask given how different the cable and telco networks are, but at the end of the day both types of companies are offering video, voice and data over broadband. They should play by the same rules.

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Tool You Can Use: iPhoneSlide

Om Malik — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 10:30:28 +0000

[qi:91] iPhoneSlide.com is a simple little web tool that solves the problem of instantly uploading iPhone photos to one (or more) of your favorite web services – Facebook, WordPress, Flickr, Blogger, or Typepad – in one pass via email. Take a photo and email it with subject and text to post@iphoneslide.com. You will get a confirmation email in return. Select the services you want to upload that photo to, and you are done.

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