RonAmok!

Technologies in and of themselves are not very interesting. What people do with them, however, is. I’m fascinated with how people USE new technologies in their day-to-day lives.

Take Twitter for example. Standalone, the technology is new and interesting. But it wasn’t until I began using a desktop Twitter client called Tweetdeck that I noticed some self-behavioral changes.

I’ve found that the TwitScoop column in Tweetdeck is where I get all of my breaking news. Consisting of a tag cloud, the column represents Twitter’s trending topics. The larger the word, the more frequently it’s being used in Twitter-based conversations.

Last Tuesday, I returned to my computer after a few hours of client meetings to find the image above waiting for me. It didn’t take much imagination to see that the California Supreme Court had issued its ruling on “Prop 8,” the measure that banned same sex marriages in last November’s elections. The ruling caused such an emotional response that the Twitterverse lit-up with every conceivable opinion.

Tweetdeck was where I first heard about the plane that splash-landed in the Hudson. Tweetdeck is where I first heard saw the words “Mumbai” and “terrorists” — both examples arriving in Tweetdeck long before the mainstream press had a reporter on the scene. It has become the defacto place for your New Media Evangelist to get his breaking news.

How are New Media technologies influencing your day-to-day habits?

Tags:Twitter Tweetdeck Twitscoop Breaking-news New Media Evangelist

Yesterday, I got a call from Christy Simmons, an intern at Widgenie, asking me to take a look at a new data-display widget service. Since I’ve been contemplating a series on measurement, her timing was impeccable, so I checked it out.

Below is my first chart created using Widgenie. Data entry is as simple as uploading an Excel spreadsheet or a CSV file — the short training video is all I needed to get started.

I had a problem importing the data from an Excel 97-2004 formatted XLS file (created from three different sources (Open Office, Google Docs, and Excel 2008), but the native Excel 2008 and CSV files worked as advertised. Since the service is still beta (and free!), I’m willing to give ‘em a pass on this little annoyance. I used a CSV file exported from Open Office 2.4 to create this chart.

Embedding the chart into my blog was as simple as cutting and pasting some javascript — which opens up some interesting possibilities for content creators.

For example, lets say that you want to publish data that changes from week-to-week. Instead of creating a new chart every week, you simply update your spreadsheet and upload it to Widgenie, overwriting the old one. Since the widget is tied directly to the file on the Widgenie server, the data will always be up-to-date, rippling through to wherever the widget is embedded. I see this as an advantage for companies wanting to maintain live customized dashboards of all sorts of data.

Lastly, Widgenie also gathers stats. Since the widget is both embeddable and sharable, these stats will help you monitor where your data is traveling to and what sorts of traffic it generates. I’ll let you know how this is working for me over the next few months.

So far I like what I see, and this New Media Evangelist plans on using Widgenie to share and analyze data.

Update: I just noticed that the chart is not displayed in Google Reader. This is a little disappointing but hopefully Widgenie will figure out a way to make this happen.

Tags: New Media Evangelist Ron Ploof Widgenie widget widgets review data charts

I was attending a meeting recently where web-metrics were being presented. When the topic came around to the company’s corporate blogs, the presenter spoke enthusiastically about the thousands of unique visitors who had read our blogs.

Curiously, she didn’t mention the blog-subscription numbers. So, with the same level of enthusiasm that she described the thousands of hits, I explained that our RSS subscription-rates were steadily rising and that one of our bloggers had just broken into triple digits. The silence in the room was deafening. It was clear that my triple digits were being pooh-poohed compared with the quadruple digits that the marketing manager presented.

Marketing folks have a paradoxical view of numbers. On one hand, they love really large numbers. If you say, “We got a million new unique hits on our corporate website yesterday,” the news will be greeted with enthusiasm. Marketing folks also love small numbers. If you say that “We had a 6% hit-rate on our latest advertising campaign,” you’ll receive enough back-slapping to collapse a lung.

The paradox is a holdover from the Golden Age of Mass Media, where corporations shot messages pell-mell through mass media outlets to see what sticks. Because the response rate for these mass communications is so dismal, marketeers were forced to play “Probability Marketing,” where large numbers were required on the front end of a campaign in order for a small number of conversions to precipitate out the back-end.

I attempted to explain why my triple-digit “subscription” numbers trumped the quadruple-digit “hits” numbers. “Think about it this way,” I said. “The people who take the time to subscribe are so fascinated with our bloggers opinions on these super-niche topics, that they demand notification whenever we write something new!”

Now that’s influence — the currency of New Media.

Successful New Media isn’t about “Probability Marketing.” It’s about a unique group of people who are interested in your products and services. In these New Media Times, it is much more important to focus on a small number of engaged customers and prospects than to use the shotgun method and blast your message through all of the noise.

Tags: New Media Evangelist RonAmok! ronamok corporate blog influence metrics