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My Third Klout Perk – Windows Phone – Part 1

// December 18th, 2011 // No Comments » // Social Networks, windows phone

Klout has been a hot topic lately, with many social media folks declaring it bunk, crazy, and making a big hooey about deleting their accounts. Instead, I’ve been exploring it, trying to find the value. While this is interesting to me as a consumer, it’s also directly related to my job as Social Media Community Manager at RadioShack. My first Klout Perk was from Axe, and my second was the #KloutChevySonic. The third was a two-parter from Windows Phone that included a free Windows Phone device, as well as VIP access to a party in Dallas.

The Party

The party was held in downtown Dallas at a snazzy fashion place. I’m not much into the ‘club’ scene, so that’s about all I know. They had the line split in two – VIP and ‘the regulars’. However, I was able to get my wife in the VIP line with me easily, and was also able to transfer my friend Philip from the ‘regulars’ line to the VIP easily, so they weren’t too strict on it. Once through the line, you registered, connecting your wristband to your Facebook account. The wristband was used to ‘check-in’ to various points throughout the venue to be eligible for various drawings.

They had food and drinks, but you got tokens when you checked in to be able to get the food and drinks. Since I was registered officially as VIP, I got a couple of drink tokens and a handful of food tokens – my wife and Philip weren’t ‘officially’ VIP, so they only received food tokens, and would have to buy their drinks (the alcohol ones, anyways. Sodas were free). They only had one food line, and it was INSANE, so we opted out entirely. The drink line was relatively short, and the waitstaff was friendly. They did have cookies and such that didn’t require a token at all.

The room was setup with live device demos EVERYWHERE, but oddly, there were only about 4 different models shown. Basically, there were probably 30-40 different devices on demo, but they were pretty much all the same. Also, Windows Devices (for now) are pretty much all the same hardware, thanks to Microsoft’s requirements, so aside from a few style cues, there’s not much differentiation between them.

There was a small stage in the middle, and they used this as a launching point throughout the night for device giveaways, as well as the Young the Giant concert. The stage was on the floor and it was quite the intimate evening.

If I had never seen a Windows Phone before, I would likely have enjoyed the evening. The music was hopping, there was alcohol, and the crowd was pretty young and preppy.

Tomorrow I’ll share details about the device portion of this Klout Perk.

Buffer Helps You Avoid The Flood

// December 7th, 2011 // No Comments » // blogging, Social Networks

I have over 250 feeds in my RSS reader, and I keep up with a TON of news that way. I also often find things that I want to share. Unfortunately, due to my schedule, I often plow through hundreds of news items in one sitting, and if I were to share everything I wanted to, I would flood my Facebook and Twitter timelines and all my friends would unfollow me. I had often wished there was a way to have these sort of trickle into my timeline periodically, to avoid the flood.

Enter Buffer. Buffer is an awesome service that does exactly what I was looking for. You can load your ‘buffer’ with up to 10 posts (you can pay a small monthly fee for more, if you need them) and then those posts will trickle out to either Facebook, Twitter, or both at various times throughout the day.

The times that Buffer publishes your posts can be chosen in two different ways. By default, Buffer will analyze your Twitter and Facebook timelines to determine the best times for your individual usage. You can also specify certain times, if you prefer.

There are two main reasons I love Buffer:

1. It’s a ‘set-it-and-forget-it’ type service. Once I set everything up, I simply click a button to load content into my Buffer and that’s it – everything else is automated. I even get an email from Buffer when my queue is running low – a great reminder that I have room to add content, if I wish.

2. Multiple Posting Options. Buffer offers a handful of different ways to load content. You can use a Chrome plugin, a bookmarklet, integrate it into Google Reader’s ‘Send to’ option, or use email or the Android app. It’s genius, and it makes loading my Buffer completely easy no matter where I’m consuming content.

There are a few limits to Buffer, though. For starters, the free version only lets you load up 10 items at a time, and you can only have 1 Twitter and 1 Facebook account connected. If you want more of any of those, you’ll need to pony up $10/month for the ‘Pro’ service. The other downside is that Buffer auto-populates itself with the meta data of the page you’re looking at. Most of the time, this is NOT optimized for sharing via social networks, so I find myself having to tweak the post before I submit it to Buffer, which is somewhat annoying. It would be great if Buffer could automatically reformat its content to include just the headline of the post and the link, at least.

There are TONS of tools to help you be more productive and efficient with social media, and quite honestly, many of them are good, but many of them also require quite a bit of upkeep. Buffer solves this one problem for me, and it solves it really well. I would highly recommend Buffer if you’re a prolific sharer and want an easy way to spread that out a little bit.

Disclosure: I really honestly love Buffer. The links above are referral links – if you sign up through these links, I’ll get an extra post (and you start with an extra post, too!). Honestly, the free 10 posts are good enough for me.

Churches Going Social

// November 13th, 2011 // 1 Comment » // communication, Social Networks

I wrote previously about my church using SMS to add to the sermon experience, so I wasn’t too surprised to see this added to the information card that’s part of our bulletin:

In addition to the regular information that you’re invited to share, our church now has fields for you to fill in your Facebook or Twitter username, which is quite interesting. I immediately wondered how they would use this for outreach, which led me to wonder if our church has a Facebook or Twitter profile. Turns out, they have both Twitter and Facebook. (Personal note: I need to find out who manages these). Interestingly enough, there is no mention of these accounts in the bulletin, nor is there a link from the church’s website (http://www.mckinneychurch.com). It could be that they’re in ‘soft-launch’ mode, but still interesting.

So, back to the original thought: What would I expect to ‘get’ from the church by sharing my Facebook/Twitter username on this form? If I had thought more about it during service, I would have put my usernames down to see if they would follow. I’m interested to find out how they use this info. If YOU had put your information down, what would YOU expect to get from the church?

And, back to the second thought, what would I expect to see on the social profiles of my church? Reading through, it looks like they just share reminders about various events, prayer requests (when appropriate to share), and some teasers to get me in the door on Sunday. Good stuff, but a bit light.

How does your church use social media?

Why Is Netflix So Anti-Social?

// June 21st, 2011 // 3 Comments » // annoying, Social Networks

I’ve been a Netflix subscriber since September of 2008 – that’s nearly 3 years – and I’m a heavy user of the service. I actually use the streaming feature more, but I do the DVDs occasionally, as well (I’m horrible at remembering to return them). Thus far, I’ve rated over 200 movies, and I’ve spent quite a while telling the service my preferences, using the handy (if not a bit limiting) ‘Never, Sometimes, Often’ rating scoring system. I really thoroughly enjoy testing Netflix’s ability to recommend movies that I’ll really enjoy, so I use that feature the most.

Unfortunately, there’s one thing that Netflix absolutely sucks at – being social. By that I mean that the service makes no attempt whatsoever to allow me to connect to my friends. There is some rudimentary Facebook support, but it’s only used (as best I could tell) to share my ratings. It’s not enough, and it limits the fun of the service, especially in bringing the community feeling back to movies.

How Could Netflix Be More Social?

For starters, Netflix could offer me the ability to find friends of mine who are also using Netflix. Many other online services make it easy for me to connect my Google, Twitter, or Facebook accounts to see if I’ve already connected with someone there, and then let me add that person as a contact on the service. This is a great feature that I often use to quickly build a contact list on a new service.

There are a handful of reasons I might want to connect with others on a movie service such as Netflix. For starters, I’d like to see what movies my friends are watching, as well as what rating they gave the movie. Clearly if 5 of my friends watched a movie and all rated it 2 stars, I’d rather avoid that film, even if it would otherwise match my preferences or viewing habits. Likewise, if several of my friends gave a movie a 5 star rating, but the movie didn’t really match my preferences or viewing habits, I might like to check it out, since so many of my friends liked it.

With an established buddy list in Netflix, I could also recommend movies to my friends individually – services like GetGlue and GoMiso already allow me to ‘check-in’ to various media – such as a movie – and a contact list in Netflix could offer me a similar experience. With Netflix’s Stream Instantly service, I could be offered the chance to share my movie selection to Facebook/Twitter/etc. either at the beginning of the movie or at the end with just a click of the remote.

As it stands, Netflix is a complete island. The movies that it recommends are solely based on me and my past history. While this often results in some good recommendations, it’s entirely limited.

I’m Quitting Foursquare

// October 12th, 2010 // 6 Comments » // Mobile, Social Networks

Location-based services are supposedly the next big thing (if not ‘the’ big thing currently). The premise is that you ‘chek-in’ when you get somewhere, telling various groups of people where you are. The original intent, at least for Foursquare, was for barhoppers and party-goers to be able to easily find their friends. When you’re out on the town, you could check-in at a bar and instantly do two things – tell your friends where you’re at (so they can meet up with you) and find out which of your friends might already be there.

That’s great if you’re out on the town frequently, but what if you’re not? Or, what if none of your local buddies think checking in is as cool as you do? Well, in those situations, it turns out to be kind of pointless. I’ve been using Foursquare for over a year – I have spent 178 nights out, and checked in a total of 346 times. I (currently) have 4 mayorships and 10 badges, so I’ve been using it as much as I can (which is the point of the service, anyways).

However, I’m not getting any value out of it, so I’m quitting. What’s Value? Value will be defined differently by different people. One way that a location-based service would add value is the obvious – make it easier for me to find and meetup with my real friends. While that’s specifically what Foursquare is designed for, it doesn’t work for me – I don’t go out often enough and most of my ‘real-life’ friends aren’t using Foursquare. Thus, it’s not helping me find my friends – in fact, I can’t think of a single instance where I was able to use Foursquare to find or meetup with my friends.

I would also count it as ‘adding value’ if my check-ins generated conversation online. I realize that’s a stretch, but let’s be honest – bloggers have egos, and whenever someone interacts with us online, either with a comment or a ‘like’, it’s like getting a treat. Just to be clear, this isn’t really specific to Foursquare, that’s just the service that I’ve been using. Gowalla is a similar one, as is the new Facebook Places and Ovi’s new Check-In service.

What do you think of the various check-in services? Have you ever used them to actually meet up with your friends? Have you gotten any actual real value out of them (aside from stickers/badges and mayorships)?

On a side note, Foursquare’s account deletion page is freakin awesome. See a screenshot below: