the thought plickens...

Chris Crabtree's plickening thoughts.

[chriscrabtree-blog]

Quality Web Engagement

Here is an article I wrote that was recently published by CMSWire here.

Why Quality Web Engagement Takes More Than 140 Characters

Let's face it, if your customer web engagement strategy hasn't already moved to a real-time open social network, you might as well be using a rotary phone, right?  The irony is that a company's best customer web engagement can often be found within the closed social silos of the company domain. 

  Customers Demand Your Social Presence

One of the most beneficial things about the push for open social customer engagement is that it adds a level of transparency.  In a sense, corporate social engagements break down the perceived bureaucratic layers and make the whole experience feel more human. It’s as if entering the social realm causes us to suddenly realize that corporations are really just made up of people like you and me.  We enjoy the idea of being able to read and write tweets to the makers of our favorite candy (@Skittles), software (@BlizzardCS) or automobile (@porsche), or post a comment on a company’s Facebook wall because it makes them feel more tangible. 

  There is also this conscious or subconscious disapproval of companies that haven’t adopted a social media presence.  Neglecting the opportunity to tune personally into your customer’s joy or pain in the social sphere can cost you.  For example, the early detection of product defects through social customer feedback can prevent massive (and expensive) product recalls.  Having a means to communicate downtime status and resolution progress during a company crisis will help maintain levels of customer confidence.  Gathering feedback on what customers expect next can help you develop the right products, reducing costly trial and error.

  The Limitations of Social Networks

As useful as it can be to engage customers where they are (social networks), there are unfortunate limitations. Most social networks were not designed with customer engagement in mind.  Twitter, for example, though useful for making announcements and discovering isolated tweets to determine customer sentiment, is not designed for rich customer engagement.  Using the web to truly engage your customers takes more than 140 characters. 

  If you don't believe me, try troubleshooting and solving a customer's issue via Twitter. Nine out of ten times the customer will be referred to a phone number, a forum or an email address, where the real engagement will take place for nobody else to see.  A shame really, because the rest of the network will never see how amazingly well you handled the customer experience.

  The missing piece to an open social customer engagement is a network that allows a true customer engagement experience from start to finish without having to leave the network.  Today, the customer is shuffled off to some off-the-network silo to finish the engagement, while the rest of those that might have the same concerns are left clueless, and the company unable to help more than a single individual.

  Forums as Discussion Networks

Forums are king when it comes to full, open and useful interaction between the company and the client.  As a customer, if you have issues, a quick search on the company forum can often yield a fully documented resolution from start to finish.  This is satisfying because you know that the company actively cares and is proficient at resolving customer issues publicly. 

  Admittedly, without an active and skillful team to keep up with forum-customer engagement, hosting a company forum can be risky.  It isn’t uncommon to find neglected company forums full of unnoticed, unresolved topics.  For companies with stellar customer service, however, forums can be a way to show off and garner rapid loyalty.

  The most effective customer web engagement will take place when we learn to move the rich discussions of a forum into the real-time global reach and interactions of a social network.  A social network that extends or even transcends the forum experience by allowing customers to discover and interact with topics across a global network of relevant discussions (think Quora) is what I call a Discussion network. 

  Final Thoughts

Discussion networks will allow customers to experience the full, quality engagement previously available only in forums, on an open social platform.  It will be interesting to watch the rise of these kinds of networks and how they solve many of the limitations found on today’s social networks when it comes to quality customer web engagement.

[chriscrabtree-blog]

The Social Network - Reality TV Version

Tonight is just one of those night where the inspiration is flowing.  Lots of work to be done on the Speaku site and I have to keep interrupting family matters to sit down for a second and send myself an email.

You see, that's how it all started.  A couple of years ago when I first came up with the idea for Speaku.  I was rocking my 1 2-year old son to sleep in his bedroom, around Christmas time, when the whole idea just came to me.  At times like that I have to drop everything (not that I dropped my son per say, but), I was soon at my computer typing down the detailed ideas about a system that would allow you to submit text, or pictures or whatever (like a blog) to a global network.  Twitter was just getting a lot of steam at the time, but I found myself frustrated by the 140 character limit. Blogs were cool, but they were too much like a virtual parking lot. I wanted to be able write and post something that the world could discover and interact with now.

It took about 3 or 4 weeks to get a working prototype, and all during that period there would be times where I'd have to pull over on the side of the road to either email myself some detailed database schema or network messaging optimization that had just hit me.  It was fun but time consuming.  With all of the other items I was working on in my current business, the chance to revisit this "nice idea" I called Attention (the original name I had coined for the project, i.e. social attention) wouldn't come for a couple of years.

And here I am again, working on a new social network, the ideas flowing, the mind alert and searching for more and better ways to turn thoughts into code. I'm working on a new landing page for Speaku. One that allows users to sign up for Beta before we do a phased launch.  I'll take a similar beta sign-up approach to that of fork.ly and connect.me.  They've accumulated tens of thousands of beta signups through use of a clever referral/reservations system that bumps your position in the beta invitation line.  so, while I was helping my daughter finish her science project this evening, this idea comes to me to further enhance the beta signup invitation process by allowing you to track your place in the invitation lineup based on the number of successful referrals (others who've signed up using your referral link), and on down the line.  A vitual MLM for beta-signup positioning! (I despise MLMs by the way)  This could turn the whole process in to sort of a game. Could become totally viral.

There I was emailing myself more ideas before the children go to bed.  After reading my son a bedtime story the thought comes to me that this whole process, the building of a new social network by a man in his late 30's with almost 5 children, living in Utah, juggling the time needed to code, promote, tweet, blog, work on science projects, make Disneyland trips, go to tech conferences, replace water-heaters, go on dates with his lovely wife, try to get to the gym (not) and (alas) sleep, could be one heck of a reality TV show.

So, here's an open invitation to TLC.  Come film a real-life unfolding of the next Social Network as the story unfolds over the upcoming months.  I'm sure you'd get millions of viewers. You should hurry though, because a great episode would be when I meet and speak with Mark Zuckerberg in a couple of weeks when he comes to give a speech at the BYU Marriott Center.  Or when we finally meet the angel investor(s) or VC(s) that can't write a check fast enough because of the number of beta signups we've been getting.  A filming of a trip to Demo or SXSW would have been cool, but there's always the next big conference.

Life is full of surprises.  You never know.  Now, back to coding!

[chriscrabtree-blog]

I have to tweet my blog.

It's hard to write your first blog post and not feel like it's going to end up buried at the bottom of a sea of blogs like the city of Atlantis, just hoping to be discovered. I mean, it takes a lot of time and effort to write something that you want to sound clever and exciting (I mean, who doesn't want to read clever and exiting things?). But to what end? 

I think I've discovered the dilemma facing people who don't blog.  This is how the typical conversation went when I asked to a couple of dozen people at the recent Spring DEMO conference in Palm Springs about blogs:

me: "Do you have a blog?"

them: "No."

me: "Why not?"

them: "I don't have the time" or "Who would read it?"

I could only suppose from these conversations that most people believe that maintaining a blog and getting attention = blogging a lot.  That if you're going to start a blog that "you better blog often buddy", or don't blog at all.

These non-bloggers never suggested a lack of interesting things to write about or even a lack the interest.  But what they did lack was the time to maintain a blog, especially if it was to get any significant attention at all.

So how does somebody new to blogging, like myself, build up a following, attract attention, get discovered even?

Simple.. you tweet.

And this introduces a strange dichotomy. On the one hand, I have a rich, full-content, passionate write up on something intriguing, gut-wrenching and provocative, all on my stupendous but isolated BLOG.  And on the other, a high-speed, real-time network capable of disseminating information instantly to the farthest reaches of the globe in (hold your breath)... 140 characters.  *sigh*

Come read my new blog at http://bit.ly?a=1fe209f4w all bout y I have to tweet my blog to find readers #blogs #believeme #followme #imcool

So I ask myself the following questions: 

Why the disconnect? 

Why should I have to direct people off of the handy-information-super-highway in order to read the rich and interesting content found in my blog? 

Couldn't we just bridge the gap and simplify the whole process by allowing people to publish rich content directly to the global network instead?

How about a single network that could be used for both publishing and discovering the same kind of content we find in blogs?  Heck, with such a system in place you wouldn't even have to consider creating and maintaining a blog.

For now though, I have to tweet my blog,  Anyways, at least until Speaku is finished.

Do you tweet your blog?