The Official Twocial Blog

Musings of Martin (@martinrue) and Shaf (@hashpointfive), co-founders of http://twocial.com: a social engagement startup (keeping it Lean) based in Manchester, UK. Follow us on Twitter @twocialapp.

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Use Negativity Positively

One of the key features of Twocial is to identify people who are talking to/about you, and more importantly, to determine whether it's good or bad.

We love it when people say good things about us:

It gives us a nice warm feeling that someone likes something we created

It's the whole point – if someone is using our stuff and enjoying it, we did our job

It validates our current direction and tells us that we're doing something right

And we hate it when people say bad things. Most of us get defensive and struggle to not take it personally. Sometimes we find excuses or tell ourselves that it was just someone having a bad day.

But when people complain they're usually being pretty honest – they really are pissed off, or think your product should have feature X, or that competitor Y is awesome and you suck.

People who go out of their way to tell you about something they dislike can actually be really useful. Reach out to them and ask them why they dislike it. Try to get more details from them about what they'd prefer to see instead. Learn from it.

Of course, you can't do this with everyone – some people just like to complain – but more often than not people are complaining for a reason. You can choose to use that and learn from it, or take it personally and potentially lose a great opportunity to improve.

It was nice to see the coffee shop Pret demonstrating this recently:

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Unfortunately, if you wait until social media is able to prove itself to you before deciding to enagge with your customers one-to-one, you'll have missed your greatest window of opportunity to move ahead of your competitors.

Gary Vaynerchuk - The Thank You Economy

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Small Town Rules

Gary Vaynerchuk is a name you've almost certainly heard before. He's an incredibly passionate guy and has the perfect mix of being both insanely inspirational and hilarious at the same time.

At the Inc 500 seminar Gary gave a great talk about how the rules of engagement in business have completely changed. If you haven't seen his talk, you have to find 60 minutes and watch it right now http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcqCAqZtedI. Many of the points mentioned in the talk are things we're really passionate about at Twocial. Here's some of the points that really nailed it for us.

It is my firm belief that every single person's grandparents are more prepared to be successful in the next decade than you guys. Because the way business was built in the old days was on small town rules.

Gary is referring to the one-on-one marketing that was common back in the days when your local butcher would know exactly how you liked your meat and had a real relationship with you. Things have changed in a big way since then. Most businesses now have no relationship with their customers at all. They don't talk to them, they don't listen to them and they certainly don't know them.

90% of you are treating social media like a one-night stand.

Most businesses see social media as another push channel for marketing – an alternative to email campaigns and banner advertisements. What we passionately believe at Twocial, and what Gary puts into a very clear and entertaining context is that this mindset misses the point completely. It's no longer just about content – everyone is pushing out great content – it's back to the small town rules. Except now we're in a huge big city.

When I hear people debate "what's the ROI of social media?" it makes me remember why so many businesses fail. The problem is most businesses are not playing the marathon, they're playing the sprint. They're not worried about life time value and retention, they're worried about short term goals.

Let's not forget that it's called social media. You can choose to treat it as a channel for pushing additional content and trying to work out how much revenue that creates. Or you can see it as the biggest opportunity in history to learn about your customers and build lasting and meaningful relationships with them. Customers who love your product are one thing, but customers who also love you are the holy grail – just look at Apple.

Word of mouth is the currency, and now we have the infrastructure for word of mouth to be on steroids. It carries dramatically further than it ever did before.

It's now more important than ever to start building great relationships with your customers. While push marketing is diminishing, word of mouth and reputation are becoming everything. Getting your customers to love you is super hard work, no doubt, but certainly the single best thing you can do for your business.

Welcome back to the small town rules.

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North Tea Power: Nailing Social Media Engagement

It should come as no surprise that here at Twocial we really care about customer engagement, particularly the kind facilitated by social media. We created Twocial so we could help businesses better engage with, and better understand their current and prospective customers.

I vividly remember the day we sat down and decided that we'd invest all of our future energy into Twocial and into making it a huge success; we were in an amazing little coffee shop in the Northern Quarter of Manchester called North Tea Power.

NTP has become a bit of a hacker's coffee shop over the last year or so. We're not their target market necessarily, but it has become a great place to hang out on a Saturday afternoon and bump into all sorts of creative people working on their own projects or startups – not to mention the great coffee, of course.

One of our primary focuses with Twocial is to make it really easy for business to be aware of people who are relevant to them. This could be someone with a large influence who has complained about a business (where dealing with their complaint quickly is important) but it could also be someone who is singing the praises of a particular business.

These endorsers are hugely important for a business – they validate it to other people with a human, normally un-biased opinion which strongly influences other people. In fact, brand endorsers can often be far more effective than regular advertising.

Last weekend we saw a great example of this from our very own North Tea Power.

Here's the conversation:

In summary: NTP humorously asked who was joining them for lunch today, mentioning their wonderful soup. I saw the tweet and replied, asking what the soup was. It happened to be my favourite, but at the same time our good friend Gemma saw the tweet and replied "omfg nom.".

So, a nice human side to their engagement and definitely no sense of mindless advertising – kudos for that alone. But what they did next was awesome. Being fully aware of the power of brand endorsement, NTP decided to bridge the gap between online brand endorsement and real life by taking a few of these endorsements from Twitter and writing them on a chalk board outside the coffee shop.

For bonus points, who noticed that they even removed the 'f' from the original tweet to be more street-friendly?

Overall what a great use of Twitter and a great example of using brand endorsement without it feeling too much like emotionless advertising. 

Well done NTP, that's what we like to see!

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Announcing our new Berlin office!

Righty, so we've had some news recently that is pretty big...

If you follow either Martin or myself on Twitter you'll already know this. Martin has been offered a job at a startup based in Berlin called Babbel. Babbel offer an intelligent web and mobile app based method to learn new languages. Martin will be doing what he does best and that's being a coding ninja. It's a cool story how he got the job; he's a paying customer of Babbel (we're both learning German) and after developing a relationship with some of the staff there he landed the gig. I know Martin is gonna kill it and do awesomely well.

So what does this mean for Twocial? Well first off, we've had countless conversations about it and we're both as dedicated to Twocial as we've ever been. So in short it's business as usual.

If anything it's pretty awesome for Twocial. Okay so it's not a new Berlin office as such - but it does mean that we have a presence in the absolutely buzzing Silicon Allee scene in Berlin. 

We've made some friends in the US, we already have friends in Silicon Roundabout in London and now we're ready to do the same in Berlin. 

This means that we're going to be Skyping, tweeting and travelling back and forth which is actually an awesome prospect. This also means that Twocial Socials are going to be a truly international affair :)

So, exciting times for Martin and his big move - and exciting times for Twocial. 

P.s. So, you're not already following us on Twitter? If you don't want to be left out of the loop then check in with us here: @TwocialApp.

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Keep it Simple, Stupid: Skype with Crowdbooster

It has been a little while since our last post so apologies for the length of this one. It's been a while simply because we've had so much on. I guess it's one of the challenges we're facing with Twocial being both bootstrapped and a part time endeavour. When I say part time, what I mean is that we both have day jobs. For those who don't know us; Martin is a coding ninja who is seriously well respected in the coding community, and I'm an ex-coder ex-banker product guy (classically trained - long story). Twocial is being developed in our spare time which is our evenings and weekends. 

But don't get me wrong though, Twocial is pretty much all we talk and think about. 

Skype with Ricky

So as per our previous post, we've been making some friends in the US. Our next Skype was with Ricky cofounder of Crowdbooster. Me and Martin met up at North Tea Power and used their WiFi sat on the veranda. Crowdbooster, based in Palo Alto, CA is a social media dashboard which helps businesses manage their social presence. Most interesting about Crowdbooster is that they analyse your twitter audience and they provide you with stats around what time is best to tweet to maximise your impact. 

Ricky already had a handle on what we're about from our emails, but he was very interested in hearing about what makes us stand out from the 500 other social media analytics out there. 

Keep it Simple

Our differentiator is the sentiment, we are able to identify which conversation about your business is worth listening to. Not only the sentiment of what is being said, it's how you engage with people and the quality of the engagements. That's our secret sauce. We talked about the standard social metrics that users have grown to expect and that naturally we'd provide them too. Ricky, without hesitation made it clear that this would be the wrong thing to do. His advise is to keep it simple - do what you do best and focus on that - and be awesome at it. Forget the rest of the features that people already use HootSuite for - the cost of converting a customer from using HootSuite to Twocial would be too much. So why bother? Build something simple and you'll stand out.

Y-Combinator

Ricky with Crowdbooster have been through the awesome Y Combinator startup incubator. If you're not aware of Y Combinator, stop reading this and come back when you have. Ricky could not speak more highly of Paul Graham and the influence he had on his idea. Me and Martin have both discussed applying for YC in the past but Ricky said just do it - although we've missed the deadline for the current intake - we're dead set on applying for the next.

The call lasted about 45 minutes and we got some amazing advice on how to focus our efforts. We've officially dropped the idea of providing standard metrics that everybody else does - we're all about user sentiment and user engagement. But most of all it's not about numbers, stats and charts - it's all about people.

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Awesome Anusha, Davai and CrowdBooster

Ok, so a few weeks ago I blogged about an event I went to at Techcelerate: The Northern Tech Funding Landscape. There I met some pretty interesting people, and I ended up making a new friend in the shape of the awesome Anusha Su. Not only is Anusha a really genuinely energetic and pleasant person, she is also an uber connected person and has some seriously intimidating tech credentials. Before moving to the UK, Anusha was an exec in a VC firm in Silicon Valley and is on first name terms with major players in the scene out there. Naturally I spoke about Twocial, we got along really well and so we stayed in touch. A few weeks later Anusha was in Manchester so we met for coffee. We were talking about the tech scene in the UK and eventually Twocial. She was really interested and promised to put us in touch with two friends of hers who have cofounded startups broadly in the same space - and that I should really connect with them. 

So, that very evening Anusha introduced us via Facebook and within days I had Skype sessions organised with each of them; Maria at Davai and Ricky at Crowdbooster.

The first was with Maria who is a cofounder at Davai. Davai are Seattle based and are focused on the social and mobile experience in the retail sector. Davai offers web and mobile apps to retailers to best target customers and provide them with branded and targeted content. Broadly summarised, the call was focused on our user base and our strategy around quality of data. Davai use a sophisticated algorithm that crawls all of the social networks and platforms and aggregates this for the retail sector. The call was great for me to tell Maria where we're at, and it was encouraging to hear that Maria had the same thought processes as we did when they were at early stage. 

My key take aways from the call were:

Twitter has a very poor signal to noise ratio (at least in the US it does) and unfiltered can be pretty much regarded as trash

A way of counteracting that is to create a captive audience (Fans of Facebook profiles, Twitter followers etc) and mine them for good data

What is your differentiator?

Do some more detailed competitor research

Focus on what makes you the natural choice for your killer feature

Maria has so much experience and her product development journey was so similar to ours - so it was great to hear the drivers behind their decision to focus on the retail sector. Maria ended the call with words of encouragement by saying we had an interesting spin and that we should check in with her once we had an Alpha release.

So, lessons learnt and food for thought. I'll be sure to blog once we've had the Skype with Crowdbooster. Until then why not follow us on Twitter @TwocialApp to keep up to date with what we're upto and when we next meet.

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The cost of subscription: How much is too much & how much is not enough?

Over the last few weeks I've had a recurring conversation with a number of different startups, just how much do you charge for a subscription? It's a really difficult question to answer. How do you know when you've hit the sweet spot for a tiered subscription model?

I was talking with James Wilson (also my colleague) founder of Adbok.com about the awesome DollarShaveClub (see the video I posted yesterday) and their $1/mo, $6/mo and $9/mo subscription model. Adbok, an established startup and a leader in its niche, is a cloud based driving school aggregator allowing learner drivers to find instructors and make buying decisions based on their preferences. At the same time, Adbok offers instructors tools to manage and track their business and financials - all integrated with social networks. James was talking about how difficult it is finding a price that is both accessible for 'non tech savvy' users without selling yourself short.

I had the exact same conversation this evening with Graham Ashton, founder of The Agile Planner. I met Graham on Monday at the Bootstrap Business Club where he gave a 5 min presentation on his product. The Agile Planner is a way for anybody using an Agile or Kanban dev process to track their tickets/ stories. Btw, from the demo I saw on Monday - I really like the look of it; crisp, simple interface and focuses on the essence of the ticket: the story. I liked it so much that it's the reason we met up this evening at North Tea Power (where else?), we swapped details on Monday and met up to talk as I use Kanban pretty religiously in my day job. The subject of subscription price came up - I asked him "based on 50 developers how much would he charge per month?" - I won't share his answer but I definitely thought it was too low! We ended up spending the rest of the time discussing frustrations around price points and perceptions.

Both James with Adbok and Graham with The Agile planner (and eventually myself with Twocial) are facing the same issue; How much is too much, and how much is not enough?

Again, none of us have the answer but we did share some interesting thoughts. I've read the awesome 'Predictably Irrational' by Dan Ariely who gave a TED talk titled 'Are we in control of our own decisions?' - about 12:30 into the talk he gives an amazing example of the psychology of subscription models (just watch it, I won't give it justice by paraphrasing).

Ultimately we shouldn't be afraid of charging from day one, Ryan Carson talks about this when Kevin Rose interviewed him on Revision 3 (about 20 mins in), because freemium don't pay the rent.

So, no great insights, no answers, just a bunch of confused people and a few interesting videos - your thoughts?

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This is one of the most awesome videos I've seen in a long time! Dollar Shave Club - their blades are f*****g great.

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Bootstrap Business Club @MadLab

So Monday evening we were at the awesome MadLab here in the Northern Quarter of Manchester for the Bootstrap Business Club organised by Tekin Suleyman.

The Bootsrap Business Club held a 'Show and Tell' night where tech startups had the opportunity to explain and demonstrate what they're working on right now and give the audience the opportunity for Q&A - all in a 5 min time limit. It was brilliant to see the loft of MadLab full to the brim with standing room only at the back. The night attracted a whole host of self funded startups all at varying stages of development. 

The evening started off with Tekin talking about his own startup Crowd FM, and then handed over to the 15 other startups waiting to pitch.

For a blow by blow live blog of the pitches and a list of all startups, check out the Northology blog. Northology is a podcast/ blog centered around the startup scene of Manchester. It's run by a friend Nathan Rae - I was involved with Northology at a super early stage until my life got taken over by all things Twocial. It's definitely worth checking out.

At the end of the evening, I managed to steal a 5 min slot at the end to conduct some Minimum Viable Product testing - I began the sentence with "Twocial is..."

Twocial is... an online sentiment analysis engine, monitoring social sentiment empowering targeted engagement.

Twocial is... a CompareTheMarket but for service and not price

Twocial is... social sentiment tracker for realtime political/ presidential debates

And I tried to garner which of the above were interesting, awesome, rubbish, had potential... the reaction was mixed but did provoke some interesting questions! Martin also pitched in with comments throughout. The pitch was total ad lib and I wasn't prepared by any means - but it was great fun to do and we got some great feedback.

But at the end of the evening, the thing that struck me most was the energy that was in the room and the diverse set of startups present. It was really awesome to be among other startups who were in the same boat - the feedback was all constructive and I think we all made some awesome contacts.

All in all a great evening and I shall definitely be attending next month, thanks Tekin for a top event.

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Twocial Social 3 - 4 startups, 1 FatCamp and ass patches?

We held Twocial Social 3 with some awesome company this week, following the launch of the Manchester Startups Facebook page we were able to get 4 startups around one table: Paul Stacey cofounder of Fatsoma, Andrew Threlfall founder of Malinko and Neil Beardmore founder of SafetyGearStore. We also had our dear friend, technical architect extraordinaire and (my) colleague Jimbob.

This was by far the best social we've had so far and I'm still buzzing from it. It was only until afterwards when myself and Martin realised that we hadn't actually spoken about Twocial all that much. From the get go the discussion was centered solely around the Manchester startup scene and what we need to do to cultivate it. 

Manchester startups where y'all at?

Berlin, with the most awesome Silicon Allee scene have a number of cafe's and bars which are the places to go if you want to bump into startup and techie types. The Silicon Roundabout scene in Shoreditch, London has the TechHub (claiming to be the digital capital of Europe) - so where is it in Manchester? Manoj is doing a great job at Techcelerate, but which coffee shops are the place to congregate? Naturally me and Martin favour North Tea Power for its great coffee and free WiFi :)

Paul, having just undergone a second round of funding with Fatsoma is moving into brand spanking new offices just off the Ancoats area of Manchester and very kindly offered a space for us to get together. This is very much in the same vein as MOO cards - who purportedly were the catalyst behind the Silicon Roundabout hype by doing the very same thing. Also, we did get an invite to tour the office once they'd moved in - blog post to follow! One other future blog post will be Paul's ideas around organising a FatCamp hack weekend.

SafetyGearStore.co.uk

So I got talking to Neil who runs SafetyGearStore from Stoke. Paul in his own words is a reformed SEO expert who took to selling lanyards and harnesses online - and although the name suggests Safety Gear, he has extended his product range to boating cranes and equipment. Neil pivots his product range directly around the demands of the customer and again in his own words "if my customers want ass patches, then dammit I'll supply ass patches" - which is a sound strategy. We still don't know what Ass Patches are but I'm certainly not googling it.

Malinko

Both me and Martin know Andrew only from Twitter, and it was great to finally meet. He founded Malinko as a Scheduling and CRM tool to manage disparate workforces. His core userbase are contractors managing sub contractors. The interesting thing about Malinko is that they started off as a team of three devs, one dev left, and they ended up getting a salesperson instead. This simple pivot enabled the salesperson to help shape the product. Not only did the salesperson trim the product down to its core features - it also helped that he was previously a customer of Malinko and helped implement it at his old workplace. Andrew is based at Manchester Business Park and is going from strength to strength. 

We ended up spending the best part of two hours at North Tea Power having made some awesome contacts and had some really insightful conversation.

We're going to see Paul and Andrew again at the Bootstrap Business Club at MadLab on March 11th which is hosting a "Show and Tell" night.

As I meet new Manchester Startups I've decided to write a bio post on each so that you're able to read about the awesome people we meet.

If you’re a techie, designer, fellow startup, current/ potential user or if you just nosy and want to say hello we’d love to meet you at the next Twocial Social. Especially if you’re just nosy. Follow us on Twitter to stay in the loop: @TwocialApp

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Twocial Social 2 - Infographics, Demographics and smashed iPhone screens

Twocial Social 2 was last Sunday (19th) but I'm only just finding time to blog now because I am a lazy person.

Martin and myself found ourselves at our first Twocial Social where it was just the two of us. Apparently meeting at 11am on a cold Sunday morning didn't appeal to most people? But as I've mentioned before me and Martin don't have a problem spending hours chatting about Twocial. 

As per usual we were at the awesome North Tea Power and discussions started with Martin lamenting his smashed iPhone screen, as a fellow iPhone user, I have to admit I did cringe when I saw it:

Infographics

So, to Twocial. When we first spoke about Twocial we both played around with the idea of displaying the sentiment/ volume/ impact of tweets in a number of interesting ways. Obviously there are graphs and charts (used by many of our potential competitors) but we toyed around with the idea of using infographics. Infographics are an awesome and creative way to present information. Not only presenting flat information in a quirky way, but data can be overlayed in a number of really interesting methods. One that caught our eye is infographics that compare seemingly incongruous data sets.

Quick mention that Martin bought me this awesome book from NY: The World Reduced to Infographics by Worm Miller and Patrick Casey which is full of brilliant examples of how powerfully communicative infographics can be. In addition this TED talk by David McCandless (Author of Information is beautiful) is absolutely amazing and really worth a watch.

Twocial is all about brand sentiment, impact and social engagement - so why not present insightful social intelligence in the format of an infographic? 

We're excited to think about how this data would look on an infographic:

How is your brand engaging with your social audience in direct comparison with your peers and competitors?

How well (or poorly) is your product or service perceived by the twitterverse?

How many of your users are true early adopters?

What is the percieved 'Half Life' of the buzz or talk about your new product?

In addition, we could make infographics a fundamental component to our product; when a user the Twocial web app, the UI itself could take the form of an infographic - this thought is really exciting. 

Demographics

Something that is key to understanding your social audience is what demographics we can derive. With Twocial we've concluded that we can pull through:

Sentiment

Gender

Location

These three attributes alone offer a whole multitude of awesome analysis we can serve up to users and the potential application to Infographics is huge.

Getting something (MVP? MVF?) out there

Finally we discussed that we need to get something out there on our homepage. I can't 100% reveal what we're putting up because Martin is busy porting his code over from the .net stack over to Ruby (yes, that's about as technical as I get before it's obvious I have no idea what I'm talking about) but we (when I say 'we' I mean 'he' AKA Martin) are working getting something out there VERY soon so bear with us!

So, as we finished our teas we hurried out so that Martin could make his appointment at the Apple Store Genius Bar, we decided to meet up the following Saturday for Twocial Social 3 - we would love you to be there!

If you’re a techie, designer, fellow startup, current/ potential user or if you just nosy and want to say hello we’d love to meet you at the next Twocial Social. Especially if you’re just nosy. Follow us on Twitter to stay in the loop: @TwocialApp

P.s. Update: Martin has a new iPhone screen and all is well in the world again!

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Quick one, if you're a startup based here in Manchester or even if you're just interested: first off read Martin Bryant's blog post and then join the Manchester Startups Facebook Group.

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Techcelerate Event - The Northern Tech Funding Landscape

Apologies in advance for long post, got so much to say this evening!

Okay, so I've just got back home from a really insightful event hosted by Manoj. Manoj who I've mentioned before runs Techcelerate here in Manchester, organised an event this evening titled the 'Norther Technology Funding Landscape'. Check the link out for a full breakdown of the event, but essentially seven investment funds outlined their mandate in terms of technology investments.

Building a Startup Scene in Manchester

Martin Bryant, Managing Editor at The Next Web, kicked the evening off by giving his talk on building a startup scene in Manchester which is very close to our heart (blog post here) at Twocial. My thoughts are that Manchester is really getting there, but as I mentioned this evening, the UK is so obsessed with the Tech City UK hype down in London (with good reason) but this has meant that all other startup scenes in the UK have been somewhat ignored.

Next it was great to hear from each investment manager talk through how some invest seed cash, some have a minimum of £50k and for eligibility for others you must have existing revenue of over £1m. Again, I'll let you follow the link and read the details for yourself.

Startup Pitch 1 - Cab My Taxi

What was really interesting was watching two Manchester based startups pitch their ideas to a panel of two Investors to offer their critque: The first was Cab My Taxi which is an iPhone (and Android) app allowing you to book a private hire cab from your smartphone. CabmyTaxi has just spent some cash on a radio advertising campaign and has seen 1000 downloads of their app in two weeks (if I remember correctly?) which is an impressive stat. 

Startup Pitch 2 - Persian Cat Press

The second pitch came from Persian Cat Press who develop interactive storytelling on touchscreen devices such as iPads et al. Jos Carlyle gave a great pitch talking about the immersive nature of their stories which provide rich content for all senses. I couldn't help thinking that with Apple's foray into education, Persian Cat Press could really ride that wave and become a major force in that area. 

Both pitches were solid ideas but I think the pitches should have been limited to say 5 mintues? or potentially keeping it as strict as Jason Calacanis does in his 'This week in Startups' podcast (which is great - both video and audio versions).

Awesome Contacts

Finally, it was great to make some awesome contacts during the evening: Anusha Su who is a Venture Partner at StartupAngel.net - incredibly energetic and gave up sunny California for the UK! Crazy I know. We swapped details in true Minimum Viable Prodict style; neither of us had business cards so we exchanged post-it notes with our details scribbled on :) Anusha gave me some great advice on bootstrapping until investment is absolutely necessary - all on the walk to Piccadilly Train Station to ensure Anusha caught her train to Durham!

Met Asim Hussain who is a starup founder of Event Overload which serves up personalised event recommendations - Asim is a fellow Lean Startup'er based in Manchester so I'm certainly going to cover Event Overload properly in a separate post. 

I finally met Coral Grainger of Capital Relations - Coral and I have been tweeting for a while now but nice to meet in person. I also met Andy Yelland of Visi Deck who develop 3D architectural visualisation tech. Another great contact seeing as Andy has spent time in both Silicon Valley and Silicon Roundabout - and he's really open to giving honest (and brutal) advice.

All in all a great night of networking with fellow startups, I think more events such as this bringing startups together is awesome so kudos to Manoj for setting it up. Also you could always join us for our next Twocial Social usually held at North Tea Power - next one I believe will be on Sunday at around 11am? Join us for a chat!

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Twocial Social 1.5 (and why I love the Manchester tech scene)

So today was pretty awesome, I spent the afternoon with two awesome gents; Michael and Ash. Michael works at a startup in Doncaster (I’ll get to that in just a minute) and tweeted that he’s travelling through Manchester. So we ended up meeting at the awesome North Tea Power which was heaving as usual on a Saturday afternoon with our mutual friend and fellow techie Ash.

Although it was meant to be tea and coffee with friends, it did end up becoming a mini Twocial Social (hence number 1.5).

Although we do have a tonne of mutual friends, I’d like to mention that I only know Michael and Ash through attending BarCamps around the country. I first met Ash at BarCamp Blackpool and since then a number of Limited WIP MeetUps. Michael and I have been bumping into each other at BarCamps all over the show: first at BarCamp Media City, then at Blackpool and finally at BarCamp London. Oh and we also bumped into each other at The Power of One conference (on 11.11.11 geddit?). Actually it’s through BarCamp Media City where Martin and I first met. The Manchester tech scene is awesome.

Ash is an incredibly intense and intelligent chap who is always on hand to bounce ideas off. By trade he’s a ruby dev and Agile coach/ Systems Thinker and he reads like a book a day. Like I said, Michael works at TweetDig which is a startup based in Doncaster. The TweetDig product is a method by which you can better manage and control your Twitter feed – it’s like Outlook but for Tweets. It allows you to create rules and folders and by all accounts it’s pretty awesome. It’s still in private beta and even though I’ve been nagging for a while, Michael still hasn’t provided me with an invite (hint hint). And btw, register your interest for TweetDig here: http://tweetdig.com/. As Twocial uses Twitter, I really wanted to hear what Michael and Ash thought of the idea behind Twocial.

After hearing my pitch (and not tearing it to pieces) both Ash and Michael referred to the Technology Adoption Life Cycle as mentioned in the book ‘Crossing the Chasm’ by Geoffrey Moore. As Twocial is about enabling social engagement and offering social intelligence – how do we then present the social audience back to a Twocial user. As a Twocial user may be as diverse as a company launching a product to a service company, how do we segregate the social audience into useful and meaningful categories and how should the user then best engage with that group? I can’t offer any deep insights here but I can tell you that it was an eye opening conversation. Crossing the Chasm added to reading list.

As usual awesome conversation, great company, great tea and coffee and plenty of notes taken.

Discussions included:

Technology Adoption Life Cycle, Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore

 Twocial as customer engagement tool (-ve: Crowded market place, +ve: Immediate value can be offered, and if we find a niche where we can offer a solution for a specific need)

Twocial as distributed focus group (-ve: Lower demand, +ve: Unique in market)

 Create stub accounts for potential customers to use as an aid in sales pitches

Check out new Twitter feature – ‘Contributors’

Principles of Product Development Flow by Donald Reinertsen

Neuromarketing by Renvoise and Morin

…and finally Guillan Barre Syndrome which is what I had.

If you’re a techie, designer, fellow startup, current/ potential user or if you just nosy and want to say hello we’d love to meet you at the next Twocial Social. Especially if you’re just nosy. Follow us on Twitter to stay in the loop: TwocialApp

P.s. We also bumped into Tekin, who I only know from Twitter who already knows Ash. That’s also why the Manchester tech scene is awesome.

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Read up on what Manoj thought of Twocial and our first Twocial Social. Apparently I'm too tall!

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Twocial Social 1 - People turned up! Awesome!

As mentioned in my previous blog post, 'Open' for business, we're going to hold regular open Twocial Socials for all to attend. Today was the first ever Twocial Social and it was great!

We tweeted out the time and place and although we had loads of interest, many of our techie friends didn't make it because it colided with their poker night - priorities right?!!

So it was myself, Martin, fellow techie Ian and Manoj Ranaweera. Manoj is a ridiculously energetic man who runs Techcelerate and Tech Centre Manchester, he is working hard to foster an ecosystem for tech companies in the Manchester area. He is a fellow startup founder of Edocr which offers cloud hosted and indexed document storage. You can check his credentials to see why his opinion is worth listening to. The plan was to meet at our beloved North Tea Power but Manoj lured us into Tech Centre Manchester offices us with the promise of free coffee and heating (it was really freezing outside!).

That's Martin on the left, Ian in the middle and Manoj on the right.

After going through our pitch, it was great to hear what Ian and Manoj thought. 

Our initial thoughts were to cater for the SME (Small to Medium Enterprise) target user however Manoj advised against this. His thoughts were that as Twocial is initially based on Twitter, will SME's provide the volume in tweets to make the Twocial social engagement analysis worth using?

Manoj liked the sentiment analysis idea, he also liked the idea of marketeers/ customer relations folk being able to monitor the dissatisfied customers of their competitors. What he liked most was consumers being able to monitor/ rate the service of service providers. A 'compare the market' based on consumer sentiment as opposed to price. I also like this idea. Alot.

Manoj had to run for a train (and boy can he run fast!), so we carried on our conversation at Costa Coffee on Market St (only coffee shop still open).

With Ian we discussed what level of demographics we can use from Twitter, and in that case how the engine behind Twocial can be repurposed to run distributed focus groups. I am in the process of organising meetings with a focus group here in Manchester so this discussion was particularly pertinent.

We were eventually kicked out of Costa - but we were really happy that our first Twocial Social went down so well. We ended the night really excited and with our heads full of new ideas. It was also great to get some initial feedback from people whose opinion we really respect.

All in all a great success! Stay in the loop with our next Twocial Social by following us on Twitter on @TwocialApp.