We just opened early bird registration for the first annual in.Telligent Conference.
If you are currently working with Telligent Community Server or any of our other products, this conference is a must. If you are considering working with Telligent Community Server, Community Server Evolution or any of our other products, this conference is a must.
You'll get in.depth information presented by the people who envisioned it, designed it, built it and support it. You'll have an opportunity to take an even deeper dive with hands-on workshops taking place on the last day.
And on the morning of the last day, Rob Howard will take you into the future of Telligent and all of its products and services.
Oh, one more thing, there will be a big, casino night party with drinks, food and party favors in.cluded. (alright I might have just gone one in. too many, sorry, I'm an ad guy, can't help it.)
Vin Crosbie writes about 'individuated media' in his latest column on ClickZ. He's writing from the 'Global Conference of Individuated Newspaper'. They are talking about delivering printed newspapers with individualized content. I'm not so sure that is a great idea.
Although what Vin says about most of us using the Web to find or use information that is particular to us is probably true, I read the New York Times/Dallas Morning News/Wall Street Journal online to be exposed to news and information that I would not otherwise see.
The ability to provide individuals a personalized online experience is one of the great things about today's technology, but maybe its ability to show and inform us about things we would never have seen without this technology is even more important.
Jump on over and take a look at Jeremiah Owyang's post about this session at the Online Community Unconference. Being on the marketing side of this stuff, we regularly look at each other and say...are we too close to this?
I think that may be the case with this session. People who are just too close.
Too close to see that ROI is the thing. Fortunately, the smart people I work with get it. One of those smart people, Josh Ledgard was there to show them our community BI tool, Harvest.
It earned a 'Telligent, right time, right place.' comment. Sometimes logical, well-executed, common sense tools become the cool shit.
Serious props to Josh for showing off Harvest and getting his picture on Jeremiah's blog.
Francois Gossieaux, over on the Emergence Marketing blog, discusses how Lenovo customer service regained his trust and how it made him recommit to the brand.
He presents two of the immutable truths of customer relationships.
One, trust regained can mean more than initial trust. Lenovo saved this customer relationship and he just told the world about it, and will probably continue to do so, the best kind of 3rd party recommendation.
The first step to saving this customer was being engaged in the online conversations of their customers. The rest of the effort was based on timely response and genuine, transparent communications with the customer. Hmmm..timely response and genuine, transparent customer communications...you would think every company that depends on their customers for revenue would do this. (that would be every company, right?)
And, with every customer touch, you have the opportunity to build or destroy the relationship with that customer. Every company should look at their customer touches, top to bottom, and make sure they are building not destroying.
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The Telligent crew just got back from Enterprise 2.0 where we made the official announcement of our Microsoft Office SharePoint Server integration solution, Community Server Evolution.
Community Server Evolution allows the enterprise that has made an investment in MOSS to add the robust social computing functionality of CS to its current SharePoint installation. Josh Ledgard, Telligent Director of Program Management, posted an overview of the Evolution preview release on the SharePoint team blog that you can read here.
If you haven't heard already, SharePoint is gaining huge market share in the enterprise. So it is understandable that there are a whole host of vendors that are trying to tie onto that wagon. But, Telligent is one of the very few that is building this based on our long standing commitment to innovation and development on the Microsoft platform.
And if you know Telligent, you know that our product team and its leadership have continually set the standard for great product ideas and the development and delivery of those ideas as tangible, effective solutions. This means Community Server Evolution will quickly evolve and emerge as the leader in this segment.
You other guys should consider yourself duly warned.
Just read an article by Vin Crosbie over on ClickZ that writers, designers and content producers of all types should print out and stick right above their desks.
The title is Good Enough Triumps Over Perfection, Vin starts with a quote by Voltaire, "The perfect is the enemy of the good." and he makes the point that relevancy is more important than perfection. Creating relevant content and publishing it in a timely fashion is more important than making your content perfect or 'great'. If it is relevant, publish it, now.
I have been involved in the creation all types of content since the early eighties. Multi-media shows, corporate video, television shows, photography, websites, online video, blogs...and I have struggled with the desire to make that content 'perfect' each and every step of the way.
This wasn't a big problem before the Internet. That was just what we did. Tweak it, edit it, retouch it, re-edit it, on and on and on...right up to the deadline...and then I was still changing it as it went out the door.
But the Internet is immediate. If you don't get that idea or thought out there as soon as you can either someone else will or it will lose its relevancy. Relevant content trumps all. So be timely and most of all be relevant.
Online communities are connecting people with common interests from all over the world, but they are also connecting people that live in the same city, town or neighborhood. Online communities are being utilized effectively by local news organizations to connect local people to local news. Newspapers are at the same time, being marginalized and being empowered by technology. If they continue to adapt they will be just fine.
Speaking of local news organizations building and supporting online communities, I just read an interesting article about running a local online community by Michelle Ferrier the managing editor of MyTopiaCafe.com.
Michelle compares it to running a political campaign. She states four rules to live by:
- Know your base. Understand your key constituents -- their age, where they shop, how many kids they have, etc. Tailor your content and site functions to meet their daily needs for information and sharing. Don't alienate this group.
- Stay "on message." When I talk about MyTopiaCafe.com, I emphasize a few key phrases: "building community," "making strangers into friends," and others that complement our written philosophy. (Yes, we do have a written philosophy.) Our content, functions, site architecture, and design all reinforce this message.
- Wear out the shoe leather. Hit the streets with camera and notepad in hand and go where the people are. Be willing to accept speaking engagements on a wide range of local topics. Recruit others to help evangelize your site and its uses. Don't underestimate the power of a few committed believers/users... and reward them when you can.
- Create strategic alliances. Target the groups or people who can get the most benefit from the site. In our case, nonprofit organizations use our tools to promote their services and events. We provide a donation exchange called Helping Hands where people can post their wish lists for goods and volunteers. I also work with local higher education institutions as a guest lecturer to talk about media-related topics. This allows me to tap into the college community -- including students with talents in journalism, photography, and Web development.
Good stuff...
Interesting article in today's NY Times that questions whether Microsoft can maintain pre-eminence spanning two technological eras; personal computing and the current era of Internet computing.
It discusses the fact that Microsoft has been aware of the impact that a vast connected world could have on it's core business from as early as 1993. But has still struggled to adequately adjust its business model to succeed in this new technological era.
I would venture to say that there are areas of this new era that Microsoft will never dominate, search being one of the most prominent, but I would also venture to say that online search and online advertising is probably not a logical place for them to compete.
Perhaps Microsoft should forget about Yahoo and focus on continued domination of the application landscape in both the enterprise and the desktop.
We are seeing, first hand, the incredible opportunity that Microsoft has in providing Web 2.0 social computing functionality both within and without the enterprise. SharePoint sales have grown faster than any other product in the company's history. And, the Microsoft SharePoint team is doing a great job in building on this stronghold in the enterprise by allowing extension and innovation tied to SharePoint with partnerships like they have with us at Telligent and our social computing platform, Community Server.
Maybe they shouldn't worry about search and should focus on extending their application platforms as far and wide as possible. Google Search is not the problem, Google Apps is.
Well, well...so I finally got with the program. Got my little blog going on Graffiti. So, I no longer have an excuse for not blogging on a regular basis.
The cool thing about this process was how easy it was to migrate my blog content from Blogger to Graffiti. Very simple, very easy.
Blogger2BlogML is a free on-line service that allows you to save your Blogger posts and comments to a single file for archival or transfer to a different Blog publishing system.
Learn more at: http://www.blogger2blogml.info
