9 February, 2010 | Written by Amber Naslund 3 Comments

When To Take It Private*

A comment by Jen on my post about using Twitter DMs for business asked a specific question:

How do you know when to take a conversation into more private channel, versus continuing it out in the open?

In other words, you have a disgruntled customer on Twitter. Do you respond via @ reply or DM? You’ve got a negative post on your FB fan page. Do you respond there, or try to contact that person through Facebook mail instead? When do you address an emerging issue or question directly in a blog comment versus requesting a conversation in a different medium, like a phone call?

Something important to note: if the initial comment is made publicly, I always make sure there is *some* kind of public acknowledgment, even if it’s to indicate that I’ll be contacting them through other means, or providing my contact information. It demonstrates that you’re paying attention – both to the individual and the rest of the community (who may very well be watching how you respond).

But I have a few rules of thumb I follow for situations that might require a more closed conversation, and I’ll share them below. Would love you to give us your take, too.

“Boiling Point” Comments

Never throw gasoline on a fire online. Just don’t do it. Flame wars are far too easy to fan, especially in truncated social network conversations. If a customer or prospect is really angry, inflammatory, or derogatory, it’s always best to try and acknowledge the conversation publicly so they know they’ve been heard, but take the discussion elsewhere.

It’s much easier to calmly gather details and really get to the root of an issue in a quieter, more individualized venue. Plus, it communicates that the problem is important enough to you to address directly and personally.

Specific Account Issues

If you’re dealing with an issue that requires the exchange of any identifying account information or details of your work with a client, customer, or prospect, it belongs in a private communication. It might be okay to swap email addresses more publicly (using the [at] or [dot] conventions to try and minimize the scraping potential), but anything like phone numbers or account information should be taken out of the public stream. When in doubt, better to err on the side of private.

Proprietary/Confidential Business Discussion

This is probably the most obvious. If you need to discuss confidential business information – including trade secrets or competitive advantages – take the conversation off the public stream. That may include resolving troubleshooting or technical issues, too. Likewise for financial information that’s not public, discussions of personnel or human resource issues, or anything that your boss, client, or colleague wouldn’t be really happy to find in the public domain.

Need for Additional Details or People

If your conversation is specific to your one-to-one business relationship, and if it takes more than a couple of messages back and forth to resolve, it probably belongs in another channel. Your entire Twitter audience doesn’t need (or likely want) to see you hammer out your mutual calendars for a conference call. If you’re trying to resolve a business question, interview opportunity, or a customer service inquiry, you might also need to ask more in-depth questions or loop in other people on your team. All of that is probably better suited to a more closed network of communication.

Personal Conversation or Gossip

If you’re catching up with a friend or even a client or colleague about the family vacation or the details of last night’s date, a few pings back and forth might be okay. But depending on your audience and the nature of the network you’re using, the more extensive personal conversations might be better served in a one-to-one channel like IM or email. Regarding how and what you say to and about other people and businesses? The only answer here is to use your judgment. But in all cases, remember that words are awfully hard to retract.

So what else would you add? Are there other types of discussions that you think are better suited to private channels? What’s been your experience about what works well in public, and what works better in private? I’m sure there are more than I’ve thought of. Let’s chat?

* (aside: I hate the term “offline” to say “we’ll take this into a separate conversation”. That’s only a true statement if you’re moving from an online channel to an offline one. Taking something from a meeting to another meeting, or from phone to a meeting, or from a phone call to email is NOT taking it “offline”. There I said it. Carry on.)
image by tiffa130

8 February, 2010 | Written by Amber Naslund 36 Comments

Wanna Write? Read Voraciously.

A writing habit is cultivated by two things:

Writing a lot.
Reading even more.

The more you write, the more you get to practice flexing vocabulary and voice as well as how to put your ideas into clear thoughts. The more you read, the more you capture lessons about tone, sentence structure, cadence, and idea flow. And the more you do both, the more everything you touch, see, hear, and read becomes the seed of something else to write about.

There are some great posts out there about cultivating a writing habit, like these:

These practices apply whether you’re blogging or penning a novel. Writing is an active discipline. You have to do it. Often.

But absorbing the written word in lots of different forms makes you a better writer. Period. Read blogs, articles, business books, biographies, fiction, whatever suits your fancy right now.

Not sure what to read? I piled a bunch of recommendations for books in my Twitter favorites. Scroll through them and you’ll find lots that have been tossed to me by my Twitter friends. And I keep an Evernote file called “Book List” where I capture all the titles I haven’t read, but want to, so I’m always prepared at the bookstore or the library.

Reading more helps you identify good writing AND bad writing, and how to tell the difference between the two. You’ll start learning to spot words that are smooth to read versus overly dense, the pace of delivering ideas and organizing them in a flow, length of sentences that are easy or hard to read, vocabulary that’s too high brow or not nuanced enough.

Julien Smith tells you how to read a book a week in 2010. I probably average that if not more, in addition to all the blogs I read and online articles, news, whitepapers, etc. I read a ton, and I write every day. If you hate to read, that’s going to be harder for you, but it’s important nonetheless.

If delivering content on the web in written form is something you seriously aspire to – for the sake of contribution of ideas or to make money or both – you’ d better learn what it takes to write well, and reading is an important step to doing just that.

There is no shortcut.

Are you a writer? Reader? Both? Do you agree? What are you reading right now?

image by moriza

7 February, 2010 | Written by Amber Naslund 23 Comments

Why Not To Do Business in Direct Messages

Look, I think Twitter is great. I use it all the time, and without question it brings me business, sends me great information, helps me build friendships and relationships. I’m a fan.

But there are some shortcomings to trying to do business in Twitter Direct Messages (DMs), and I think they’re important to consider. I’ve noticed a lot of folks in my stream trying to swap them out for email, and it just doesn’t work as well, at least for me. I’ll be curious to hear your take. Here’s why:

DMs can get consumed by the stream.

DMs are linear, and if you use a client of some kind (like mine, Seesmic Desktop), the ones on the bottom of the pile just get shoved off the screen. In fact, API call limitations sometimes mean that a DM might never get put into the client at all. If you choose to turn off email notifications for volume’s sake like I do, you don’t get notified of new ones, and even if you do, you have to get into your Twitter client to respond. When you’re mobile? Even worse.

In addition, they’re not threaded, which means that your DMs are interspersed with all the other ones that arrive in the same period, potentially fracturing our conversation even further. And with the volume of junk-clicking DM spam that continues to happen, your message can very easily get lost in the fray.

DMs aren’t annotated, and they don’t wait for you.

Related to the above, DMs don’t easily hang out in an inbox that’s easy to sort or search later. You can’t set up rules or filters or priorities. In order to really take advantage of them and be responsive, you need to be in front of your Twitter stream as they come in. Otherwise, they’re really easy to lose and forget. This to me is probably the most critical reason why they don’t work well for business dealings that take more than one ping to get done.

DMs are hard to share.

It’s cumbersome to forward a DM string (though some of the mobile clients like Tweetie 2 do it pretty well). You can’t add on, copy, or append other people to the string that might need to be in on the conversation at some point. DMs are definitively one to one, and while that’s great for some things, it’s not so great for others.

You can’t organize or archive DMs, or easily save the information they contain.

Most of us need some way of sorting or organizing the messages we receive in order to act on them. At the very least, it’s ideal to be able to keep or somehow store the information contained in them without taking a pile of extra steps. You can’t do that easily with a DM, and alongside the point above, if you send me your phone number in a DM, I can’t search for it or easily find it if it’s been buried from three days ago.

Some conversations just can’t be conducted effectively in 140 characters.

I’m all for concise, but it’s really hard for me to answer questions comprehensively or provide solid information through a DM. It’s equally hard for me to receive same. And if there’s lots of back and forth or discussion necessary to work something out, 140 character bursts just aren’t sufficient. It’s way too easy to misinterpret tone, abbreviations, or leave critical information out trying to cram it into a character limit.

So, what are they good for?

Direct Messages can be great as a nudge, a heads up, quick call for help, or a door to exchanging contact information like a phone number or email to move the conversation somewhere more elastic. They’re a good short burst private conversation mechanism if you know the other person is on Twitter at that given moment. They can be a good hello and get acquainted vehicle in a casual, personal way (not a crappy automated one).

But overall, email to me is a much more consistent and universally adopted form of online business communication. It’s been through its paces and has a level of functional maturity and reliability that just isn’t matched by messaging in other platforms (even Facebook or LinkedIn mail, though those are a bit better than DMs).

Not everyone uses Twitter the same way (if at all), and you can’t assume that everyone makes it work the way you do. It’s not consistent enough yet, and it doesn’t work its way into other business functions or applications very well.

The way I use it and the way it’s built, DMs aren’t an effective and robust enough form of communication to conduct meaty pieces of business. Not yet (and maybe not ever). Your mileage might vary, of course, but I’m going to keep pushing the people I work with not to rely on them as a main communication hub.

How about you? What’s been your experience, and how are DMs working for you as a communication tool? Let us hear it.

image by Pink Sherbet Photography

6 February, 2010 | Written by Amber Naslund 19 Comments

8 Apps I Use and Love

I always feel a little silly writing these posts, as I’m not remotely an early adopter or a tech authority by any stretch. But I have lots of conversations with folks who are curious about what I use and why or how, and every time I think I’ve answered the questions, someone else asks. So what the heck? If it’s helpful, here you go.

I’ll share a few of the apps I’m using lately and what I’m using them for, in hopes that you’ll find something new, or revisit something and find a new, helpful use for you. Oh and PC folks, fair warning: I’m a Mac, and some of these are specific to that OS. If PC folks will share their alternatives in the comments, you might find some gems.

Click on the application names to head over and check them out.

Evernote

Oh, how I love Evernote. It’s the online version of my Moleskine notebook (which I use more for journaling and working through ideas). I use Evernote to take meeting and conference call notes. I keep project lists for my team members in there so I know what to chat with them about during our updates. I draft blog posts there and keep fleeting post ideas as they come to me, because they’re easy to copy and paste right into the blog platform.

I use the desktop and the iPhone app, and sometimes the web version (because right now that’s the only way I can share a notebook with another person). They all sync seamlessly, and it’s free. Great app that knows what it’s for and doesn’t try to be anything else.

Things

This is my task management application. Sorry PC folks, but it’s a Mac-only thing (and I’ve yet to hear about a good alternative for PC folks…maybe someone can share some ideas in the comments). It costs $50 for the desktop app and another $10 for the iPhone app, but it’s worth it for me, because I have a big to-do list.

I love that I can tag items different ways from the main task or project buckets, and I can look at my tasks through different lenses: priority, due date, sequence, tag, project, etc. It’s flexible but really simple, and I love it more than any other task management application I’ve tried (and that’s several, including Remember The Milk and OmniFocus).

The only downside right now is that you have to have your phone and laptop on and on the same wifi network in order to sync right now, but they’re working on that as we speak, and I can’t wait.

Google Wave

I’ve found this really useful for collaboration with colleagues and project partners. The real benefit is that I don’t have to be on IM or the phone with someone at the same moment, yet it has the fluidity of that kind of conversation (vs. a more stilted and fractured email stream). I use it for discussion and conversation with small groups of people, project notes and updates, and brainstorming/knocking around ideas with folks. I’m also playing around with Waveboard, which is a desktop and iPhone Wave client that has push notifications and more.

Go read Chris Brogan’s post about how he’s using it. Mine is similar, though I can’t stand to use it for task management, and there are times when I want a more concrete doc for things. But I went through a similar adoption curve, and he said it better anyway.

If you don’t yet have an invite, either leave a comment or email me and I’ll get you one.

Picnik

Photo editing the easy way. It’s so straightforward and easy to use, and it makes editing a photo for a post so simple it’s silly. And because it’s web based, I don’t have to wait for a desktop app to load every time. Those photo editing ones can be cumbersome memory hogs. You can pull photos from your machine, or from your Flickr, Facebook, and more. The basic app is free, and you can get more and fancier features with premium account if you want.

Delicious.com

I capture so much stuff here. Case studies. Social media resources and reference. Statistics. Supporting research and articles on topics that interest me, like social media measurement or internal social networks. I use it to keep a vanity file of people kind enough to interview or write about me. It’s a great way to build a reference file for myself, and to be able to share it with tons of other people who might find it useful, too.

Spanning Sync

I’m a Mac, and I have an iPhone. The iPhone syncs with Address Book and iCal for Mac, but I don’t use those. I use Google Calendar and Gmail, which means lots of my contacts are housed in there. Spanning Sync lets the two pairs of apps talk to each other, syncing my contacts and calendar back and forth. It costs $25 for a year or $65 for a lifetime buy.

For the bonus round, I use MobileMe ($99) to sync my phone and laptop wirelessly over the air, instead of having to plug in and sync to my laptop.

Morning Coffee (Firefox Add-On)

This is so ridiculously simple, and not really an app, but really helpful for me. I start my day with most of the same tabs open in Firefox: Gmail, my Radian6 login, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Wave, Facebook. Morning Coffee remembers them and pulls them all up with a single click. Call me lazy, but it helps me remember to check all my relevant stuff at the start of the day.

1Password

Have waaaay too many passwords to remember? Yep, me too. And I suck at generating really strong, unique ones for different accounts because I don’t want to remember them all. Enter 1Password, and now I’m a much better little password student.

It keeps them all for me behind a master account, generates random ones for new accounts if I ask it to, remembers them, and fills them in with a single click. You can also have it remember your identity profiles and even purchase or e-commerce wallets and payment info if you want and are comfortable with that.

So, let’s collaborate here, shall we? What applications are YOU using that you can’t live without these days? If you’re a PC, share your alternatives to the above, or different ones entirely? Fun and productive welcome. Let’s find some new stuff to monkey with.

image by John-Morgan

5 February, 2010 | Written by Amber Naslund 17 Comments

Rules and Education Aren’t the Same

Social media needs more training teaching, not more rules.

[update: if you read the post, you'll know that I'm talking about teaching more than training. But for those not reading past the first sentence, let's clear this up.]

Guidelines are great, if they emerge from education. If they’re the arrival point through which folks can get reminders or touchpoints or advisement. They do not, however, replace or negate the need for teaching and discussion. And I see far too many folks talking about putting guidelines in place before they’ve even considered things like goals, intent, or strategy – and shared those with the people that will be impacted by them.

If you want your employees to learn social media – or anything - don’t just hand them the list of dos and don’ts. That teaches them nothing, gives them little experience or context, and doesn’t help anything stick.

If I’m the quarterback and you just hand me the rule book, I’m not going to do a very good job if I don’t understand the game itself or why I’m even playing.

The policies and guidelines you set need at least cursory investment from the people that have to follow them, otherwise at best you’ll have indifference, at worst, a mutiny.

So before you whip out the keyboard and start putting down rules, be sure you’re presenting and discussing the fundamentals, like:

Why Social Media Matters To Your Business

How is it emerging in and impacting your industry? What have your customers been telling you, specifically? What have you learned about the implications of the social web on your market, not just in the news?

What Your Goals and Assumptions Are

What are you hoping to gain from participating in social media, or at least paying attention to it? What are you projecting will happen, based on your research or strategizing? What worries you and what are the potential risks? How do these goals trickle down to the people in your organization? Do they agree with you or not, and why? What’s the plan for execution?

How It Impacts Your People

Will this create more work? Streamline processes? Change people’s roles and responsibilities? Cost more money? Less? What expectations are you setting for their involvement, either now or eventually? If they’re not participating directly, are you going to ask them to respond or act on what you learn?

How You’ll Welcome Feedback and Participation

Is social media the purview of one department? Several? If people outside direct functions have input or ideas, how can they share them and with whom? Are their opportunities for interested folks to get more involved?

Sure, you’re going to have people who are totally indifferent. Yep, you’re going to get questions and criticisms and people who want to share their opinions. Yes, it takes more time to do it this way.

And no, not everything is a democracy or decision by committee (let alone by entire company).

But social media is still new to a lot of people. There are questions and misconceptions. And if you truly want social media to be something that you can adopt as a core business strategy – not just a whizbang new shiny thing – it’s important to share at least the why and some basic how to the people involved before you start putting rules and limitations on them.

Culture matters. It’s an important piece of the social media strategy puzzle. Change can be difficult. A little immersion and education can go a long, long way toward starting your teams off on the right foot.