My Name is Kate

One Smart Way to Keep Your Social Network Spam-free (or at least spam-low)

This blog (and most of my blogs, really) run on Typepad. Typepad has a "social networking" aspect to it - it allows people to "follow" you. In the last couple of months they ran into a massive spam follow problem seemingly as part of their free microblog service. They have now put in some functionality for Tyepapd users to take control of who they want following them which is great, if not a little late in coming.

I was thinking about how this all could be prevented in the first place and I came across this piece of functionality on Goodreads (my social network of choice for books and reading) - the Challenge Question. So simple, yet so effective.

This is what it looks like in your profile settings:

And this is how it appears when you make a friend request:

 

Now, LinkedIn does something like this when you ask to make a network connection. But it pre-populates with standard "We should connect on LinkedIn" which 97.6% of the people who send me a request don't bother to edit. So I like GoodRead's approach where they give you an example Challenge Question, but leave you to actually fill it in.

For an additional level of security (in case you are reading classified documents and then posting about it on a social network), you can also specify a one-word Challenge Answer. When you activate this option, it looks like this:

I really like how the example prompts change as this Challenge and Response is intended to be much more personal.

This kind of functionality would really help with spam reduction but would also create stronger "weak ties" that are key to maintaining online social network relationships. What would really be great is if this data were then stored and visible in your view of your friend's profile on that particular social network (so, when Ben (the example above) looks at my profile on Goodreads, he would see how I answered his challenge question). That would go a long way towards maintaining those weak ties.

I look my friends on Facebook and while I have made a half-hearted attempt to organize them into lists (conference buddy, Squidoo lensmaster, person I met at a Tweetup once who is best friends with at least 5 of my friends), it's ineffective and there are still several people who I am just not 100% sure who they are.

LinkedIn in does something very smart in that they allow you to add notes and tags to an individual's profile.

But again, it is after the fact. Prompt me for this information when I accept/make a connection request.

I don't use services like Sales Force, or any real contact management system, but I imagine that they have similar kinds of note/tag mechanisms. 

Has anyone seen other social network spam filters/meta info collecting like the above that they particularly like? Or, do you have any tips on how you organize your friends/contacts on the various services? This kind of meta content around our online social lives seems to be a cruicial component that isn't widely available yet, but should be.

From Olympic Pins to Small Business Branding - Me and Raspberry Kids

As I've mentioned, I recently started my Vancouver 2010 Olympic Pin collection. Well, sometimes exciting things happen when you blog about your weird obsessions. Sue Sinclair, Founder and Chief Executive Mom (on Twitter), of Raspberry Kids reads MNIK and sent me a note: she had some Vancouver 2010 corporate pins from Bell as well as a few others and would I like them for my collection.

Well, I'm sure I don't have to describe the frisson of delight I experienced. (Pins!)

Sue dropped the packet of pins off a day or so later. Gems!

Something else was included in the packet: a cute card (with handwritten note), a couple of discount code cards and a packet of Wild Raspberry tea. I asked Sue about it and she said it's something she includes with all orders. 

I love this kind of branding initiative from small businesses. First, it reinforces the brand consistently in an engaging way - that can be tricky when promoting a brand whose name doesn't explicitly say what it is. And it absolutely speaks to the kind of feeling that Sue is trying to evoke via Raspberry Kids: warm, comforting, personal.

And finally, it's a reminder to businesses that they can actually be human - we go into business with people, with individuals who can make or break a businesses reputation. And this is true whether you employ 10, 1000, or 10,000 people - each of them is a person who carries a direct line to the company and their reputation. Empower employees to keep those lines strong.

When I followed-up with Sue and told her I wanted to share this little example of added-value marketing, she offered to set me up with a discount code for my readers. Who doesn't love a discount code? So now you can get 15% off at Raspberry Kids if you use the code kate15 on checkout.

Olympic Fever - I Haz It

With less than 100 days to go til the Olympics officially kick off here in Vancouver and the Torch Relay finally underway, there have been a lot of Olympic-themed campaigns that have started around the Internets and beyond.

The Canadian Olympic Committee launched their "Paint the Town Red" program.  If you need ideas on how you, your organization or your town can Paint the Town Red, you can download their idea booklet (pdf). Some of my favourite suggestions (tongue only occasionally in cheek here):

• Hang strings of red Christmas lights from your porch or balcony (note to self: stock up on red lights - these will go fast at Canadian Tire, I bet)
• Have a ‘wear red to work’ day, with roving facepainters (the idea of roving facepainters scares me - yet, it's the kind of thing I would like to do)
• Bake red cookies and give them out at your community centre, senior centre or sports club
• Create a ritual every time a Canadian athlete wins a medal eg. put another Canadian flag up in the lobby (or eat another red cookie)
• Sign all correspondence in red ink (I feel like there are some weird legal ramifications to this - but if I change my email font to red, you'll know why)
• Free parking for customers in red cars (this one is pretty clever)
• Switch the company logo to red (for celebration days or opening ceremony) [the parenthesis on this were actually in the booklet - I'm trying to imagine the argument between the creatives and the brand police on this one "Oo .. have people change their logo" "OMG - you can't change the LOGO" "Well, what if they did it just for the opening ceremonies?" "Oh, ok then".]

The COC also created this facebook app - PodiumPals - where you can stick your face on different cartoon sports representations and use the pic as a profile app.

Disclosure: the COC's PR firm sent me a "Paint the Town Red" paint can kit as part of the launch of this program.

And as you could expect, National Olympic Partners are also starting to launch their promotions. Petro-Canada has re-launched their iwilldreambig.ca site.  It now includes a very cool "Longest Wave in the World" - you can take a series of 5 shots with your webcam, mimicking you doing the wave, and then upload them.  The website animates them and joins your pic in a wave across Canada.  It's a neat idea.

As part of the iwilldreambig relaunch, LintBucket Media (my company) worked with Petro-Canada on a blog to promote their Canadian Athlete Family Program (CAFP).  The CAFP takes care of two family members of Canadian Olympic Athletes who are competing at the Vancouver 2010 Games.  Once they arrive in Vancouver, Petro-Canada's CAFP houses them, gives them great swag, gets them tickets to their athlete's competition, transports them to the competition and provides other support during their stay.

Finally, my own personal Olympic fever stems from my recently caught pin obsession.  Olympic pins.  This month is my birthday and Rosemary kicked off my birthday month celebration with these four pins.

Cute, huh?  (Mukmuk, with the foam finger, cracks me up every time I look at him.) And then I entered a pin contest on Twitter from Atos (an awesome "100 days to go" pin - and they are still doing the trivia if YOU want to enter) and then I entered another pin contest from Cold F/X and I read Andrea's 2010VanFan blog obsessively and have been entering her draws. Oh, AND I donated $20.10 to Molson's podium fund to get their pin. It's a sickness.  But I can't stop. This is my pin collection goal.  

So, if you have any Vancouver 2010 Olympic pins that you have kicking around that you don't really want, I know where they can find a good home :)

The Truth and Lies about Why We Buy - Martin Lindstrom's Buyology

I was sent a review copy of Martin Lindstrom's new book Buyology a month or so ago.

I haven't had a chance to read it yet - it's in my holiday reading stack -  but their press agent just sent me a link to their book trailer which is so awesomely tense, creepy and compelling that I moved the book to the top of my stack.  Check it out below :)

The music is also the background music on Martin's site. You might want to take a valium before you visit! 

Oh, Carmen got a copy of it via Mini Book Expo: Business Edition - her review is posted over on One Degree.

Is it Time to Send Your Website to Summer School?

I've heard this a lot lately: "I need more traffic.  I need more traffic.  I need more traffic. "

And I listen to the people who are saying it to me and I think, "No, you don't.  Your website and/or product and/or process sucks.  Why tell more people about that?  So they can have a craptastic experience and tell all of their friends?  Right.  Let's fix the experience first, THEN tell people."

And then I find a nice way to actually SAY that out loud to them.

I've been thinking about this ever since I attended the CMA's From Mass to Grass WOM (Word of Mouth) Conference back in June.  Pretty much every speaker said something to the effect of "Focusing on making your product superior will drive WOM tactics." or "If your product & service are great, it evokes WOM." 

Note ... my apologies to the uncredited quotes above.  The first was from someone on the Inside the Rainmaker's Studio panel and the second was from either Mike McDerment of Freshbooks or Scott Brooks of ConceptShare.

Here, think WOM = traffic.

So I think it's time we all sent our websites or products to summer school.

Have you ever been to summer school?  I went once.  The only way I could fit physics into my high school curricula was to spend 2 months in summer school.  Now sometimes, people take summer school to fit something in or get ahead.  But other times, summer school is used to reinforce something you may not have done too well in during the school year.  An intense course in getting back to basics. And that's where everyone should send their websites this summer. 

Let's get back to basics. 

What about your website drives your customers crazy? 

• Too many clicks to drill down to the info they are looking for? 
• Poor search functionality? 
• Forcing them to register just to SEE your products let alone order them? 
• Defying basic web conventions like linking your logo to your home page? 

Seth Godin has a post about this some of these - fixing low-hanging fruit using "web podiatrists", someone who can come up with a check list of 50 or so things and make recommendations on basic changes to adhere to web conventions.   Joy Boyson offers her take on some basic logical changes to make to your website, specifically in regards to online forms.

In doing a quick search for "basic website usability", I found this actual checklist from Richard Waller.  It's a great place to start.  And it leads from just doing some basic no-brainer things like "link the logo to the homepage" to doing things that enable your site to be found by and rank well in the search engines. It amazes me that regular SEO is not part of every web shop's (internal and external) basic skill set.  Mitch Joel mentions the need for paying attention to these basic skills in his recent post about Bryan Eisenberg's keynote at Search Engine Strategies Toronto.

It all started with the website, and now it seems to all end there too... and yet we are spending less and less time optimizing our pages for search, findability, usability and functionality. We're intensely focused on driving traffic and clicks and deftly terrible at understanding what is happening once they arrive and why. We have robust web analytics tools and amazing web research applications - all available either for free or fee (but readily available) - and yet bounce rates continue to suck and I'm not seeing a much better conversion on both e-commerce and non-transactional sites.

Optimizing for search doesn't have to be this crazy, painful, expensive process.  Heck - even just starting with putting "alt" tags on all your images is a good place to start.  Vijay Shinde has a list of 10 Basic SEO Tips that is very helpful - a real summer school kind of post that includes basics like what to put in your <title> tag and how to submit a sitemap.  Added bonus, Alexa Clark liveblogged Day 1 and Day 2 of SES Toronto over at One Degree - some great nuggets and links in there too.

And the textbook I would recommend for this summer school class?  Douglas Rushkoff's current book, Get Back in the Box.  He spoke at the aforementioned M2G conference and shared a few highlights from Get Back in the Box .  As you might be able to surmise, a key theme is that marketers need to get back to basics - to the core of what their product or service is all about.   It's an excellent read - incredibly thought-provoking; I found myself nodding violently in agreement and making lots of little stars in the margins.

So grab your book bag and your 10-speed and get on down to summer school.  These website fundamentals are going to do a lot for your traffic in both the short and long term.  THEN once these are addressed, we'll start to worry about how to get you up and running on Twitter.

Photo Credit: dystopos

One More Reason I (heart) Typepad

Depending on when you're reading this, you may not be seeing my sidebar.  Typepad is currently having a problem with sidebars displaying.  I went to file a help ticket and saw the following announcement on the help screen:

By having the "known issues" space, they save both me and them a lot of work.  I don't have to file a help ticket b/c they already know about it and they don't have to respond to a bunch of help tickets, diverting their resources from solving the problem. 

Well done, Typepad!  If more services took this kind of initiative, it would go a long way to addressing some common customer service problems.  Now, Typepad also has a Status Blog which is usually up-to-date with any issues.  It's actually the first place I checked before I went to the help centre.  Unfortunately, it hasn't been updated with this issue (although technically Typepad blogs are still up, just degraded).  But this kind of ongoing status ping is also super-helpful; my domain and email provider, Domain Direct, have a network and services status page, although it doesn't have a feed which would make it even more helpful.  Flickr does something similar - they post outage notices on their blog.

It's all about keeping your customers and your stakeholders informed so that they can take appropriate, informed action.  And this, of course, extends beyond software status but to larger corporate communications issues as well.

Golden Compass Daemon Chooser has a Social Component

I discovered this fun little toy from the new movie, The Golden Compass via Ingenue's SL fashion blog.  I was intrigued by it because not only is it a "personality test" widget (incredibly popular on the interweb) and a great tie-in with the book/movie, but it has a social component as well - crucial, in my mind, to the success of these types of promotions.

How it works: you take a 20-question personality quiz to get your initial daemon.  Then, you can email a link to your friends or post your interim results on your blog or MySpace page.  Then, your friends can provide feedback, through agreeing/disagreeing with 5 qualities of your daemon, on whether or not they think your daemon matches you.

So, here's mine .. the Snow Leopard.

Now, I have to warn you, when I tried to respond to the "how do you rate your friend's daemon" part, I had a little interface trouble.  The "next" button isn't appearing for me.  It should be on the bottom right where there is the tiny little whoosh of brown.  You should be able to click there to move the questionnaire along.

It will be interesting to see if enough people disagree with my daemon, if I get any notification of it changing.  Otherwise, it is supposed to become "solid" in 12 days.  So, we'll see what happens.  But to me, this is a neat way of getting friends involved in these popular personality quizes aside from just the "cool" factor.  It would be great if they were networked in some way as well.

Amazon moves to left hand navigation ...

I just went to Amazon.com and was STUNNED!

Amazon.com has shifted to the left.  This is my homepage now:

And this is the image from an "About our Redesign" page they have (which I always recommend for sites undergoing such a radical change).

Wow .. Amazon.com has been like the LAST hold-out on tabbed browsing.  I wonder how long the internal debate was about the switch.  Also, I tried the amazon.ca site - still tabbed browsing, but their "about" page indicates that they are still in testing phase - so maybe it's an occasional thing?  Or perhaps not rolled out to international sites yet.

In any case, pretty wild.

When creating your site's error message

you might as well make them painfully, adorably cute.  It takes away the pain from loosing access to the app.

The following is from when I broke Twitter just now ...

The emotional aftertaste of your brand

I have known for a while about the brilliance of Ze Frank, particularly after seeing him at TED a year or two ago.  But when switching iPods and computers, I inadvertently unsubscribed to his vidcast, The Show with Ze Frank.  But through Catherine Winters' (aka Catherine Omega) blog, I found this gem.  Brand theory, media fragmentation, the demise of reach.  What more could you ask for in a video?

FYI, Catherine makes an great point about Tommy Douglas' brand and how much more impactful his own brand might be if people knew he was Jack Bauer's grandpa.  Check it out, after the video!