Welcome to infographic mania! Now, where are the standards?

While the “rush thru everything” part of me does appreciate some “chart porn” (as Dan Frommer puts it), the lack of reporting standards by which many infographic creators are operating is beginning to be a major turn off.

Sure, infographics are shiny and alluring, but the data inaccuracy (or perceived inaccuracy due to missing information such as a date, data sources, etc.) diminishes their value. This is a real shame because infographics are an incredibly valuable format for delivering a high volume of data in a highly comprehensible manner.

As kids, we all learned basic reporting standards while being graded on the creation of countless book reports. Why should infographics be immune to basic reporting standards? Infographics creators go through the effort to create something that looks amazing, why not take a few minutes to validate it’s credibility with the following basic elements?

• Date (freshness matters)
• Author(s)
• Data Source(s)
• Advertisement disclaimer
• Content license / distribution terms

This isn’t about hampering creativity. The graphics designers I know are real sticklers about leveraging standards. It more about reliability. These aren’t just pretty, traffic driving pictures — they have the potential to influence critical business decisions.

[Poll] Does the new Twitter retweet feature annoy the crap out of you?

Additional thoughts: “Integrating Community Into Corporate Websites”

Matt Zellmer has an excellent post titled “Integrating Community Into Corporate Websites“, where he summarizes a comparison study that he ran regarding six high tech sites (Cisco, Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, and SAP).

Some thoughts:

I agree that one size does not fit all, but whatever the corporate community/social media user experience/information architecture is, it should be somewhat cohesive & at a minimum, there should be some cross-pollination in place by making the all inclusive community bits findable & easy to navigate between each other & the main company site.

With regards to community sites outside of the main site (or company domain), another example of when this is OK is for open source communities. But there again, there should be some cross-pollination (at least links from the main site to the external open source site(s)).

Two additional principles I would suggest are:

1. A single set of guidelines/policy (including community moderation) for all community tools that are officially sanctioned/branded by the company. Again, open source communities that reside outside of the main site are an exception.
2. A single search engine. When people are seeking community contributions centered around a particular topic/product, they should be able to do this via a single search query.

And what about globalization, localization & internationalization? That’s one area that companies seem to have forgotten about in their over-all social media/community strategies.

Buying Corporate Gripe Site Domains: Effective PR Defense Mechanism?

RaganTV.com has an interesting interview posted with Paula Berg, media manager at Southwest Airlines. She explains how Southwest buys domain names that may be used by hostile consumers to denounce the company or it’s execs — these kinds of sites are also known as “gripe sites”. Per Paula, “[For] $10 or $15, what’s the harm? It can prevent some PR crisis down the line.”

My take is this can become a slippery & expensive slope. The best way to quiet an angry mob is to listen, then promptly & efficiently react — I’ve found that more often than not, they’re right. Having a company engage in the discussion on the gripe site might actually be perceived as more credible since the conversation is happening on community turf. At best, buying gripe site domains might make the conversation slightly less findable.

Thoughts?

Does your corporate social site inadvertently lock out compelling contributors?

To me, the primary objective of any company blog site should be to tear down all communication roadblocks (firewalls, difficult tools, overly rigid policy, etc.) that stand between employees & the world to enable free flowing human to human conversation. The Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta has done that with their blog site.

The content, in multiple formats (video, blog posts, etc.), as told through compelling stories by their employees is heartfelt — like this (they need a video embed feature).

Though the underlying recruiting objective of the site is obvious, the site’s design & functionality is super comprehensive & efficient to use — which is paramount considering the focus of the employees/medical practitioners is likely not blogging, editing HTML, etc.

When decision makers choose a new media platform for their employees, the employees’ skill set, work style & time available for blogging, is often not considered because the platform decision makers (usually in IT) are primarily focused on the technology — which can be just as important as considering the users capabilities to successfully utilize the tool. The level of effort involved with supporting less tech savvy, or time available individuals (CXOs, practitioners — as in doctors & nurses in this example, etc.) should not be under-estimated. Trust me on this one.

If the tool is too cumbersome & time-consuming to use (especially by the employees with the most compelling stories to tell), then what’s the point? And believe me, you want their contributions.

My New Virtual Mom

While in couch potato mode watching mind-numbing Kardashian episodes, an interesting Kleenex commercial came on promoting their new campaign: getMommed.com.

I checked it out, took a brief quiz & found the best matched virtual mom for me is a nice lady named Magnolia. She had me at “There’s nothing that pie can’t cure, honey.” But that’s not all. Magnolia has her own Facebook fan page. I love that. I joined out of pure curiosity of seeing what Momma Magnolia will do next.

By the way, my real momma is a lot like Phyllis — extreme in-your-face mothering is her style. So, please don’t tell her about Magnolia, alright?

@kevinokeefe, Lawyer, on Companies who block Social Media

By now, you know how passionate I am about the proven goodness that companies see via the use of social networking (see the fine print here for one example). So, it’s no surprise that my stance on companies that block social sites is not one of support.

Kevin O’Keefe, my most recent favorite blogging lawyer, (but not my 1st favorite — sorry Kevin), has an excellent blog post on the topic titled “Companies and law firms blocking use of social media : Insanity is rampant“.

A few of my favorite quotes from his blog post:

“Maybe things have changed since I started practicing law almost 30 years ago. Back then law firms got their best work by word of mouth. Both lawyers and non lawyer personnel were expected to represent the law firm well in all they did (some things we were more proud of than others). We knew the more our employees came in touch with other people, the greater the opportunity people got to know them, and when the need for a lawyer arose, the people our employee’s met would think of us. Novel concept? Hardly.

Now we have one of the most effective mediums – the Internet – for time and cost effective networking and we’re telling lawyers and other legal professionals they can’t use it. Can’t use it because of fears born out of ignorance. That’s nuts.”

Have a look at the full post. Well worth the read.

Checking off the “Be a guest blogger” box

Since my 1st official blog post 5+ years ago, I’ve been a sole blogger (only blogger contributing to a blog), a soul blogger , a group blogger, a behind-the-scenes blog helper (for friends, interesting people & high profile people with a blogphobia), a blog trainer, a blog site admin, but never an invited guest blogger…until now!

Thanks to another “serendipitous connection via social networking”, as I call it, I can now sport around the badge titled “Guest Blogger”. It all started when @KylePLacy, Author of Twitter Marketing for Dummies, tweeted the following to me “I really think you should do a guest post on my blog. What do you think?” To which I responded “What if my neglected blog finds out? What did you have in mind?”.

I went with a topic that is often discussed: Corporate Social Media Policies — something Sun, specifically the Sun Blog Founders, nailed several years ago and continues to be a solid template for other companies social media policies. Have a look at the guest post “Do Tight Corporate Social Media Policies Help or Hinder?” & let me know what you think.

Some “feel good” Outside Perspective

I just received a Tweet from @kbladow that made my day. It lead me to the following Technola blog post — which means a lot coming from a non Sun person (not that kudos from Sun peeps aren’t just as sweet, but we drink from the same Kool-aid fountain ). Thank you Kate and thank you @emzee for the tweeted advice. @emzee is my web design partner at Sun.

Still think corporate participation in Social Media is optional?

Still think you can fully control your brand or inevitable conversations about your company? Statistics show otherwise — which is why encouraging and engaging in open dialog on your own front porch will help make your company and products stronger, more accurately understood and more widely known.

Via Kyle Lacy:

You may own your digital footprint, but will it be there tomorrow?

You know the drill. You register for the next shiny social networking site and click the Terms of Use “Accept” button faster than the speed of light. Most of us never read a word of the lengthy legal foo because it’s boring and it makes our eyes bleed and we’re in a hurry to lifecast our next thought before the moment is lost, or we want in before the crowd shows up and ruins the novelty.

In our haste, are we giving up ownership of bits of our digital selves or blindly banking on the fact that those bits won’t be monetised by the site owners? Or worse, making the assumption that our content won’t go poof one day without warning?

I’m definitely guilty as charged in this regard, but have made a vow to at least read enough of the legalese on the sites I currently post content to so I know the rights that matter to me most:

1. Do I own my content on this site?
2. Does the site co-own my content?
3. If they co-own my content, what can they do with it?

Most site’s terms of use agreements lean far, far over to protecting the site owners, but some totally get that it’s in their best interest to take care of their community members by granting them (co)ownership their content. Examples:

Twitter: “Twitter is allowed to “use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute” your tweets because that’s what we do. However, they are your tweets and they belong to you.”

Facebook: “You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook…” (it’s worth reading the dots on this one).

Sun Blogs*: “Under the license, you will get to use and copy your blog in its entirety, and we can keep your entire blog in place at http://blogs.sun.com.” *Side note: Note that this is a corporate blog site. Sun has always been a leader in defining sensible corporate social content guidelines, so it’s not entirely surprising that they’d progressively cover this base as well. It’s good to know your rights as an employee who contributes social media content to company sanctioned sites.

OK, so you own your content. Now what?

Ownership is just half the battle. Assuming you own a copy of your content, does any of that matter if you don’t religiously back-up a local copy? Not really. Most sites have a sensible back-up strategy, but there’s no guarantee that they’ll restore missing or damaged content and there’s definitely no guarantee that they’ll perpetually host your content so your children’s, children’s, children can cherish your immortal and compelling lifecasts.

In addition to knowing your content ownership rights, before you decide on posting content to a site, be sure to know if there’s a feature that enables exporting of your content. Alternatively, check-out services that make this process a bit more convenient, but all of the above applies to them too.

JavaOne, CommunityOne, and Sun Cloud Community Channels

Thanks to the beauty of the social web, we have tons of communication channels that are alive with JavaOne, CommunityOne & Sun Cloud conversations. Here’s a quick summary of those channels — please join the discussions:

Sun Blog Action

• JavaOne blog posts
• CommunityOne blog posts
• Sun Cloud blog posts

Microblogging Action

• All Inclusive JavaOne & CommunityOne Tweets
• JavaOne on Twitter
• CommunityOne on Twitter
• The Sun Cloud on Twitter
• Sun’s primary Twitter handle
• Sun’s Software Team on Twitter
• Java’s Mascot, Duke, on Twitter

Facebook

• JavaOne Conference Fan Page
• CommunityOne Group
• Sun Microsystems Fan Page

Videos

• Sun Microsystems on YouTube
• Sun Total Access Net (or the chicks I refer to as the Barbara Walters & Katie Couric of JavaOne)
• Dude, where’s my pass? videos submitted by Java fans around the world.

Podcasts

Sun Radio on Blog Talk Radio

Conference Tags

If you join any of these conversations & would like to tag your posts, a summarized list of tags are posted here.

Webcasts

If you can’t attend the conference, a live webcast will be made available for the CommunityOne General Session and Technical Sessions.

If you are at JavaOne, I’ll be at the community corner booth on Monday and the spinning wheel on Tuesday — drop by to say hello.

The Humans Behind the Logo

It seems that infusing the precise dose of corporate brand in social sites can make or break you. Too much, you’re screwed. Too little, you’re screwed.

By “brand” I don’t just mean a tight logo with a trendy color palette & volumes of images of happy people action shots where the consumer has to spend time interpreting how the high flying kite somehow represents a product. I mean the whole ball of wax: logo, look & feel, authentic conversation focus & tone from genuine human beings whom people in the market place get to know individually on a personal level because you build commonality with them by sharing non-corporate passions, interests, hobbies, silly pictures of you with your pets, etc. and by taking an interest in not only shoving corporate info in their direction, but by getting to know them as a person not just a potential wallet. It’s been said countless times, but people rather stand behind people they personally know, like and trust and/or are recommended by other consumers or friends.

“You think you can market to people with whom you have no relationship Listen first. Monitor what’s being said about your brand, your industry, your products. Then join the conversation and become part of the community. Then your occasional marketing messages will be accepted, or at least tolerated because you also add value to the community.”
~ Top 10 Reasons Your Company Should Not Tweet

Similar to how consumers 50+ years ago bought from the local mom and pop shops because they knew the shop owners and the small town chatter was the product review system, we’ve all become digital influencers and base our purchases on reviews we share at lightning speed — only now the “small town chatter” happens instantly and globally.

I’m not suggesting that what I call “traditional brand” (logo, look & feel, etc.) isn’t important, it is — just ask those who have been brand-jacked or have opted to hand over the keys to their brand to whomever wants to commandeer it on their behalf via the vast new media channels simply because they (the brand-jacked) chose to not join the conversation. Or, ask those who have over-branded their social net activities via a one way, stuffed-shirt social network presence that looks a lot like traditional web 1.0 content shoved into a web 2.0 pipe — it doesn’t fit.

“If 1.0 was about buying attention, 2.0 is about earning attention by creating great experiences and providing value. In a sense, advertising 2.0 turns marketers into street musicians who must hone their performance and their content. They have to be so good and so relevant that random passers-by will choose to stop and experience the content. The digital manifestation of this is strategies that aim not to drive traffic to your site, but rather, drive your site to the traffic.”
~By Jeremy Lockhorn, ClickZ

What I am suggesting is there are interesting brand influencers who don’t reside in your brand/marketing organization(s), or company for that matter, at all — individual humans engaging in the new media arena sharing their knowledge and experiences. Market place conversations about your company and products are happening right now with or without you — good or bad. You, the human(s) behind the logo, best be sensibly participating in both.

For those already engaged in the new media area, the above is old news. For those new to this space who may be wondering how to join the conversation, have a look at how other companies are participating and decide what best fits your company’s style & focus. Here are a couple to get you started:

Extending the Customer Experience

View more presentations from Brian Kalma.

Girl Geek Dinner Presentation

View more presentations from Linda Skrocki.

Corporate Community Participation

Via a Girl Geek dinner connection, I had an engaging conversation about corporate use of community sites this morning with the CEO of InsideGOOD — a very cool ratings site for nonprofit organizations. Following are a few resources that came up during the conversation that may help her drive awareness, site build out & participation. I figured these may be of interest to others in the community and small to medium business spaces, so I’m posting them here as well.

Sun’s Guidelines on Public Discourse: Brief, conversational read that offers Sun employees sensible advice when participating in social sites

Sun Forums Moderator Program: Guidelines and summary about our volunteer community moderators program. The value add has help drive a remarkable improvement in setting a positive tone on the Sun Forums.

Why Your Brand Needs a Managed Community: “The survey included results from over 112,000 people – or about 11% of the total 1 million people represented in the population of the 22 communities surveyed. Social marketing programs achieved nearly 5x the ROI of direct marketing programs and 30x the ROI of traditional media advertising programs.” Holy cow!

Sun’s Startup Essentials Program: “…designed to help startups get their business off the ground FAST with the right IT infrastructure at the LOWEST COST possible.”

Sun’s Small to Medium Business Program: Useful SMB information sharing, cost-effective solutions, success stories, SMB offers, etc.

Via Barton’s blog, Scott Monty on a couple interesting new media initiatives at Ford (I love the Ford Fiesta initiative — 100 digital influencers in 100 Ford Fiestas providing unfiltered public digital perspectives):

Colorado Front Range Girl Geeks Dinner This Thursday

If you are a woman in tech in the Denver metro area, please join @DeirdreS and me as we co-host a Girl Geek Dinner at the Sun Microsystems campus in Broomfield. Here are the deets:

Thursday, March 5, 2009
6:00pm – 9:00pm
Sun Microsystems Broomfield Campus
Sun Conference center, Building 1
500 Eldorado Blvd.

Please RSVP via the Facebook page or the wiki.

We look forward to seeing you!

Art + Sports + New Media = Community Super Bowl Mood Ring

You can join the new media tool toting community & contribute your slice of the mood to the interactive, ginormous Super Bowl mood ring at: http://www.tampapublicmoodring.com/

.msnbcLinks {font-size:11px; font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; color: #999; margin-top: 5px; background: transparent; text-align: center; width: 425px;} .msnbcLinks a {text-decoration:none !important; border-bottom: 1px dotted #999 !important; font-weight:normal !important; height: 13px;} .msnbcLinks a:link, .msnbcLinks a:visited {color: #5799db !important;} .msnbcLinks a:hover, .msnbcLinks a:active {color:#CC0000 !important;}

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Cisco Launch Investigation Videos

In case you missed it, Cisco has been releasing some pretty funny pre-launch videos (the first episode has over 10k YouTube views) — nicely done guys! The only thing missing is a cameo appearance by Martin Hardee, my favorite Cisco blogger.

If you’re interested in the topic of Cisco’s coordinated launch communication efforts, be sure to check out Dianna Huff’s blog post — good stuff! I love how Cisco promoted the video series via their blog, Twitter profile, and Facebook page.

Tuesday Nov 11th 7PM Tweet-up: Broomfield, CO

@Cdash is in the hood, so if you’re in the Broomfield, Colorado area on Tues, November 11th, please swing by the following Tweet-up at 7PM (non Twittering heathens are also welcomed, but hopefully you at least blog on occasion )…

Gordon Biersch Brewery Restaurant
1 West Flatiron Circle
Broomfield, CO 80021
phone: 720-887-2991

UPDATE: We’re meeting at 7:15 @ Bloom instead (a few doors down from Gordon Biersch).

Please post a comment or tweet me if you plan to attend so we can request adequate seating.

Palo Alto Tweet-up Weds Oct 1st?

Who’s up for a tweet-up in Palo Alto on Weds, October 1st? @DiTucci, @tehduh, @smaragdis, @chrisbl99 and I will be in the hood & it would be fun to sync up with our twitter friends in the bay area.

Interested? Any suggested locations? Does 5:30-ish work for everyone?

Update: The confirmed location is Blue Chalk in Palo Alto. Hope to see you there.

CEO’s Who Tweet

In case you missed it, BusinessWeek ran a story on 18 CEO’s who use twitter. Sun’s CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, was among the 18 — in addition to a couple of my favorite twitter users, Tony Hsieh, Zappos.com CEO, and Loic Lemur, Seesmic CEO.

Jonathan’s response to how Twitter helps him run Sun:

“Communication is a key part of leadership—as CEO, I need to engage the market, inside and outside Sun, with whatever technology affords me the greatest possible reach. Through blogs, online news, social networking sites, or Twitter, the Internet has fundamentally changed how we communicate with one another. Today, we have thousands of employees participating, engaging customers and developers across the world, 24 hours a day. And whether it’s via a half-hour streaming video or a 140-character Tweet, we need to reach everyone in the forum and format they choose—not what we choose.”

There’s obviously a style difference between how the the 18 CEO’s profiled leverage Twitter — some use it to emote, others use it to inform, and yet others use it as a combination of the two+. Jeremiah Owyang asks:

“@SunCEOBlog twitter account is so unpersonal, for a company that preaches being so open, this isn’t living the brand, agree or disagree?”

Jerimiah is one of the most interesting and informational Twitter users that I follow, but I had to disagree with him on this one:

“@jowyang -1 on this one. @SunCEOBlog (not @SunCEO) simply tweets his new blog posts. His blog is his general communications channel.”

I think it would be odd and unnecessary to expect all/any fortune 500 CEOs to maintain multiple social media profiles while effectively driving the success of their companies. It’s also not necessary if they have at least one channel where they can hold open conversations and syndicate those conversations for ease of engagement — as is done by Jonathan using his blog for widely distributed conversations then having posts syndicated via Twitter.

Similar to Lee LeFever, thanks to Twitter, I use it as a combination of a chat, micro-blogging, and feed reading tool. The few feeds that are most important to me are fortunately syndicated on Twitter. So, I rarely check my full feed reader anymore.

Setting up a feed for syndication on Twitter, is super simple. Check out Twitterfeed for the details.

“Happiness as your Business Model” – Tara Hunt

Tara Hunt, AKA @missrogue on twitter, created an excellent presentation, “Happiness as Your Business Model”, on how to leverage the following “pillars of happiness” to make your websites, products, and services successful:

“1. autonomy
2. competence
3. relatedness
4. self-esteem”

She offers specific case studies of how companies like Zappos.com, Moleskin, Twitter, Ma.gnolia, & WordPress have become “agents of happiness” by infusing the pillars of happiness in their business models to make their customers/users happy.

My favorite implementation examples of the pillars are as follows (slides 124 and 134):

“5 ways to create feelings of autonomy:
1. give people tools to personalize their experiences
2. build tools that democratize previous inaccessible industries
3. offer clear and attractive choices
4. be open and transparent
5. don’t lock people in

5 ways to increase relatedness:
1. build multiple ways for customers to interact
2. have many collaborative experiences
3. create simple ways for customers to share with a friend
4. design for generosity
5. create online/offline meeting experiences”

Good stuff. Check it out.

Dapper Demo: Create a feed, widget, or alert

In these days of “syndicate and widgit-ize everything”, one might find Angad’s cool & comprehensive demo interesting. How to leverage dapper.NET to create a feed (by scraping content off a page), widget and alert:

Check it out: http://blogs.sun.com/angad/entry/getting_automatic_updates_of_the

See also: Demo on the dapper.net page

Today’s Twitter and Scoble Interview

Good “clear the air” interview between Scoble and Twitter today about the Twitter stability issues and how they are in small part related to power users who follow and are followed by a lot of users.

In addition to making it clear that there is a big difference between power use vs illegitimate use of the site and the sum of the impact of both, I appreciate Twitter’s transparency about the site’s stability issues. Basically, they have a lot of power advisers and the solution isn’t necessarily something that throwing money at any one thing will solve — it sounds like the primary wellness necessity is time and effort to work on laying the new foundation concurrent to maintaining the site and applying stop gaps in the meantime.

The overall user frustration is the duration of the stability issues. All I can say is, having been on projects where stability issues seem to linger on and on, there’s almost always a small team of committed, exhausted people working their you-know-what’s off who are far more disturbed by the issues than anyone else. Tho’, I can’t speak to the level of actual commitment going on behind the scenes at Twitter, of course, but let’s hope that it’s maximized. Time is their worst enemy at this point.

I still would rather work on a project in the hot seat than to work on something nobody cares about. Sending Twitter some get well soon vibes…

“User-Generated Holiday” wiki style

Via Chris Saul, here’s a brilliant use of a personal wiki — an EMT plans to spend his two week holiday touring the UK and has set up a wiki for anyone to propose places he should visit.

I suspect the volume of suggestions couldn’t possibly fit into a two week holiday, but the beauty is other folks planning a UK vacation will likely benefit from the knowledge sharing.

Sun Feeds on Twitter

The following Sun Twitter profiles are now live. They aren’t human tweeters, but Twitter-ized feeds for folks who leverage their Twitter accounts to also read their favorite feeds.

@SunCEOBlog: A feed of Jonathan Schwartz’s blog.

@SunIRNews: A feed of Sun Investor Relations news.

@SunNews: A feed of Sun news.

Other Sun Twitter accounts:

@SunMicrosystems: I think the primary purpose for this one is still being sorted out.

@SunBlogs: This one has been around for a while. It provides a feed of Sun Employee blog posts.

@JavaOne2008: Human tweeted tips, news, and where to go/what to see at JavaOne this year.

@JavaDuke: Human tweeted information on all things Java.

And of course, there are tons of individual Sun Employee Twitterers — check out the directory. If you’re a Sun Employee, please add yourself to the directory if you’d like.