Category Archives: Tools

Why I’m hooked on Google+

Mark Ragan asked on Google+: “Why do you like Google+ or dislike it? What are its greatest strengths? Weaknesses?” I wrote a longish answer, which I’d like to share here as well.

Why I keep returning to Google+

I find myself looking at and replying to the posts in my Circles at least daily. You can see my public posts Why have I added it to Twitter and RSS feeds as a principal source of information?

1) The organization of comments with the original post enables an intelligent, longer form conversation. A step above the declaratory statements that Twitter’s 140 character limit make possible.

2) The absence of the “traffic building” gimmicks that caused Facebook’s interface to become a junkyard (on the way to being he next MySpace in terms of a messy interface?)

3) Google+ Hangouts and Chat provide instant communications options – from every page.

4) Circles, of course! Think about organizing your interests in different circles the way you’d sort your clothes into different drawers by category and season. It makes it possible to focus on the conversation about the subject  you are interested in at any given time.

It still could be improved

Not every thing is perfect. Google+ is still a channel-in-the-making. The biggest disappointment so far is the Sparks feature. I can only hope that Google is going to give us more refined search controls on this feature. Once they do, it too could be great.

My public profile on Google+

If you’re interested in following what I have to say on Google+, check out my public profile.

Inside PR: Hanging Out on Google+

Inside PR 2.62 Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

It’s two weeks since Google+ launched and the Inside PR hosts, Gini Dietrich, Martin Waxman and I, have been testing it for its strengths and weaknesses. This week we  talk about our experience so far.

One of the things that has caught most people’s attention is Google Hangouts, the feature that lets Google+ users set up video conference calls with up to ten users. So we thought that we’d use this feature for our recording. Well, as you’ll hear in this episode, there’s a reason why Google+ is still in the “test” period. Not everything works the way that you’d like it to. We lose Gini part of the way through. But she rejoins us by the end. We also experienced the same problem that Shel Holtz noticed when he and Neville Hobson recorded a special episode of the FIR podcast using Google Hangouts with Camtasia studio. The video recording had several defects – frozen screens and video that lagged behind the audio. Hangouts is quite ready for this use. But we’re hoping that Google will keep improving this feature and we’ll keep testing it. Eventually, I’m sure we’ll be able to produce a video version of Inside PR to accompany the audio version.

Have you ever sat down with a long time partner and said, if we could do it over again, what would we do differently? So far, I think that Google+ is the Social Network that’s doing it over and is doing it right.

For me, Facebook started as a place that suggested we could have private conversations with friends and family. But as Facebook developed its business model, it broke the faith with us on that. Bit by bit, it pushed our information onto public feeds – and it wasn’t always up front about what it was doing and didn’t provide us with easy control over how we could control our information.

Martin has been focused on rebuilding his network on Google+. And he’s found that it feels like the early days of Twitter, before the celebrities invaded it and the network became obsessed with numbers of followers. Martin’s finding that he can connect with his real community of interest on Google+ and have much higher quality conversations than he’s experienced on the other networks.

So far, I’ve had an experience similar to Martin. I’ve found that I share the interests of most of the people who have followed me. And by using the Circles feature to sort people by topic, I can dip into different areas just as I would if I were choosing between sections of a newspaper. A great way to increase the signal to noise ratio.

Martin also finds that a strength of Google+ is the ease with which users can adjust their privacy settings – on a general basis and on a post by post basis. It’s intuitive and clear.

Gini also points out that the Circles approach is different from the asymmetrical following on Twitter and the symmetrical friending on Facebook. And this means that we’ll have to develop a different way of figuring out how to manage ourselves in a way that takes full advantage of the unique properties of Google+

So, that’s our Google+ discussion this week. It’s the biggest thing that’s happened in social media in the past couple years. We’ll continue to test it and share our experiences in future weeks.

And what about you? Are you using Google+? What do you think of it? It’s strengths? Its weaknesses?

Send us an email or an audio comment to insideprcomments@gmail.com, join the Inside PR Facebook group, leave us a comment here, message us @inside_pr on Twitter, or connect with Gini Dietrich, Joe Thornley, and Martin Waxman on Twitter.

Our theme music was created by Damon de Szegheo; Roger Dey is our announcer.

This week’s episode was produced by Kristine Simpson.

 

An A- for Google+

I’ve been using Google+ for several days. So far, I think that, by and large,  Google got it right this time.

On the Plus Side:

The combination of video Hangouts with a Friendfeed-like Stream provides a natural conversation platform in which I can easily move back and forth between posting and live video conversations. It’s unlike anything else that so far exists.

The concept of Circles provides a fresh-start to those of us who found something wanting in both the Facebook symmetrical friending and Twitter blanket-followership. Circles should take the focus away from the blatant pursuit of large numbers of followers and place it back on finding others who truly share our interests – and want to engage in conversations about them.

On the Minus Side:

Search? How do I find things? Believe it or not, Google+ lacks a proper search function. The closest it comes is a feature called Sparks, which includes a search bar that suggests “Find stuff you’re interested in…” Surprisingly, it offers only basic search. It doesn’t offered the Advanced Search functions we’d expect of Google.

A pretty darned good start.

So far, an A- for Google on the early days of Google+. And given that I’m talking about a service that’s still in its trial phase, that’s a pretty good mark.

 

Kobo: My favourite eReader app just got better

I logged onto iTunes this weekend to discover that my favourite eBook reader app just got better. Kobo introduced version 4.5 of its iPad app.

This version includes something I’ve been eager to see: proper handling of footnotes. With this feature, I can simply click on the number of an end-note to be taken directly to it. Once I read the note, I can click on its number and I’m returned to the main text. Simple. A great timesaver.

This feature adds to an already great application that allows me to:

  • Highlight passages in the text and add my own notes to them;
  • Share passages that catch my attention via both twitter and Facebook; and
  • Download books in ePub format that I can read on virtually any device – a Kobo eReader, my iPad, my Sony reader, an Android device.

Kobo’s slogan is “eReading: anytime. anyplace.” They make good on that promise. Having used iTunes for my music and now realizing that Apple’s strategy is to keep me locked into their products, I’m reluctant to go down that path with eBooks. So that pretty much rules out both iBooks and Amazon for me. I like Kobo’s commitment to openness. It’s good for competition. It’s good for the publishing industry. And it’s good for me, the reader.

Of course, nothing is perfect.

I have had one problem with the Kobo eReading app on my iPad. On three occasions over the past year, the application has frozen. The only way that I could get it to work again was to reset the iPad. Each time, I lost all of my locally stored data. That means my highlights and annotations. For someone like me who writes a lot of notes to refer back to later, that’s a big problem.

I hope that Kobo is looking at making it possible for readers to back up our notes on their server. This could have the added benefit of enabling me to download my notes to any device on which I’m reading – syncing my notes between devices. I think this should be feasible for Kobo. Already, we are able to share our notes with friends via their servers. It should be a relatively easy thing to enable us to save those notes to be download the next time we resync a second or new device.

If they’d do that, they’d make their already great app almost perfect.

Can “media visibility” be used as a surrogate for market research?

The current Canadian government has made no secret of its disdain for traditional public opinion research. They have slashed budgets for public opinion research and curtailed the number of studies being commissioned.

So, it’s not surprising that alternatives to conventional market research should be a hot topic in Canada’s capital.

The Ottawa Chapter of the Marketing Research and Intelligence Association will feed this discussion at an upcoming luncheon seminar. According to the event description:

Michael Sloboda, Director of Media Intelligence for MediaMiser, will give a presentation revolving around both social and traditional media scans, content analysis and how to combine tone, attention, and prominence to derive a metric for Media Visibility. This will apply to print, online, and broadcast media.

This concept (Media Visibility) is being used both private and public companies and departments as a surrogate for primary market research such as surveys and to corroborate other types of analysis in activities such as program evaluations and benchmarking. The presenter will review the method, tools, and present a case study.

This presentation will provide the audience with a new approach to get an understanding of public opinions on issues, programs, or brands via media scanning and content analysis.

This sounds interesting. It’s not something I’ve gotten my mind around. So I plan to attend to hear what Michael has to say.

What do you think? Is this a concept you’re familiar with? Do you subscribe to the notion that “media visibility” can be used as a surrogate for primary market research?

The way I work today

In the mid-90s, I would open Microsoft Word and Excel at the beginning of every workday, knowing that I would spend most of my day using these applications. That ended some time ago.

Today, I open the Chrome Web Browser as soon as I boot up my computer. It’s also the last thing I close before I shut down at the end of the day. So, what do I use it for? Well, the tabs that open by default at the beginning of the day describe pretty well why the browser is my mainstay tool.

I use my browser for the four major things I do every day: publishing, measurement and analysis, knowledge gathering, and community.


Publishing

I open a series of tabs for each of the blogs that I contribute to: ProPR.ca, Inside PR, Social Mediators and Corum. This helps me to focus first thing each morning on writing. And I find I am most able to write at the beginning of my day when I still can close more door and before I open any other applications that might prove a distraction – especially email. (I keep Outlook closed through most of the day, opening it only when I have a block of low energy time that I want to use for low involvement work.)

In addition, I have a tab for the Admin panel that 76design developed to enable me to curate the posts that go on the home page of the Thornley Fallis Website.

Measurement and Analysis

I look at several tabs at the beginning of each day: PostRank, Google Analytics and Feedburner. These give me a quick indication of the engagement and traffic on the various blogs I contribute to. Of these, I’m most focused on PostRank. Traffic to my sites is nice. But what I really strive for is content that engages people enough that they will want to act upon it – share it, comment or even just follow a link.

Knowledge gathering

Social media has made it possible for experts to self publish in a form that is readily available and shareable. I find that most experts I’m interested in say their piece on a blog or on Twitter. So I subscribe to their RSS feeds and Twitter streams. And so I’ll go to Google Reader and Twitter (I use both  Hootsuite in my browswer and Tweetdeck on my desktop) when I have the time to gather new knowledge and news of what’s happening in my world.

There’s one more knowledge gathering tab that I’ve kept open for the past few months – Quora, the question and answer site. I’ve answered questions and posted questions of my own. This could be a great resource if the questions and answers broaden beyond the tech roots of the early adopters. The jury’s still out. However, I go here late in the day when my writing and creative work is done and I want to be stimulated with new perspectives.

Community

We use Present.ly as our “behind the firewall” team collaboration software. I’ll keep this open throughout the day so that I can respond to requests and queries from my work teams.

I use Meetup.com as the online host for the Third Tuesday events. I’ll check this daily when we have upcoming events.

Twitter. Twitter. Twitter. My main social network, as well as a great knowledge gathering site. I’ll check into Twitter several times a day. Then sign out when I’m done. Must avoid distraction.

Yes, I open LinkedIn and Facebook at the beginning of each day. And then I mostly ignore them. Both seem designed to trap me in a mindless attention loop. Too much random noise.

Focus on one thing at a time

A final note. Even though I open several tabs at the beginning of the day, I close everything I am not using whenever I am trying to create content. I find it takes me some time to get into the flow of creation. So, I don’t want any distractions. No email. No pop up alerts. No skype. No telephone. I just try to focus on the one thing I am trying to create.

Your turn

What about you? Do you keep your browser open through the day? What tabs do I have set up to open automatically at the beginning of each day? How do you maintain your focus?

The people formerly known as Facebook Users?

As I see it, Facebook still is far short of fulfilling the promise of targeting advertisement to people for whom it is relevant.

Case in point: This ad appeared on my Facebook homepage.

Erase my criminal record? Heck, I haven’t had even a traffic ticket since 1985. I hardly need this. And it’s kind of creepy.

So, what’s really at stake here?

This isn’t just about me being annoyed by an ad and wanting to poke at Facebook.

No, the stakes are much bigger. We’ve seen other incumbents who thought they were too big to fail – MySpace, AOL, Yahoo and others.

As Facebook keeps pushing to monetize my attention, it will have to do a better job than this. If it doesn’t, I and others like me will be ready and quick to move away from it as soon as the next innovator arrives. And make no mistake, it will arrive.

So, Facebook, it’s time for you to respect me as a user. Respect my privacy. Respect my attention. Or I and others like me may become “the people formerly known as Facebook users.”

The way video is produced today

What does the picture to the right convey? Of course, it immediately shouts out video production. For years, we’ve seen cameras like this toted by professional news videographers. You see them at every news conference and at major events.

But that image of video production is becoming as outmoded as the image of the rotary telephone.

Take a look at this picture of Kevin Rose interviewing  Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey for his Foundation video blog.

Kevin Rose interview Jack Dorsey

The tradtional video camera is totally absent from this picture, replaced by a trio of DSLR cameras. Producing top quality video. At an affordable cost.

The future of video production is here today.

Browsing Facebook is now secure, but not in Canada

Once again, Canadians can only envy our neighbours in the United States as they enjoy a much-coveted feature that a service provider hasn’t enabled for us. In this case, secure browsing of Facebook.

Earlier today, Facebook posted that, “Starting today we’ll provide you with the ability to experience Facebook entirely over HTTPS.” The post was illustrated with a graphic showing the option in the Account Security settings:

So, I clicked over to my Facebook Account Security settings and what did I discover? Facebook browsing may be secure in the U.S., but not yet in Canada. Canadian Account Security settings still lack the Secure Browsing (https)  option:

The delay in offering this option to Canada is ironic given that Canada’s Privacy Commissioner more than anyone has been holding Facebook to account for its capricious approach to privacy. I would have thought that anything that provides greater security of personal information would be rolled out in Canada at the outset.

I’ve asked on Quora when secure Facebook browsing will be available in Canada. If you know this information, please post the answer on my question or as a comment on this post.

UPDATE: It’s now Friday, two days since Facebook announced secure browsing. I just checked my Account Security settings again. The Secure Browsing option still does not appear. Is it unreasonable to think that Facebook could roll out a basic security feature like this to all of its subscribers at once?

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Thanks to the Blog Herald for pointing to the Facebook post about the new secure log in. Even if I can’t have it now, I know I want it, whenever it is turned on for Canadians.

Do you know WhatTheHashtag? Tell them their domain expired

If you follow hashtags, then you may have found WhatTheHashtag to be a very useful free service.

This morning I went to do a hashtag search using the service and received this screen.

If you know the folks behind WhatTheHashTag, let them know that you love the service and encourage them not to let the service lapse. It’s a valuable tool.

UPDATE: The domain is back up. That’s a good thing because WhatTheHashTag is a valuable service. Thanks for coming back to life, @wthashtag.