Free Flowing Thoughts

Chinese social media use surpasses US

And it's early...abstract for the Netpop report below, the full report available here:

Social media isn’t just taking flight in the U.S. In fact, 224 million broadband consumers in China regularly make contributions through a diverse number of social media channels – twice as many as in the U.S. Furthermore, 41 million of them are contributing content online through six or more activities (uploading photos, publishing blogs, posting ratings/reviews, etc.). These heavies are connecting with an average of 84 people in a typical week. As in the U.S., the news they choose to share can change the marketplace overnight with such scale that companies must tune in and be in a position to react quickly and decisively.

 

 

Netpop | Connect: Media Shifts to Social - China 2009 Preview

View more presentations from Netpop.

A Different Approach to the Month of the Military Child

April is the Month of the Military Child, a very active time for MCEC as you can imagine.  Our typical PR activities this time of year include reaching out to a media roster we keep in touch with to remind them of the importance of this month and activities MCEC pursues on behalf of military children.  Sometimes this resulted in nice articles, sometimes not.  But we do it anyway because we want to build awareness of the cause.

This year we did something different.  We solicited art in the form of poems, stories and drawings representing the life of the military family.  Who better to tell their story?  We posted these submissions on our blog site, YouTube channel, Facebook group, and promoted with our Twitter feed. 

Our goal during the Month of the Military Child has always been to share the joys, challenges and opportunities to support the children of our military families.  Redirecting our efforts toward social media and less focus on traditional PR is helping us accomplish our mission more effectively.

Read more of these powerful submissions here:

I’m proud to be a military child because of everything it has taught me. I’ve gone through millions of goodbyes, welcomes, tears, laughs, and smiles.  I’ve been a military child since the day I was born. It’s my first nature and a title I live by.  My father is a Colonel  in the United States Army and one can’t begin to understand the feelings I have towards that title and job my hero holds.  My father has given up everything for my family and me to live in this free land. We have crossed oceans with him supporting his every decision.  Every child knows in their heart that their loved ones would give up their world, life, and family just to know that your safety, freedom, and peace is in their hands.

Corporate Adoption of Social Media - The Creepy Factor

Marshall Kirkpatrick explores some of the creepier side of corporate involvement in social media on this post.  Admittedly there is a slightly odd feeling when you imagine marketers and other company resources scanning blogs and Twitter streams looking for mentions of their company and reaching out.  I still recall the odd feeling when I saw my surprisingly accurate 'social profile' in one of these tools the first time.

Having worked at Dell as we adopted such a program, and now implementing one for Windows Azure I am convinced this involvement is a very good thing.  Not only for the companies who learn from these interactions with their customers, but for the customers as well.  In both programs I have been able to reach out to people having issues or with questions about the product and I cannot recall a single instance where someone asked never to help them again.  

The keys to removing the potentially creepy factor:

1. Be open about representing a company or product.  In some countries there are regulations on this area.  My user name on Twitter includes @ MSFT and at times I respond from @WindowsAzure to remove any question.  My former colleagues at Dell do something similar.
2. Offer to take the conversation offline where it's reasonable.  Some topics are more appropriate handled via email or (shudder) a phone call.  Make it easy for people to get in touch with the same human who reached out online.
3. Add value by offering information or help.  Simply letting a customer know you saw them talking about your product can make people feel a little uncomfortable.  If you have nothing to add, don't feel obligated to reach out.

Monitoring Online Conversations

Improving your social media efforts starts with being able to measure.  Radian6 offers a great service for not only measuring but managing the follow-ups necessary to build community.  At a simpler level, the overview here on building an RSS dashboard is a great start.

http://webworkerdaily.com/2009/03/31/how-to-monitor-online-conversations/

An RSS-based monitoring dashboard is a great way to collect everything you’re monitoring into one place...For people new to RSS, I generally encourage them to use something like Netvibes, which has a visual layout with multiple tabs and columns where you can see several key conversations at a glance.

New Email Productivity Tool

A few years ago I took a course that made a big impact on my time management.  It's from The Effective Edge and is based on the David Allen book Getting Things Done.  One of the keys of the course was setting aside time to process incoming mail and do it/delete/delege/defer it.  The course had great hands on advice for using Tasks in Outlook to manage follow-ups. 

When I worked at Dell I thought I recieved a lot of email.  Since I moved to Microsoft I can confidently say no other organization on the planet generates more email.  It's as if every day Softies get up determined to stress test Exchange.  There are dozens of people on To: lines and multiple dozens on CC.  We have thousands of distribution lists and most people are added (often without asking) to dozens of them.  As a culture we are very inefficient at how we use email.  

So how do you process your mail when it just keeps coming?  I started using this Do Not Disturb feature which _stops mail from coming in_ while you process what is already there.  Yes I know there are other workarounds, but when I click the Do Not Disturb button I feel free!  The Prioritizer feature also looks for keywords and reporting relationships to flag the most important emails.  It is actually quite effective, so much so I stopped using other complex rules I created to filter notes based on priority.

 

Download it free here from Office Labs.

See you at the TechCrunch Cloud Computing Roundtable on Friday

Looking forward to attending the TechCrunch Cloud Computing Roundtable on Friday.  Very good panel including our own Amitabh Srivastava from Windows Azure. 

Good post from Steve Gillmor who will be running the show:

"On Friday, the dialogue will be about when, not if. When did cloud computing begin? How far are we into the cycle? Is cloud computing a baby or an old man in diapers, and are we going backwards or forwards so fast that we can’t tell the difference? Or are we and cloud computing meeting in middle age, each ready for the other?"

Can you explain your product in 140 characters?

Marketers spend a lot of time working on descriptions of their product or service.  Often these take the form of press releases, PowerPoint decks and formats that entice you to use a lot of words.

Why not try to describe your product in a Tweet?  If you cannot distill the essence of your product or service into 140 characters or less you're making it too complicated. 

John Mullinax from Microsoft does this for Windows Azure here and another from Pascal Bourque a user of the service.

Practical, but potentially unpopular, solution to the economic crisis

Great column in the most recent Fortune on how to stimulate jobs and investment over the long term.

No one in either party seems to dispute that America needs to create jobs and increase investment. I hate to be the one who says this out loud, but where do those things come from? They come from companies and the wealthy.

 

 

eWeek Predictions on Windows Azure in 2009

Clint Boulton at eWeek makes his own predictions for cloud computing in 2009, and discusses those made by others.

"Then again, the task before Microsoft is unprecedented in the era of Web-driven software. I do know that if Microsoft fails to impress the Windows developers, it will severely damage the company. Microsoft can't afford this kind of failure, so I expect Azure to wow folks and offer flexible, competitive pricing to challenge Google, Salesforce.com and Amazon Web Services."

Although I am new to Microsoft, I hear repeatedly from people who have been around a while that we are making some of the most significant investments of talent and money in many years.  There is a very high level of confidence that Windows Azure is going to deliver, and an engineering team focused on customer feedback and incorporating that feedback collected through the CTP into the new service.

Boulton also made the point:

"Microsoft's SAAS will complement its on-premise apps until customers are ready to move entirely into the cloud. When will that be. If I knew that... well, I'd be the predictions market."

The feeling inside the Azure team is that most customers, especially enterprise customers, are not going to be shutting down their own data centers and moving entirely into the cloud anytime soon.  Instead, we anticipate customers to move some data and applications into the cloud over time, but at an accelerating pace, as they become more comfortable with the idea.  Our expectation was that the technology will be ready for a massive shift into the cloud before enterprise customers wanted to do so.  But, we still might be surprised by the pace of the adoption of enterprise customers.  Even in an early CTP stage we are seeing a surprising number of inquiries from enterprise customers.  It could be the economy and budget constraints are causing enterprise IT managers to consider alternatives they not have before

Changing How I use Twitter and Facebook

Lately I've found that some of my friends on Facebook are getting a little frustrated with my constant talking about Windows Azure.  As hard as it is for me to understand, not everyone is as fascinated by this product as me. 

When I first started using Twitter and Facebook, I used Twitter mainly for personal updates and linking it to my Facebook status was an easy to way to keep everything up to date.  Now that the volume of work related Tweets has increased so signficantly my Facebook friends are getting spammed with Azure, Azure and more Azure.  So I turned off the link to have Twitter update Facebook status.  Personal updates are going to Facebook, and other stuff is going to Twitter.

What made me think about de-linking these was this great post on personal productivity tips at GigaOM. Read the whole thing here, but tip #1 made a good point.

Pick a social network for each persona, and be strict about who gets in. Maybe Facebook is for friends and LinkedIn is for business. Or maybe you have a secret identity on Facebook for your buddies or a password-protected personal blog. The web offers many wonderful tools for updating folks about your personal life, but the best ones offer you a way to keep others out. Use these filters, especially if you don’t want to offend coworkers or clients with the latest tale about your ex. Don’t rely on them not finding you. They can — and will.