Twit or Fit?

Remember hotornot.com? Apparently it was sold for $20 million not too long ago. Now hot on its heels is twitorfit.com!

The site uses your existing profile picture on twitter (you know, the tiny one people can’t see too well) and asks people to rate you from 1 (twit) to 10 (fit). It’s interesting to see this format still, potentially, has legs and as twitter becomes more mainstream and grows in popularity I guess it could join the ranks of other twitter add-on sites.

For the purposes of research, I’ve signed up so if you come across me – go easy on the 1s eh! twitorfit.com/boringwill!

2009 Social Media Predictions

Peter Kim today has produced a report with commentary from many people in the social media space about where they think social media will go in 2009. Here are some of the interesting points from it:

• “Although it is now cheaper to launch an initiative leveraging Web 2.0 technology – it requires qualified and passionate people to make them successful.” – David Armano
• “You may not always start the year as a leader, but you can certainly finish it that way.” – Rohit Bhargava
• “Doors are going to close all over the social web. Why? Because the money didn’t come the way people thought it would.” – Chris Brogan
• “The tipping point has not only *not* been reached, but could still tilt *away* from Social Media.” – Todd Defren
• “There’s a lot of fixing that needs to be done.” – Jason Falls
• “We’re going to develop a set of better metrics to help guide, direct and validate ‘commitment’.” – Joseph Jaffe
• “These will be cumulative events and interactions that will build brand loyalty for the companies that pay attention to them.” – Scott Monty
• “The recession will force revenue results out of social technologies.” – Jeremiah Owyang
• “Companies that focus on earning love will thrive during hard times, and kick ass when good times return.” – Andy Sernovitz
• “Suddenly, being Facebook friends with your mom will seem less ridiculous than following 4,000 strangers on Twitter.” – Greg Verdino

Personally I think it will be an interesting time. The rush we saw in 2008 for companies to be on a social networking site as a ‘me too’ factor will diminish, along with their willingness to spend lots of money without thinking about what they really want to achieve first. I also think it will get more personal with brands realising that it’s not about blogging as a corporation/business but using executives and staff to act as ‘faces’, blending personality with PR.

You can  download a pdf of the report here, or read the article in full at Peter Kim’s blog here.

Capturing user feedback

Being able to discover what users think about your website is essential. The fact that you can solicit feedback across an entire website is something I find very exciting. No, really. What you do with the data is a whole other kettle of fish but it’s that ability to ask a visitor for feedback at any point of your user journey means that, in theory, you’ve lots of useful stuff to help you work on future site iterations.

For the launch of Boring Studnet and MyLongLunch, the plan is to have a horizontal feedback button either on the left or right edge of the site. It will simply read ‘Feedback’ and be visible and clickable from any page on the sites. Clicking it will pop up a little free text box, so that users can provide their thoughts/bugs/ideas throughout the entire site. Sound familiar? Totally, I see it every day on my favourite URL shortening site, bit.ly!

Having development resource means we have the ability to build our own feedback mechanism into our sites but what if you really don’t want to embark on another building mission? Personally I would say that if you can, try and build your own form as that way you capture the info you want but don’t worry if you can’t as there are a few companies out there who will handle site feedback for you at a relatively low cost. Here are a few solutions for website feedback I’ve come across.

Suggestion Box: Suggestion Box isn’t strictly about website feedback but I thought I would mention it as it’s a great way for consumers to suggest improvements to a business or the products and/or services they provide. Though at time of looking at Suggestion Box there were a number of impressive organisations listed, such as Nike, Linkedin and even Obama, it’s not limited to big organisations and anyone can create a Suggestion Box account simply and for free (using their 30-day free trial). There’s a weath of administrative tools and they provide a unique url for you to point users at so they can provide honest and anonymous feedback. Suggestion Box subscription after the free trial starts at a not-too-credit-crunch-friendly $50/month.

Crowd Source: Crowd Source is a site developed by a company called intrideas. Their feedback application appears to work by integrating a widget into your site. This method adopted by Crowd Source has its advantages, as you draw lots of attention to the feedback element and can make it immediately clear to the site visitor what sort of feedback you’re after, along with being able to put the widget on other sites, not just your own. Its disadvantages include possibly not being able to incorporate it onto every single page as there simply isn’t the space on your site, along with having to put up with the Crowd Source widget design and potentially annoy the consumer as it lacks any subtly. Crowd Source offers a free version with some neat features such as spam and profanity filtering or a plus version for about $10/month letting you customise the widget and have SSL security for admins.

User Voice: User Voice is my favourite of the three as it has all the features I like. Firstly the feedback mechanism is simply a small feedback button which sits to the left hand-side of the page, on every page of your site. Secondly User Voice has a nice way of presenting user feedback in tables and allowing you as the site owner to comment on this feedback and make all this public, so people can see you’re listening and making changes (or not making changes but at least listening to their feedback). Thirdly, fourthly and fifthly it just has the edge when it comes to design and usability when compared to the other two, so User Voice gets a big thumbs up from me. Though there is a free version for up to 10,000 contributions, after that the prices do leap to almost $300/month for the never level up, enabling 20,000 active users.

Remember that user feedback is so so very valuable and if you can’t do anything with it visitors will notice this, cease to contribute and eventually cease to visit your site! If you can do something about it, make sure you create a song and dance about this – they need to know about it!

Last.fm layoff 20% of workforce

Having got most of Acknowledgement and Boring staff onto Last.fm over the past few months, I was sad to learn earlier today that last.fm, the social network based around the music you and your friends listen to, is laying off 20% of their 90-ish strong workforce.

Last.fm was a favourite of mine as the software would just sit in the background tracking the music you listen to through media players, such as iTunes, or via the streaming service on the last.fm website. This tracking of music even had a verb: ‘scrobbling’.

After getting everyone to register and use the site religiously, we had a few weeks of fun creating an office chart and seeing how our music choices differed. The thing was, that’s where it ended. The level of engagement last.fm provides, though fun, doesn’t reward frequent users enough. Sure, it reccommends music you may never listened to before but if you’re anything like me, it’s pretty easy to exhaust these offerings and get bored of their suggestions.

It’s never nice to learn of people in the same industry as you losing their jobs, so as a mark of respect I’m going to use last.fm all day tomorrow. Even though I know it’s going to suggest Kylie, one too many times.

You know when a software project fails when…

Recently I answered a question on Linkedin which asked Finish this sentence. “I knew the software project was doomed when…”

I’d worked on a project back at AOL where the project named changed about three times in as many months so shared my quip. When I was contacted by the questioner to be told I was the top answer and made the first entry in her article on CIO.com, I was pretty pleased.

You can view mine and the 25 other answers, bound to resonate with anyone who’s worked on a software/large scale web project, here.

The late bird catches the worm?

As I mentioned before, though I’ve been working in digital for long enough to have the cheek to call myself a vetran, I only properly embraced the world of social media tools very recently.

Today marks another milestone. I’ve properly started twittering. I say properly because I have had a twitter account for quite some time, maybe 18 months, but never used the bloody thing as I couldn’t see the value. Now, I can see that if I tweet and check out other people’s tweets, I’m bound to learn lots and those who are silly enough to follow @boringwill might see how strange I really am.

It’s Just All Noise, Right?

“Blogs? Ha! What a bloody waste of time and webspace”

These are words that, in the past, I would proudly put my name to. I’ve never been convinced of the value of blogs. In fact, I’ve scoffed and spluttered an excessive amount when I hear that someone intends to embark on writing a blog -  the world could really do without more thought, opinion and comment. WordPress has i-dunno-how-many million blogs, blogger probably has a similar number; it’s just all noise! So the fact I am even typing this first post does make me feel a little bit strange. I’m a bit spooked.

I often have these turnaround moments. I think anyone who knows me well enough will be familiar with my firm stance on something, only to change my way of thinking. Indecisive? I’d rather call it, um.. progressive. So I spent a few minutes yesterday thinking about it, going through my bookmarks and checking out my RSS reader. I quckly came to the realisation that I’ve actually always avidly followed a number of blogs and RSS feeds, for example Google Blog, Springwise and I’ll admit that I do follow the Digital Spy celebrity news RSS feed with more interest than I’d like people to know. The thing about these examples is that they lack any sense of personality. So that must mean I am not a proper blog user. Phew.

I was wrong. Argh! I realised that  when I search for something, the answers would very often come from a blog. So I thought that I would start to make my contribution.

So now my stance has changed… “Blogs? Oh yes, they’re good aren’t they.. mmm yes”