Andrew Wirtanen » Social

Bonobos CEO: Don’t use Twitter for marketing

Andrew Wirtanen — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 12:41:37 +0000

Bonobos CEO Andy Dunn is someone who gets it. He understands that the value of Twitter for businesses is not to reach out to new customers, but it’s more about listening to your current customers. As Dunn says, the signal-to-noise ratio on Twitter is very low, and Twitter is more of a tool to open up a new channel of communication with your existing customers.

In other words, there aren’t a lot of people using Twitter to discover new things. Even if they were, it is hard to do because there are a lot of useless tweets and spam. Use Twitter to ask and answer questions to your customers. You will get more qualitative data than a poll on your website can provide, and you won’t get complicated answers since they have to be under 140 characters. By talking with your customers, you will establish trust, and then your customers will talk about you more to their friends and co-workers. It’s simple, but not many people understand.

Click here to view the embedded video.

[Bonobos Blog]

Illustrating reCAPTCHA Phrases

Andrew Wirtanen — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 03:23:24 +0000

The reCAPTCHA Project takes words from books that computers can’t read (via OCR) but humans (hopefully) can. For more info, see my overview of reCAPTCHA back in 2007. Well, this weekend, the folks at Something Awful and Buzzfeed are having some fun with the random phrases that are generated… here’s my contribution to the party:

Original pictures (the first one may be more amusing than my remix):
http://www.flickr.com/photos/davesag/20785424/

[via Waxy Links]

Learning from Amazon.com

Andrew Wirtanen — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 04:37:41 +0000

Jared Spool (UIE) is always fun to listen to, and his latest work of art, “Revealing Design Treasures from the Amazon” is now on Slideshare. In the presentation, Spool introduces Amazon.com as a unique place on the Internet, where strange things happen, like the reviews for Tuscan Whole Milk, 1 Gallon, 128 fl oz. Some of the main points that stuck with me were: customer reviews are only helpful if you have the customers to drive them, users hate redesigns so roll out designs slowly, and sometimes making one small change to meet user goals can have a large impact on sales (e.g. Amazon’s most helpful favorable and critical reviews).

Personally, I’m a huge fan of Amazon.com and I place orders nearly every month. I’ve loved the tab-free design ever since I first encountered it in 2007.

One of the most recent oddities on Amazon.com is the Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt, which inspired this Pocahontas parody video:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Tips from Two Tweeps

Andrew Wirtanen — Thu, 28 May 2009 01:53:13 +0000

Boston has a very strong usability community, which every year turns out in great numbers to their own annual “Mini-UPA” conference in the spring. It’s called Usability & User Experience and it actually has grown to compete with the national UPA conference.

A couple of my former peers at Bentley (@jledwell and @kaniasty) created a great presentation on Twitter called “Tips from Two Tweeps: How User Experience Pros Find Value on Twitter.” Apparently, the presentation drew a full room and sparked great conversation. The presentation mentions @uxforward, a user experience link sharing service, which I started back in December ‘08. @jledwell now does a lot of the posting for @uxforward.

[@jledwell's blog: Compete on Usability]

Explaining Twitter

Andrew Wirtanen — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 22:36:59 +0000

It’s safe to say that Twitter is now accepted as another means of communication. It fits right in with email, blogs, and social networks. The service has also gotten a lot of attention recently with news networks and celebrities (e.g. Shaq, Britney Spears–look at WeFollow.com for more). Anyway, here is a funny clip from SuperNews, which airs on Current TV (Al Gore and Joel Hyatt’s TV network):

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you really want to learn about Twitter, then try Common Craft’s Twitter in Plain English.

[SuperNews via Neatorama]

Obama’s First Weekly YouTube Address

Andrew Wirtanen — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 14:14:30 +0000

President-elect Barack Obama has started posting weekly video addresses on YouTube. As president, Obama will will deliver both the traditional weekly radio address and a weekly YouTube address. The “weekly fireside coffee talks” are a throwback to FDR, who delivered 30 evening radio addresses between 1933 and 1944 (Wikipedia: Fireside chats).

I think the weekly YouTube address will have a much larger audience than the radio address. The radio address is also available as a podcast (iTunes: The President’s Weekly Radio Address).

Here’s the first YouTube address by President-elect Barack Obama (interestingly enough, comments are closed for the video):

Click here to view the embedded video.

[via Gizmodo]

Google Reader in Plain English

Andrew Wirtanen — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 00:25:37 +0000

If you don’t use Google Reader or don’t know what it is, then you should watch this video:

Click here to view the embedded video.

This video is by the people at Common Craft, who are experts at explaining technology. One of their best and most popular videos is Twitter in Plain English. I actually think that video helped increase Twitter usage!

Facebook Crosses the Line (Again)

Andrew Wirtanen — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 19:30:01 +0000

Facebook is notorious for launching features seemingly without any user research. In 2006, Facebook launched the “News Feed”, which led to an unprecedented backlash in social networking. Ironically, two years later it seems that all Facebook users have gotten acclimated to the News Feed and now enjoy the feature. (It was actually the lack of privacy settings that originally bugged most users).

Today, while browsing my News Feed, I noticed this (image altered with sensitive info removed):

I’m pretty sure I read that Facebook was going to start doing this, but I did not think I would ever see it. Who possibly could have thought this would be a good idea?

Facebook’s “Pages” features allows users to become a fan of certain products, celebrities, etc. Somewhere in Facebook’s Terms and Conditions (I couldn’t find the clause when I looked), Facebook must have a condition that allows a user’s image and name to be used to promote a product to their friends on the site.

I am really amazed that Facebook continues to do things like this. They are pushing the limits of privacy, and are sure to see another backlash.

Top 5 Election ‘08 YouTube Videos

Andrew Wirtanen — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 13:57:45 +0000

The 2008 election is the first to harness the power of user-generated content. The Internet is causing a renewal of interest with young voters unlike any Rock the Vote movement could provide. I thought it would be interesting to compile some of my favorite pro-candidate YouTube videos.

“We Are The Ones” by Will.i.am

Click here to view the embedded video.

Will.i.am was the founding member of the Black Eyed Peas. This is his 2nd political music video that he posted to Youtube. His first video was “Yes We Can,” which currently has over 12 million combined views on Youtube, and has spawned many parodies, including “No You Can’t,” which attacks McCain.
Ron Paul: A New Hope

Click here to view the embedded video.

Ron Paul may be out of the race, but this video made a big impact with the help of Digg.com. It helped to inspire one of the first and largest political Internet movements, which resulted in breaking the single-day online fundraising record on November 5, 2007.
“Hott for Hill” by Taryn Southern

Click here to view the embedded video.

There aren’t many hit pro-Hillary videos on YouTube. This one made rounds last summer as a response/parody to the landmark “I Got a Crush on Obama” video by Obama Girl. The only other Hllary video I could find was “Hillary4U&Me,” which I refuse to link here.
“I Believe Barack Obama” by Jonah Matranga

Click here to view the embedded video.

Yes, another Obama video. There are a lot of them, but this one comes from one of my favorite singer/songwriters of all time: Jonah Matranga. Jonah is one of the leaders in the record label-free music movement, and beat Radiohead to implementing the “pay what you can afford” concept.
“Raining McCain” by The McCain Girls

Click here to view the embedded video.

I really don’t know.

Most Popular Social Networks Around the World

Andrew Wirtanen — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 14:48:57 +0000

This (French) visualization shows what the most popular social networks are around the world. I’ve always found it interesting how some regions will rally around a certain social network, even though others have clear benefits.

(larger image on Le Monde.fr; via Neatorama via Geek Like Me)