In Field of Dreams, Ray Liotta says “If you build it, he will come.” He’s talking about Shoeless Joe Jackson.  People often misquote it as “If you build it, they will come.” I’m one of those people and I’m here to use that analogy to make my point which is this: You can build the coolest, hottest, social-est community on the worldwideweb and it’s going to take a hell of a lot more than launching the damn thing to get people to congregate.

Three Must Haves When Building an Online Community

Promotion

People need to be able to find the thing. Organic search is your friend, but it is also a lot like a Miracle Gro. You will see the benefits, but that tomato you planted today is not going to bare fruit tomorrow. With a little bit of audience analysis, you can target the sites they prefer and put up some banner ads that will assist your paid search.

Seeding

Get some creative people to seed content for you. If you are Staples and you are putting together a new site, it’s a no-brainer to talk to the people who live your brand every day. I would love to see Staples partner with Lifehacker and have them show people their vision for the Speakeasy. I could see Lifehacker with a budget from Staples and a bunch of creative things to do with their products that make life easier. The Speakeasy needs video content, but I do not want to pick on Staples (in this post).

Training

Video is the ultimate new training tool. Throw together a montage of someone using the site. Show the features and be sure to use an inspirational example. Software tools are doing this really effectively right now. In fact, some of them are doing it in lieu of doing anything else.

TRiiPLES from Jeffrey Hau on Vimeo.

Today’s post is by guest blogger Jaye Schneider. Jaye is a freelance quality assurance and hi-tech market research professional who owns a consulting shop called QA Ready. If you are a business owner or agency in need of quality assurance strategy and execution, contact Jaye at jaye.schneider {at} qaready.com.

Recently, I found myself a little bit envious of the 20-something set. Not because of their youth, or their ability to be just starting out with their lives, but because for the majority of their lives they have been connected to all of their friends via the Internet. Thinking back on my days at school, camp and college and all the people that I lost touch with before the Internet makes me a bit sad for the connection that I missed.  Browsing some Generation Y’s Facebook and MySpace pages, I realize that they have not lost touch with people, they have them all in their networks and can re-connect at any time.

However, as I joined into this new world of people networking, I realized that when someone does not care for you in this spectrum, there are many ways for them to show it. Prior to these friendship sites, losing touch could become a passive act; not returning e-mails or phone calls.  A person could fall out of contact with a friend or acquaintance and never know if it was lack of time, disinterest, or true dislike that caused the connection to be broken.  The Internet friendship sites take the guesswork out of losing touch; if someone wants you to know who they are and what they are doing, you are their friend, otherwise, you are not.

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Microsoft Surface may not be about immediate return on investment, unless of course you are Harrah’s, but I think it could give companies who are willing to take the leap into the 21st century a competitive advantage. In my mind Surface can bring 3 things to user experience:

• Efficiency.
• Uniformity.
• Innovation.

Efficiency

Think about the things that drive satisfaction. In a retail situation, you just want the transaction to be correct and expedient.

Uniformity

People don’t like McDonald’s for the food (do they?), they like it because they know that no matter which McDonald’s they go to, wherever the hell they are, they are going to get the exact same thing. That said, they do not have apple pies in China, they have pineapple pies! Brilliant! Surface has the power to bring that uniformity.
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Since Microsoft Surface was introduced in May 2007, I have been excited about the possibilities.  While the coffee table model is cool in a retro-pac-man-in-a-pizza-joint way,  I immediately envisioned form factors from walls to phones to smart cards that can fit in your pocket.

Imagine the walls of your house in Surface. You would have total control of the style of the room from the wall colors, to the artwork. There would be no need to have a television, it could exist whenever you wanted it to and then disappear as artwork, solid colors or maybe even an aquarium.

The placement of your TV would be variable. If you wanted the kids to be able to watch a small “television” in their beanbag chairs, you could drag a small TV down near the floor where they could watch. You could also drag the TV around the wall and modify the size, the shape and even segment into multiple TVs to monitor other channels. Imagine that during sporting events! Who needs picture in a picture?

In the office you could have relaxing scenery that transforms into a conference call command center, complete with charts, stats and live avatars of participants. Want your office to look like a library or a beach? Surface!

One of Surface’s powers is its ability to interact with objects and devices. The examples we see are the camera being set down on the coffee table version and the pictures spilling out. People can then put their Zunes on the table and drag photos onto the Zune. That’s pretty cool, right? It’s true social computing because the Surface does not limit the number of active interfaces, meaning I can drag photos to my Zune while you do the same, at the same time, on the same Surface.

Anyone who knows me knows that I am big on process innovation. Technology is a big enabler for me, however I try hard not to force technology into a situation just because I think it is cool. That said, if we do not start innovating with Surface, we are not going to see its benefit anywhere.

The general sentiment of the blog-o-social web is that the Seinfeld ads were terrible. They produced a sort of anti-buzz throughout that resonated on blogs, twitter, seesmic and vimeo.

In other words, everything went exactly as planned.

Microsoft knew that one of two things would happen. People would love the approach and they would begin a long series of Bill & Jerry ads; or people would think they are terrible and people would begin a wave of criticism and disdain for the campaign, not the product.  In the process, they would tell Microsoft exactly what they really wanted the brand to be and Microsoft would react… swiftly.

The ads were released in early September. This chart shows a spike in Microsoft, Seinfeld and PC related buzz on twitter. Granted, the buzz was generally negative, but if the ads had been funny, people arguably would not have reacted so passionately.

This buzz is consistent across social media properties:

• Microsoft needed to brand themselves for the everyman.
• They needed to remind people that they are crushing Apple
• They needed to explicitly state that it’s OK to do what everyone else is doing
• and that the lion’s share of computing is running on PCs

Loren Feldman of 1938media nailed it.

Coincidence? If you believe that any PR is good PR, then Microsoft got their wish with the Seinfeld ads. They also got a load of free consulting from bloggers, nanobloggers and the media. Shortly after everyone told Microsoft what they wanted, they got it. Seinfeld and the Bill & Jerry campaign were “canned” and “I’m a PC” was born.

Ha ha suckers! Pure Genius. Oh and kudos to Wired for almost realizing that it was all part of the plan.

It all started a month ago when @melkirk tweeted:

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Dear Apple:

I am writing to express my disappointment in the Apple 3G White 16GB iPhone. I have found areas of the iPhone to be inferior to my previous smart phone, the Treo 650p. As most would agree, Apple is a visionary organization known for pushing the limits of user experience and customer satisfaction. Therefore, I did not expect that things like battery life and phone reliability would give me fits when I made my “investment” in your technology.

iPhone 3G Battery Life Sucks

So let me just come right out and say, without mincing words, that the battery life of my iPhone 3G is horrible. I get all of these great phone features like: email, youtube, applications and web surfing and Apple’s marketing encourages me (in every marketing campaign) to use them, and then find that my battery needs a boost around 2PM every day.

I even believed some of the Apple zealot propoganda out there. See the third comment on that thread. It basically “reminds us” that lithium batteries need to drain totally, then have several 12 hour charging cycles before we judge them. I did this. I made sure that my battery was totally drained, not just mostly dead.

I have 2 problems.

• Apple obviously knew that the battery life was going to be a problem or they would not have put out this comprehensive guide to becoming an iPhone battery ninja. It’s practically a course syllabus.
• The phone is sealed so that I cannot swap the battery for a replacement mid-day even if I want to

Let’s take an in depth look at the suggestions for improving battery life.

• Minimize use of location services: OK done!
• Fetch New Data Less Frequently: Oh, ok. I guess I can get my mail less frequently.
• Turn off push mail: How infrequent are we talking now? Every hour is a long time to wait
• Auto-check fewer email accounts. Is 3 too many? Gmail, Yahoo and Corporate email are all pretty important. I guess I could scale back.
• Minimize use of 3rd party applications. But, I thought you wanted me to get cool stuff that differentiates my phone from every other phone. So I can have it, but I just shouldn’t use it that often? What if I meet a Sith Lord and need to battle with my Phone Saber? What if I don’t recognize a whole block of songs and need a whole lotta Shazam? Seems unfair that I should be encourages with 16GB of space and not be able to use the apps when I want to.
• Turn off Wi-Fi. I thought that WiFi was supposed to help battery life. Oh, I see it does! “If you rarely use Wi-Fi, you can turn it off to save power. Go to Settings > Wi-Fi and set Wi-Fi to Off. Note that if you frequently use your iPhone to browse the web, battery life may be improved by using Wi-Fi instead of cellular data networks.” Man, that sure is confusing. I hope there is a one-click method for picking which configuration I am using. I move around a lot during the day.
• Turn off Bluetooth: I don’t use it. It’s off.
• Use Airplane mode in low coverage areas. AT&T has low coverage areas? GASP! It’s the “largest wireless operator in the country”.
• Adjust Brightness. All the time?
• Turn off EQ. Reduction in sound quality! AWESOME
• Turn off 3G. Great idea. Turtle phone.

Would it have been that hard to expose the battery and let us buy another battery/charger so that we could run all day?

Sincerely,

the Michael Schneider

Readers: what thoughts would you add?

re: @chrisbrogan’s tweet:
chrisbrogan Is Twitter an intern-level responsibility for a business? http://tinyurl.com/5u75pe . Look@comments

Like anything with Twitter, the more transparent you are, the better. It depends on the social media related goals of the company. I see pros and cons to this dip-your-toe-in-before-jumping-in strategy.

If the intern is twizzlin’ to get a sense for web related buzz, to make announcements about upcoming objects-of-interest, or take feedback with an “I’ll check and get back to you” sort of flare versus being expected to be the online voice of the organization, then I think it is excellent. The intern could be twitter triage! It would be difficult to expect an intern to be able to represent the company. That’s a lot of pressure for someone who may not know the company very well.  That said, if Claris Networks has not made a “we’re on twitter” announcement to their customers, they might find that they have a limited, manageable following/stream at first that they can use as a microcosm for what they actually want.

Businesses should expect that they are going to achieve limited benefits vs. putting an executive or even a full-time community manager online. And I’m sure they do. Businesspeople are smart. They understand the value of their resources and tend to (at least it is their best intention to) allocate their sparse resources carefully. We don’t all have AT ATs, Tie Fighters, Battle Cruisers and Death Stars at our disposal!

Looking hypothetically, I can picture the decision makers of Claris Networks in a room talking about social media and its impact.  I can picture both evangelism and nay-saying. I could picture them coming to the conclusion that they should be doing something and that either they will use an intern to get learnings about the benefits or  use them until they can hire a community manager (anyone checked their site for this exciting potential career opportunity?)

If you look at Claris Networks’ twitter stream, it is pretty sparse on the “social” and heavier on the announcements. This article will certainly help them shape their strategy and perhaps help them engage in a more warm and transparent way. I’m a new follower and I’m excited to see how their twitter and social media presence evolves. 加油 Go Claris Networks! 加油 Good to see an increasing number of people like Brooks Brown out there who get it!

I figure that Google must be close to having some technology that can actually distinguish the voices in a film or video from the music track. I would guess they can use their text-to-speech capabilities to listen to video content and save either the entire contents or a set of keywords as determined by a secret-sauce-like formula.

I know that Google understands the importance of video, after all they bought youtube. They also have at least one text-to-speech experiment in Goog-411 (that we know of) and they have the resources of Emperor Palpatine. If Amazon can scan the lion’s share of their books, couldn’t Google “watch” and digitally imprint all of youtube’s videos? They have the processing power.

The trick is the isolation of the vocal tracks. Most would argue that this is impossible because when you combine all the tracks like in a .wav file, the track information is left behind, but there are people who claim that they can get (most of) the music track to go away.; If anyone can do it Google can, right? And if they can do that, they can implement speech recognition technology and output the results to good ol’ XML.
What do you think? Could they be close? Are they working on it?

Americans enjoy statistics, action and scoring in their sports. I think that Americans are not into soccer because they try to compare it to their own version of Football. Soccer is a thinking man’s game. It can be slow to develop, but the developments in the game are often as important, interesting and exciting as the actual attacking and scoring. Americans are thinkers so let me give you 4 great reasons to watch the English Premier League this season.

Big International Personalities

Soccer has huge personalities, all of them more famous Internationally than Brett Favre and Tom Brady combined.

• Kaka is a Brazilian midfielder who last year won an award called the Golden Ball, which means he was last year’s MVP of the WORLD. He plays for AC Milan in the Italian Serie A league. He walks on the straight and narrow, is a philanthropist and a devout Christian.
• Ronaldinho is a Brazilian midfielder who is one of the most creative players ever. He can do things with the ball that most people could not even conceive of let alone do. He play for Spanish giant Barcelona.
• Christiano Ronaldo is probably the best player in the game today. He plays for the New York Yankees of Soccer, Manchester United.

Not to mention Messi, Beckham, Fabregas, Robinho, Ronaldo, Sneijder, Ibrahimovic, Drogba, Lampard, Van Nistulrooy, Rooney, Van Der Saar etc etc etc

There is more at stake than just the League

Your favorite team’s league is only part of a season. There are other tournaments throughout the year that your team may be able to participate in. Imagine two to four March Madnesses at the professional level every season. Here are a couple:
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