SocialMedia | I'm AmyO

I like Clouds

22 12 2010

OK, I like clouds. Nah, not those big ones that have been dumping lots of white stuff on us this week. But I do like the ones that prevented Punxsutawney Phil from seeing his shadow this morning – maybe once I dig out from this storm we’ll see that early spring! And I also really like the clouds that are enabling our new way of working, living, communicating. A couple months back I re-entered the workforce after a pleasant sabbatical – I had been considering opportunities in four different spaces – all places that have piqued my interest over the past few years.

I wanted to work in mobile, because we all are mobile these days, and as IDC predicts “shipments of app-capable, non-PC mobile devices will outnumber PC shipments within the next 18 months”.
OR I wanted to work in BigData. Back when I was in Sun storage I was awed by the challenge of storing data efficiently – as Eric Schmidt recently said “Every two days now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003″ and the challenges around storing, retrieving and anayzing data have increased exponentially.
OR I hoped for more work with social media. After spending most of my sabbatical designing and implementing social media strategies for non-profits, I had a taste of where the world is going from a communications perspective. Social media is turning it inside out.
BUT REALLY I wished for something interesting in the cloud world – what a fascinating paradigm shift for the compute and data worlds. It simply doesn’t make sense for so many people in the world to be managing servers and storage systems – cloud answers a basic competitive advantage question.

And then I came across an intriguing opportunity at Nokia: to run product management for Nokia’s cloud services. A cloud that stores mobile app data… A cloud that delivers analytics… A cloud that enables social networking… So, I do like clouds. Just not those bad ones outside right now. D*mn gotta go shovel again. D*mn clouds.

The black line is the top of my patio table

Front sidewalk - where can I put the snow?

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Tags: Cloud, Data, SocialMedia
Categories : Cloud, Data, Mobile, SocialMedia

Tweeting for the Newbie

23 08 2010

I’m a huge twitter fan – it’s an incredible source of information, a good discussion forum, and all-out entertaining to boot! My passion seems contagious, because recently a number of friends have asked me how to get on twitter and what to do once they’re on… So here are my seven easy steps for getting started. And once you’ve started, follow a few people like @TweetSmarter and @twitter to learn more quickly.

1. Go to twitter.com and create your account. On the ‘Account‘ screen your username will be what people see when you tweet (mine is ImAmyO). Then go to ‘Profile and fill out your bio with some interesting stuff about yourself and post a pic. No need to mess with the mobile settings or your screen design – always time later for that…

2. Follow someone. Are any of your friends on twitter? Or find someone famous that does something interesting (I follow @MarthaStuart cuz I like to know what she’s eating). Follow the news (I like the CCN Breaking News feed @ccnbrk). Follow someone in your industry, again if they’re posting cool stuff. Use ‘Find People‘ in the upper corner of your screen to look for people. Go to twubs.com and enter a word that is important to you – on twitter the word is called a hashtag cuz you can put it in your tweets as a flag so others can easily find info on a subject. Twubs will show you a bunch of tweets on the subject – you’ll see #<the word you entered> in the tweets. Follow some of the people tweeting on your topic of interest. Then go to the profile of each person you follow, by clicking on their name in your following list, go to their following list, and follow some of them! Look for people who tweet topics of interest to you, and especially people who include a lot of links to other site – that’s where twitter starts to become a good knowledge-base.

3. Tweet something. Come on. What are your reading? What have you seen? What do you know that would help others? Post a link in your tweet to something you read online. Post a link to a picture. And here’s a tip – since a tweet can only be 140 characters, you don’t want to waste them on long links. So go to bit.ly.com and enter the long link (sometimes I post links to NYT articles that are almost 100 characters) and bit.ly will give you a short link instead.

4. Retweet something. Huh? Yup, this is the essence of twitter. When someone you follow says something interesting, you can retweet it so that all your followers see it. Now don’t get too caught up in the fact that you probably don’t have too many followers yet, retweet anyways cuz on twitter retweeting is seen as the highest form of flattery…

5. …besides following someone who follows you – that’s also a twitter form of flattery. As time goes on and you tweet / retweet more, and follow more people, people will start to follow you. They’ll find you because of your bio, what you tweet, and who you follow, and who’s following you (just like you did in step 2 above). So what should you do? Follow them back. For sure, not always, but click on their twitter handle and go to their profile page. Check out their bio, and what they’ve tweeted. If it’s interesting, follow them! That’s how the network builds.

6. Be informed and entertained. You can watch your twitter feed (that’s all the incoming tweets from people you follow) on twitter.com, but I like to use a different twitter app called TweetDeck. Download it from TweetDeck.com and you’ll see that you can arrange columns with different searches. I also love the way it pops the latest tweet up in the corner of my screen; I can scan to see what’s going on and quickly decide if I want to check the tweet out further. Retweets are easier in TweetDeck too, and there are TweetDeck apps for your smartphone as well.

7. Repeat steps 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 in random order for infinity. You’ll be engaged, enlightened, and entertained. Enjoy!

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Tags: Community, SocialMedia, tweet
Categories : Community, Personal, SocialMedia, Strategy, Technology

The Old Give and Take

16 08 2010

When I was helping my daughter unpack in her new apartment in North Carolina last week, I ran across one of her psychology books called “Influence: Science and Practice”. At first my interest was piqued simply because of all the talk in social media land about influence these days, but by chapter 2 I was hooked. It’s the same topics all over twitterland and facebookhaven. But down to the brass tacks – or should I say the science of psychology – of the basics of influence.

The textbook was copyrighted in 2001, well before the emergence of social media as a marketing channel. And it explains so well the basics of influence, upon which social media marketing relies. Chapter 2 was all about reciprocation – the old give and take. Take the experiment by psychologist Dennis Regan in 1971. Two subjects in a supposed art-appreciation experiment were supposed to rate paintings. But one of the subjects was actually Regan’s assistant Joe, who had an additional role to play. In some of the cases, Joe would leave the room during a rest period and return with a Coke for himself and one for the other subject. In other cases, Joe would return with only a Coke for himself.

After all the paintings had been rating, Joe would then ask the subject to do him a favor. Joe was selling raffle tickets and would get a $50 prize if he sold the most tickets. And across the board the subjects who received a Coke from Joe bought twice as many raffle tickets as those who hadn’t received a favor from Joe. It didn’t matter if they liked Joe or not; if they felt they owed him a favor, they bought twice as many tickets.

Social media marketing is all about reciprocity. Give away content on your site that will help others. Retweet interesting information. ‘Like’ good products and services. Which creates a cycle that may help you.

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Tags: marketing, SocialMedia, Technology
Categories : Personal, SocialMedia

The Influencer Project

21 07 2010

60 speakers in 60 minutes? Yup, about a week ago I attended the shortest marketing conference ever – 60 speakers in 60 minutes discussing how to increase your digital influence. The Influencer Project, presented by ThoughtLead, featured key insights from people who spend lots of time using and thinking about social media. I took a few minutes to write down keywords these influencers used over and over during the conference. I attached a not-too-scientific weighting to each word, based upon number of times used directly and in context. With a little help from wordle, you can see how content, relationships and passion pop out. Kinda important for success in many aspects of life, even your digital influence. Interesting conference… Kinda like speed-dating for marketeers I highly recommend a listen in here – it’s an hour well spent.

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Categories : Community, SocialMedia, Technology

Time and Space

12 07 2010

When I missed my sister’s phone call, she yelled at me on facebook “ur 2 busy blogging, twittering, fbing…2 p/u the old fashioned phone…” Truth be told, I often prefer online forums over voice conversations: the asynchronicity, the one2many-ness and many2one-ness, the visuals, the links, the networks. A community with subcultures that affect how we interact. Subcultures created by time and space.

Consider differences in the state of technology at the time of adoption. My daughters don’t naturally use the ‘comment’ and ‘like’ features on Facebook because those features didn’t exist at the time they started on FB years ago. Matter of fact, the news feed didn’t even exist. It wasn’t until FB opened up outside schools that those features were added. Go to the wall of 19-22 year old these days and you’ll see one side of a conversation – the other side is on someone else’s wall. Go to my wall and you’ll see interactive conversations among a disparate group of friends, all using the ‘comment’ feature to engage in a conversation. Same technology, adopted over different periods of time, causing major differences in the subculture among users.

And then there’s space. HBR just published a map showing social media usage differences by space, or locale. Internet users in India and China tweet 3x as much as those of us living in the U.S. Some our lower usage can be traced back to the reliability and relatively low cost of our old phone network; we think nothing of just picking up the phone here. But in developing nations, wireless and cellular networks often emerged before – and sometimes instead of – local phone networks. And by the time the Internet was available in many locales, microblogging technology had matured. With less predisposition for the phone, those users turned to the social network.

And then there’s Japan, where social networking is used to communicate among close circles of friends, not to extend those circles. And South Korea, where users approach social media from a gaming perspective. And France, … but you get the picture. While it may be one network, it’s certainly segmented by time and space.

I’m gonna sign off now and go call my sister on the old fashioned phone.

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Tags: blogging, SocialMedia, Technology
Categories : Community, Personal, SocialMedia, Technology

It’s the content, stupid

28 06 2010

Linotype Machine

Not to point out the obvious, but with the low barrier to entry for using social media it’s pretty easy for anyone to say anything to anyone about anything these days. In contrast, my dad was trained as a printer in Ireland, and spent decades here in the U.S. working the night shift to produce the newspapers we relied upon for the news each morning. Reporters hunting down the scoop by day, editors fine-tuning the story in the evening, and my dad toiling through the wee hours setting the type. I loved waking up to the news he brought home each morning in that freshly printed paper.

These mornings I roll over and grab my iPhone off the nightstand. I click one of multiple apps to see what’s happened overnight. I check in on blogs, scan my twitter feed, make sure my facebook friends aren’t having major issues – all before I lift my head from the pillow. It’s over coffee that I turn to traditional media for more news: wsj, theregister, nytimes, … While I trust my friends to offer up their views on just about everything, I want their opinions supplemented by reporters hunting down scoops, backed by intelligent and thoughtful editors working the story.

That’s why I’m so intrigued by the Atlantic’s recent article on Google’s attempt to save traditional media. User generated content is often ad hoc, and it works best for me when supported by a system of professional journalists working the systemic stories.

The Sunday paper best exemplifies the traditional journalistic business model. All that news is paid for by the huge bundle of colorful ads that sit in the center of the folded paper. But in new media, the news doesn’t arrive in one convenient bundle that advertisers can use to push their message. And that one convenient bundle represents the traditional journalistic business model. But it’s not a question of whether we still need professional journalism, it’s a question of how to change the traditional media business model to support that profession.

Google acknowledges that they need the content produced by professionals to sustain the Google business model. And those professionals need to adapt as well to these changing times. The first thing to go will be the print, as more and more journalism goes on-line. That radically changes the cost structure of the news business. The second change is news aggregators, like Google News, directing traffic through content excerpts. And finally, the news will again be supported by ads, not in a bundle this time that falls out of your Sunday paper, but in on-line ads tailored to your interests via clickstream analytics.

So my dad no longer needs to set his linotype (good thing, cuz he retired and is now happy volunteering at a local cancer center), but we do need the journalists to feed content into our news ecosystem.

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Tags: content, news
Categories : Community, Data, Personal, Services, SocialMedia, Strategy

Mother’s Little Helper? Data

24 06 2010

I’m fully supportive when my loved ones go off-the-grid on some new adventure. But the worrier inside me usually starts roaring around 3am… “Is everything ok?” “Where are they now?” Until recently it was pretty difficult to calm my worrier. But now, like the lyrics of the Stones, I’ve discovered my own mother’s little helper: Data. Yup, data.

In March my adventurer photographer husband spent 6 weeks in various parts of Africa working with children’s charities, exploring and mountain climbing. And attached to his backpack was a GPS sensor, which sent data about Ed’s whereabouts to a centralized service. I could go to the service website to see his location mapped, like his footsteps up Kilimanjara shown here. And I could post these satellite images to Facebook so friends and family could keep track as well. No more lost sleep. Saved by the data.

I was at an interesting conference this week where much was discussed about data. Stephen Baker, of Num3rati fame, delved into the next big wave of data coming from sensors in the world around us. Kinda creepy in many ways, but as with every new innovation, there’s a cost-benefit analysis to be done. In the simple case of the FindMeSpot, I’m all for it. We’re gonna have some interesting discussions, though, over the next few years as sensors become more prevalent around us. And we’re certainly not gonna suffer from a lack of data.

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Tags: Data, Services, SocialMedia, Technology
Categories : Data, Personal, SocialMedia, Technology

A marketeer’s dream

21 06 2010

I’ve lived a marketeer’s dream for the past few months. I had a product that everyone loved and an event that everyone was looking forward to attending. I had a community of people who wanted to share. And I was tasked with raising awareness, strengthening the community, extending its reach. In marketing speak that’s basically strengthening the brand, driving retention, and generating more demand. Oh, and here I am living in the age of social media.

The product: a charity that brings happiness into the lives of seriously ill children. The event: a weekend-long bike ride that gives 100% of its donations to that charity. Dan's leg The community: a special group of volunteers, riders, and sponsors connected by a series of stories. Stories about their own children helped by that charity. Stories about friendships made over years of riding. Stories about helping one another through the good times and bad. Stories about fundraising. Stories about training. Stories about life and love. In marketing speak, that’s content the likes of which is rarely seen. Oh and did I mention the community is so dedicated to this charity, a few members even had the logo tattooed on their leg? Now that’s brand affinity!

Here’s where the road meets the Internet. We created an information architecture for this community, using its website for logistics info, using facebook for informal chatter and discussion, twitter for event updates, and an email newsletter and blog to share the stories. We took the online community from zero to several hundred in a couple months. Our riders and volunteers contributed more stories and pics and videos. We extended the event from one weekend to year-long. Because the community is more than the day of the event. Because social media extends the bounds of space and time.

As Seth said so well, you’ve gotta have passion about what you’re marketing. So yup, I’ve lived the marketeer’s dream.

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Tags: AngelRide, blogging, Community, SocialMedia
Categories : Community, Personal, SocialMedia

DeSchooling for the Geek in High Heels

12 06 2010

When my daughter started unschooling a few years back, she went through a decompression period called deschooling: “the mental process a person goes through after being removed from a formal schooling environment, when the ‘school mindset’ is eroded over time. Deschooling may refer to the time period it takes for children removed from school to adjust to learning in an unstructured environment.” High Heels

I have been deSomethingOrOther-ing for the past few months. Getting a tough acquisition out of my mind; shaking off the bad vibes from a year of layoffs; turning to non-profit work, an executive MBA program, and assistant teaching about IP protection. The smile’s returned to my face, the light to my heart, and the energy to my blog.

I hope in my next life to return as an inventor, a Nobel Prize winner, or a RedSox starting pitcher. But in this life I am satisfied to surround myself with geeks and enjoy my role as a Geek in High Heels. So I’ve moved my Sun posts over here to WordPress, and will continue the journey chronicling my encounters with the geekiness around us.

P.S. Sun provided a license option for content originally posted on blogs.sun.com. This content was licensed to both Sun and the blog author, which allows for legal re-posts.

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Tags: AngelRide, Geek
Categories : Community, Personal, SocialMedia

My All-Avatar Meeting

31 10 2008

How do you get your team together when they’re scattered all over the globe? Well, I hosted my first all-hands meeting in Second Life yesterday and it was awesome to see people from Germany, Singapore, London, France, Sweden, Canada, Colorado, California, and Massachusetts – to name a few – coming together, across time zones and continents, to share thoughts and ideas.

What a time to be in marketing – the transformation from traditional media to social media is changing how we interact with each other, our partners, and our customers. While there’s still lots to figure out about how to use social media effectively to get Sun’s message out through communities, we were privileged to have MaryMary (Sun’s Mary Smaragdis) to help lead our discussion. Mary talked about the exponential growth of the various Social Media communities and, most interestingly, she explained the powerful impact of individual conversations in this new social ecosystem. One short blog entry, one twitter, one facebook update can add to a cadence to create a ripple effect. These individual bloggers start and sway conversations within the tech-influencer community.

It was great to see everyone hang out after the all-hands to mingle – I particularly enjoyed the many conversations about avatar hairdos (“Are you the one with the green hair?” “I have more hair here than in the real-world”). And I’ll admit – I love that my avatar never has a bad hair day.

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Tags: avatar, marketing, SocialMedia
Categories : Community, SocialMedia

My SecondLife: AmyO Later

30 04 2008

Yesterday Sun sponsored an employee event in-world. I’ll admit I was a skeptic, but sitting in a virtual theater with co-worker avatars is MUCH better than listening to a meeting on a phone. I hung out with friends from all sorts of real-life locales, and was able to fidget and change seats throughout the day. The talks were all great – with a focus on Sun strategy and interesting speakers from across the company.

Ya know how companies typically sponsor parties at the end of a long event? Last night I teleported into Club Java, where I was promptly animated into a great dancer by our Second Life staffers. I’m the redhead on the right, Doreen is in the middle and Lizzi is dancing up a storm in the back.

Who said I couldn’t dance?

Signed, AmyO… Later

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Tags: avatar, SocialMedia
Categories : Community, SocialMedia, Sun

New Business Models: Red Sox and Open Source

6 04 2008

How do you expand your business beyond existing customers and traditional revenue opportunities? Take the Red Sox for example. Fenway Park seats just under 40,000 fans and the Red Sox have sold out every home game since May 2003. But with the highest ticket prices in the majors, there’s just no room for price uplift to help revenue. So the Sox launched a number of businesses that leverage their baseball success into other areas: services like FanFoto, added value product like post-game concerts that in turn sell more food and merchandise, consulting to businesses that want to market through sports, online ads, and travel packages with the team to away-game destinations.

All around us new business models are maximizing economic value. I often get asked why we open source our software at Sun, and how we can possibly make money doing that. Well, developers that use our software platforms (e.g.; OpenSolaris, Java, NetBeans, MySQL) can innovate in their applications without worrying about the scalability, reliability, and flexibility of the underlying platform. And open sourcing those platforms expands our reach to developers who don’t have the funds to pay steep software licenses.

The number of people using our software increases each and every day. But we all learned at a young age that zero times a large number is still zero, so how do we make money when we give away our core software intellectual property?

Our business model today delivers support and managed services, added value products, servers, storage and consulting to empower open source deployers as they grow their businesses at Web scale. Value-added businesses that surround and enhance the open source experience. Ya know, not all that different from what the Red Sox are doing with their Fenway Sports Group business.

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Tags: fenway, RedSox
Categories : Community, Services, SocialMedia, Sun

Mini Me

31 03 2008

At Sun we’re all about “The Network is the Computer”, which really means instant access to information, anytime, anywhere. And the pace at work continues to speed up as development happens more and more rapidly on the Internet. Each and every day it’s a pace that races in the fast lane. A good friend recently articulated his strategy for maintaining a balance to our overdrive work environment: “work hard play hard”. Well said. To that end I matched my work pace while at play this past weekend – under the tutelage of Phil Wicks (he stunt drove the red Mini in the original Italian Job). That’s me driving my yellow Mini…

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Tags: Data, MiniCooper
Categories : Data, Personal, SocialMedia

I’m Blogging This…

23 08 2007

One of my favorite people gave me the I’m Blogging This t-shirt recently, and I’ve had some great fun wearing it around. O’Reilly is right that “it’s unlikely that you’ll actually see anyone overtly change their behavior lest they be blogged, but you’ll certainly shake up a paranoid few.”

The most paranoid reaction I got was from the poor hotel clerk who was helping me to get wireless working in my hotel room. I didn’t figure out until later that he probably thought I would blog about a bad Internet connection – maybe I couldn’t even post my blog because of it? I’m not a rampant consumer blogger though, and I’ll confess now that I had inadvertently hit the wireless switch on the side of my laptop, so it wasn’t even the hotel’s fault that I couldn’t connect.

It was interesting to see who commented when I wore the t-shirt while working at our Menlo Park campus: one IDC analyst, our analyst relations lead, an incredibly nice Sun communications manager (she introduced herself and exclaimed “what a great shirt” as I passed her in the courtyard), a Sun executive who really likes black t-shirts, and my product marketing buddy who really likes black shoes…

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Tags: blogging, SocialMedia
Categories : Personal, SocialMedia

Brad Pitt & George Clooney: Tape is not Dead

20 06 2007

When I was at the movies last week watching Ocean’s Thirteen, it dawned on me that our SL8500 tape library got closer to Brad Pitt and George Clooney than I ever will. As Nigel mentioned, we lent one of these beauties to Ocean’s Thirteen for the ‘Bank Casino Operations Center’. So yeah, tape is not dead. Tape is alive, well, and hanging out with the likes of George/Danny Ocean and Brad/Rusty Ryan.

But I wonder if George and Brad know just how awesome the SL8500 actually is. Do they know, for example, an SL8500 can hold a petabyte of data – about two hundred thousand copies of their Oceans Thirteen movie? Do they know that if the Bank Casino used 1000 cameras to gather their surveillance data and stored that data for 30 days, they would fill the tapes in an SL8500? And in interests of saving the planet, do they know tape is about 25 times less expensive to power and cool than disk because it uses that much less energy? All great news for the IT budget and the planet.

I spent some time this week with our Media and Entertainment sales team – to say the data in M&E is exploding is a complete understatement. One customer digitizing TV shows is expecting to have 50 petabytes of metadata to enable all the searches they need to handle – never mind the raw entertainment itself! And the M&E industry is heading full steam ahead into complete digitization, consumer mashups, affiliate communities… Data, data, and more data. No wonder why many cool web sites are using SL8500s to help store that data.

So, sure Brad and George were cast for the Ocean’s movies because they’re so hip, but our SL8500 certainly fit right in with the Ocean gang on their latest caper.

Comments : 2 Comments »
Tags: Data, Software
Categories : Data, SocialMedia, Software & Open Source, Sun

I'm AmyO