10 Rules for Today's Consumers In the New World of Real-Time

The world of communication and product delivery is changing as the Web evolves and new services are introduced, enabling us to gain faster access to information, download richer media more quickly, and rapidly voice our opinions and feedback near and far in a wide variety of methods, including text, voice, video and imagery. As customers become more savvy and in tune with these new tools, we are also expecting those offering products and services to adapt, and as such, I thought it made sense to put forth what I believe are key tenets of a new consumer manifesto for today's real-time world.

1. We Want Access to Your Product As Quickly As Possible

We have become an "instant gratification" society. Our short attention spans are being rewarded with ubiquitous access to fast food, the rollout of ever-faster download speeds, near elimination of commercials, thanks to DVRs, and the ability to replace activities that were once limited to venues outside the home with in-home equivalents, including on-demand programming and simulated bowling on our Wiis.

When we order your products, or sign up for your service, we want access to them immediately. We don't want to wait for an approval period, and if the product is physical, we want it shipped quickly at the first possible convenience.

2. We Expect the Product to Work On Any Platform In Any Location

Many of us spend more time in the Web browser and our e-mail than we do in our Operating System software these days. We rapidly grow frustrated with any Web sites or applications that operate differently if you utilize different operating systems or Web browsers, and we expect to have access to your product, or a mobile equivalent, when we are away from our desktops.

3. We Want to See That You Allow for Feedback, Positive and Negative

The time of a siloed product experience is gone. We want to see that you provide a forum or link to a third party site that discusses your business and your products, and connects us with peers, where we can learn from one another in a venue that reaches you as well. And if you do provide a forum or bulletin for us to provide feedback, we will not look kindly on your deleting threads or comments of substance.

4. We Expect That You Respond to Your Customers, Quickly

Customers are talking about your products on their blogs, on Twitter, on Facebook and other aggregation sites. They may send you e-mail or post in public forums. While we can't expect CEOs of the largest companies to respond to every mention, we do expect company representatives to be listening, and for the smallest companies, we do expect founders and entrepreneurs to be accessible.

5. We Expect That You Join and Lead the Conversation

In the absence of communication from you, rumors and negative feedback can snowball. And while you might be coached in handling crisis PR in case something gets out of hand on blogs or Twitter, the best way to get ahead of potential issues is to have a presence in these social areas before problems occur, so that your customers have a place to engage you, and you them, helping to redirect the conversation and react. Additionally, you can use your communication outlets to show thought leadership and teach us better ways to use your product in ways we may not have considered.

6. We Want to See That You Continually Improve Your Product

Thanks to the now assumed two-way conversation with your customers, we expect you will be making incremental updates and improvements that both meet your corporate objectives and satisfy user expectations - beyond fixing bugs. Not only do we now expect instant access and near real-time responses, but we hope for rapid iterations that add to our satisfaction. A stale product will lead to cranky users, and breed disloyalty, as we may migrate to alternatives that appear to be updating more frequently with more agility.

7. We Expect You to Use Your Product and Be Visible

One of the greatest endorsements of your own product is that you use it and make it a part of your own visible activity - making you appear as a peer with a shared experience in parallel to that of your customers. For the smallest companies, including startups with 1-10 employees, we expect to likely see your CEO and founders visibly consuming their own dog food, both exulting in its benefits and suffering through its disappointments. And if you do put up a central example of your employees or founder using your products, don't do it once and never update again, because we'll know about it, and it will a stark reminder of your pandering.

8. We Expect That You Will Embrace or Lead Standards

As we are helping you create a business by selecting your product instead of that of the competition, we expect you will help us, and the ecosystem as a whole, by either embracing existing standards that are agreed upon, or by forging new standards and releasing them to the community for the benefit of all. We reject proprietary methods that don't deliver significant differentiation, or aren't forced by antiquated legalities.

9. We Expect You Are Driven By More than Money Alone

As consumers, we are eager to be seen as your partner, and to contribute to improving the next iteration of your product, or in helping to grow the information base around it, through consistent feedback, formation of user groups, or in creating content related to your product. As such, we do not expect to be seen as blank checks, there to support your bottom line when quarters draw thin. Instead, we want to see that you share a passion for your products and your market, and know that you, as we are, are driven by the potential of what your product can enable us to accomplish. We want to know the story of what you are trying to solve, and how it can help the community, more than we want to hear about your margins and your EPS.

10. We Want You To Treat Us As Informed Consumers and Partners

We have real-time access to news and many of us are rabid information sponges who are experts about you and your product. We don't want to be talked down to, and often have significant history with your organization. We despise the tendency to architect service, support and marketing to the lowest common denominator, and greatly appreciate your expecting that we have a baseline of understanding that includes recent headlines on you and the industry.

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While books including the Cluetrain Manifesto and Naked Conversations have chronicled the move by consumers and businesses to e-commerce and a new world of online communications, continued advancements toward real-time news and exchanges of ideas lay the platform for a revamped approach to consumer relations with business. We are finding out more about you than you ever believed possible, and we are more than willing to share it just as quickly - both the good and the bad. Embrace the change and embrace us as partners and we can be your greatest ally. Be truthful, transparent and trusted, and you can help us cross the chasm from customers to fans.

Google Reader Adds Comments for Social Conversations

Google Reader, the RSS feed engine that has become a major hub in my daily information gathering, pulling in feeds from the hundreds of blogs and Web sites I follow, is taking a step forward in terms of making the service more social, by integrating private conversations between friends. With today's release, every post and every share has an option to add a comment, which will be displayed to your friends who you are connected to.

Google Reader, which started out as a data silo, where you could passively read your news in isolation, has since expanded to include shared link blogs, the addition of notes, and the ability to follow friends and their items within Reader. Items from my shared link blog play a critical role in populating my profile on a variety of social services, including Socialmedian, FriendFeed and Facebook, as well as social news sites including RSSmeme and ReadBurner.

And now, you can make comments and have a conversation with friends, without having to e-mail articles out, and without having your private conversations aired in public on the original blog.


Making a comment on a shared item in Google Reader


The comment, added to a shared item in Google Reader
Last year, we saw a great deal of controversy around publishers like Shyftr, who, at the time, ran a service that displayed comments along with full feeds. In that case, many blog owners felt that Shyftr was potentially making money (through ads) on their content, and hijacking comments. The Google Reader team, who I met with today at their headquarters in Mountain View, is very keen to do the right thing, and is not confusing public, centralized, comments with the private conversations available in today's release. And, so far, there are still no ads.

If you are a Google Reader user, you can see a new item called "Comment View" below "Friends Shared Items". If friends have made comments you haven't seen, the item will be in bold. You don't yet have a parenthetical number showing how many comments are left unread, as you do with total available items. (1000+ anyone?), but you can see if conversations are happening, either on your shared items or those of your friends.

As a Google Reader junkie, I was worried that conversations happening in my shared feeds would bump them back into my "unread" items and make me have to see items more than once. But Google Reader is not doing that. Read items stay read, but are available in the "Comment View".


A Popular Comment Thread in Google Reader


The Expanded Comment Thread in Google Reader
As you make comments within the shared items of Google Reader, those comments are visible to all friends of the original person who shared the item - and you can see comments by other people on those items, even if you are not friends with them yourself, but unlike Notes, they aren't exportable to services like FriendFeed, so they stay internal to the Reader.

You can see which friends are connected to you, as their names will be links to their Google profile, and those who are not friends display only a gray avatar. And today's post by the Reader team clarifies that, at launch, this is English-only, and not yet available in the "All Items" feed. But you can probably expect those to come with time.

The new addition is yet another way that Google Reader is looking to get more social. They've come a long way since my original post two years ago now that asked them to integrate trends, recommendations and more social features. And from today's meeting, it's clear much more is coming to what is now clearly the gold standard for the online RSS experience.

Is Twitter Broken, Or Are We Looking at It Wrong?

By Ken Stewart of ChangeForge (Twitter/FriendFeed)

Twitter is broken - again!?!

It's not the "fail whale" this time, but there is a lot of conversation going on about why Twitter isn't working for those looking for conversation. While Twitter reaches a point of critical mass and is being talked about more as a mainstream application among many demographics today, there is something fundamentally flawed with how it is being used.

Twitter has become, to many, a rolling billboard of information that might just give you indigestion. Dictionary.com defines the word twitter.

Twit - ter:

–verb (used without object)

1. to utter a succession of small, tremulous sounds, as a bird.
2. to talk lightly and rapidly, esp. of trivial matters; chatter.
3. to titter; giggle.
4. to tremble with excitement or the like; be in a flutter.

With a definition like that, why would we think it lends itself to having more than superficial conversations. Many might complain about the lack of threading and context, they also pin its success to the incredibly simplistic nature of the service.

"What are you doing in 140 characters or less?"

Wow, how did we get that mixed up? We grew hungry in our searches for massive followings, and feeling some quasi-social obligation to follow everyone that follows us. How many people in your subscription list do you actually converse with?

While some may argue that Twitter is an information source, and that following a massive number of people allows you to play the inevitable numbers game and find a few rare gems, in reality the chances of you missing rare gems is actually higher.

On FriendFeed, several threads have been circulation around, one from Robert Scoble, and one from Tina illustrating quite plainly the on-going debate many still have. Robert goes on to say,

"Twitter, you see, is really broken for interacting with large numbers of people. Friendfeed is much better."

Is Twitter any better or worse?

There is an old saying that goes, "If the only tool you have is a hammer, then every problem you find looks like a nail." In this bold new world we find ourselves in, thankfully there are many tools from which we can choose - maybe even too many. Certainly FriendFeed has its merits, but is Twitter broken?

Twitter is working better than it ever has, but let's wake up and realize that we are trying to make an appetizer the main course. The problem isn't with Twitter, it's our expectations that Twitter is a panacea to solve all ills, when in fact it is simply a hammer.

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Ken Stewart’s blog, ChangeForge.com, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology. To connect with Ken, you may visit him at DandyID.

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Where is Your Focus: Subscribers or Traffic?

By Corvida Raven of SheGeeks.net (FriendFeed/Twitter)

James Duthie of Online Marketing Banter has a really valuable post on 5 important lessons that he learned from his first year of blogging. I think everyone could agree to having learned a lot of the lessons that he listed, myself included. However, his first two lessons really inspired me to think about where my focus is when it comes to my own blog. 

Lesson 1 - Momentum disappears damn quickly.

Lesson 2 - It's not all about the traffic.

With these two lessons in mind, I think that as a blogger begins to evolve they have have to make a decision: you can work overtime to keep up traffic to continuously build momentum or you can stop worrying about the traffic and shift your focus to converting the traffic that you receive into subscribers. Some people focus on both, which can be a daunting task. Getting people to visit your site in the beginning of your blogging career is no easy task, unless you have great connections.My decision was to worry more about subscribers than traffic. I figured that with enough subscribers, you can begin to have consistently decent traffic, without worrying about the momentum that disappears all to quickly for some of us.

Know Your Goals

For me, this was an easy decision because I don't display any ads on SheGeeks, nor do I care to. Though recently I've been dabbling in sponsored links. Being aware of what you plan to do with your site can help you better understand what decision would be best for you. The answer to the aforementioned question is all so dependent upon the focus of your site and what you are attempting to achieve. I want more conversation. With more subscribers I can easily generate more conversation. This is easier for me rather than trying to generate conversation by trying to increase my traffic. And no, high subscribers doesn't necessarily mean high traffic, especially if your content is few and far in between.

Know Your Audience

On another note, I'm aware that the majority of my readers user RSS feeds to access the site. I'm also aware that the majority of my readers are probably "skimmers", meaning they don't read everything in its entirety unless it's truly worth their time. So traffic is just a moot point for me the majority of the time. What does this mean? Be aware of your audience and the tools they use. To me, the aforementioned facts reeks of a low click-through rate. So really, why bother?

What's Your Focus?

Which leads me to ask the rest of you: where is your focus when it comes to your blog: subscribers or traffic?

Read more by Corvida Raven at SheGeeks.net.

Are We Missing Something By Reading An RSS Feed?

By Rob Diana of Regular Geek (Twitter/FriendFeed)

People that read this blog regularly know that I am a big proponent of the conversation. I blog about what conversation may or may not be. I have written a tool to let you track where in social media people are talking about your blog post or some keyword you want to watch. I do this as a software engineer with no formal training in psychology, sociology or marketing. I do this as someone who regularly engages in conversations each day, as a normal person. In order to keep myself up to date on what other people are talking about, I use an RSS reader, specifically Google Reader.

This weekend I read a post on GrowMap.com regarding a blog review contest. Obviously, this has nothing to do with "conversation". However, there was something said earlier in the post that got me thinking:

Regular visitors to GrowMap are bound to have come across some great ideas in the comments left by Dennis Edell. Hopefully you’ve already visited his main blog DirectSalesWebMarketing.

What is so interesting about that quote? Well, I read GrowMap while within the familiar confines of my RSS reader. I rarely go to the source of a blog post unless I plan on commenting directly on the site. By doing this, I am obviously missing something. I am missing the conversation part of a blog post, the comments. Generally, I do not even know if there are comments on a post if I am within my RSS reader. Yes, I know that many feeds include feedflares that may include a comment count, but how many people look at those unless they want to email, Digg, tweet or generally take some action on the RSS item.

By missing the comments, we are missing part of the conversation. It is a large part of the conversation because it is the one part of the blog post where readers can interact. Are we shortchanging ourselves by not reading the post on the blog along with the comments? How much more intersting would your RSS reader become if it included the comments in the feed? Can somebody work on that?

See Also:
louisgray.com: The Trouble With RSS: I'm Not Involved
GeekWhat.com: RSS Readers Kill Readers’ Involvement?

Image by Photopia
Read more by Rob Diana at RegularGeek.com.

8 Ways to Start a Conversation: Social Media Style!

By Ken Stewart of ChangeForge (Twitter/FriendFeed)

The purpose of social media is to be social of course, right?

It helps social butterflies among us stretch across continents with the strokes of a few keys and allows the geeky introvert to have a voice. Starting a conversation has never been easier, has it? A friend of mine, Ken Allan, and I were having a conversation across blogs over the last few weeks. Both of us started our blogs for varying reasons, but primarily it is to reach others and extend the conversation.

But how do you extend the conversation if no one on the other end reciprocates? Blogging, Twitter, FriendFeed, and Facebook all share one thing: You have to have followers to talk to in order to even have a chance of starting a conversation. This is often hard work, but to some it comes naturally – some few names have risen to the top as conversation starters. Whether by wit or will, these individuals stand out in my mind – exemplifying how you start a conversation, and even keep it going:

Mona Nomura (Pixel Bits / FriendFeed / Twitter)
- A picture is worth a thousand words!

Mona consistently posts interesting material on Friendfeed and Twitter. What sets Mona apart, though, is her avid use of images in her FriendFeed posts. This quickly draws your attention, and the images she chooses really make you want to laugh, cry, and most of all - comment.

Leo Babauta (ZenHabits / Twitter)
- The guy that you can relate to.

Leo comes in with almost 80,000 subscribers to his blog ZenHabits.net, and coins himself as just a regular guy. With over 250,000 estimated uniques, Leo offers advice and observations on things from productivity and frugality to parenting and happiness.

People love to read his blog because it makes sense in a hectic world.

Louis Gray (LouisGray.com / FriendFeed / Twitter)
- Let me show you this new … !

Interested in new discoveries, including new technology, services, and content, Louis Gray is an animal – devouring content at more than a healthy rate. The name sake of this very post you are reading has been blogging for over 3 years. He has recently hit a dramatic upswing in popularity, and his blog has become the host for many up and coming bloggers. Chances are if you are a new technology or service, Louis will be using you, and chances are if you are new blogger, he will hunt you down.

Darren Rowse (ProBlogger / FriendFeed / Twitter)
- Do what I say, and what I do. I even wrote a book about it!

We all know and love Darren as the founder and chief blogger at ProBlogger.net, Digital Photography School, and the new TwiTip. Nearing 70,000 RSS subscribers and an estimated 450,000 uniques on ProBlogger, Darren has carved out a niche as a blogger who makes money blogging, and even wrote a book on how you can too. Darren uses social media to actively engage his readership, and is a genuinely nice guy.

Jason Calacanis (Mahalo / FriendFeed / Twitter)
– I is what I is, and that’s what I is.

Founder of Mahalo, Calacanis officially gave up blogging back in July of this year, citing that e-mail was a more personal way to interact with 5 or 10 - thousand - of his friends. (He never replied back to me, I wonder why?). Many saw this as a media stunt, since Jason has quietly resumed his blogging after this announcement. Calling him a blogger or not seems irrelevant at this point. Maybe that’s a sign of arriving in itself?

Whether you are upset with Jason for pulling a fast one on his loyal readers or think of him as being a true trail blazer, none can deny he understands how to start a conversation.

Chris Brogan (ChrisBrogan.com / FriendFeed / Twitter)
- Community and Social Media.

His tagline says it all. Chris is famous for being able to stir people into movement, and often showcases others as the hero. For instance, his Rockstars page showcases blogs of all shapes and sizes.

Chris understands that by scratching others' backs, they will return the favor - or at least pay it forward.

Mike Arrington (TechCrunch / FriendFeed / Twitter)
- Evil Genius or Shrewd Entrepreneur.

Mike has been called an evil genius by some, but his website, techcrunch.com, has seen an estimated 1.4 million uniques. Obviously, Mike knows how to get eyeballs on the page regardless of where you stand.

Robert Scoble (Scobleizer / FriendFeed / Twitter)
- Is there a difference between conversation and controversy?

Robert has been doing this for a long time. Now part of the talent at FastCompany.tv, the Scobleizer has a knack for starting both conversations and controversies. Robert is the kind of guy that loves to be in a noisy room of 30,000 geeks, and even tries to listen to all of them at once. Robert took time off from his blog this past year to jump feet first into Twitter and FriendFeed. He now has over 23,000 followers on FriendFeed and over 44,000 on Twitter, logging an estimated 2000 hours on these services alone in the last year. Between interviewing up and coming tech-execs, blogging, and participating heavily in social media, Robert’s name always comes to mind when thinking about social media conversations – and is perhaps THE name when thinking TECH in general.

Final Thoughts

So it has been a banner year for social media, and this list comprises some of the heavy hitters that you might look to when thinking about how you want to start – and continue –your conversations on the web. With conversations happening in more places than just your comment queue, seriously consider not only your message, but how you are going to broadcast it. By the way, this list is not exhaustive, and is solely my opinion.

I would love to hear from you! Who knows how to do it right – and why?

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Ken Stewart’s blog, ChangeForge.com, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology. To learn more about Ken, visit his about page. You may also find Ken on FriendFeed, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

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