Do problems with your brand mean more opportunities in social media?

I spend a lot of time thinking about how companies can use social media tools to enhance their communications efforts.

• Some involve a new take on traditional outbound or inbound marketing.
• Some are conversational, building relationships rather than selling.
• Some focus on customer service and solving pain points for people.

It occurs to me that to some extent, the effectiveness of two of the options above may depend on the state of your existing brand.

Caveat: This is by no means the only factor involved in this decision, which is why companies need to approach social media from a strategic perspective (with full consideration of multiple factors) rather than a tactical one.

If your brand is healthy and people generally think positive things about your organization, well-targeted communications along interruption and destination-based lines may be well received. However, if your brand has little equity and people are distrustful, it may be that you have more to gain from other social media approaches than healthy brands.

Why?

Because the bar is set low.

Wooden corporations can benefit greatly from allowing some personality within their online activities. As I often say, people don't want relationships with brands; they want them with people. (Note: I'm not talking about slick artwork and design; I'm talking about real people.)

Similarly, if your brand is on thin ice, online customer service improvements can be received with open arms. Peoples' expectations are so low that just solving problems (essentially, taking them from a negative to a neutral state with the product/service) can have positive effects on your brand. Companies like Dell and Comcast bave benefited greatly from this approach.

As I noted recently, it's when times are tough that you can differentiate your company.

What do you think? Do you think companies have more to gain from social media when their brand is suffering?

(Image: Shutterstock)

Some newspapers scrambling to survive the internet condemn websites like Google News and the Huffington Post. Aggregators, they say, need to pay for the right to point to a newspaper's site. Public radio stations, on the other hand, face competition from the internet as well and are just as competitive between themselves as they are collaborative. Somehow, they've responded differently to new media. There may be no better example of that than an iPhone application built by several large public radio organizations and called Public Radio Player. The team behind the app launched a major new release this morning.

The application aggregates live streaming and recorded radio broadcasts from across the US, displays their current and planned content schedules and now offers a search function that stretches across all those different types of content: live streams, podcasts and text show descriptions. It's a free app and the the organization that makes it hosts almost nothing on its own servers. The end result is a remarkable user experience that ought to be an inspiration for old media of every kind. It isn't perfect, but it's getting better fast.

Sponsor

The app was made by a non-profit organization called Public Radio Exchange (RPX). RPX was founded and is run by Jake Shapiro, a man who used to be an associate director at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Shapiro used to produce an NPR radio show with Christopher Lyndon and before that he was one of the first tinkerers with web distribution of music for his band Two Ton Shoe.

Two Ton Shoe didn't find a lot of success in the United States, but thanks to the long tail of the web Shapiro says they somehow found a big fan base in Korea. The band toured there and Korean bands have covered some of their songs. "I'm a Korean rock star," Shapiro says, "and I believe there's a 'Korea' out there for everybody."

About a year ago Shapiro says he called around all the major players in public radio and argued that they had a unique opportunity if they could collaborate and create a really strong offering. An organization called American Public Media decided to contribute the work they had done so far on their own iPhone app to Shapiro's project and NPR and Public Radio International agreed to lend their support to what would become the Public Radio Tuner, today renamed the Public Radio Player.

Funding Local Radio on the iPhone

Public Radio Player could facilitate that long tail experience for obscure local public radio content by making it far more available on the iPhone. But PaidContent's Rafat Ali worries that by freeing radio listeners all the more from their local radio station, the Player could sever the loyalty and fund raising connections that keep public radio alive.

To that concern Shapiro has two interesting responses. First, he says that survey data shows most users prefer listening to their local stations on the app, along with a variety of favorites from elsewhere.

Even more interesting is the project's collaboration with Cluetrain Manifesto co-author Doc Searls. Searls is at Harvard's Berkman Center now, developing a framework for what's being called Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) - a customer-based response to the business paradigm of Customer Relationship Management (CRM). The VRM project and Shapiro's RPX are developing ways for Public Radio Player users to track what they listen to on the player and make financial contributions to the radio stations they've consumed from the most.

Shapiro says that part of the project faces a major roadblock from Apple. Though Apple introduced in-application payments last month, the feature is only available to paid apps (Public Radio Player is free) and charitable contributions through the iPhone are strictly prohibited. They can't even be talked about, Shapiro says, because Apple doesn't want to deal with the possibility of charity scams, there's tax complications, the platform's standard 30% fee for payments isn't tenable in a non-profit context and Apple has no financial incentive to solve this sticky complex of problems.

For now the app is funded by a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. That funding is up for renewal now. Shapiro says that a second round of funding would be used to create "showcase apps that would break new ground and create new technology." He says the company is particularly interested in technologies that represent a hybrid of digital and broadcast. "With radio," he says, "there is still a tremendous amount of reach that you don't want to give up on when you move into the digital space."

Fixing the App

That hybrid paradigm is very well represented by the new version of the Public Radio Player. The previous version, called Public Radio Tuner, was one of the most popular free apps in the iPhone store but it didn't really work that well. Radio streams got dropped a lot. That's no longer a big problem with version 2.0.

The new version of the app tackles the problem of dropped streams by making the buffering settings much more sophisticated. Remember, the App doesn't host any of the audio, it just points to the live streams or podcasts stored on public radio stations' own servers. Project manager Matt MacDonald says the app now determines what kind of bandwidth the receiving phone has, then buffers the inbound stream accordingly before serving it up to listeners. The end result is a radically more usable radio app on wifi, 3G or Edge connections.

It's still not perfect; this like every app is at the mercy of AT&T's wireless network, but dropped streams appear to be much, much less frequent than they used to be. The interface sometimes hangs when loading menus, but Shapiro says that with the new release today bug fixes are a top priority and though crash reports are appearing infrequently, they are being closely watched. "Just shake the phone," he jokes. "Then it will work better."

More Than One Kind of Content

The new app brings a whole lot more radio to your iPhone. In addition to pointing to hundreds of radio streams, RPX has co-ordinated a number of different sources to pull show schedules down to be stored locally on your phone. "Scheduling data has been a big effort," Shapiro says. "It never existed in one place and is still a moving target."

A company called Public Interactive (recently acquired by NPR from Public Radio International) has a metadata tool that originally captured music playlists but now publishes radio show schedules as well. NPR and many station websites also display schedules on their own websites. PRX aggregates all that data, stores it on your phone, syncs it with the radio stream links and then checks for changes each time you launch the Public Radio Player app.

Having the particular show that's playing displayed along with a station name makes a very big difference in the user experience.

The 2.0 version of the app also includes support for "on demand" or podcast listening. Hundreds of podcasts are navigable by featured shows, category or alphabetically. Podcasts are integrated into some of the show schedules as well. When listening to a streaming station, you can view the rest of the day's schedule and see what other shows will be broadcast later. Then you can choose to listen to previous recorded editions of those shows. It's a pretty seamless experience.

Search is No Small Matter

The new search functionality integrates all of the above, letting you search for keywords or topics and finding both recorded and currently live shows that match your search. MacDonald says the company used an open source program called ThinkingSphynx on the back end, worked closely with the NPR API team and is still working on teaching local radio stations about the importance of standards-based content titling. Listening to streams and podcasts on iTunes or an iPod may not have been so difficult with incomplete file names, but show a radio station how broken its content looks in a dynamic iPhone directory and the message comes through loud and clear.

There have been other efforts to index all the public radio streams online; Public Radio Fan is the most notable and is more international, but is less sophisticated and is based on the desktop and browser. (After listening to some international broadcasts via Public Radio Fan it's hard not to be a little disappointed with even Public Radio Player's extensive but exclusively US menu.)

As a media technology, Public Radio Player offers a unique blend of content aggregation, focus on both real time and recorded content and extensive data integration on the back end. All on the iPhone. Its design and performance continue to improve. It's a very impressive offering in terms of content delivery; if it can find a way to use the new platform it's on to transcend the public radio paradigm of on-air pledge drives, that would really be remarkable, wouldn't it?

Jake Shapiro says that offering Public Radio Player on other platforms, including a web interface, is a logical next step. You can follow the project's progress on the Public Radio Player blog and download the application here.

Photo by Hamed Saber.

If you are a photographer and have a website, you need a blog. A blog can be a huge supplement to your website and can offer more for the viewer than just viewing your portfolio online. You can post new work to it and describe a little bit about your recent photo shoots, and add keywords to your copy which in turn will bring the search engines coming back to your site looking for new content.

Website Structure

I post the work I want prospective clients to see on my main website. This is where I host my updated portfolio for viewers to see. The stronger images are posted here so that clients see a range of work. I don't show everything I shoot just the photos I want people to see and those that represent my business' look and feel. Remember the saying: less is more.

Here is where the blog comes into play. When I set up my blog, I wanted to use it as a journal for quick updates so the viewer can see what I have been working on, where I've been shooting across the country, as well as anything else I feel like sharing. I like to post behind the scenes photos from recent shoots. By doing so, the blog becomes a little bit more personal, and it allows the viewer to see my studio space or the type of lighting setup I am using. The most important thing about having the blog is that it allows me to post photos that might not make it to my main website. Basically, it's an online portfolio of constantly changing work, and a great way to refresh the content on your website.

What to Blog About

For all of us photographers, I have found that a great thing to post to your blog is a couple of quick images from a photo shoot that have just been completed. It can be personal work or something you shot for a client. It can even be an article relevant to your business. All of these things are great ways to keep fresh content rolling through your blog. I do a lot of editorial shoots for publications so they get dibs on first run, but as soon as they hit the newsstand I will post a few shots on my blog. This is also a great way to plug a website and show the viewer who you have been shooting for. Don't forget to link up if your client has your work posted on their website.

How a Blog Benefits You

The benefits of adding a blog to your site are numerous. I can speak from experience and tell you that I have had clients call my portfolio in for review simply because they looked at my photoblog and liked what I was doing. It shows a different side of your work. I am a big believer in getting fresh work on your site as often as you can, so that it will show your prospective clients and viewers what you have been working on.

It's amazing when looking at your website traffic through Google Analytics or through your own website server how people are finding you and the keywords that are bringing them into your site. Because of the photoblog, I have gotten traffic from places I normally wouldn't have on my business site, and I bet you will have the same result if you get started and keep the content rolling in.

Getting more inbound links means better rankings in Google without extra costs involved. It will take a while to see results but you will see your website gain ground gradually.

As far as posting frequency goes, I think a good number to shoot for (bare minimum) is three to four times a month. If you think about it's not that much time dedicated to helping your photo business move along, and the more you post, the more success you will have.

How to Get Started

There are hundreds of ways to get your blog rolling. Personally I use WordPress.com but there are many options out there. Do some searching and see what works best for you. A self-hosted option like WordPress.org is often the best choice for business. If you decide to load software onto your server space and you're not too sure about technical matters, find someone who is willing to help you get it set up, whether you've got a knowledgeable friend who will do it for free or you hire a professional.

I don't have a single reason why you shouldn't blog. The benefits are staggering and any negative consequences are rare and few. It's a truly great thing for your photography business.

1. No Silos.

2. Listening.

3. Inbound Marketing.

*drops mic*

Lifestreaming, according to Wordspy, is "an online record of a person's daily activities, either via direct video feed or via aggregating the person's online content such as blog posts, social network updates, and online photos." In this post we review some of the top lifestreaming web apps: Onaswarm, Lifestrea.ms, Soup, Jaiku (the service Google bought), and perhaps the most popular of them all, Tumblr.

There's even a niche blog devoted to lifestreaming, called The Lifestream Blog. It recently noted that Wired magazine named lifestreaming a "wired" technology (as opposed to 'tired' or 'expired'). So it seems lifestreaming is the new black. Let's check out some of the leading lifestreaming apps...

Tumblr

For a recent episode of Read/WriteTalk Sean Ammirati sat down with David Karp, the founder of Tumblr. Tumblr is a platform that makes it easy to create Tumblelogs - which Wikipedia defines as:

A variation of a blog, that favors short-form, mixed-media posts over the longer editorial posts frequently associated with blogging. Common post formats found on tumblelogs include links, photos, quotes, dialogues, and video. Unlike blogs, this format is frequently used to share the author's creations, discoveries, or experiences without providing a commentary. One of the many tumblelog sevices is tumblr.

Read more...

Onaswarm

Onaswarm is a new lifestreaming application from Toronto's David Janes and BlogMatrix. Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote that Onaswarm is a smart, interesting service that combines groups, microformats and flashes of really good usability.

It's very text-centric and clearly better for geeks than it is for the artists who like Tumblr, for example. The Onaswarm site architecture and navigation need a substantial overhaul to improve usability, despite some nice touches.

Read more...

Lifestrea.ms

Lifestrea.ms is a powerful new lifestreaming service from Germany that you'll want to keep an eye on. Marshall checked it out and said that it's a real testimony to the potential of the new web that anyone would even try to create something like this company has. Currently in private beta, we hope the company will fix its usability issues and launch soon. Send an email to beta@lifestrea.ms if you want on the list for an account.

Lifestreaming aggregates all your inbound and outbound activity online, see Tumblr or FriendFeed for other examples. If everything under the covers at Lifestrea.ms can be made as good as the front page of the site, then we'll be in great shape. That page alone is a marvel to witness.

Read more...

Soup

Watch out Tumblr, here comes Soup. According to Josh Catone, Soup is an easy to use tumble blogging application that includes two killer features: social networking (kinda) and outside activity streams. It's sort of a cross between Tumblr, Pownce, and a social activity aggregator.

At its core, Soup is a microblogging app, and a pretty easy to use one. Their tumble blog set up supports text, link, quote, image, and video posts. Sign up is a snap (you can actually begin posting to your tumble blog before creating an account), and like Tumblr, Soup blogs can be mapped to an outside domain.

Read more...

Jaiku

Jaiku can aggregate and automatically republish stories from your other activity streams: blog posts, del.icio.us links, Flicker photos, even Twitter updates. In this regard, it is a lot like Tumblr (another service that has a huge lead on it traffic-wise). We think this is the part of Jaiku that Google was interested in when it purchased the site -- Jaiku as an activity stream aggregator, not Jaiku as a presence app.

We heard last summer about a Google sponsored project at Carnegie Mellon University called "Socialstream." Socialstream's goal was to "create a system for users to seamlessly share, view, and respond to many types of social content across multiple network." The idea was basically for Socialstream to be a hub for all of your social networking activity -- whether that was on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Digg, or Flickr -- all of your attention data would be collected in one place where you could manage and share it.

Read more...

Finally, you may want to check out What's Next on the Web: a RWW Toolkit for 2008, which features Open Data as one of the 5 big trends Marshall Kirkpatrick compiled resources for. Lifestreaming is a type of web app that will benefit greatly from open data, so check out our toolkit to prepare yourself.

The Canadian company AideRSS produces one of my favorite tools on the market right now. Their RSS feed filtering service is very useful in all kinds of circumstances. You can enter any RSS feed and it will score each item in the feed by number of comments it received, number of times it's been tagged in Del.icio.us, Diggs and inbound links it's received. You can then get a new feed of just the most popular items from your original feed.

The company announced today that it's closed a round of funding from Waterloo, Ontario early stage investors Tech Capital Partners and a collection of Canadian Angel investors.

The basic functionality of AideRSS is remarkably simple but powerfully useful. It's the kind of thing everyone I talk to about it says "wow, that's cool and useful looking." Getting a little money in the bank should help AideRSS make its product more robust as well. To be honest, I have experienced frustrating performance issues since I discovered this service - but its functionality has been so compelling and unique that I find myself coming back to it regularly anyway.

ReadWriteWeb first covered AideRSS prelaunch in July, when Josh Catone gave it an in-depth review.

Information Overload

The company is positioning themselves as a solution to the growing problem of information overload. That's a big statement and implementation of that idea can take many forms.

I used AideRSS, for example, in building the ReadWriteWeb Toolkit for 2008. In that post I made available a collection of the top RSS feeds in each of five fields I believe are going to be hot in 2008 (Data Portability, Semantic Web, Mobile, etc). Each of those topics ended up having quite a lot of feeds in them and for the sake of efficiency there was no better way to offer our readers a feed of just the most popular items in these top feeds than to use AideRSS. I spliced each topic's feeds into one feed, ran than feed through AideRSS and then ran the AideRSS feed through FeedBurner - but you don't have to do anything nearly so complicated to use this very useful service. You can do a lot of very cool things with AideRSS, though. Try putting in del.icio.us feeds and search feeds, for example.

A simpler example is this. You might feel overwhelmed with the number of posts that ReadWriteWeb makes each day and want a feed of just the most popular items. You can visit or subscribe to this URL to do that: http://www.aiderss.com/best/readwriteweb.com

Limitations of AideRSS

There's lots of different ways to try and determine what the best items in feed are. AideRSS uses explicit Attention Gestures on 3rd party networks to track global popularity. Just because things are popular doesn't mean they are good, though, nor does it guarantee that they are the right items for you to read.

AideRSS is clearly taking a different approach than other systems based on your personal Attention Data, like FeedHub (our coverage) and some of the Newsgator products that rank news according to your reading habits. Other apps can filter news according to what's hot among a particular group of users you belong to (Attensa in the enterprise and to some degree Google Reader).

Everyone wants to tackle these issues and AideRSS has a particular approach to doing so.

Reaching Out

AideRSS has a freely available, public API that other apps can leverage internally as well. The showcase example so far is the super-search tool Lijit, which uses the AideRSS API in addition to various other cool tricks it can do.

This little Canadian company could have a bright future ahead of it. It does a great job of serving both a core need for all users and satisfying the need for magic that RSS power users have. Check it out, it's worth at the very least a few minutes of your time. You might find yourself coming back to it regularly like I have.

Steve Outing wrote a very good article at Editor and Publisher on Friday about the need for cultural change inside the newpapers around the US (found via the wonderful CyberJournalist.net). That article got me thinking that people in many different industries probably hear many of the same objections to new, social media and online tools. ("It takes too much time, conversations online are insipid" etc.)

I decided to make a list of the Top 10 Objections to New Online Tools and What You Can Say in Response. I surveyed my nearly 1300 friends on Twitter and got all kinds of thoughtful replies. Below is that list; I hope you'll find it useful and leave comments helping to extend the conversation further.

In my mind I'm thinking of everything from RSS and wikis to Twitter, Facebook and blogging. Online tools that leverage social connections.

Last month we wrote about an initiative called The Working Group where people trying to bring about innovation in big companies. Many readers probably know about Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang's fantastic blog, where he explains social media in a business context, often in a format you can take directly to the boss. There are lots of different resources available online to help the intrepid early adopter and I hope this list will be one of them.

Ultimately, I'm not yet convinced myself that persuading anyone is the way to go. If you can make time on the side to use new tools and you can perform - perhaps the benefits can best speak for themselves. If that's not the case inside of a company, I'm sure it is between two companies with different attitudes towards adoption of new social technologies.

ROI is the elephant in the middle of the room, and it's addressed a bit in item number ten below. It's a topic I need more people to chime in on; I live and breathe this stuff and can articulate the benefits of it to a great degree, but it just speaks for itself to me too. So if you're an ROI-head, pipe up. Links, traffic, mindshare, connections between people and early access to actionable information are the things I usually cite without quantifying.

Let's get into the list though, and please do feel free to add your own thoughts as well.

A List of Objections, Replies and Concessions Regarding Social Media and Tools

1. I suffer from information overload already.

Possible replies:

Try just skimming messages in some fora - you may need to look closely at every email you get but you don't have to look at every Facebook friend's update.

The right tools for you will feel helpful in time, not like a burden. Experiment for awhile with new tools and stick with the ones that deliver you the most high-quality information, whether those tools are high-quantity or not. (Thanks to Aaron Hockley and Ruby Sinreich for these thoughts.)

Times change and so do information paradigms. Get used to it. The amount of information you had access to 3 years ago was infinitely more than people at any other point in history and we're in the middle of another huge leap right now.

Concession: If you think consuming all this new information is a challenge, wait until you try to find the time to make sense of it! (Thanks to Nancy White for that thought.)

2. So much of what's discussed online is meaningless. These forms of communication are shallow and make us dumber. We have real work to do!

Possible replies:

Much of it is not meaningless, but if you feel overwhelmed with meaninglessness - try subscribing to a search for keywords in a particular fora and using that as your starting point for engagement.

Having a presence and starting a conversation is rarely a bad thing - bring quality conversation to a space and you'll find others ready to engage. (Thanks to Bannana Lee Fishbone, obviously a fan of open, non-anonymous public communication :) for this articulation.)

Personal information can be very useful in understanding the context of more explicitly useful information.

If learning how the market feels about your organization, engaging with your customers and driving traffic to your web work - all very realistic goals for social media engagement - aren't work, then I don't know what is. Even in the short term, strategic engagement with online social media will have a clear work pay-off.

Concession: The signal to noise ratio will be easier to maximize if you can find an experienced guide to learn from. Just jumping into social media and new tools on your own will not neccesarily lead to a meaningful experience. It could, but it will take longer.

3. I don't have the time to contribute and moderate, it looks like it takes a lot of time and energy.

Possible replies:

If you aren't going to eat that lunch of yours, I'd be happy to, thanks.

With practice, familiarity and technology fine-tuned with a little experience you'll find the time required will decrease.

You might consider this time spent on marketing or communication with existing customer base - perhaps there's something else in that department that isn't working well and could be replaced with online work.

Concession:
Doing anything well does take time and energy. You've obviously been thinking about this stuff a lot, it is important - and it's going to take time and energy.

4. Our customers don't use this stuff, the learning curve limits its usefulness to geeks.

Possible replies:

You might be surprised to learn how many of your customers do already use these new tools. Even more will do so in the future.

The best designed tools are designed like good games - you can get small rewards right away and then learn more advanced skills to win bigger rewards. Among online services that are intended for general audiences, only poorly designed ones are too geeky.

Many of these tools provide value vastly disproportionate to the literal number of people they reach. These are like high-value focus groups where you'll gather information and preparation to engage with the rest of the world.

Try asking someone near you to give you an in-person demonstration of one of these tools. You'll find it much easier to learn once you've seen the right paths taken to show what it can do.

5. Communicators [bloggers, tweeters] are so fickle, better to stay unengaged than risk random brand damage. We don't want hostile comments left about us on any forum we've legitimized.

Possible replies:

If you need to, you can require that any comments left on your own site be approved before they appear. This slows down the conversation but if it makes conversation possible for you then do it.

There are far fewer people who will take the time to say hostile things, even on the internet, than you might imagine.

Engage - you'll be appreciated more for it. People are going to say what they are going to say - you can either let any criticism go unanswered or you can be the bigger person/brand for responding well.

Conversations are going to happen online, better to be engaged than to have it happening behind your back. (As articulated by Rick Turoczy.)

It's ok, no one believes that anyone is perfect anymore. Swing for the fences sometimes - you might strike out, but sometimes you'll hit a home run.

Even if you're not responding publicly, you should watch closely so you know what people are saying. Maybe you don't have a blog, but subscribe to a blogsearch feed or alert for your company's name. Maybe none of your people are on Twitter - you can subscribe to a feed for a search via Terraminds.

Concessions:
Some of the critical things that get said about you online might not warrant a response. Just decide which ones do and file the rest away somewhere.

Communicating in this different context is very new and challenging for traditionally trained business people. Good luck.

6. Traditional media and audiences are still bigger, we'll do new stuff when they do.

Possible replies:

They already are, from blogging to online video to social networks to mobile to microblogging - big, established brands are already doing all of it. They may be experimenting but they will bringing all their market dominance into the most useful social media sectors as soon as it suits them. Will that be too late for you? It might be.

Traditional media audiences are also more passive - online audiences can engage with, rebroadcast and otherwise amplify your communication efforts.

Concessions:
That's true and fair, if you think your business can thrive while taking that attitude towards a period of intense social and economic change then you just rock on with your bad self. I'll be taking my love of innovation to the employer down the street.

7. Upper management won't support it/dedicate resources for it.

Possible replies:

A lot of technology adoption has for some time had to happen despite this reality. People adopt new tools on their own at work, without permission. They discover powerful ways to solve their problems and then they share them horizontally.

Compared to other expenses, meaningful engagement with new online technology does not have huge costs.

Concessions:
Meaningful engagement with new technology does require some expenditure of time, energy and money. If you're not willing to do this then you'll be unlikely to see big benefits.

8. These startups can't offer meaningful security, they may not even be around in a year - I'll wait until Google or our enterprise software vendor starts offering this kind of functionality.

Possible replies:

The skills you build and the connections you make will remain with you, though. This is a paradigm shift underway more than it is about any particular tool.

Chose your tools carefully - expect data export as an option so you can back up or switch services whenever you need to. This isn't widespread yet but the best tools allow it.

Concessions:
You do need to be careful, but if you do so intelligently then the benefits can really outweight the risks. It is very possible that any one of these services might shutter in a year or two, but you'll get a lot out of them in the meantime and hopefully won't lose access to your data if that happens.

9. There are so many tools that are similar, I can't tell where to invest my time so I don't use any of it at all.

Possible replies:

A little experimentation goes a long way.

Try asking people in your field who have some experience what tools they are using.

Try searching for keywords related to your work in various sites. You'll find out that way which sites are best suited for you.

Concessions:

It's true, it can be very confusing and very few people are able to keep up with all the new services that are launching. Don't worry about it, just do your best.

10. That stuff's fine for sexy brands, but we sell [insert boring B2B brand] and are known for stability more than chasing the flavor-of-the-month. We're doing just fine with the tools we've got, thanks.

Possible replies:

Some of these things, RSS and wikis for example, aren't passing social fads - they are emerging best practices and the state of the art.

ROI is very hard to measure, but try allocating a little energy over time to experiment and see what kind of results you get. From connections between people and projects, to search-friendly inbound links, to early access to important information - the benefits of engaging in new social media go on and on.

Conclusions

There are no conclusions, this is just a conversation. Please feel free to add your thoughts in comments and check out the comments to read what others suggest as talking points when faced with these objections.

Every day I get inbound emails from entrepreneurs looking for funding. I triage these quickly as I can usually tell within a couple of minutes of looking at whatever is attached (executive summary, overview, intro powerpoint) whether or not it's in an area that I'm interested in investing in. Since my top level filter is "theme" it's easy to make a quick call. If you've ever sent me something, hopefully you've gotten a quick response.

Most of the exchanges I have are generic and aren't focused on me. Sometimes they are. Over the weekend, I had one that I think is an ideal example of how to get my attention.

It started with an email from Nick Napp of Disruptor Monkey. I remembered Nick and Disruptor Monkey from a previous referral from Square 1 Bank, but I didn't remember where our conversation went (or didn't go.) Nick's email started off with the Subject line "Some thoughts re: Exchange server" and continued with:

Your recent post (Where Is Microsoft In This Party?) rang a few bells over here in Monkey land. Since you are well down the road drinking the kind of coolaid we enjoy, I'd like to share some additional thoughts with you. You are quite right that there is magic in the Exchange data far more data than just email messages. There's social network data, implied definitions of individual/personal relevancy and a huge collection of exploitable meta-data.

There's more which was equally relevant, personalized to what I was thinking (and blogging) about, and simple to process (e.g. a handful of short, clear paragraphs.)

I responded with a quick "So er um when do I get to play with something?" to see how real this was. Nick responded with an awesome video demonstration teaser that was customized for me. There are lots of great attributes of the video including:

• It is only 2:43 minutes long
• Nick is the moderator
• It's personalized to me and Foundry Group
• It has a 30 second setup of the problem
• The other two minutes are a demo set to Steppenwolf's Magic Carpet Ride (which made it easy for me to sit back and watch.)

Under three minutes and I get that what Disruptor Monkey is doing is interesting to me.

Now, I don't know if I want to fund Nick's company, but I definitely want to spend more time with him.

Plus they've got a bitching logo.

Have I mentioned that I take requests? Today Sandy leaves a comment for me, asking me to explain the economics of RSS feeds; I'm happy to oblige.

The comment keys off my description of FT.com's decision to truncate its RSS feeds as "idiotic". Why so, asks Sandy aren't blogs an ad-driven medium? Don't you need to visit a web page to see its ads? And doesn't truncating an RSS feed force people to visit the web page in order to read the whole thing?

The answers to those questions are yes, yes, and yes. But.

First, it is possible to put ads in RSS feeds, and no one I know objects to them. Indeed, the future of ads in RSS feeds helps to explain why Google thought that it was worth spending $100 million to buy Feedburner. But it is true that at the moment, these ads are neither particularly sought-after by advertisers, nor are they particularly clicked-on by readers. It's fair to say that ads served and viewed on a web page are more valuable than ads served and viewed in a feedreader.

Second, there are lots of reasons beyond ad revenue why people might want to write and publish blogs. Fred Wilson, for instance, makes money from his blog despite having no advertising on it: instead, it helps him find investment opportunities. Most of the top econobloggers are tenured professors who use their blogs basically as a high-level economics seminar. And so forth. But yes, if you're talking about blogs on the likes of FT.com or Portfolio.com, I'm quite sure that the publishers are going to want to see as much ad revenue as possible from all those pageviews.

So if web pageviews are worth more than RSS pageviews, and if a truncated feed sends readers from the RSS feed to the web page, isn't a truncated feed a no-brainer?

Not at all. In fact, there's very good reason to believe that a full RSS feed will end up driving much more traffic to the web page than a truncated RSS feed will. Mike Masnick of Techdirt puts his finger on one part of the reason why:

In our experience, full text feeds actually does lead to more page views. Full text feeds makes the reading process much easier. It means it's that much more likely that someone reads the full piece and actually understands what's being said -- which makes it much, much, much more likely that they'll then forward it on to someone else, or blog about it themselves, or post it to Digg or Reddit or Slashdot or Fark or any other such thing -- and that generates more traffic and interest and page views from new readers, who we hope subscribe to the RSS feed and become regular readers as well. The whole idea is that by making it easier and easier for anyone to read and fully grasp our content, the more likely they are to spread it via word of mouth, and that tends to lead to much greater adoption than by limiting what we give to our readers and begging them to come to our site if they want to read more than a sentence or two.

And Robert Scoble says something similar:

RSS lets people read about 10 times the amount of content than if you just use a Web browser. That's why journalists, connectors, bloggers, geeks who care about productivity, etc use RSS. It's also why advertising in RSS isn't yet working. These people aren't good targets for loosely-targetted advertising...
So, how does anyone make any money?
Well, let's stay in TODAY'S world. In today's world you get journalists, geeks, bloggers, connectors, to read your content and link to it. That'll bring a larger audience to visit your Web page. How do you do that? Serve out full-text RSS. Why? Cause by doing that you treat the connector with the most possible respect and give him/her the easiest way to consume your content and link to it.

It's undeniable that RSS users love full feeds and hate partial feeds to the point at which we will tend to skip over the partial feeds even if we don't unsubscribe from them entirely. When Megan McArdle started blogging at the Economist, I subscribed to her feed. When she left, the feed remained but I think I've actually clicked through and read the blog exactly once since then under its new author, because the feed is so truncated as to be all but useless.

More generally, I'll skim through all manner of stuff in a feed reader that I'd never read on a web page. Entries are just easier to read when they're cleanly presented in a black font of my choosing on a white background with no annoying colors and graphical elements. So if you want me to read your stuff, serve up a full feed. And you do want me to read your stuff, because if I do then there's a good chance I'll link to you, and that will drive traffic your way.

There are other reasons to serve full RSS, too. For one thing, most feedreaders allow their users to browse content offline. I been known to catch up on quite a lot of blogs while on a train or a plane. And you can't do that with truncated feeds.

What's more, nearly all feed readers have a search function, and people use their RSS readers to search for stories they're interested in. Their search term is much more likely to come up if you serve a full feed rather than a truncated one. The FT should certainly know this, because they do it themselves. Here's a little something they published back in April:

Which led blogger Felix Salmon to note that investment banks are now primarily valued for their ability to bring their own risk appetite to the table. And they're not just taking on senior debt, they're taking on equity bridges and even outright equity risk, Salmon writes.

The URL they used to link to me is very, very long. It's not a direct link to my blog; it's not even a link to Feedburner which redirects to my blog. Instead, it's a link they pulled off a blog search they did in Bloglines.com, searching on the terms KKR and "investment bank". If I hadn't been serving the full version of my blog, my blog entry would never have come up in their search results, and they wouldn't have linked to me. But they did, and my website got extra traffic even though the FT themselves never actually visited it.

So if you want to maximise your advertising revenues, you want to maximise your traffic. And the way to do that is not to put up barriers which stop people from reading you or finding your stuff. Rather, the best way to do that is to get inbound links. And a full RSS feed will generate many more inbound links than a truncated RSS feed will.

Amy Gahran understands:

Partial feeds are popular with media organizations and others who measure success primarily by counting pageviews on their sites. That is, they think it's more important to lure people to their site so they can count them and increase their online ad rates, than it is to build loyalty by finding better ways to serve online communities on their own terms.

Even if truncating RSS did increase pageviews, it would still be a bad idea: as Jeff Jarvis says ad nauseam, what publishers are really selling is their relationship with their readers, more than easily-quantifiable eyeballs. And so they should be trying to make that relationship as good as possible.

In any case, publishers should stop thinking of websites just as websites, and start embracing all of the rest of the internet not only HTML but also XML and anything else that will bring their content to their readers.

But the real reason why truncating RSS feeds is idiotic is simply that it's stunningly self-defeating. I used to read Slate a lot; now, I don't, because I've moved from the web to RSS, and Slate hasn't. Likewise, the FT's Alphaville blog. Hell, I'm even unlikely to notice Portfolio.com content, if it doesn't turn up in one of the RSS feeds, and one of the reasons why I'm sometimes bad at responding to comments here is that I don't have a comments feed to keep me up to speed.

I'll admit to being something of an outlier when it comes to RSS usage. But we RSS outliers are precisely the people that the likes of FT.com want to attract. They'll work it out eventually, I'm sure.