Reno shows local government how to go mobile

mySchools, an interesting social media solution for schools and students

I found this great picture of my Alma mater on Flickr (by wallyg) and I knew it would be perfect for this post. 

I chatted with Sasha Peterson, President at Hobsons EMT, about their mySchools offering. Similar to the way Parature brought its helpdesk CRM integration directly into Facebook, Hobsons EMT is bringing their enrollment CRM application directly into Facebook, benefiting potential college students and universities in the process.

For those of you unfamiliar with Hobsons EMT, or Enrollment Management Technology, the solution is a CRM application specifically designed to enable higher education to manage the application and enrollment process.  They have more than 650 installations and were looking for a way of helping their customers in higher education to more easily interact with their customers (the potential students) where they were already hanging out. Facebook was, and still is, the right place to engage with these users.

The Facebook application is fairly light-weight for now.  Hobsons is on an eight to ten week agile development cycle and expects to deliver much more in the near future.  For higher education customers of Hobsons the application is free, it is simply another tool that enables them to reach out to their audience.

For potential students using the Hobsons College Views and/or College Confidential applicationsthey will be able create Facebook badges to dynamically display their top five schools. Not much, not yet, I agree.   However, this starting point should lead to additional buzz as students discuss their college choices, as others want to display their badges, and ultimately lead to more promotion for the  institutions using the product.  Ultimately, that is goal.

As a father of a soon to be college freshman I could see this starting point being of value.  However, if Hobsons wants to fully leverage this channel for their customers they should also consider improvements such as:

• Dynamically updating as the student narrow their choices down to the last choice.  Perhaps showing a new badge as the top choice.  Something that will further give students a reason to discuss the school.
• Enable wall updates based upon news feeds from the higher education institutions.
• Hobsons could offer value added wall updates like general tips discussing tips and best practices for students going off to school.  The goal,provide great information while giving students more to discuss.
• I am also a big fan of some level of game integration, even if nothing more than quiz-style games that enable students to work through a pretend degree program.  Fun, engaging, building awareness of the university and Hobsons.

While not directly related to the Facebook product, it’s worth noting that the Hobsons EMT product enables organizations to manually define rules about how to best communicate with a given student.  For example, if one student spends the majority of their time on Youtube while another spends hours on Facebook the solution will deliver information to the student over the channel that they are most actively using.  Smart approach.  One that is far better than the carpet bombing approach many companies use today.

What else would you like to know?

John

Twitalyzer, a serious analytics tool for Twitter users

I have been watching this application for a while, and regularly chat with Jeff Katz one of the real leaders in the analytics space.  Twitalyzer will be releasing their 3.0 release within the next week and, if you have not yet checked them out I would urge you to do so.

Note, their free offering is enough for most people and probably most small businesses and local governments.  While I did attempt to sign up for their low cost individual offering I received an error through PayPal.  Unfortunate as this has been the only major glitch I have encountered so far.

What is Twitalyzer?

Twitalyzer literally analyzes your Twitter activity, and that of your network, to give you a rich set of  metrics with which you can refine your efforts on Twitter.  While the tool would benefit from analyzing other networks as well, providing organizations with a complete view of their activity, it does Twitter analysis so well that it is a must have tool.

Tell us more

The dashboard view has a graphical representation of 20 key metrics, ranging from simple measures such as number of followers to calculated measures like Impact and Velocity.    I would focus most upon these metrics:

• Impact. This measure takes into account key numbers such as number of followers, number of unique retweets, the number of unique mentions, and other factors.  It is a good indicator of your overall “buzz”.
• Signal.  This measure is an indicator of the value of your tweets.  It takes into account how often your tweets include links, mentions of others, retweets, and the like.  In other words, are you just telling us about your last cup of coffee or are you sharing something of interest.
• Retweets per 1000 users.  This metric gives you a great feel for the business value of your community.  If your community is not helping you spread your message you need to find ways to bring in people who will.

Alright, can the tool help me find the right people?

I am glad you asked…. Yes, it can.  Twitalyzer includes the ability to search for other users to follow.  As an example, searching for users mentioning marketing with a generosity score greater than 80 returns a list of those users who retweet a lot of content about marketing topics.  Follow these people.  If and when they follow you back you MAY have enlisted someone who will retweet your content dealing with marketing…  Maybe?

Social media only goes so far, where can I go to meet with my community in person?

Twitalyzer enables you to visually find where the most impactful members of your Twitter community live with a nice use of Google maps.  Getting ready to go on the road?  Reach out to these users and meet them in person.

Curious which of your tweets are going the furthest?

Similar to bit.ly Twitalyzer highlights which of your tweets are the most popular in terms of number of retweets.  I am looking forward to eventually having drill-down as I really want to know things like who retweeted and when. I would also love to see:

• The impact score of the tweet.  In other words, take the average impact of the people retweeting the tweet as that is often more important than the total number of retweets.
• The overall reach of the tweet.  Based upon overall community size for all of those people who have retweeted content, how many potential viewers saw my message?

What’s next for Twitalyzer?

As a betting man I am waiting for someone like Salesforce, Google (who should buy Salesforce too), or Lithium to ultimately by the company.  It would be a great addition to their offerings and give a major differentiator.

What else can I tell you about Twitalyzer?

John

Applications to check out

I saw a number of great application updates this week that I wanted to call your attention to, you may find them valuable.

Gist for Android

I wrote about Gist several months, considering it a good example of personal social CRM.  I still feel that way as the product continues to evolve and continues to simply get better.  Gist released their Android application this week and gave me even more reason to recommend the product for you to use.  Some of my favorite points include:

• All of my connections, and all of their social media activities, are available to me all the time.  My phone is never far away and now Gist is always with me as well.
• As with the full product all companies and people who I am interacting with are available in the Gist CRM application.
• It is easy to filter the amount of social activity by channel type (I generally ignore twitter in Gist due to the volume) and the importance of the connection.
• While you can easily Share, using the built-in Android sharing capabilities Gist does include, by default, extraneous marketing text with the Share ability, explaining to your connections that you found this information using Gist.  Please give me a way to turn this off.
• The ability to capture notes is missing from the Android application (at least I have not found it) and this is a big gap that I am hoping Gist addresses in one of the next updates.

Overall I like the application and would encourage any Android user to download the application and begin using Gist.  Understand, however, that it is a V1 application and more work is needed.  However, Gist has demonstrated an ability to rapidly iterate, expect the same on the mobile front.

Tweetdeck Version 0.34.2

Support for Google Buzz and Foursquare, need I say more?  As you know, I share a lot of information via Twitter but I also attempt to share it on Stumbleupon and Google Buzz as well.  The ability to simultaneous share updates across Twitter and Google Buzz is a personal time saver.

While not new in this release, I wanted to point out the translate feature which I use frequently.  I follow many people who tweet in languages other than American English.  The translate capability works well enough to understand their message and that, combined with the Google translate feature allows me to learn from anyone, anywhere in the world.  Are you taking advantage of this yet?

Note that I also took a look at Twitalyzer’s 3.0 Beta product and I will have a more detailed update coming on that soon.

John

A show about nothing…

Why isn’t your organization doing more with video? it’s pretty easy and adds a powerful engagement method to your communication efforts.

Mobile web browsing stats

While most people understand the need to offer mobile support for their applications I wanted to briefly share a few statistics that I hope will help all of us better understand why this is important.

Worldwide Usage

Mobile web browsing has increased by more than 240% since March of 2009.  While worldwide mobile web browsing is only 1.70% of all web browsing it is rising quickly.

You’re probably wondering, how does this compare to the mobile browsing habits on one of our favorite social media sites?

Facebook Usage

The current Facebook statistics, as of this time, show that about 25% of all active Facebook users access the platform through a mobile device.  25% comes to more than 100 million users.

Okay, but how active are they?

Facebook users that access the platform through mobile devices are twice as active as non-mobile users.  That’s right, twice as active.

Still unsure about support mobile applications and mobile web browsing?

What is your approach to Social Business or Government 2.0?

Once again it is time for a survey and I am using SurveyMonkey so it is, unfortunately, not embedded in this post as nicely as I would like. The questions focus on your approach to Social Business Strategies (think social media done right) for your organization (business, federal agency, local government, etc..).  The survey should take 5 minutes, tops and I truly appreciate your time to answer these questions.

Click here to take survey

Results,  once completed, will be shared with all.

Collaborative solutions are slow in coming to Spain, help is on the way

While countries like the United States, Canada, Australia, the UK, and others are making good strides around the use of social media and other collaborative solutions and strategies, countries like Spain are just getting started.  I learned of an interesting effort underway in Madrid, an effort to make Madrid a Smarter City, and I had to reach out to the people involved to learn more.

Jose Angel works as an R&D Consultant at Anova IT Consulting, a Spanish company which focuses on Business Strategy Consulting, R&D&I and Technological Services.  The information he shared with me, after receiving the proper approvals, opened my eyes. One of these days I will have to get over to Spain and work with these folks as they are doing some truly good work.

Q. What do you mean when you speak of making Madrid a Smarter City?
A. When we talk about making Madrid a Smarter City, we talk about making it smarter for the citizens, about developing applications that will make their lives easier. That’s our main goal. The main idea of the Project I am working on is to optimize the existing transport infrastructure by creating a sensor network that will lead us to create a real-time map of Madrid traffic.

That will allow us to develop mobile applications for the citizens so they can avoid traffic jams, get valuable information about where is the nearest parking spot, or to detect the position of public transport services allowing us to synchronize them in the future.

I am a follower of Bill Chamberlin´s Horizons Watching blog (Social Insights Consultant @IBM), and while we were developing our proposal, I just saw his last post. “I see a future where Advanced Traveler Information Systems are capable of advising travelers of suggested travel route changes due to traffic congestion changes…all in real-time.” So I just say hey, we are going in the right direction.

Q. What return on investment are you expecting to see with these efforts?
A. Right now we are at a stage where we expect the project to be approved by the Ministry of Industry. That will allow us to obtain mixed funding to begin its development.

One of the ideas is to make the applications a collaborative network. Thus, the effectiveness of the parking application will increase as it does the number of people using it since one of the principles on which it relies is to redirect the citizens to the nearest parking avoiding that two drivers using the system go to the same spot

In order to reach a bigger audience we will allow downloading the application for free. After a year we will charge an annual fee that will allows us to maintain the network.

Q. In the US there is a big move to make 311 (non-emergency services) more open, via social media and open data, to citizens. Is there anything similar underway in Madrid, Spain, the EU?
A. While working on the project I just saw a web called Seeclickfix. It is undoubtedly a brilliant idea to connect citizens with their local government. But it’s an application that no one is using in Madrid. On the other hand our City Council has an excellent website that allows multiple online activities related to the administrative field, however the communication between rulers and citizens by social media is not happening. I guess we are still in Government 1.0.

Q. Are you familiar with location-based services like Foursquare and Gowalla? Are there similar services being used in Madrid?
A. Yeah, I know Foursquare. Indeed Dennis Crowley was recently in Spain, but I am not an active user and to be honest I did not knew the existence of Gowalla till you mention it in the question. However, I foresee a promising future for those kinds of projects as they evolve to provide useful information to their users. Our vision of such services was more limited. Just suited for tourism promotion.

Last year we were working on an idea to integrate those services into tourist guides through augmented reality browsers, so we could offer the tourist a different vision of the city by getting him into an immersive game. The project was approved by the Ministry of Industry and is currently in development.

Q. What role do social networks play in Madrid, in Spain? Which are the most popular?
A. In Spain they are two major social networks. Facebook and Tuenti. In fact Tuenti was co-founded by a former classmate. Twitter is starting to take off. Indeed it was translated a few months ago. However, the use of these networks is just mainly about communicating with colleagues and friends. By contrast, the use of professional networks is extremely limited. While I have almost all my friends on Facebook only ten of them have created a profile on LinkedIn. I guess as soon as people start to realize the potential of this networks they will grow exponential.

Tuesdays with Moore

My good friends in the GovLoop community were kind enough to ask me to do a weekly video blog post called Tuesdays with Moore.  The focus, of course, will be on my random thoughts about what is taking place in the public sector, focusing primarily on the use of collaborative strategies.

Education is one of the things most needed across all sectors and a simple goal for this series is to continue to educate you and I both.  Let me know what you think.

Crowdsourced tips from my Twitter community

Alright, you know I like Rob Cottingham’s Noise to Signal cartoons, they are awesome. I am once again lifting one of Rob’s cartoons (with permission of course) because it fits well with this post.

Twitter, like any other social media channel, has its upper echelon, its average users, its new users, and so on and so forth. So often people forget that they are engaging with real people and real organizations and simply make foolish choices.  We’ve all done it, to be honest, but we do not want to make a habit of it.  On the flip side, there are many, many, people and organizations doing great work which I try to constantly celebrate in my various case studies and interviews.

First, in honor of those that have lost their way, much as our well-followed friend in the cartoon, here are some of the things not to  do any longer:

• Stop referring to yourself as a visionary, ninja, guru, expert, or something similar. My friends @JoeManna, @TheMaria, @Eric_Andersen, @WendyWooWho, and @BillShander were discussing this recently and all agreed that this is a real turn-off.  If someone else refers to you in this way, fine, but please never write these phrases into your profile.
• @AntOf9 shared this:  ”10+ “listening to ___ song” tweets in a row (not same as I LOVE THIS SONG! tweets), w/ meaningless foursquare posts a close 2nd.”
• From @MikeSmithDev, “auto DMs. About as productive as having a conversation with an answering machine.”
• @JNJosh points out “The word “Crowdsource” ” .  Of course, he was also laughing at my attempt to crowd-source this blog post.
• @LoisMelbourne shared this pet-peeve, “people that stuff my twitter stream with multiple tweets all at once intentionally”.
• @Mattrdmn shares a much more practical issue as he notes “I have a hard time finding new people to follow. I find myself searching and searching but a lot of the things I’m interested in are tweeted by spam feeds.”
• Then @Story_Jon looks at two extremes when he notes “Broad: Self serving twitter strategies. Narrow: Automation, paid tweets, and not tweeting for yourself (ie Britney Spears)”
• @Quinno99 notes “How To Make Money on Twitter” spam, followed by news orgs tweeting celebrity gossip.” while @wilsonsway also notes “Spam and pushy sales #Twitter”
• My friend, @StephMcDonald, noted the one that disturbed me the most when she pointed out “People who randomly send you their blog w naked pics of themselves b/c you mentioned “cooking” in a tweet. Not kidding.”

In terms of positives, there is a huge list, as I have noted, of organizations and individuals doing it right.

• @wilsonsway noted “How to improve content, learning new things about Linux, for example. #twitter”
• @MattRdmn notes “I love the way news travels on twitter. How a story can break here and I only hear about it on the news the next day.”

Equally as important, never forget that many organizations are delivering real value through collaborative solutions and social media driven support, marketing, and sales.  Companies are reducing operational costs, increasing collaboration internally and externally, and often times breaking down the walls that should never have been erected in the first place.

John