“Instead, sell a small sub-set of your products that you think may sell well online. For each product, provide a high level of detail describing the product. Follow up with some solid advice on how to choose the correct product for you, or provide expertise and background on the origins of the product.”

People want to trust you, so let them. It’s simple; if people trust you, they will come back. Have a look at the most popular bloggers, they cover a small niche of subjects, they don’t try to be the ‘online newspaper’ with hundreds of articles everyday.

“Most products can already be found online, but there’s often a lack of detail and advice regarding the product. This can become an important and trust-building point of differentiation between you and your competitors.”

Online business is not very different from blogging or online journalism. You are trying to feed your users with the content they want, trust and transparency is one of the biggest factors in building a reliable reputation online.

The best thing you can do for your users and customers, which is not touched on in the article, is to come and play on their playground. You come to where they are, don’t just try and persuade them to come to you. Visit their blogs, offer advice (DON’T SELL) but don’t be that guy. Sign up to forums about your topic or product and start engaging with your users (DON’T SELL), become their friend.

One of the reasons that blogs can become so popular, so fast is that their authors probably had build their reputation way before they started the blog. Most blogs spring up out of interest from the author, bloggers love to engage online, they’ve probably been regulars on forums oand other blogs for years before they started their own. In other words; they already had a brand that people could trust.

It seems like hardcore twitter users are mostly trying to compare the two services, and friendfeed users take pride in separating the two.

I have been describing friendfeed as Twitter on steroids which I believe to be true to some extend. At least to someone who’s not familiar with friendfeed but is using Twitter like nobody’s business.

Some of the stuff that to me shows their differences are the fact that, you can’t link to individual comments and on Twitter we hate when users are simply spamming their streams with automatic rss feeds, where on friendfeed we love it. To me it suggests that people expect more intimacy on Twitter than they do on friendfeed, or that Twitter users expects some kind of selective sharing, where on friendfeed you are expected to share everything by default.

A lot of features separate the the services. Friendfeed has an impressive set of features that Twitter lack. This will undoubtly make friendfeed more popular by tech geeks and social media addicts who are used to dealing with lots of information and needs these filtering options. But, it seems like only a very small amount of friendfeed users can actually handle that amount of info, as only a small percentage of it’s users are actually subscribed to more than 40 friends. Or, is that just a snapshot of the active user-base that friendfeed currently has? Is Mike Arrington right after all?

here are some of the responses I got on friendfeed. I’m sorry I can’t link to them ;-)

friendfeed will not be superior to twitter for conversation before a feature to easily isolate, and link to individual comments is released.

I say:

[E]specially bloggers and news reporters, frequently use responses they get to questions posed on twitter in their final stories. Such responses would be impossible to link to here on friendfeed. And if friendfeed can’t persuade bloggers and news-makers to come over here, friendfeed will have a very hard time getting a substantial user-base.

Lindsay D.:

FriendFeed has a loyal following and community, many of who prefer it to Twitter for their day to day communication with others online, and take offense to Twitter being referred to as superior [...] FriendFeed outshines Twitter in many ways, and is much better for conversation in my opinion.

Lindsay D.:

So I would suggest that FF’s goal may not be to have bloggers linking comments in their blogs, but getting the whole conversation here instead. [...] I think the people who prefer Twitter are not the same as the people that prefer FriendFeed because they have different needs and expectations.

I say:

[A]n interesting take, that friendfeed is trying to steer away from individual comments because they want to focus on the whole debate. I think individual comments can be worth more than that, and a feature to like comments or link to them would be very useful I think. For example; a question about someones opinion on X, is encouraging opinion regardless of context and would give a lot of individual viewpoints that likely could be very worthy, even out of context.

This was simply some selective highlighting of the main points, but if you want the whole picture and participate in the discussion, I recommend you take a look at the original friendfeed entry.

Louis Gray approaches it from a marketing perspective and ReadWriteWeb from a more journalistic perspective, but I don’t think that makes much of difference.

Unsubscribe, Unsubscribe, Unsubscribe

The main pointers from Louis Gray were as taken from a therapy session (which worked on me), convincing us that we are in control and have the power to defeat the information overload monster. His main points were:

• Your are in control of what you subscribe to.
• Opt out of email lists.
• Use filters to ‘discover’ the important stuff.
• Unsubscribe, Unsubscribe, Unsubscribe.
• Skim like mad.
• Analyse your sources to determine follow worthiness.

What I like:

• Skim reading
• Quick source analysis

What I don’t like:

• Unsubscribing is not the solution.
• Overly complicated filters.
• No clear mention of grouping of sources.

Subscribe, Subscribe, Prioritize

ReadWriteWeb have their own take on how to control your information overload. According to RRW ‘groups’ are the holy grail of controlling the information of the social web. And in true social media style, they recommend you to subscribe to everyone who subscribe to you. Some pointers from the article:

• Group sources by topic.
• Prioritizing is your noise filter.
• Context brings meaning.
• Have your closest contacts handy.
• Value your weak connections.
• Follow everyone who follows you.
• Learn to appreciate the full stream.

What I like:

• Prioritize to filter noise.
• Using (broad) groups to create context.
• Selective follow-back.

What I don’t like:

• Following everyone who follows you.
• Too many specific groups.

Both are valid strategies or solutions if you like, to a common problem. I believe in a combination of the two. Unsubscribing is a tempting solution as it quickly decreases the noise, but it’s only a temporary solution as you will inevitable keep adding to your stream. Filters are good but can get complicated and hard to maintain. Filters are good for extremely targeted keywords, which makes them great as short term solutions for specific projects (or research for articles).

Time is a big decider as well. You don’t want to spend several minutes analysing every person who subscribe to you, or leave a comment on your site to determine whether you should follow back or not. You could either not subscribe at all, or simply subscribe to everything. I believe (not saying I do this) that everyone who follows you, are worthy of a follow back, IF; they are a ‘real’ person and don’t just spam their stream with links. It takes around five seconds to determine that.

Use groups, but don’t overuse them.

Don’t have too many groups, the more you have the more time it takes to determine where a source goes. Use a few broad topic groups, preferably no more than five.

Make sure you got a group with all your most important feeds/streams/followers. Most people could probably get away with just having one group where all the most important sources go. This is the best way to filter the noise, you know which sources are the most valuable, you should have quick access to all of them. Even if you follow 2500 people on twitter, you simply need 1 group with the 50 most important and you have cut noise significantly. You can pay attention to the important ones, and skim read the rest.

Don’t worry about missing stuff, if you are on twitter, friendfeed or facebbok, you can be sure that the community will let you know if you have missed anything. More importantly, focus on what your friends missed, that’s where the real value is.

I really like the potential of Friendfeed, and I want to get a few more subscribers than the 11 I have got now . here are a few of the things I’m going to try to change that.

• Use Friendfeed to post status updates.
  I will start posting status updates to Friendfeed and cc twitter. This will show my subscribers that I’m actually using Friendfeed and not just aggregating. The problem with people that only aggregate, is that they probably won’t see the comments you make on their entries. By posting actively to Friendfeed I can show that Iactually spend time there. The other upside is that all my short URLs on twitter will be ff.im/xxxxxx, people on twitter using Friendfeed can see that I’m on Friendfeed and maybe they’ll subscribe (I know it’s a long shot but anyway).
  Update: I have my twitter settings set to ‘Link to source site instead of FriendFeed conversation’, deselect that, and your twitter links go directly to your Friendfeed entry instead of the link source. It publicises your Friendfeed account more, but it also requires one more click on your users’ part. Scobleizer and Thomas Hawk use this so it can’t be that bad, considering they are some of the biggest Friendfeed users. – Maybe I should try it?
• Join rooms and, most importantly, contribute.
  Contribute to the community! Friendfeed supports ‘groups’ as they call them. Everyone can create their own room and invite others to post to them, this gives a space for a community to have a specialised discussion. A little like you know it from forums and discussion boards. Posting to these rooms should get my name out there to the Friendfeed community and hopefully a few people will notice and follow me.
• Use the Friendfeed bookmarklet
  The Friendfeed browser bookmarklet is actually quite handy. It works almost like the Shareaholic Firefox add-on . You can share anything on Friendfeed by the click of button. It’s an extremely easy way to post interesting links, and if you use the post to twitter option your links will go straight to your twitter stream. No more copy pasting into Tweetdeck or various URL shortening services.
• Discuss on Friendfeed, not twitter.
  I will start engaging more in the discussions that are happening on Friendfeed. It’s super easy to follow discussions on Friendfeed, they are all grouped together around the original post, like a blog post.
• Using saved searches (filters).
  This saved searches are really filters, bu t I guess saved searches make more sense to the average user. These let’s me filter for keywords, like count and comments count. Great feature if you want to cut down on all the noise and discover the most important discussions. Let’s say you are into formula 1, you can filter all entries with 1 or more like which have at least 5 comments, – powerful feature .
• Like more.
  It’s no secret that I have had doubts about what the like feature on Friendfeed and Facebook was good for. But with the saved searches function it really makes sense, it’s like a voting system where you can filter out the best entries. Whenever you like an entry, a little link to you Friendfeed profile is displayedjust underneath the entry saying ‘kasperbs liked this’.

It might sound like I’m all interested in the number of followers or subscribers. And I’m am, to a certain extend. For a service like Friendfeed to be more useful to me, I think you need to build a following just like you do on twitter. These services are great for instant discussion, but it doesn’t make sense if you are only talking to yourself. – That is why I still have the ‘post to twitter’ option turned on so all my updates will go to twitter, where most of the people who care, spend their time.

Social capital and whuffie is basically the same thing, – it’s a reputation currency. Tara got the word from Cory Doctorow’s book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom where it’s described as a futuristic replacement for money.

“A person’s Whuffie is a general measurement of his or her overall reputation, and Whuffie is lost and gained according to a person’s favorable or unfavorable actions.”

A person’s whuffie can literally be used to pay for stuff and the more whuffie you got, the less $$ you need. But in reality, this is simply a set of guidelines on how to create relationships online. Measuring whuffie is just a way to convince companies that they can’t just ignore it, and have to embrace social media, rather than shy away from it.

Personally I’m a big fan of this approach to measuring social media capital. Social media investments can be extremely hard to measure. Traditional marketing results are much easier to transfer to a graph and show of to companies.

5 things that will increase your whuffie

1. Turn that bullhorn around
   Stop blasting your message out and start creating relationships. Listen to your customers and react to feedback as fast as possible
2. Become part of the community you serve
   Figure out who you are serving and become part of their lives. Engage, but DON’T sell. Break it down and identify who, why and what makes people interested in you and be interested in them!
3. Create amazing customer experiences
   Make people LOVE your service or product, really love. Appeal to emotion, inject fun into you or your product, give people control, simplify, make happiness your business model.
4. Embrace the chaos
   Don’t try to control the message. Basically this is about facing the chaos (problem) and actively showing that you are addressing it. See it as a chance to improve
5. Find your higher purpose
   Find a way to give back to the community by thinking ‘customer centric’. Send them to other websites, don’t cut down on customer service.

This really doesn’t do the talk justice so have a look through the 317 slides and watch the hour long video.

The new beta design of Friendfeed adds some really nice advanced filters. I’m really excited about the addition of ‘popularity filters’ as I call them. They allow you to search for conversations or posts, that have received x number of likes or comments.

Just imagine how you can put this to use in your own field. You can search everybody’s posts (or just your friends’) for keywords, and filter them in terms of popularity. You have a unique ability to catch content way before it makes it to the mainstream online media.

Full res. on flickr.

You can have multiple tabs open with several advanced searches going on. This seems like an improvement over something like Twitterfall, which is browser based, and doesn’t have the same advanced search functions.

Here are Yahoo’s goals for the app:

• Create a desktop application that allows for the creation, grouping, and auto-execution of advanced search queries against Twitter
• Leverage existing skill-sets and tools
• Target the Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux operating systems and minimize the amount of platform specific code that must be written
• Open source the code so that others can learn from, contribute to, and/or extend the product as they see fit

But to be fair, it does also seem like the ONLY advantage is the advanced search. Sideline offers very little in terms of interaction, you can’t reply or DM anyone, you can’t even log in. You can mark tweets as favourites, but as you are not logged in, these will only be saved locally and won’t be viewable in your Twitter favourites.

Except for being a desktop client and featuring tabs, it doesn’t offer much more than the official twitter search. It only updates every minute, you can set this to be less frequent. But you can’t have it update every two seconds or so, meaning if you monitor popular search terms, you will be bombareded with 100’s of results to go through every minute.

Hopefully Yahoo will improve this Twitter client in the future to include some of the features that you have in TweetDeck and Twitterfall, but at the moment it doesn’t seem very usefull. I will stick to Twiterfall for my Twitter searches. But as mentioned on mashable:

Sideline seems to be more of a research project for Yahoo rather than building a new major new product or division.

There hasn’t been many reactions as of yet in the blogosphere, but there has been a few on Twitter:

mahadewa@avianto That’s cool :) re:sideline 2 minutes ago from TweetDeck in reply to avianto

alicam: Not sure if we need another Twitter search app but it works nicely – http://sideline.yahoo.com/ 2 minutes ago from TweetDeck

frumpa: trying out Yahoo’s Sideline but the links are NOT active hyperlinks http://sideline.yahoo.com 38 minutes ago from TweetDeck

e_D_D_y: Is Yahoo! SideLine an April Fools joke ? Can’t get any result, it’s just… empty :( about 1 hour ago from DestroyTwitter

As Gavin Wray says in the comments on Michael’s post:

“Thanks for making this guide. You make clear sense out of what can seem a daunting task.”

You see it time and time again. Organisations showing terrible timing and understanding, responding to bad feedback by alienating people and ignoring the community.

If you can answer these questions by a yes or no, you have come a long way in your aproach to bad feedback. The golden nugget being: listen first, then react.

The audio of my Social Media presentation at WxWM (mp3) (courtesy of Rhubarb Radio).

Is there a difference between using social media profesionally or personally by kasperbs

The slides that accompanied my talk:

A list of all the other presentations (with audio) can be found at Rhubarb Radio