Image by Bryan Veloso via Flickr

1. Official blog. It doesn’t matter if it’s hosted or ran elsewhere on some blogspot subdomain. Make it easy for your fans to follow your human voice. You can also just post cute pictures, like Flickr blog does.

2. Facebook fan page/group. So you can count your followers easily and massively notify them of events and happenings around your brand. I like the way Kiberpipa Facebook group is actively managed in this regard, always inviting people to events.

3. Twitter account. Just have a quick and lazy way for someone to follow news about your company, be able to @brandname and a way, if you want, to officially reply. I love the way Six Apart highlights changes in their services and promotes their users.

Image by Chandra Marsono via Flickr

4. Flickr group and official account. Make all the pictures in there Creative Commons or public domains, to make it easy for bloggers and others to build on top of your brand and spread a good word. Great example of Flickr search results would be startup Spotify. It took me 2 seconds to find a cool post to go with my blog post.

5. Vimeo or YouTube channel. Make it easy for others to emeeded and once again, blog and share your video material. If you’re a boring traditional Web 2.0 startup, you have at least some screencast to show. Mozilla Firefox Vimeo channel is definetly going into that direction, as is Brightkite.

6. Dopplr Group. Even though they’re still in early beta, you should make sure that everyone in your organization that ever travels, is in your group. Then you can stick a widget of your presence on your blog and have the cheapest way for you to announce your presence in a certain part of the world. With greater idea that this means more potential feedback opportunities or potential business partner meetings. No examples yet, but it should happen soon in a few week as they roll out the service in full.

Image by roland via Flickr

7. Upcoming listing. If you are organizing an event, a party or just semi-ad-hoc meetup, you have to add it there. Often people figure out what’s happening in that city on the same day or day before, so having an even in a group like Web 2.0 geeks, should give a few more visitors. Startups and events organizers to imitate, are all that are in Web Conference Junkies and similar (at least for London and San Francisco).

8. Get Satisfaction for support forums, if you run some kind of service or make a product. For a while now, we’ve been collectively teaching users how to get support there, so it makes sense for you to piggyback on this. If you don’t they’ll create a group for your product anyway, and you’ll just be forced to go there. Classical example of something wonderful coming from this, is Timbuk2 group on GS, that actually prompted them to create a diaper bag, after enough people expressed interest.

Image by Damien Tanner via Flickr

9. Ma.gnolia or Del.icio.us for social bookmarking. As you get more popular and your team grows, you’ll want an easy way to track buzz and then pull it in into your web page. Having everyone in team add mentions under pre-arranged tags into a group allows for a great collaborative buzz-tracking experience. Examples? OpenDNS blog buzz and Zemanta on Ma.gnolia. For more details on this technique, see my post – Online buzz management for startups.

Image by Robyn Gallagher via Flickr

10. Moo cards. You’re not a proper social media enabled company, without these signature cards. The ones that have them will instantly connect with you, while you can enlighten others.

11. Whatever works for you! You community might be more into Meetup.com then Upcoming, go with that also. In Slovenia I’d go for Koornk on top of Twitter, while in UK I’d defintly consider Bebo vs. MySpace if I’m in music space and younger Y Generation members.

Related posts:

1. Social media presence is not what your product needs
2. Cuil – where’s the social media in the launch?
3. Social media advice to Seedcamp finalists

Image by hz536n via Flickr

Gathering qualitative data, like interviews, presents an interesting alternative to classical online surveys. While in survey gathering we can setup an online environment, and leave it running for longer time without our strict supervision, in interview setting a real-time component is really important (unless you want to do a bit longer interview over e-mails).

 

Going the voice way

 

Our first option is to emulate phone interview, by using one of the IP/internet based – VoIP alternatives. Most well-known would certainly be Skype, freeware multi-platform Voice/Video/Chat system. It should be fairly easy to setup an interview session using this medium. You can even call them to a land-line or mobile phone and use one of the popular Skype recoding utilities to make a digital copy of the interview.

Image via Wikipedia

Afterwards you should use a dedicated transcribing tool, to easily make a transcript of your session. Do note that you really want to have a specialized utility for transcribing, since it allows you to slower down the recording, to the speed of your typing, pause and rewind easily with keyboard shortcut and a lot more.

 

Having a chat

 

Other alternative to voice or possibly video, would be asynchronous-chat. While it isn’t as involved as interactive voice, it gives more ease to interviewee since they can take time to think of their answer, have someone else in a room, etc. The same luxury is also present on your side of the interview.

The tools of the trade would usually be chat applications like Microsoft Messanger, Google Talk, Skype, etc. The issue here is that connecting using these tools can present serious invasion into privacy of other user (as you now know their screen name), it also means that the person will be online at the time, making probability that some-one else will want to chat to her, much higher. It also turns out that a lot of people online still don’t fully understand the Instant messaging, so this might lead to a serious of confusions and problems (especially if the person interviewing is not technically most skilled).

My proposed solution to this would be to use a tool like Campfire from 37signals, to setup a web based chat room, into which the interview participants would then be invited it. This is also good tactic for online focus groups, as it allows for easily connecting a number of people without worrying about their different screen names and incompatible applications. 

There are a number of free alternatives that could be used to setup a Campfire like environment, one way would be to use Moodle with a chat module where you would treat participants as students and conduct chat sessions with them.

 

Online worlds

 

Image via Wikipedia

Second Life is today a de-facto standard for a virtual world. If you have luxury to place your participants there, you can also study their gestures and general body language while talking or chatting to them. The only problem is that it’s quite a complex environment where all participants need to beforehand know how to navigate it.

Easier (but less powerful) alternative could be Google’s 3D world called Lively that allows a bit more freedom like traditional chat room, while still having limited enough controls to be within reach from technically less-savy participants.

While conducting interviews in online worlds looks like a great idea at the start, it usually turns out that you’ve severely limited the amount of people who can participate because of hardware requirements, internet speed and technical knowledge. Depending on the type of research you do, this can present a serious set-back once you start your work.

 

General observations

 

Doing online interviews is demanding task that will folly occupy you. You should expect that each interview (esp. unstructured) could easily take you a few hours of involved typing. Afterwards you should also take time to go through the interview, adding the notes and studying responses so you’ll have easier time later analyzing it.

Also don’t forget to take time in the beginning to do a dry-run full interview with someone you know and trust so you can learn the technology and get general idea of things that could go wrong.

I mentioned just a popular few applications for doing the tasks. There are numerous alternatives with their own specific, but in this context I felt discussing them would add noise to the post.

Related posts:

1. 3 easy ways to do online surveys
2. WebCamp break out session #1 – Adoption challenges (for social network portability) and ways for solving them
3. The importance of identity in online communities

This is a short tutorial how to insert links into your blog post using MySpace blog editor on OS X in Firefox. It’s pretty verbose as I tried to see if I can write a detailed tutorial. It’s a quick republish of the blog on my MySpace blog, as I’m not sure if everyone can see it there. For more technical audience of this blog, just ignore this post

Lets start first with the fact that you’ll need Firefox for this to work. Firefox is a free alternative to Safari. (Btw, this tutorial works for all Firefox users on all other platforms – Windows and Linux).

After you installed Firefox, go to your MySpace page and open up Blog editor. You’ll get an error message like this:

Just press cancel and a full editor will load for you:

(this screenshot uses Zemanta so it’s a bit more full of things, as it will suggest to you all sorts of things while you blog).

Now moving on to placing links part. We’re going to create a link to moo.com. They’re makers of really great business cards.

Click on the green world with a paper clip icon:

Now just enter their URL – web address, and the text you want for your link:

There is also an option what to do with the link target. While there are four options there, in reality they will just do two things for you: either open link in the same window, and replace your blog, or open the link in a new browser window.

To open a blog in a new window, select option _blank. All other will open in the same window. For those who are more technically inclined, you can read full explanation of target attribute on this page.

And that’s it. Now you have a nice link:
moo.com – makers of cool business cards. (btw, I have some discount codes. Leave a comment if you are interested).

I also noticed that MySpace blog editor is pretty buggy, so sometimes the icon doesn’t work. Refreshing the page seems to fix that.

That’s it for today. Leave a comment with suggestions what else you’d like to see a tutorial on, or if I didn’t explain something correctly.

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