MindComet

Future of measurement

I had the pleasure of meeting (and whooping up on in Golden Tee) Jason Peck of E-Way Direct at Social Fresh Tampa.

He pulled me aside that day and asked for my input on the future of measurement. Here’s the interview:

Read More & View Comments

Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Feb. 12, 2010

After conference TODOs

Hats off to Jason Keath for putting together one hell of a day at Social Fresh Tampa. It truly lived up to it’s promise of big conference speakers with a small conference feel.

It’s back to work time and I thought I’d share a few things I like to do after right after a conference.

Enter my contacts into my contact database

Managing my own business contact database is very new to me. I’ve been adding contacts into the MindComet database for years, but had never really pursued building my own. Chris Brogan really drives this point home in Trust Agents and I listened.

Add people I met along the way to my “conference people” Twitter list.

Social Fresh was chocked full of great people all interested in social media, many of whom I was able to lay the foundation of a social media relationship with. To keep the relationships warm, I maintain a Twitter list specifically for these folks and pay special attention to interacting them on a regular basis.

If I was a speaker, update my bio on MindComet.com and Linked-in

I was originally slated to just be a panel speaker at Social Fresh Tampa, but at the last minute Jason invited me to moderate the “Real Facebook and Twitter Results” panel. It’s definitely an honor for me and something that I’m attaching to my professional credentials. Plus, iteratively building your resume is MUCH easier than an en masse update when you need it.

Read More & View Comments

Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Feb. 10, 2010

Leveraging Twitter as a voting engine + FREE SOCKS!

Why is Twitter such a powerful medium?

It’s no secret that Twitter’s year-over-year growth is consistently in the 1000+% range. That’s a staggering and very impressive metric for this relatively new medium. But why?

I attribute this growth to Twitter’s flexibility as a tool. While it started out as a way to post what you are doing, it’s grown to be so much more. I still contend that the power of Twitter is in your imagination. People are leveraging Twitter in a variety of ways, whether it be personal or professional, that suits their needs. Some examples are: Market research, making new friends/connections, company announcements, and event updates. Hell, R. Alexander Spoerer wrote a science fiction novel on Twitter! Can you believe that, he wrote a novel on Twitter, 140 characters at a time.

In addition to an application design that allows for flexibility, the architects of Twitter were very smart about rolling out a very full featured API that allows you to pull and update Twitter data through your own applications. There must be thousands, if not tens of thousands, of developers all building experience/utility apps on top of the Twitter platform… MindComet included.

We’re really fond of using the API to leverage Twitter as a voting engine for promotions. This has a few HUGE benefits that I’ll explain later.

How it works is rather simple -

Let’s suppose there is a local retailer that wants to allow consumers to vote for their favorite argyle sock design. We’ll call the campaign, “Sock The Vote”. There are a total of three sock designs - sock one, sock two and sock three. As part of the campaign, the retailer setup a Twitter account called @sockthevote and created a landing page that shows the three socks, the number of votes cast for each sock and instructions on how to vote. Each sock also is assigned a unique hashtag which corresponds to it’s name. For example, sock one’s hastag would be #sock1, sock two’s is #sock2 and so on.

Users are instructed to vote by telling their friends which sock they like and why, and including @sockthevote, the hashtag of the sock they’re voting for (#sock1) and the shortened URL of the landing page (http://bit.ly/sockthevote). We like to provide a tool to pre-populate a Twitter message. The order of elements is VERY important. You don’t want the @sockthevote address at the front of the message, which is what users are accustomed to doing when creating @ messages. @ messages can only be seen by the user and their followers.

An example tweet for our tweet builder might look like this:

My feet threatened 2 go numb if I didn’t vote 4 sock1. Viva La Green Argyle! http://bit.ly/sockthevote @sockthevote #sock1

The users have done their part, now your site needs to be setup to collect votes. This is done using the Twitter search API.

So for the Sock The Vote campaign, we setup a search that runs every five minutes which looks for messages that contain @sockthevote and the shortened URL (http://bit.ly/sockthevote) of the promotion. Results that are pulled in are put through a number of filters:

Which sock’s Twitter vote is this? - this is done by parsing out the hashtag that the user was instructed to include and matching it to the recognized hashtags (#sock1,#sock2,#sock3)

Can this user vote? - we verify this in a couple of ways:

1. How old is this Twitter account? - You can lookup various bits of information about a Twitter account, including the account creation date. We typically limit votes to accounts that we’re created before the promotion was launched. This prevents users from creating thousands of fake accounts and spamming the vote.
2. Has the user voted already? - This is entirely up to you. We typically limit it to one or two votes or limit the frequency (e.g. one vote every 48 hours)
3. Have we seen this vote already? - In other words, was this Twitter vote pulled in a previous search. All tweets are incrementally assigned IDs. To accomplish this you can record the largest ID number from previous search and disregard tweets that are less than or equal to that ID. Or better yet, Twitter provides a search parameter since_id which allows you to pass in the largest ID number from the previous search and the API will exclude older results.
Once the vote has been validated it can be assigned to a sock. So why use Twitter as the voting engine instead of building your own?
1. The footprint of your voting campaign extends beyond your URL. Users are promoting your campaign in exchange for casting a vote… viral baby.
2. No user registration required on your site. Twitter handles that.
3. Enhanced fraud protection versus traditional methods. Cookies and IP-based voting enforcement mechanisms are too easy to conquer.
4. Plus, It looks f’in cool to allow voting through Twitter.

BTW, just kidding about the free socks…

Read More & View Comments

Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Feb. 01, 2010