Archive for category SocialMedia
Why is it so hard?
Posted by cheuer in Leadership, Personal, SocialMedia on January 18th, 2007
So blogging is really truly “as easy as writing a public email” – but sometimes it just feels so damn hard! Not the act itself, comitting an act of blogging is super easy, just as it is right now, a stream of consciousness, focused on my WordPress posp.php page. It is really the one’s that matter that are the hard ones. I could talk to people all day about the insytes I want to share (and most days that is what I do, talk to people). To actually focus those ideas into the post.php form, however, is a different story.
Last weekend, Kristie and I were having brunch with Robert and Maryam Scoble, along with Francine Hardaway, to discuss Francine’s upcoming conference in Phoenix, when Robert made it clear to me what my real problem was. I am often afraid to write something that is not perfect, that might make me look ignorant or foolish. He mentioned to me that one of the things he has really discovered and now uses as a technique, is to go ahead and write something before having a full and deep comprehension of the topic (publish or perish?) and let his commenters/readers educate him on the subject and/or correct him. Once my audience gets that big, perhaps it will work for me too, but in the meantime, I just need to hit publish more. Interestingly, Brian Oberkirch mentioned a similar approach the other day, with a very humorous slant on this, but I can’t find the post now…
The reality is that I have worked on letting go and not trying to be a perfectionist for a long time. It is the one trait I dont understand in my psyche – or rather, I don’t know where it comes from. I am certainly not perfect, and believe the Tony Robbins angle that the goal of perfection is the worst goal – to really work on being Outstanding instead as a much higher plane of being your best.
Bottom line – now that I can see this is one of the things preventing me from blogging more freqently, I can do something more about it, but I still wonder why it is so hard? Does anyone else have any ideas or thoughts or suggestions?
David Sifry Good, Service Still Not
Posted by cheuer in New Media Release, SocialMedia, SocialMediaRelease on October 6th, 2006
Thank you David Sifry for responding to my blog post about my trouble with Technorati and having your engineers take care of my primary concern regarding the Technorati rank being broken for this blog, chrisheuer.com, but you have a bigger problem on your hands then just a colo server move and you need to let people know what is really going on and what you are really doing to address the problems rather than patching on complaints one person at a time (I will be glad to talk to you on the phone BTW, but please note my prior post).
While this one issue was fixed, almost all other parts of the Technorati page about my blog are still way off. In addition to the problems that my fiancee told me about upon my return with not being able to get Technorati customer support to respond to her problems, numerous other people who don’t want to go public with this problem have privately told me about similar frustrations. I like you David, and know you are a stand up guy with good intentions, but I dont understand why you guys can’t get these problems fixed with the money you raised over the past few years. I would like to believe it is a server move causing it, but it really seems like a much deeper problem given how long this has been going on and the pattern of problems we have all experienced over the years.
David must have seen my complaint, and like Rick Klau does regularly for FeedBurner – responded by having his engineers fix at least one part of the broken bit (my technorati rank is now 40,181 (147 links from 68 blogs) and personally responded on my previous post. However, it says it was updated 2 hours ago (correct), but the most recent post listed is from 118 days ago. Also, the most recent outbound links are from a magnolia blog bling link? The popular tags are way off, I can’t even imagine how they came up with that mishmash of a ranking on the tag strength.
When I interviewed Rick Klau for They Get It, a Social Media Club podcast to be published this weekend, he had said to me something that has been nagging at me all week – “when a Blogger complains and a company does something right about it, the Blogger owes it to the company to point that out too.” So David, I am sorry for not getting this up sooner and I am thankful for your personal response, but more sorry to report it still does not work and I don’t suspect you can really fix it by the end of the server move (please prove me wrong). I did however photoblog the reponse right away on Flickr, so I don’t think I was unfair, just slow.
As I said, I like the folks behind the service (and know several socially), but after all this time and all this money, the service should be working normally and it is not. They can not afford to do customer support on issues like this for everyone that cares about this service or they will certainly go bankrupt or provide dismal service as they have done with my fiancee. While I appreciate David taking the time to respond, I also know he should be spending his time on finding innovative solutions to the company’s problems. I fear that they have little time left to get this together and save their reputation/credibility but few people are really complaining about it, which is odd – perhaps it is like those other silicon valley darlings that no one is willing to publicly criticize. It seems that no one really ever wants to point out the pink elephant in the middle of the living room…
The recent design changes at Technorati are great improvements and I am certainly a supporter of their efforts with Microformats due to our work with the Social Media Release, but if they can not get their core indexing and data infrastructure stable, all the remodeling on a shaky foundation won’t hold up the walls when a strong wind blows. I am not switching to IceRocket yet (not even linking to them), but may need to change my habits finally if I can no longer trust Technorati is accuracte. As Greg Narain said when we were beercasting with John from Swinecast, “no one is fooled when you throw lipstick on a pig” or a pink elephant for that matter… (btw – just thinking about that South Park episode at least brought a smile to my face)
Credited on Valleywag…
Posted by cheuer in Leadership, SocialMedia on October 2nd, 2006
Just wanted to point out that this photo got picked up on Valleywag (just as Jason Calcanis predicted shortly after he uttered those words attributed to him in the quote). While Jason is indeed pretty bombastic and can be somewhat offputting to most people (including me on at least one occasion) – I do appreciate that he can say it like it is – at least to him. He will often say the things that other people only think, or say in very private conversations. I respect him for that just as I respect Jeremy Peper for the same sort of attitude, even when I disagree with their opinion.
I wonder what it would be like if they could take that same approach with a dose of sugar instead of vinegar and a little more repsect of everyday folks in the process. But I guess if either of them suffered fools gladly, they wouldn’t be who they are, so if for that reason alone I for one am glad to hear their voice as part of the conversation.
Technorati Still Broken After All This Time
Posted by cheuer in SocialMedia on September 30th, 2006
Now, I generally like Technorati and the people behind it. Which is why I emailed both Tantek Celik and Dave Sifry over the course of the last 2 weeks to see if they might be able to explain why this is so far off. But they never responded and I am finally going to write about it. I have written about their problems before, last year when we realized there were problems with technorati on many levels. They have since culled their staff, increased their server capacities and supposeduly fixed a lot of problems, but it seems that it has not by evidence of the screen shot here and the link to a search for this blog.
Technorati says that my Rank is 305,618 (14 links from 10 blogs), but right underneath it says 150 links (which is actually a lot less than what is out there really) and that it was last updated 112 days ago, even though I updated it the other day and do ping them from this blog when it updates with a new post.
Now it might be just my vanity, but given Dave Sifry’s folksy story about the reason for building Technorati being to serve his vanity, he should be more conscious of making sure it is accurate. Or perhaps responding to emails from people on the Z List, or C List, if I may be so bold…
Are they ever going to become a reliable source for the blogosphere’s search and influence needs?
I decided to write it up after my podcast interview with Rick Klau today about proactive customer support and how companies should be dealing with reputation management and engaging with their customers. I gave them the chance to respond to me directly, but they did not. If this was Feedburner, I would have heard from them and it would have been fixed by now, but clearly Technorati is no Feedburner.
The Importance of Social Media – Please Read & Comment
Posted by cheuer in Social Media Club, SocialMedia on September 25th, 2006
If you have not found this article on the Importance of Social Media I posted as part of my Blog Orlando session, please take a few minutes to read through it and send me some feedback. It seems to be striking a chord with people, especially since it contains my thoughts on where all of this social media stuff is headed.
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Chris Heuer is the founder of Mentor Bureau, a global collaborative of Startup Mentors focused on #SmoothScaling over #Hypergrowth. He has invested his life in working to create a better society through personal and community efforts that brings people together such as Rysing Tyde and Social Media Club. To learn more about Chris, visit his profile on LinkedIn.