Articles – Page 20 – Thoughtfaucet

Social Customer Service: a mindmap of Bill Gerth (Comcast) & Morgan Johnston (JetBlue) presentations to the Burlington VT Social Media Breakfast (#BTVSMB)

[Please welcome a new voice to the Thoughtfaucet blog: Apprentice Entrepreneur Brett Chalupa. He is a freshman college student with exceptional initiative. I hope you value his thoughts and observations as much as I do. –Gahlord]

Social customer service was the topic of the March #BTVSMB (Burlington, VT Social Media Breakfast) this past Monday.

Social media breakfasts are gatherings of people in the area who are interested or work with social media. People from the area purchase tickets and gather at a set place. People socialize and eat a light breakfast before there is a presentation.

The most recent #BTVSMB featured Bill Gerth, who works for Comcast, and Morgan Johnston, who works for JetBlue. They both gave thirty minute presentations on social media and how it is used in their companies–especially customer service delivered via social media and social networking tools.

Here is a mind map I made during both presentations. It also features a few of the questions from the Q&A that followed the presentations:

Continue reading “Social Customer Service: a mindmap of Bill Gerth (Comcast) & Morgan Johnston (JetBlue) presentations to the Burlington VT Social Media Breakfast (#BTVSMB)”

Listen locally

One of the things I guess I’m known for is talking about listening.

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I’ve written a little bit about listening and strategy before, too.

In this post, I want to cover some things on listening and location. So instead of saying “Who do you listen to?” or “What do you listen for?” there might be another question to ask. Continue reading “Listen locally”

Step by Step: How to Configure a Hootsuite Stream for Location-based Twitter Search

HipsterPDA|Moleskine Pocket|Large version of S... — Image by guccio@???? via Flickr

If you manage a lot of social media profiles on different services then chances are you’ve used Hootsuite. But what if you only want to see chatter that is near a specific location? Like the town you live in or a city you’re about to visit?

Use Tweetdeck? See this location-specific Tweetdeck column tutorial.

You can configure a search stream on Twitter to just show tweets from a specific location. This is helpful for anyone who wants to listen to a local area and find out what people are saying.

Use Twitter as your own open city-wide chat channel via Hootsuite by following these very simple steps.

Continue reading “Step by Step: How to Configure a Hootsuite Stream for Location-based Twitter Search”

Geofence

Geofence: A digital representation of space. Often containing either a single point and a radius from that point or a series of points that make up a polygon.; Locative media applications will use geofences as triggers for specific actions. For example, a Twitter search with a geofence will only show Tweets that are inside the radius and point of the search query. Or Foursquare will only show tips which are within a certain radius of a user.

Geocoded Twitter Searches, a reference of location-specific search strings for Twitter clients.

This page is part of the Twitter Location Search (aka fun with geocodes) resource on Thoughtfaucet.

Here are a selection of Twitter searches by location. Each one has a geocode and map so you know how far it reaches.

If you don’t find the search code you need in this reference, leave a comment and let me know what you’re after. I’ll update this reference.

Twitter search can filter by the location of a Tweet if the user has location services turned on. If the Twitter user doesn’t have location turned on, Twitter can filter tweets based on the location in a Twitter user’s profile. If that is left blank, then you won’t be able to find that Tweet using a standard location search.

Additional background on this concept is at the beginning of the online version of my Listening Strategy presentation.

Using geocodes to filter tweets based on location is what locative media geeks refer to as setting up a geofence. Here are some example geofences and their twitter search strings.

Continue reading “Geocoded Twitter Searches, a reference of location-specific search strings for Twitter clients.”

Step by Step: How to Configure Tweetdeck to Search Near a Location

Sky Pic Burlington Vermont — Image via Wikipedia

Twitter is great for communicating with people all around the world. Except when it isn’t.

Sometimes you really want to stay focused on a specific location. Maybe you’re a local real estate professional or politician or diner or social media guru. Or maybe you’re just a good digital citizen and want to stay in touch with your local community via Twitter.

Use Twitter as your own open city-wide chat channel on Tweetdeck by following these very simple steps.

Use Hootsuite instead? See this Hootsuite location-specific stream tutorial. Continue reading “Step by Step: How to Configure Tweetdeck to Search Near a Location”

Figuring out the geocode (lat and long) of a location.

This page is part of the Twitter Location Search (aka fun with geocodes) resource on Thoughtfaucet.

Every place on the earth has a specific coordinate. Each coordinate has two numbers, a latitude and a longitude.

You can remember which is which by using this simple rhyme taught to me by my 2nd grade public school teacher, Mrs Anderson (West Elementary, Grand Forks ND): “Latitude Flatitude.” If you’re looking at a map, latitude lines stretch from the left to the right, flat across the page. Longitude lines go up and down. Mrs Anderson didn’t have a simple rhyme for longitude. Flongitude?

Use this tutorial to figure out what the geocode of a specific location is. Then you can do awesome stuff with that information. Like make custom Twitter searches that focused on a local area. Or other cool GPS related stuff like setting up a geofence. Continue reading “Figuring out the geocode (lat and long) of a location.”

Burlington Vermont Snowday.

Warning: This post has no information related to marketing, communication, emerging technologies, SEO or Google or social media or anything. Instead, it has skiing.

We got a lot of snow today. I got to work on cross country skis. This is how I would like to get to work every day.

Continue reading “Burlington Vermont Snowday.”

Stop trying to engage your audience.

When you read about social media or listen to presenters talk about social media it’s easy to get jaded. The big deal, according to these presenters and bloggers, is that you should “engage your audience” via social tools like Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn!

But what does that really mean, anyway? “Engage your audience.” It’s like telling someone who has a weight problem they should eat better. True? Yes. Helpful? Not very.

When it comes to my audience, I don’t really try to be engaging, instead I try to be listening. I try to be helpful.