The Social Customer Manifesto

Surprise! Another chronicle of Dell support follies.

Tim Berners-Lee is now blogging.

(via des peroz)

Like thousands of other TypePad customers, The Social Customer Manifesto was affected by today’s uber-outage.

WILT*: How to back up a TypePad blog

1) Go to the “Weblogs” tab within TypePad

2) Select the “List Posts” option on the blog you want to back up

3) Click on “Import/Export” in the menu bar

4) Scroll to the bottom of the page, and right-click to save on the link shown

* – What I Learned Today

As widely reported this morning, Google has released a number of new features that enables them to act as the gateway to a great number of music-related resources. Here’s how it seems to work:

For example, Dave’s faves the Beatles show up with their own section if you do a standard search for “The Beatles” from the Google search box:

Notice the special area up top above the search results with the picture, etc. This way of entering the Google music area only works for a handful of artists, currently.

(The results seem to be somewhat random; Queen currently returns the “normal” search results, while less-well-known acts like Death Cab For Cutie get the full treatment.)

This seems to work for a much larger number of artists.

• The artist’s page (the Google “musica” page)

• A page for track listings for each album listed (the Google “musicl” page)

From the listing purchase page, you can see which online sellers have the item (the Google “musiclp” page)

There appear to be a few other functions as well (e.g. “show all tracks“, the Google “musicad” page). Enjoy!

tags: google googlemusic

Who are Dunder and Blixem?

(…and a fiery right on! to John T. Unger who nailed the answer to last week’s question.)

Larry Weber, at Syndicate. Weber (as quoted by Doc):

“The stronger the dialog, the stronger the brand; the weaker the dialog, the weaker the brand. Also The best (future) writers for the New York Times… are writing blogs. Not quite verbatim, but you get the point. More… It’s pandemonium and it always will be… We’ll be talking about no nightly news. Because there’ll be no sponsors. To marketers, about “enterprise-generated media”, which he says Microsoft and Sun do very well: Why do you need marketing collateral when you’ve got blogs? Why do you need interviews when you’ve got podcasts. Hey, throw a party in your digital space. Opinions shape marketing now. Marketing doesn’t shape opinions. This guy is on the cluetrain, huge time. His bet: On the superbowl this year, 18 ads will be about getting you to a digital destination. Last year there were 12. Stop focusing on clicks and start focusing on time of engagement. He’s knocking the “transaction interface.” Click! Buy! Some things you want to keep there, but… If your sites don’t have a social interface, you’re going to lose the leadership position in what you do. Something that wants to look, teach, and learn from you. And it’s going to be hard because in this marketing world, people are used to looking through one-way media. Success measure: Share of conversation. Whoa: Whenever a business category gets messed up, we get a C title. Now marketing is so messed up, we’ve got CMOs. Perspective: How many of you had that evolution poster at school? I think we’re still at the slimy animal stage.” (emphasis added)

(via Doc)

The key line: “In what amounts to a nationwide social experiment, corporate America is testing whether this cheap and quirky medium proves useful in the battle to reach the public, communicate meaningfully with employees and keep costs down.”

link: Corporations go off a-podcasting

(Disclosure: I’m quoted in the article. Also, a huge guffaw out to Social Customer reader Dave Ritter who has the best line in the article, which was pulled from the comments here.)

The following line in Charlene Li’s post on the Yahoo! acquisition of del.icio.us stood out for me. Charlene:

“The acquisition by Yahoo! is significant for much the same reason why it bought other social computing darlings, Flickr and Konfabulator – Yahoo! is laying the groundwork for its users to add, personalize, and contribute their content and votes to the Web.”

Follow my reasoning here, and I’d love your thoughts.

• One: With telcos, a significant strategic advantage goes to the provider who controls the “last mile” – the access to the consumer’s home (“consumer” used thoughtfully here). In traditional media distribution, the “last mile” is a strategic bottleneck, and whichever entity controls it has disproportionate control over its competitors (and customers, as well). In times when “content” only flows one way, downhill, those bottlenecks are critical.

• Two: There are a variety of ways to try to control the last mile. For example, Google’s trying to do it via setting up wireless networks. Others try to control the physical lines themselves, the access to those lines, and so forth.

HOWEVER…with user-created content (be it in the form of blogs, photos, tags, what have you), it’s now a two-way content flow. It’s not just one way “down the pipes,” but also from those myriad “endpoints” back into the pipes.

• Three: Perhaps, therefore, it’s not just the “last mile” that matters, but also the “first mile” as well. That is, whomever controls the access to the means of user production of content will have symmetric power to those who control the “last mile” of the distribution mechanism.

Telcos are fighting over the last mile. Google wants to set up the GoogleNet and control the last mile.

The question: Is Yahoo! doing a strategic end-around, and trying to gobble up the significant “first mile” technologies? What would be the strategic advantages?

• Whomever controls the first mile gets “first look” at any new content

• Whomever controls the first mile can optimize the indexing of new information as it is created
• Whomever controls the first mile doesn’t need to “crawl” those sites anymore…the first mile provider gets perfect visibility into the nuggets of user-created gold as they are created…

Hmmm…

Yahoo acquires del.icio.us.

Coincidence? I think not.

(link)