Did I spam you with Spock invites?

I’m not very happy with Spock today.

I’ve raved about it in other blogs before how great I think it was, even offered Spock invites to my colleagues because I thought it would be useful.

But this morning a colleague came by my desk and told me that Spock has sent invites to his contacts on his behalf. I received one from him too, which I didn’t really understand since I was the one who invited him to Spock. I’m spam-tolerant so I just deleted the invite and didn’t think much of it, but apparently, his contacts were not as forgiving.

I went over to the Spock blog to find out if anyone else was having this problem and found one comment on the problem. The user’s contacts received invites sent on his behalf. Since Spock is relatively new I’m a little more tolerant and was kinda hoping for a response from Spock that went something like “it was a glitch, we’ll fix it.” But apparently, that’s just the way it is. I don’t remember the sign up process anymore, but apparently during the sign up process, Spock will automatically invite all your contacts unless you OPT-OUT of it.

Sorry you overlooked it, was pretty much the response fron the Spock team.

Now I’m wondering if I opted out. Now I’m wondering if my entire address book got invites sent on my behalf.

I understand that Spock isn’t the first to do this. I’m just really irked because I really like Spock and had great expectations for it.

Considering the consequences of spam, I really think that the invite feature should be an opt-in option, not the other way around. I’m sure it’s the same with most people, but my address book contains business contacts as well as personal contacts, as well as people I really don’t talk to anymore for one reason or another.

Now. I don’t send my clients forwarded chain letters or e-mail petitions not to buy gas on a particular day. E-mail has become so formal nowadays that when my client receives something from me via e-mail, it is quite important. It is formal. It’s official.

I like receiving invites to private beta, and yes, even unsolicited ones. But that’s me. Again. High tolerance. I can’t assume the same for everyone else. I know I invite a lot of people to services but I never send unsolicited invites. I will usually do a post with my e-mail on it, asking people to contact me if they would like an invite to something. And then I send. I make people go through the trouble of asking for it because I know that when I invite people, they will get an e-mail with MY NAME on it. And I treat e-mail like it’s golden.

Another irk. When I logged into Spock this morning I found that I had an X amount of “favorites.” I think Spock automatically turned my LinkedIn contacts into my favorites. When I first started using Spock I thought I would use the “favorites” feature as sort of a bookmarking feature. Like “this would be a person of interest later I’ll mark him/her.” Since Spock took the liberty of favoriting people for me, I lost that bookmarking function.

I understand that maybe Spock is trying to automate things but again, that should be an option and shouldn’t be done automatically. I’ve seen people with thousands of LinkedIn contacts. Now if you have thousands of “favorites,” how exactly again are they “favorites?” I’m sure there’s a feature to un-favorite people on Spock, but I add LinkedIn contacts on a regular basis so does that mean after I accept an invitation to connect on LinkedIn, I would then have to go to Spock and un-favorite them?

All that said, I like Spock. I think it’s a great search engine for social media. I just wish it would stop doing things for me.

Cisco New Media Summit

Went to the Cisco New Media Summit today. Thanks to the folks at Cisco for sponsoring this event.

It may not be a big deal to a lot of folks who came to the New Media Summit (judging from their badges most of the attendees came from large companies who probably have the budget to send their marketing folks to watch a panel discussion) but the event was free. (Ok fine it wasn’t free because Cisco’s achieving something out of this, etc, etc, must we always clarify that FREE isn’t truly FREE?)

I won’t summarize the event here only because others have already so just my two cents here and there. Check out these posts on the New Media Summit.

Jeremy Pepper was live blogging the event.
Jeremiah Owyang — Key Themes at the New Media Summit. Jeremiah was a panel speaker for Measuring the ROI of Social Media.

My Two Cents
The panel discussions were great and though they may be talking about different topics with each session the common theme seems to be that we are at the forefront of what may be the norm in marketing and corporate communications in the not too distant future.

There are no standard processes to measuring the ROI of social media YET because it’s so new. There was even a discussion there between Katie Paine and Jeremiah Owyang about whether we should even be measuring social media ROI in the first place. What is the value of a positive comment?

The fate of traditional media is uncertain. It looks like blogs and social media will replace traditional media but it’s still too soon to tell. I thought it was interesting that I happen to stumble upon Chris Salazar’s post on bloggers and journalists just as this discussion was happening.

The session of internal collaboration tools and strategies wasn’t what I thought it was going to be, but I thought it was interesting nonetheless. I was looking forward to a discussion about other tools in addition to blogs like wikis, social bookmarking and crowd sourcing and other tools to increase collaboration and knowledge sharing within the enterprise, but instead it was more of a discussion on corporate blogging and conversations/collaboration that happen outside the firewall.

The last panel discussion was definitely the coolest because one of the panelists was an avatar on Second Life. I’ve always known of Second Life but have never been in there. I’m not sure why. Is it because it requires me to download the client? Is it because I’ve heard of some really bad things happening there? Not sure. But marketing/collaboration in the Second Life space is definitely something really new and it will be interesting what comes of it.

And I meant to ask (but didn’t remember the question until after the panel discussion), are these virtual worlds the next thing after social media sites? Will everyone do their 3d virtual thing on Second Life or will companies come out with their own branded virtual world a la Wells Fargo’s Stage Coach Island?

It’s definitely an exciting time to be a witness to all the changes that are happening and having the medium to discuss those changes as well.

And in true Social Media fashion, I’ll have to say here that even more important than the panel discussions themselves are the conversations that follow and the connections that are made after.

I got to chat a little bit with Sun’s Terry McKenzie about the challenges that we are facing in the industry I make a living in (note to self: blog about some of that stuff on the other blog…), sat with the folks behind Cisco’s Human Networkprogram and Cisco’s Blogger in Chief (that’s what it says on the agenda) John Earnhardt, got to chat with Liz Guthridge and Jennifer McClure about the issues that social media poses in the staffing industry, and got to share a few thoughts with AMD’s David Kroll who was sitting behind me.

Tidbits

There are things I want to write about but feel I can’t until because everytime I start a post I always end up spending more time than I wanted. And the list keeps getting longer and longer and well…I don’t want to lose them.

So here are bullet points for now, until maybe the weekend…provided of course that this boy and his brother go to bed early and leave mommy with some blogging time.

• Wridea. How much I loved it at first and how I eventually forgot about it.

• My ZohoMail wishlist.

• Applications that I don’t want to tell anyone else about because I reaaaaaally want to keep them for myself.
• How excited I am to try out Zude. Because that’s just what I need…another profile to manage.
• How I don’t get UrbanSeeder (perhaps because I am not part of the target market?).

• My Wufoo wishlist.

And some thoughts in my head that I’d like to open up for discussion (I hear crickets…) because I will probably end up writing an incohesive post about them:

• Difficulty of convincing the enterprise to switch — Web2.0 services and applications are mostly free and low-cost, but cost-savings isn’t enough to switch. How would you address questions on reliability (“it’s free/low-cost”…”they might go out of business”…”it’s too new”…”what happens to our data if they go away?”) and security (“it’s web-based,” “it’s managed by someone else,”) ?
• I love it that an individual user can directly impact how an application/service is developed in the Web2.0 space through blogging and other communications and how quickly these companies adopt new direction based on user feedback. Not a question, just a statement, I guess…but your thoughts on this are welcome anyway.

Lisa out.

Invite me. Please?

Because I’m a true Digerati Wannabe, invitations to try out new things (apps on beta, private beta, double-secret beta beta, alpha, kappa or whatever hip Web2.0 term you want to use) never fail to excite me. And when I get one, I make sure to show it off and blog about it.

Now. I even though I try to sound like I know what I’m talking about, I really don’t want to give anyone the impression that what you see here is unbiased. If you give me an invitation to a private beta, you’ve already put me in a good mood so guess what. I’m probably going to like it, unless it just really sucks.

<shamelessbegging>

So. If you want to read about someone getting all happy and excited about your new web application, send me an invite.

</shamlessbegging>

That’s not to say, however, that I promise to write only good things. Here are a few things to keep in mind:

Here are things that I am mostly interested in:

Business [social] networking — Apps that can help me connect with other people in a professional setting.

Mobile — I have a dumb phone. If your web app can turn it into a smart phone, I’d definitely want to hear about it.

Mobile Messaging — SMS alerts. I’m in Marketing. Can your app help me reach a bunch of people on their cell phones with just one click?

GTD, productivity, workflow — Can you help me be more productive? Can you help me organize the million things I have to do in a day?

Content Distribution, publishing – I have a bunch of cool things I want to tell people about. Can your app help me get the message out? (RSS, publishing tools, etc)

Search — Can you help me find information so I don’t have to fish the wide Google ocean?

Metrics — I like measuring things. Sitemeter excites me.

Tools – Again. I’m a digerati wannabe. I’m not technical. Can your app help me do cool things without me having to write a single line of code?

Business applications — I have a day job. And I like playing hero at work. You know the type. I love coming up with solutions and improvements to existing processes. Can your app make me look good at work? Email me if you need specifics of what I’m looking for.

I have a short attention span, not to mention I don’t have all day to try out stuff. If I don’t “get it” in two minutes, I won’t sit there to try to figure it out, because if I’m having a hard time “getting it,” I’ll probably have a tough time explaining it to everyone else anyway.

<shamelessbegging>

So please? Send me invites?

</shamelessbegging>