We'll See

Just came across this great fable, courtesy of Derek Sivers:

A farmer had only one horse. One day, his horse ran away.

All the neighbors came by saying, “I'm so sorry. This is such bad news. You must be so upset.” The man just said, “We'll see.”

A few days later, his horse came back with twenty wild horses. The man and his son corraled all 21 horses.

All the neighbors came by saying, “Congratulations! This is such good news. You must be so happy!” The man just said, “We'll see.”

One of the wild horses kicked the man's only son, breaking both his legs.

All the neighbors came by saying, “I'm so sorry. This is such bad news. You must be so upset.” The man just said, “We'll see.”

The country went to war, and every able-bodied young man was drafted to fight. The war was terrible and killed every young man, but the farmer's son was spared, since his broken legs prevented him from being drafted.

All the neighbors came by saying, “Congratulations! This is such good news. You must be so happy!” The man just said, “We'll see.”

Worth remembering.

Social is conversation.

This post was originally posted on iPlatform's company blog, but it's a project that I'm spending a lot of time on - and one that I believe is very important, which is why I'm also cross posting to my personal blog here.

Over the past two years, we've worked with a huge range of companies to help them market themselves effectively inside Facebook. We've built dozens and dozens of interactive applications and campaigns, and throughout this we have learned that the most important aspect of a company's presence in Facebook is the ability to speak directly to their customers. All of the advertising to push people to your fan page, and getting them to press that 'like' button, is money well spent - because once they've liked you, you can speak to them directly, through their newsfeed, every single day. 80-90% of all engagement with fan pages happens through the newsfeed - which is also where users spend most of their time. The interactive applications and competitions we build are always most effective when they are promoted to highly engaged fans - which only comes when companies have learned how to communicate with their customers properly through the feed.

By engaging properly with your fans in the feed, you build up their trust and interest in what you have to say - so when you have an application, or a video, or a new product you want to promote, they'll listen; and if it's good, they'll share it with their friends. Without this trust, it doesn't matter how many fans you have - they're not listening.

Twitter has taken the lead in companies' minds when it comes to having conversations with followers. It's a great platform - and because conversation is the only thing you can do there, it's easy to understand why companies have jumped into it. But, the great mass of your customers are on Facebook. The availability of the Facebook platform and engagement ads has meant that a lot of companies have focused purely on its potential as a broadcast medium - but the newsfeed and status updates were invented in Facebook first, and the amount of comments and engagement can dwarf what you get in other platforms. We believe that it's time for companies to start really engaging and having conversations with their customers in Facebook. This is especially important for companies who have already invested in large pages with lots of fans (it's likely that you have customers asking you questions right now, and you're just ignoring them) but it's also a powerful medium for all companies, big or small, to interact with their customers.

We want to help companies have these conversations, and manage them in an effective way. It can be difficult for companies to keep track of all the comments they are getting, especially if more than one person has responsibility for responding and engaging back. To help address these problems, we've been working on a new software as a service product, Conversocial. Conversocial pulls in every user interaction on your fan page or pages, and makes it easy to manage your responses and actions, individually or as a team, with tools to make your day to day management more efficient - including keyword tracking and email alerts for flagged content.

You can read more on what Conversocial can do here.

Conversocial is already being used, by numerous customers, to manage fan pages with almost 10 million fans between them. Over the past couple of months our early customers have been helping us test and scale. We have bold plans for where we want to take Conversocial, but we also believe in following an agile process - we release basic features early, and focus on learning what you actually find useful and use, and then use that knowledge to improve.

If you are managing your company's fan page, and struggling to keep on top of what comments you've already read or responded to, Conversocial can help you right now. And if you're not managing your page yet - you should be! Get in touch now.

Why I don't read articles about the election

There's so much information out there in the world. What's worth reading?

Information translates into knowledge, and I give information a weight based on how valuable the knowledge will be to me. Knowledge can be built on other knowledge; so information which adds and builds up knowledge is more valuable to me than information which gives me a distinct bit of knowledge; especially if that knowledge has a short timeframe for being useful.

Some types of knowledge which are pretty much permanent, and can be constantly built upon:

Intellectual - Philosophy, spiritual, things that add to my thinking processes.

Scientific - how things work, physical, chemical, biological knowledge that adds to my understanding of the universe and the world.

Practical - programming skills, learning to use a technology, how to manage people, how to cook, etc. Adds to skill base; can be constantly refined and improved over time, but each step adds value and experience.

On the other hand, news information about politics, economics, and general goings-on are generally either snapshots, or historical analysis. Historical analysis can be extremely interesting, and adds to understanding about human nature and many other things. On the other hand, snapshots of information, which almost all daily news falls into, often present incomplete pictures of what's going on, so are unreliable, and usually have a very short timeframe of valuable knowledge.

For example - let's say you read 10 articles before the election about the latest poll or political activity. How does this information translate to valuable knowledge in 3-6 months time from now? Probably no value at all. In a few weeks we'll know the actual results and what people actually did, and 90% of the 'forecasts' and extensives articles about how people think will be proven incorrect.


Compare that to reading a single article (or even book) after the election analysing the ups and downs and relating that to actually what happened. It will give you an overall picture and show how individual events fitted into the wider scheme of things. It doesn't really matter about the length of the respective articles - just that the latter would add to your permanent knowledge base, and so have a high value, whereas the 10 snap shots would be almost meaningless, probably wrong (we'll find out soon anyway) and most likely forgotten six months out (unless you work in politics and care about the minutae, or are the journalist writing the analysis).

There's so much information in the world, I think it's useful to think about how much time you spend studying information that in the scheme of things doesn't add any value to your life. That's why I refuse to read any daily newspapers, I just selectively read articles from The Economist each week, which at least picks out only the most important news and gives an objective analysis, often dipping into history to give a background. Even then, I only read articles that I find particularly interesting or I think add value.

Just my thoughts.