Internally we’ve been discussing the book Groundswell by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research. We meet once every week or so (it’s hard to get a big group of us together for an hour on any one day) and discuss in depth what the ideas mean to our business and our clients.

My favorite part of the book is the technographics ladder, which breaks online users into types based on their participation online. Our goal as community builders is to realize where users are on the ladder, and create applications that allow these users to connect online the way they want to… and potentially move users up the ladder to engage even more with the community. We tailor features, functions, content, tone, etc. to these users - knowing the potential users even affects the way we think about design and technology. This initial analysis helps us immensely to ensure the success of a project.

There are a lot of great nuggets in this book, and I highly recommend it for anyone interested in reading more about online communities, and how people are making themselves heard online. For more on Groundswell, check out the official website.

The Customer Experience Labs comments on the Community Pulse about how customers “just want to be heard.” The Community Pulse is a great way for Dell, Inc. customers to be heard and to get their issues out in the open. The post goes on to say “…such a platform creates transparency where an organization has problems, but it is also a way to show that an organization is taking unsatisfied customers serious and is not afraid to show the current state of customer satisfaction.”

Sean McDonald from Dell, Inc. weighs in with this comment:

“One caution to other companies is about control. At Dell we do not want to control what our customers are saying, but instead join customer conversations wherever they occur. We are a better company when customers share their compliments, complaints, and comments.”

Dell has guts, and their commitment to the Pulse confirms they are human, they care, they want to be better.

I wanted to hear everyone’s thoughts on the newly released facebook chat.

In case you haven’t been on facebook 15 times in the last twelve hours (I know, I have a problem), the chat appears as follows:

Chat docs in the lower right of your facebook window and tells you how many of your friends are online at any given moment. If they’re not online, you can still send them a chat (kind of like Google chat?) but they get it later (kind of like sending them a facebook message and then waiting for a response when they sign on next?). You are also updated on a friend’s facebook status as they change it (kind of like an AIM away message?).

My thoughts: I’m skeptical.

The chat windows look suspiciously Google chat - esque, which I rarely use because I already have several means (facebook messaging, IMing, texting) to get a hold of my friends quickly. I suppose the idea is that it’s unobtrusive enough to run in the background so user’s won’t disable it and make it useless (like the ultra-creepy Beacon project of a few months ago). Then people will slowly get used to the idea and start using it. That has seemed to be the pattern in the past.

It’s true, I was skeptical of mini-feed, additional applications, and several other facebook features that I currently cannot live without. So maybe I should just give up talking about it and welcome Mark Zuckerberg and the facebook overlords into another area of my personal life with open arms.

Now this is a subject that I can get into… Let’s see, small electronic devices that can make telephone calls, act as my personal information manager, guide me on my travels with GPS navigation, email, chat and instant message, not to mention thousands of other uses that could be performed on the hand held mobile device of our choice! Not a bad set of subject matter to create a blog for, when you first think about it.

Most of the time when we get calls from customers who want blogs, we have to ask the simple, three-letter question. “WHY?” As Handango called out in their very first post, “there are more than 110 million blogs already and 175,000 new ones created every day.” It’s no secret to anyone capable of performing a simple google search, that blogs are becoming almost another form of SPAM. We all agreed at the time that Handango was a prime candidate to enter the blogging community, but the questions behind the “WHY” were the “what, how, who, and who cares?”.

To answer these questions we first performed a little research on the general market to understand the language and contexts for which users communicate. We explored the subjects and the material. Even before we looked at any competitors, it started to become obvious as to where the opportunity came to play for the world’s largest hand held software provider to make its social media debut. In so many categories, blogging is a field of copy cats. There are millions of content poachers who seemingly try to mask their poaching by simply referencing someone else’s authentic content, taking advantage of linking, tagging, and aggregating topics. While there’s a plethora of technical data, reviews, and product comparison information out there, it seems the market was severely lacking in the area of authentic content.

It’s more of a simple recipe than a needle in a haystack. Handango is a company who has a culture and set of core values that told us exactly where to look…and finding the recipe was not far from home. While the customers of Handango arguably can be technically savvy, there are plenty of users who are less interested in the technical data points and more interested in the impact of their mobile devices on their lives. We explored a few personas:

• Aspiring professional who wishes to be sophisticated in how his/her mobile device compliments their work style
• Conversation piece for aspiring professional who explains to his/her pals how GPS software helped get him/her out of a jam
• Soccer mom who uses GTD software to manage everyone else’s schedules, including her own, to bring some sanity back into her life
• Mother of three who finds it easy to take pictures of her children from her cell phone and easily integrate and upload pictures to online photo management service to share with distant relatives
• Aspiring professional who uses camera phone to take snapshot of location he/she parks car at airport to ensure he/she does not spend hours looking for car after return flight
• Aspiring professional who uses latest media package to super charge his/her Windows Mobile Device as an MP3 and Movie player instead of having to carry an extra iPod while traveling.

There are so many more stories and scenarios, the list can continue forever. This emerging market is so exciting and after some careful planning, forming a stellar blog team, and deploying a great looking blog, we think that Handango is another perfect storm for creating authentic content that people will care about in this hot technology space. Here are a few great stories generated by the Handango team to kick things off:

• “Why Another Blog?”
• “If My SmartPhone Were A Person, It Would Wear High Heels”
• “Kids and Phone Features”
• “Five Easy Things To Do Before Your Phone Is Stolen”
• “Why A BlackBerry Isn’t A Very Smart Phone”

From time to time, there’s a lot of traveling happening here at RD2. For me, this is my favorite time to re-activate my blogging activity.  Something about sitting on a plane or some random Starbucks in an unfamiliar city where my attention turns to a few things “social.”

Recently, my travels took me to the BlogWorld Expo, where we had fun in the Southwest Airlines booth and took in a few of the activities in Vegas.  I hardly noticed, but if you were to look into my bag, there was a hearty stash of gadgets and gizmos that make blogging interesting, easy and fun. Of course, you have to have an appetite to actually use some of the fancy electronics and do a little problem solving along to way, in order to make it worthwhile.

Blogging can be as simple as you want it to be, and can require nothing more than a computer with an internet connection or a phone with a medium level of sophistication to get your content online.

Blogging can also be as complicated as you want it to be, requiring you to pack a treasure chest of gadgets and install some sophisticated software that enables you to properly use all of these fancy gizmo’s. If you learn from my mistakes, and countless hours of relentless experimentation, you can save some time, money and use your energy to create better content.

So, here’s a few tips from the archives on how you can look like and feel like a professional blogger. I’ll break this down into a couple of simple categories:

The Basics / Style:

1. Design Snob: It’s OK if you are, we certainly are here. There are a lot of out of the box blog themes out there and if you use one of those, there’s a really good chance that you will find yourself breaking the mold fairly frequently when you choose to push the envelope.
2. What is pushing the envelope? Posting with lots of bullet points, indentations, pull-quotes, pictures, video, audio or any of the millions of badges or third party applications that are used to “extend” your community or blogging experience. There’s so much you can do, but if you care very much about having a tight and right look and feel and want to stay far away from that “MySpace” look, then this is something you may wrestle with forever. This is one of the major reasons that people tend to pay us for developing their own custom blogs rather than using the ones that come in the can.
3. Get a Grip On Style: If you have tight control over your style, then great, you are probably pretty far ahead of most of the other blogs out there. You probably have a grasp of how your style sheet will translate even the minor nuances of your blog. Having a well planned and thorough approach to style will go a long way, and ensure you spend more time blogging and coming up with cool content approaches rather than tweaking…
4. The Bottom Line: Spend some time planning your blog. Don’t “cheap out” on design and formatting if that is even remotely important to you. You have to create a blog that will work with the way you will work and the way you anticipate your content requirements.

Hardware Gizmos:

1. Apple MacBook Pro: Any computer will work, for that matter. However, the software that is used on an Apple seems to fit well with some of the blogging approaches that will be discussed. Also, let’s face it, Macs look cool. They have that crisp cocoa interface on many of their apps that give you a little extra pleasure along the way. And, if you are focused on the design aspects of your blog, or if you are the type to spend extra time photoshopping your photos, then Macs are a very good choice.
2. Canon Digital Elf (any model): Some models may have higher resolution, but I have experimented with so many of the smaller form factor digital cameras and have found that nothing is better than the Elf cameras. They turn on fast, focus fast, have traditional view finders, and don’t give you that silly delay from the time you push the button to the time the camera takes the picture. Not to mention, these cameras generally take great pictures. Also, the Elf line of camera is recommended since it is very compact and easy to carry.
3. Sanyo Xacti: Mine is a C6 which gives impressive sound and audio quality. It’s super tiny and uses an SD card. You can get these cards pretty economically now and my recommendation is to get a minimum of a 2 gigabyte card to start. The batter life is excellent and you will not believe how portable these cameras are. In fact, this little camera is the only video camera that I have ever used that takes outstanding still photos.
4. Sierra Wireless Aircard 875U: My card is used with my AT&T provider and is roughly 59 bucks a month for unlimited internet service. This card plugs into my USB port on my Apple and works the first time, every time. Also, this card supports the 3G network and is impressively fast…even when uploading photos to my flickr account.

Software Imperatives:

This is where it all comes together. Hardware gadgets are fun and nifty, but none of it matters if it does not work elegantly with your choice of software. My recommendations here come from many different trials of my own and lots of reading on blogs and forums. Until the latest of Leopard and the iLife suite, I had been working with extremely expensive solutions such as Final Cut Studio to make simple video edits. This post is really about coming home to the simpler and more basic tools…because they just work:

1. WordPress: It’s a solid blog platform, It’s free, widely used, easy to get someone to help you with it, and has the best feature/functionality for novice or even advanced users. And, I highly recommend not falling into the trap of using the third party publishing applications if you can help it. The browser works just fine, and it’s good discipline to get comfortable with it.
2. Firefox Web Browser: Sure, there are plenty of options here, but my recommendation is to stay with “old steady” Firefox. I will also note that other browsers which work fine (and could be a post on their own) are Camino and Flock. You might be careful of Safari.  Safari is getting much better but still does not handle the web interface of WordPress as well yet as the other browsers mentioned.
3. Flickr: Owned by Yahoo!, this is a widely used and highly supported community photo sharing (web based) tool. They have a myriad of tools to help you push your pictures online and also have lots of API’s to help you publish your photos to your blog….so easy.
4. YouTube: Online service for your video sharing. Any other description needed? Doubtful.
5. iMovie 08: The new iMovie 08 is excellent and super easy for quickly taking movies from your camera and editing the clips. What’s amazing is that when you are finished adding text, adjusting and trimming your audio/video, there’s a “share” option. All you have to do is select “share/YouTube” and you will not believe how easy it is from there. You will be prompted to provide your YouTube username and password. Once your iMovie has established a connection to your personal YouTube space, you will then be able to use the iMovie interface to write your description and tag your work. Selecting the publish button, and you can watch the magic happen and iMovie publishes your content through your computer and out your wireless card and into the web. It’s dirt simple.
6. flickrUploader: flickr has an uploading tool that allows you to simply upload your photos to your flickr account. You can eliminate the need for this software if you opt for the Flock browser, which has an excellent flickr uploader built in.

These are just a few pointers, and again they are based on a lot of trial and error. You don’t need the extremely high end devices to do the job. You can save hundreds and even thousands of dollars and get the job done with even greater ease. This is coming from someone who has spent the money on the software and hardware and only found that simple is better.

Oh yeah, don’t forget a cool bag to carry all this gear!

Southwest Airlines had a booth at the BlogWorld Expo in Vegas, and I was lucky enough to hang out with them for the show. There was a lot to learn and a myriad of vendors showing off their technologies and services.

For the show, I had my MacBook Pro with iMovie and Final Cut Studio. Pairing my computer with a handy little Sanyo cam, and we were able to fire off a few clips (also seen on blogsouthwest.com). For these videos, Christi and I put together some “on-the-fly, up close and personal” videos. So fun…

Here’s a couple of the rock stars Brian Lusk and Bill Owen. And, I’m not kidding, these guys are rock stars in the community. Everyone at the show knows them. They provide great content and have quite the following.

Our project plan says, “Creative Brief: June 9th, 2007.” That’s just six weeks ago when we were still “talking” about the design ideas and the creative direction for the new Blogher.org redesign. Lisa Stone is always up for an enthusiastic late night call when it comes to talking about the design for the web’s number-one destination for women’s bloggers. Had it not been for the opportunity to get to know Lisa before taking on this effort, I don’t think we would have been able to make this happen…

So, many of you know the rest of this story. The reader’s digest version goes something like this:

• Scores of late night Skype calls between designers, developers and Blogher
• A few rounds and revisions of design
• A few color tweaks and changes
• Some very random late night ideas
• Some new functionality and aesthetic things to add
• Setup Drupal environment
• Build Drupal templates
• Database this and Drupal module that…
• Build/test, build/test, build/test…
• You know the rest…

Before I knew it, the time was 3:00 am. I was on a four way Skype call with Graham, Jeremy and Michael. At this point we were past the point of no return as we were deep into the migration process. These guys had not slept in days but they were cool, calm and collected. Sure, there was the occasional four letter word when the inevitable surprise occurred, but this is when they would systematically triage and remedy each issue as it would come up. I was imagining that this was like a very complicated surgery. A procedure that would last for hours and where the body was in a strange sort of balance. I pictured the team in their surgical clothes, shoe-cover-thingies, masks, rubber gloves and special microscope glasses. Passing the tools around the table, a few stitches here, suction there and an organ transplant every now and then.

This launch has a happy ending as we went live in the early hours of the morning on July 24th, 2007. In this business we just expect launches to be challenging. There are always surprises and special circumstances. It was particularly challenging since we were also repopulating thousands and thousands of old posts and comments into a new Drupal 5.1 system and theme. While being persnickety about the code, we were faced with the challenges you might expect from a community made up mostly of user generated content.

Please note the word “beta” on the Blogher logo at Blogher.org. We have a bug list and soon will redeploy the creative team to sift through the details, comparing the approved color comps to the actual site…..while our coding team tests in every browser.

Sometimes life rewards us with rare opportunities to fade into that special blur where we just go into overdrive and turn out great work. Making new friends with people like the Blogher team is the unexpected bonus that is extra cool and great.

Blogher is an amazing community that we are sure has a business model to carry it very far. Thanks so much to Lisa, Graham, Jeremy, Brandon, Jenny, Mike, Candice and Gabe. Great work, and get some sleep for crying out loud!

Shopping.com came to us a while ago wanting a big, fun corporate blog. We proved that the idea of “fun” and “corporate” could co-exist when we worked with Southwest last year. I can say however, it takes a lot of creative energy from both us and the client to keep the spirit light and the executives happy. Luckily, Shopping.com proved to be another great company to bring into the blogosphere (WhatsInStoreBlog.com).

We are always working to be a creative shop that insists on a good concept before design begins. In this case the challenge lies in finding a visual look for a blog that could potentially talk about 100,000 different products. The concept that emerged was a 25 color palette and a huge mosaic representing every product Shopping.com offers. Obviously, this is a pretty big chore but to the team’s credit, it looks great. Special thanks to Jeff for drawing hundreds of products by hand.

Once the concept is in place and the client is happy (Shopping.com was happy after round 1, thanks guys!), we start designing the function of the blog. Its amazing how simple it is to make good design decisions when the concept is solid. In this case our major goals were a tag cloud that actually looked well designed, and a special Q&A blog post. This is where our integration with the front-end architects is crucial. We are always willing to ask and they are always happy to work with us to find a solution that is up to standards and well designed.

In the end, the blog went live with a few days to spare and looked just like the comp the client loved. Well done to everyone involved. We are getting this blog thing down to an art. Next big chore: re-doing our own blog.

I like this post by Ken Rickard. Ken obviously “kicks ass” on his Drupal Learning Curve. In particular, I took notice to the “drastically customize front page” and various call-outs to theme and content ability. So, this got me to thinking… Some time ago we had some conversations about who’s doing what with Drupal. Yes, we love the platform, but we want to see some more great implementations of design within Drupal. I will list a few below that I have found. Would really love it if anyone can post a few more… would be great to add them to a collection for the “Drupal Fan Club Gallery.” Need more hard core design thinkers in this category.

Chart found here, originated here, inspired by here.

List of Drupal Sites, some are from a video I found by Jeff Robbins at Lullabot. Another is of our work on the Guidewireconnection.com site and not sure who did the PopSugar site:

• GuideWireConnection
• Musicbox.com
• Indymedia.be
• NowPublic.com
• AskANinja.com
• MTVFlux
• Teen.SecondLife.com
• PlayStation Asia
• Daughtry
• US Magazine
• Twit
• Moby
• PopSugar

We’ve been working with Rusty Weston on the MyGlobalCareer.com project for the past few months at RD2. It’s been a real treat working again with someone who is passionate enough to leave the safe harbor of a real job and go into business for himself as a blogger with a great mission. If you read his “about” section, you will see Rusty’s view of how to make the world even smaller by connecting people and careers globally.

Rusty is off to a great start and he is contributing some really great content. As a professional writer, Rusty has a natural and easy to follow voice. Today I enjoyed reading Rusty’s post on “How a Pro Uses Social Media,” where he connects a real life experience and how it is intersected with social media to enable one to extend his career.

On MyGlobalCareer.com, From “About” MyGlobalCareer.com (By: Rusty Weston):

“Welcome to My Global Career, a blog–based information resource by Third Set Media in Lafayette, Calif. There are 300 million career links available on the net, according to Google, but we believe the world needs one more, a category–leading site for those interested in exploring — or engaged in — global careers.

My Global Career features reader–generated content by a burgeoning community of global workers, hiring managers and recruiters among others.”