March – 2010 – Steffan Antonas

My Story: From Georgetown Graduate Student To Tech Blogger

A common question I get from curious folks who find my blog is “What made you decide to start blogging?”. In an interview I did this week with my Alma Mater I did my best to answer that question

Here’s an excerpt from the interview about how I got into blogging about technology, community and design:

A bit about my blog…

In my second year at CCT I wrote a thesis titled Gaming In Cyberspace: How Interactive Entertainment Is Changing Communication & Identity On The Net . Back then (2004) social media wasn’t really mainstream yet (Facebook was founded in Feb 2004, and our class at Georgetown wasn’t on it until late that year. Twitter didn’t even exist until 2006). For my thesis I did a lot of research on how people interact and communicate in virtual communities – I read a lot on network theory, interaction design and human behavior in digital mediums. I was super interested in this stuff, but back then it didn’t have much practical application because these kinds of virtual communities were so new. Though, I knew huge numbers of people were changing their behavior and gravitating to these communities and that this stuff was going to be big. Quite a few people at CCT thought that I was just a wee bit crazy.

Fast forward to February 2007. I was at a tech conference here in San Diego (O’Reilly’s E-Tech) and was introduced to Twitter. After just a few weeks being on the service, I had bumped into half of the authors that had written books that were the foundation for a few of our core classes at CCT. People like Howard Rheingold (Smart Mobs) and Steven B. Johnson (Interface Culture and Emergence). They all had blogs and were having daily conversations about the stuff I loved. So I started blogging publicly and joining in those conversations. Because I had studied a lot of this stuff at CCT for my thesis and in my courses, I was having great informed conversations with influential people in the tech world. I was having a ball.

I would never have had this access without the exposure to the authors and ideas I was exposed to at CCT. I’ve been having conversations about new media daily online (on blogs and on social media etc) ever since as a full time hobby and it’s opened a lot of doors. I have written for one of the top 10 blogs in the world, ReadWriteWeb, and I’ve been on WSRadio Internet radio here in San Diego several times (recently again last week as a guest host). This month I was nominated for InfluenceSD’s New Media Blogger of the year award (awards take place in April). I didnt plan any of this, it’s just sort of happened organically while I was writing about stuff that I like. Over the last year I’ve also turned the blogging and social media it into a part-time freelance business. I do social media marketing projects with companies and non profits in southern California, which keeps me busy and engaged on nights and weekends…

The Ten Commandments Of User Experience

This presentation given by Nick Finck and Raina Van Cleave at SXSW this year is great. Slides 5, 10 and 11 stand out. Special thanks to @Fraser for sharing the link on Twitter and pointing to the most valuable slides. Here’s a quick summary of the talk:

“User experiences are your everyday experiences—anything from operating a car, to making a pot of coffee, to ordering a pair of shoes online. User experience is the result of your interactions with a product or service, specifically how it’s delivered and its related artifacts according to the design.

In this presentation Nick Finck and Raina Van Cleave will explore the ten characteristics of a great user experience. They will cover all aspects of user experience design such as user research, information architecture, information design, technical writing, interaction design, visual design, brand identity design, accessibly, usability and web analytics. Nick and Raina will also explain how following the ten commandments can boost your web sites, web app, or mobile app’s ease of use, appeal, conversion rates, and more.”

The Ten Commandments Of User Experience

View more presentations from Nick Finck.

Nominated For San Diego “New Media” Blogger Of The Year

I’m excited and honored to have been included in InfluenceSD’s nominees for “Blogger Of The Year” for 2009. InfluenceSD is a San Diego-based awards event created to unite champions in new media. The event celebrates success in social media and the people behind the campaigns and content. The fact that I’ve been recognized in this category by my peers and readers is truly humbling. A heart-felt thank you goes out to everyone out there who reads my stuff and leaves comments on this little blog. You guys make writing a joy for me.

The award winners are decided by your votes, so if you read this blog regularly, I’d really appreciate it if you could help me stay in the running. Voting closes on March 24th. You can register and vote here. :)

Again, thanks to all of you out there who make the conversations we have on this blog what they are. You’re the reason I write.

Case Study: How To Use Foursquare To Draw A Crowd Into Your Restaurant

Restaurant owners are quickly discovering how to use social media tools like Twitter, Facebook and Yelp to their advantage and drive customers to their tables, but there’s a guy in Wisconsin doing it better than almost anyone else.

Joe Sorge, who runs a burger joint in Milwaukee called AJ Bombers, shot me a tweet yesterday to tell me about a Foursquare party they had this week that brought a flash mob of 161 Foursquare users to his restaurant. My eyebrows shot up when I read that number. 161 check ins in one day?! How could that be? There are only about three or four hundred Foursquare users total in Milwaukee?! Over 150 of them were in the same place, on the same afternoon?

When I called him up, Joe explained. They came to earn the highly coveted and elusive Foursquare “Swarm Badge” – something you can only get when 50 or more Foursquare users check in at the same place at the same time. I hadn’t heard of it, but apparently the promise of this coveted Foursquare badge can really draw a crowd. Read More

Your Customers Leave A Trail Of Breadcrumbs Online

If you sell online, pay attention to the data trail your customers leave. There are golden nuggets of information about what your customers are like and what they want everywhere; Some really good stuff can be found in customer reviews, automated “customers also bought” or “you might also like” recommendations (just to name a few). Paying attention to these details can lead to great insights about what your customers actually want, how they use your product and what their other interests are. If you’re an author, what other books are they buying when they purchase yours? If you’re selling electronics, what are customers bundling their purchases with? You’ve got to ask yourself these questions. It could tell you a lot about services you should be offering, where your product might be lacking or even what partnerships and opportunities you might seek for win-win promotions.

flipcam This (above) is just one example. I’ve talked about how tons of people are hacking their Flip cameras because the company isn’t listening and offering a wide-angle lens adapter. There are a ton of blog posts and YouTube videos about how to glue-on wide angle lens adapters to make the Flip more useful…and these lenses only cost 30 bucks. If the company was listening, they’d be partnering with a lens maker (or making their own) and offering a premium version of the Flip with an adapter included. The trail of breadcrumbs around the Flip already shows that people are willing to pay for the parts and go through the extra hassle to get the improved performance, so this is a no-brainer.

What’s the trail of breadcrumbs around your product telling you about your customers?

How To Test How Your Audience Is Responding To Your Online Videos In Real Time

Recently, I’ve had a few of my clients ask me whether they should be video blogging more. My answer usually starts with the question “how comfortable are you on camera?”. Video blogging isn’t for everyone, and it can make or break you, in my opinion. While it’s true that your audience wants to interact with you in an authentic way, it’s also true that when people read text-only blog posts, they tend to bring their own filters and voice to what they read, which can work in your favor if you’re a talented writer who happens to be blessed with a squeaky voice or a shy demeanor.

By contrast, when they watch you on video, there’s no where for you to hide and your strengths as well as your flaws get amplified and become a focal point of the audience’s experience. People are picking up all kinds of non-verbal cues that they’re using to decide whether they like you and what you’ve got to say. There are people out there who are so comfortable and enthusiastic when they’ve got a camera in their face that they were born to do it. Others…not so much. Whether you were born to be on camera or stick to writing is not necessarily a reflection on your character or intelligence either – you’ve just got to know your DNA. Stephen Hawking wasn’t born to be a TV rockstar. Enough said.

The good news is that if you’re thinking about trying out video blogging, you can dip your toe in without committing too heavily on equipment and time, and use TubeMogul to measure and test how people are reacting to you and your video content in real time. If you’re a video amateur the instant feedback you can get from seeing how long people watch your content, where they’re watching it and when they drop out minute-by minute (called drop out rate), can give you a pretty good indication of how you’re being received, and whether people like what you’re doing or not. You can use that data to tweak your message and style and see how your audience responds. Pretty neat stuff. This way you can borrow a camera from a friend (or rent one) and see if this is something you want to invest in long term. Here’s the demo video from TubeMogul on how their drop-out analytics work:

Sometimes It IS About The Technology

You know when the technology itself makes the most difference to how much engagement you get on the social web? In the very beginning, when it’s brand new to everyone. That’s when the alpha geeks, the 1% of the people that produce the most content online, temporarily ignore their other social networks to focus all their attention on the shiny new object. For just a few weeks following any major launch, you can build lasting relationships with the true online influencers by being a part of the action as they congregate on the new service in an excited feeding frenzy. If you’re there, and you’re as enthusiastic, helpful and engaging as they are, you’re seen as part of the tribe.

The engagement cycle is almost always the same on new social networks with a lot of hype (Google Buzz is a perfect example). The alpha geeks “follow”, listen and interact a lot early on when the community is still a small, tight-knit group of early adopters. They amass large followings quickly, and while they develop dense networks of influence, they are also less discriminating about who they interact with and “friend” because the frenzy is highly social.

Eventually they all hit a saturation point, though. The numbers get too big, their sense of true community dissipates and the initial excitement wears off. The second the enthusiasm for the shiny object disappears, they start spreading their attention out evenly again on the tried-and-true social spaces where they get a real sense of intimacy and personal connection. That’s why, in the long run at least, the technology doesn’t matter much and why focusing relationships to achieve long-term social goals is so important.

I’ve made these observations from interacting online and joining and leaving social networks for years, but I don’t have any hard data to back this up. It’s just a hunch, so I’m really interested to hear other people’s opinions and ideas on this or get pointers to any good examples. It’s sound long-term strategy to focus on relationships over technology, but if it’s the early adopter crowd you want to notice to you, there doesn’t seem to be a better time to get their attention than on someone else’s launch day. What are your thoughts?

The Way We Consume Magazines Is About To Change: TOUCH Changes The Ecomomics & The Experience

Back in January I wrote a post discussing why the iPad would be so significant to the future of publishing where I said the following:

“the reading experience itself is going to change…it’s all about the apps… that’s where the real innovation is going to happen, and that’s where consumers are expecting it to happen. They don’t want a crazy new device they have to learn how to use – they want something they know how to use that does new and useful things. The extra screen real estate is exactly what developers have been waiting for, and it’s all they need to change the way we think about reading.”

I stand by what I said – and I think the upheaval we’re about to see in the publishing market is going to be driven by a shift to tablets in general. Once again, the point is that the significance of the iPad isn’t due to the fact that Apple has created something conceptually revolutionary, it’s that they’re in the best position to create a new market and change consumer behavior on a massive scale with what they’re releasing (feel free to debate this point in the comments ;-)).

This afternoon I found this demo (below) of Wired Magazine’s new iPad Table app that made me pretty confident that the way we consume magazines is about to change in a hurry. I’ve seen similar demos like this for magazine-like reading experiences on a tablet (The Mag+ by Bonnier that was demo’d on PopSci immediately comes to mind), but the fact that this is a working demo for the iPad (which hasnt even been released yet!) is pretty significant. I think Chris Anderson‘s bit in this speaks volumes about how publishers perceive the opportunities for rich story telling and revenue that the tablet phenomenon presents (not just the iPad, tablets in general). He says…

“This is what we’ve been waiting for, for 15 years. We’ve been waiting for an opportunity to use all these visual tools at our disposal to tell these stories in a way that is efficient, that is multi-dimentional. But we also think it’s an opportunity to reset the economics. For the first time people might value this experience so much that they’ll pay for it.”

Touch Changes The Revenue Game

Chris’ point about resetting the economics for magazines is an important one. We all know that print is on its way out. You’ll notice in the demo that they make the point that advertising is just as important to the consumer’s experience of Wired as the content itself is….but check out how interactive the ads are. It’s a whole different experience. You know why you haven’t seen ads like that on your laptop? Because we don’t touch our screens, that’s why. When you’re encouraged to touch and explore, ads themselves are much closer to interactive content than they are to an object of interruption. The act of touching is literally creating a whole new category for advertising (as content). Now, you couple the opportunities there with the fact that what you’re touching (the magazine) comes in the form of an application that consumers are downloading (easy distribution) and probably paying as much for as they did for the print version…no wonder these guys are excited.

Considering this is a working demo for a product that hasn’t even been released yet, I’m pretty excited to see what other players are doing. Apple was smart to give developers a window to get going between the official announcement and the actual release date. If this is the beginning, this is a really exciting time to be in publishing.

Topics

Blog

Month March 2010

The Ten Commandments Of User Experience

Nominated For San Diego “New Media” Blogger Of The Year

Your Customers Leave A Trail Of Breadcrumbs Online

The Way We Consume Magazines Is About To Change: TOUCH Changes The Ecomomics & The Experience

Touch Changes The Revenue Game