Paul Metcalfe › Comments

Check out http://willowglen.ning.com/ - David Cohn

Was just getting similar recs from someone! http://mombloggers.ning.com/ looks really well organized. Also, http://www.streetball.com/ and http://jonasbrothersfans.ning.com/ And finally, TishGrier recc'd http://www.theswom.org which is nicely done. - Stacy Bond

http://nerdfighters.com - Andrea

Cool. Thanks for the reccs. Some good ones there - Paul Metcalfe

Here is another a friend of mine started http://sudburysaturdaynite.ning.com/ - Dan from twhirl

How can't they? Being able to more or less spy on, observe, and participate in multiple "around the watercooler" conversations about news stories regarding a brand is valuable market research. It's one thing to see how journalists are reporting about your brand (vis a vis blogs and news outlets), it's another thing to see how regular people are reacting to those stories. - Mark Trapp

I think there's a pushback to that, Daniel: it's akin to astroturfing. But it does provide enough research to change your marketing moving forward. Do people think your service is unreliable? Change your marketing to focus on how reliable you actually are. Do people think you're a ripoff? Change your marketing to highlight the value of your service. - Mark Trapp

Tracking/measurement is obviously beneficial, but brands can also jump in to correct misperceptions, which invariably crop up in conversations you don't moderate - Daniel Feygin

Are the rules different than business blogging here in Friendfeed? I don't think so. - Jeremiah Owyang

Brands should search FriendFeed just like they search Twitter and others, so they can respond to users quickly. - Louis Gray

Jeremiah, I don't think so either, but with one possibly major difference: with blogs, it's all about what the blogger said. With Friendfeed, it's all about what the people who read the blog said and how they react. There is much more emphasis on the comments than the story. - Mark Trapp

Jeremiah, I'm lacking data. I know everyone raves about Zappos on Twitter, but everyone raves about Zappos in general. Comcast seems to have more ranters than ravers. How do you measure the meaningfulness of Comcast being on Twitter? What are the metrics for measuring that from Comcast's perspective? - Robert Seidman

Mark, doesn't astroturfing involve disguise? I am not suggesting that at all. - Daniel Feygin

How do you take all this lovely data from ff or other and convert it into a marketing strategy? - Paul Metcalfe

If companies look at FF or Twitter or any of the newer communication channels with marketing glasses on, they'll be missing out on a lot of opportunities to really connect with a lot of people. Lets look at Twitter and their recent transparency regarding what's happening over there. Even though they have their own communication platform, they themselves waited far too long to actually communicate. Now, instead of communicating they're in damage control mode and reacting. - Paul Short

continuing - Yes, they're communicating with users but some would say it's too little too late. If other companies want to expose their brands and get all they can out of these new services, become early adopters and make friends in the way regular people do. That's how to benefit - be one of us, not just use our blabbering to gain intelligence or monitor what we're talking about. - Paul Short

I understand. But I still ask how you get this compelling info/data into something that will help create a strategy. I'm thinking blue-chip and not start-up. - Paul Metcalfe

Paul is right, engaging with users is more than PR/marketing activity, so speaking strictly of brands in this context is limiting. Executive, product management, account management, customer service, etc have a lot to gain from both monitoring and entering into these conversations. And PR should stay away from being the gatekeeper. - Daniel Feygin

if they can have an actual person interacting with friendfeeders, truly participating in the community, then I wouldn't mind. if they are not going to do that, I don't think I'd want to see or hear them. - edythe

I agree with Julian. Since brands are looking to engage customers on so many digital media channels from YouTube, to Facebook, to blogs, to Twitter it only makes sense to point your customers in the direction of something that doesn't have them running around all over the place and where you can be sure that every last bit of marketing material that you put out there is directed to the... more... - Devlin Dunsmore

Actually in the case of Facebook since they are now allowing imports of thrid party site data into the news feed you could use a similar strategy for that as well. However given the controls of the mini feed right now it would be much easier to manage the content through FriendFeed. - Devlin Dunsmore from twhirl

I agree with edythe. - Ginger Makela Riker

Brand awareness through engagement. Brands who are part of the conversation improve their overall standing, think Microsoft's blogging strategy - Duncan Riley

brands are screwed here unless they can manage the massese of "noise" Get that right and... - Paul Metcalfe

@Robert: the plain fact that you're talking about Comcast (a horrible company that I still do business with) means they've succeeded on some level - primarily marketing. Positive branding? Not sure. But do you think of Comcast as being more cutting edge then they were? Probably. - AJ Kohn

See: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r... - Louis Gray

Seems so. - Jacob Nahin

Holy cats, I'm in love. What a great idea! - Carla Thompson

Ah...thanks Louis. Gotta stay on top of the FriendFeed blog! And yup Vince - I missed something! - Hutch Carpenter

Clocked it a little while ago. Anyone using it yet? - Paul Metcalfe

So even Twit-Out didn't help Twitter make through a day without locking up. Not good. - Capn' One Eye - adrift

so does MG Siegler, Hutch..:) - Shey, Jamaican of FF

I can't believe how much worse it's getting. Success is killing them. - Hutch Carpenter

Well, at least now they can't blame me for taking it down anymore. - Robert Scoble

You gotta be kidding :) - Charlie Anzman

why does anyone even care anymore? just post through friend feed... - John Duff from Alert Thingy

@Robert - that's true. What are you, like 25% of the volume there? :-) - Hutch Carpenter

Lol it's down here - Rosana Kooymans

Robert hasn't been on all day and we've had plenty of conversation, it's been great. (Not the Robert hasn't been on all day part) :D - Shey, Jamaican of FF

can FF update facebook status? that's why i like twitter and why it's annoying when it goes down - Paul Metcalfe

Twitter's been one site that I could always count on. One day I thought my internet might have been down, but I checked Twitter, because they're a surefire check. Now that we know that they can go down, I don't know which way is up. {% endsarcasm %} - Eric Florenzano

Ping.fm and HelloTXT can update Facebook statusses... Don't really know about FriendFeed. I guess not? - Rosana Kooymans

Haha, you're right Louis! He's a genius! - Lindsay

Talk about setting yourself up for success...LOL - Rahsheen ™, Coach Rah from twhirl

I think you should both kiss and get it over with @LouisGray ;-P - Ken Stewart | ChangeForge from twhirl

It will go mainstream. In fact I have seen people from real estate using it - Varun Mahajan

I like FF ( and no, that is not FireFox) more and more every day - Denis

To answer the question about bloggers' conversations occurring on FF instead of their comments: you could just post a link at the end of your blog post to the FriendFeed page for that post (once it's available) and say something like "to comment on this post, go here". I'd like to see someone try that out. - Nathaniel Payne

There is already a plugin to pull the comments from ff and stick them on your WP Blog. Sounds like we are not that far off. - Rahsheen ™, Coach Rah from twhirl

+1 for Brandon - Varun Mahajan

I think us bloggers are going to have to learn to accept that conversations about our content will occur outside our blogs. People are able to talk about religion without having to go to a church to do it; people who want to complain about Katie Couric aren't expected to make their statements only to CBSNews.com. What we'll benefit most from are discovery tools to find out where people are talking about us and what they're saying - Summize, etc. - Todd Mundt

@Nathaniel - just started doing that exact thing! See for yourself on my blog http://bhc3.wordpress.com - Hutch Carpenter

That's an idea, Nathaniel, but the problem is that the conversation becomes splintered. It won't stay on that discussion thread alone. Someone will tweet about the post and it'll continue there. Someone will share it in Google Reader and it'll continue there. The conversations aren't tied to just one place, they're everywhere. - Shawn Farner from twhirl

Multiple discussions occuring in different places about the content you created. This used to be a Positive for marketing... - Rahsheen ™, Coach Rah from twhirl

@Shawn - from my perspective, comments are great for discussing ideas, wherever they occur. In adding FriendFeed links to my blog posts, I actually included some to another person's Google Reader share of my blog post. Why? The conversations were better there. So someone else gets the comment action. Not a problem. I can always find it via searching FriendFeed. - Hutch Carpenter

@Rahsheen - a positive for marketing buzz, but a negative for brand management - I can see bloggers' concern, but like Todd Mundt just said, we have to accept that conversations are allowed to exist beyond our blogs and that we can't contain it all - why bother trying? - Nathaniel Payne

Exactly, Rahsheen. I don't get why people are so resistant to discussions happening in more than one place. - Brent Newhall

I've even had conversations about blogs with people offline and neglected to post transcripts back into the stream. So, maybe they don't even exist. - Michael Markman

if the discussion takes place away from the blog, it reduces the page views and consequently the potential ad revenue - Paul Metcalfe

That sounds logical, Paul. But I think this argument is akin to the music industry saying they lose money when ppl d/l mp3's - Rahsheen ™, Coach Rah from twhirl

Cliffnotes of Part I: "Normal people (ie, those who aren’t on Twitter 18 hours a day) don’t like noise." Seriously, I think that sentence is really the key point and largely crystallizes your whole argument. - Deva Hazarika

Paul: A discussion on FriendFeed may generate *more* page views (and thus ad revenue) on the blog because of people seeing the FF discussion and clicking through to the blog. The more discussions that happen around the web, the more popular the blog's going to be. Surely it's better to have lots of different discussions happening all around the web about your blog, right? - Brent Newhall

Personally, if it were discussion about something I wrote, I'd like to at least be able to take part in the discussion and that's the problem I see with FF. The fragmented conversation. If the conversation takes place in the blog comments, it's much easier for me to follow. If people spin off into their own conversation and you aren't following them, you'd have no idea. If there was a way to keep everything under the umbrella of the original discussion, FF would be even more powerful. - Shawn Farner

I think their needs to be some type of cooperation between content creators and friendfeed. If you know your convo may move to ff, move it there yourself, plug ff directly into your blog with a plugin or something. Embrace it. It could only help. - Rahsheen ™, Coach Rah

I just realized I wish FF had a save or tag-like function Sometimes I see conversations that I'd love to come back and re-read later. I've been saving a link to some of them, but since moving to del.icio.us, I barely bookmark anything. Web 2.0 stuff is making me lazy. :) - ha3rvey (sup homepants)

But, what is it that FeedFriend do that can't be done by anyone else? Where is the sustainable advantage to this system? - Bob Wyman

There lots of reason it won't go, but the IU issues will get resolved and the watch out. - Russellreno

bob, you're here. That was such a Microsoft response. Sigh. - Robert Scoble

already is main stream my man - Travis Cooper

All I know is, ff did something that I was looking for and no one else had done. That by itself makes it sustainable unless someone attempts to do it better. - Rahsheen ™, Coach Rah from twhirl

But the discussion is ALREADY fragmented? Why is this new? If you write an article and I blog about it, the discussion among my blog's readers will occur on my blog? Sure, I might send your blog a trackback, but I find that so many of my trackbacks are spam that I don't even bother looking at them anymore. - Mitch Wagner

Posting a comment here does not allow me to also post to my Twitter account unless the original post was generated by Twitter (the checkbox doesn't appear below this textbox). Even when I can simultaneously post, my twittering is associated with FF, but not the URI. Any gratuitous @ symbols I throw in are associated with the username's comments which may have nothing to do with the context of the message. - RandaL Hicks

IMHO FF should always allow an option to cross-post and enable linking back to the conversation. FF would send a tinyURL (generated from the URI) along with the message to Twitter. Twitter would display the message, and at the bottom list FF as the client, but the 'in reply to:Username' field would be In Reply to: http://tinyurl.com/4yjmce ...In the meantime we'll have to clue our friends in manually, all concerns about fragmented conversations aside. - RandaL Hicks

hello - arash