Techpaulogy

Startupalooza and #drunkgeeking

This weekend's Startupalooza event was a lot of fun. Thanks to all the organizers! While I very much enjoyed learning about some really cool new projects in PDX, as is the case with most structured events, the most rewarding part for me was all the side conversations buzzing in hallways and nearby bars. It's all about the people! It reminded me of one of my side projects, the Entrepreneur Salon, which has been percolating for a year or two. The essence of it is to gather techie folks for informal meetups at local bars, to get together and have fun, with no real agenda -- only time set aside to hear each other's ideas and get the entrepreneurial spirits (literally and figuratively) flowing. I haven't done much with this idea yet, though Scott Kveton just called me out, in his re-cap of Startupalooza:

And, as is the case at any event in Portland, there were the seedlings hatched for new events. One was an impromptu idea that Paul Biggs (aka @techpaulogy) had called #drunkgeeking. Say you’re married, with an SO, etc and they have gotten tired of your inebriated ramblings about technology. Wouldn’t it make sense to find a couple of other nerds you could get your drink on with and then talk about geeky topics? Instead of trying to organize it on a regular basis, why not just use Twitter + the hashtag #drunkgeeking to coordinate on-the-fly events. For example, you could couple this with Unthirsty and find a good happy hour, Tweet “#drunkgeeking in 15 minutes at the Side Door” and see what happens. I love it and am looking forward to it after Paul gets done with his three day pantless bender. :-)

Aside from that latter part about the bender (which may-or-may-not be related to CommandoSEO.com), I must agree. If anyone wants to give it a whirl, that is, getting together ad hoc beer & entrepreneurship/techie meetups, try to send up the bat signal on Twitter: #drunkgeeking. Here is the inagural tweet, and here is the Hashtags page to see how the idea fares.

(Sadly, I won't be able to be involved for a week or two thanks to the current frenzy at Jive -- I've been rallying with our Web Engineers and Design team in the office until 2am every night for the past week, and plan to do so again this week as well).

Bumpin' SEO Tactics - Get Your Rank on Lock

A good portion of my job revolves around search engines, both paid and organic (with the trusty help of Anvil Media). I've often explained what "search engine optimization" or "lead generation funnels" are to my friends and family, but maybe I should have enlisted the help of Chuck, who puts it best:

See all his SEO beats over on YouTube. Yeah, there's a few...

Jumping Desks - Frogger Anyone?

Due to Jive's rapid growth, there has been a ton of shifting around the office. Lots of cube hopping. So, what better coincidence, than to hop up a floor and over to the next building -- and to end up 10 feet from an old school arcade with Frogger and 8 other games:

It makes up for now being 10 minutes from the sweetest break room in town. (Almost - Guinness keg on tap.)

Jive's code to be in millions of Google Android phones!

Here's some great news: we just found out that Jive Software's Smack XMPP library is being built into Google's Android mobile platform. It was news to us, but it's great to be a part of this industry-changing initiative between Google and the Open Handset Alliance. Read the Jive Talks blog post for more info...

Evaluating Buzz Monitoring Tools - Suggestions?

My team is currently in the process of evaluating buzz monitoring software to get a better grasp on Jive, its competitors, and the enterprise software industry in general. When I say "buzz monitoring," I mean a tool that tracks blogs, wikis, discussion forums, news sites, and other online communities for specific keywords, and helps aggregate and analyze that data to determine trends, supporters, product feedback, etc. I'm hoping some other folks out there may have feedback for Justin and I?

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Right now, here is an initial list of products being reviewed:

• BuzzLogic - we were also evaluating this when I was at Anvil Media
• BuzzMetrics - BrandPulse/BlogPulse (by Nielsen)
• BuzzPerception (by CustomScoop)
• Orchestra (by Cymphony)
• Radian6 - thanks to @davidalston, @RichardMcinnis, and @lebrun on Twitter
• SEER (by VML)
• TruCast (by VisibleTechnologies)
• Umbria

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The basic requirements are as follows:

Track/Monitor

• Track social media by site and by source (some bloggers post on multiple sites)
• Allow for both branded search ("Jive"), competitors, and general industry terms ("collaboration software")
  • Including advanced search operators (and, or, not) to filter noise
• Weighting/ranking of posts -- some are high impact (ZDNet) some are low impact (personal blogs)

Analyze

• Allow for trend analysis
  • Data import/export to integrate with Google Analytics, Eloqua, and SalesForce traffic & lead data
• Record tone of post (positive, neutral, negative)
• Record meme of post
• Record product discussed in post (Clearspace, Clearspace X, Openfire, etc.)
• Allow for human intervention in automated processes
  
  • Weighting
  • Tone
  • Meme

React/Participate

• Tools for getting involved in external conversations
  • Track replies to comments
• Track offline/back-channel communication (a.k.a. CRM when conversation ends up on email)
  • Depending on the CRM capabilities of the tool, we might also consider integration with SalesForce.com to manage blogger relationships

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Does anyone have experience with these products and services? Any recommendations? For example, Jason Falls has a great video over on his blog about his visit with Radian6.

Jive Won "Technology of the Year" Award from Infoworld

Jive just won Infoworld's annual Technology of the Year award, for its Clearspace X online community software. Specifically, Clearspace X was recognized as the  "Best Community Platform" in the Applications and Middleware category, alongside other winners like Oracle SOA Suite ("Best Enterprise Service Bus"). Winners were chosen by InfoWorld Test Center editors and reviewers:

"these Technology of the Year award winners represent the best business process management system, best enterprise service bus, best database middleware, and the best SaaS collaboration and community platforms we tested in 2007."

The award is based on a review of version 1.1.1 earlier in the year, and since then there have been a number of great additions, including:

• Customizable dashboard (users can filter updates & new content they're interested in)
• Customizable interface (admins can drag-and-drop rearrange and add content modules)
• Popular and related content widgets connect blog posts, wiki documents, and discussion threads
• 1-Click sending discussion/forum/blog/wiki content via email

More commentary on the award can be found at:

• Silicon Florist
• Fast Wonder
• Jive Talks

Track Your Company and Competitors in Real-time: Persistent Search for Business Intelligence

A number of people have recently asked me how to setup real-time alerts for different things -- Jive, competitors, their own name (vanity?), etc. I've tested a number of ways to facilitate this "persistent search" functionality, whereby I am notified any time one of the many search engines out there (Google, Yahoo, Ask, Technorati, etc) finds a specific keyword. Let's use "Jive Software" as an example. Here is what I want to do:

• know any time a blog mentions the words "Jive Software"
• know any time a static website adds a page that contains "Jive Software"
• be notified ASAP so I can react

Now, to facilitate this, there are some process points:

• I want to avoid clogging my inbox, so this has to be done via RSS, not email (so Google Alerts won't fit the bill).
• I also want to over-subscribe, and build logic to filter the noise -- as opposed to only subscribe to one or two sources -- so I don't miss anything (which crosses-off the persistent search functions built into RSS readers like Attensa , where you could setup searches for both "Jive Software" and "Clearspace" and get two of every article that mentions both).

So, I turn to Yahoo Pipes. This tool is absolutely fantastic. A life-saver. And for you Perl ninjas out there, you can make it do even more than me. So here's what it does: takes in data (RSS/XML, JSON, whatever), allows you to mash it up (splice, sort, filter, rename, etc), and then spits it out in whatever fashion you want (RSS, JSON, email, text message).

Back to our "Jive Software" example. So, I want to setup a "pipe" to monitor this term (a free-standing tool that sucks in data, processes it, and spits it back out):

1. Log-in to your Yahoo account
2. Go to http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes
3. Go to my profile http://pipes.yahoo.com/techpaulogy
4. Hover over my pipe that says "Persistent Search – Jive"
5. Click on the "Clone" link in the upper-right of the gray highlighted area that pops up
6. Click on the "My Pipes" link in the top navbar
7. You should see a new pipe in your list of Pipes that is a copy of mine.
8. Click on the title of the copied pipe to go to it's management page. You'll see the current live results for "Jive Software" searches on Google, Yahoo, Ask, and Technorati , etc.
9. Click on the "Edit Source" link. Now for the magic (click the image -- it's 1600 px wide, might need to resize or download to see it best):

Here, you can see the guts of the pipe. It uses modules to fetch the source feeds, in one case re-maps some data fields to sync up with each other, combines all the sources, sorts them by date, filters out duplicates, and outputs the new feed. Voila! Play around. Now that it's been copied to your account, you can break it to your heart's content. Envision expanding this to also track searches for competitors, Jive product names, industry analysts, etc. (you'll see another pipe in my account called "Splice - Jive Feed" that combines this persistent search pipe with a shared OPML file of enterprise software blogs -- it's a work in progress).

Who else has played with this? Any Perl ninjas out there want to help me write logic (based on Regular Expressions) that can help standardize dates in all the various feeds to enable better sorting? Right now it's pretty hit or miss. Also, I'd love to explore publishing some shared "best-practice" OPML files (one for Competitor's blogs, one for Enterprise Software blogs, etc) that can be plugged in -- I was having trouble parsing the OPML file in the example "Splice" pipe.

Starting my New Job with Jive Software

Last week was my final run with Anvil Media -- I had a great time there. They have an amazing PPC/SEO/Web Analytics team, who I will miss tremendously (but luckily will be working with, and playing with, still).  Anvil has a track record to prove its success, with a client base that includes enterprise software companies, global technology publishers, universities, brand name e-commerce sites, financial services providers, travel & tourism sites, etc. Plus, this year we won a Marketing Award of Excellence (MAX) for Best Return on Investment (ROI) from the American Marketing Association (AMA) of Oregon (for our work with SmartWool's PPC campaigns.

While all this was very exciting, I've been feeling a little antsy recently, working for client service firms. A good chunck of my professional career has been spent in the worlds of management consulting and advertising agencies. More and more, I've been wanting to trade breadth for depth. Working in client services provides an amazing opportunity to experience a wide variety of businesses, challenges, and opportunities, as well as develop an arsenal of skill sets -- I used to call my days with Deloitte Consulting a "business boot camp for liberal arts students." These days though, I want to focus, go deeper, have more ownership in the process, and ultimately leave no stone unturned as can sometimes happen within the constraints of multiple clients, budgets, billable hours, and the intricacies of client-vendor relationships.

So, timing of the opportunities at Jive Software couldn't have been better. I'd already met the team through various events (Portland Web Innovators, BarCamp Portland, etc.), and had done a good amount of my client work in the enterprise software space (e.g. Deloitte, Attensa, ColumbiaSoft, and PolyServe). Plus, I am a rabid consumer of online collaboration tools, so its enterprise collaboration software called Clearspace was right down my alley. Jive also develops a real-time, business-class instant messaging server called Openfire,  and an online community portal called Clearspace X that brings all the bells and whistles of Clearspace to an externally-facing platform that offers customer support and user collaboration (the next generation of the wildly popular forum software). I'm coming on board as the Online Marketing Manager, to help coordinate Web efforts to market Jive's suite of products, as well as generally promote the benefits of collaboration software to bust information silos that have been built in a world of emails and redundant conversations. It's going to be lots of fun!

See You at Ignite Portland on Oct. 25th

I just got pinged by the BarCampPortland distro list -- which reminded me to let everyone know to get on down to Ignite Portland this Thursday (Oct. 25th). This event is going to be awesome! Thanks thanks thanks again to the organizers: Dawn, Josh, Raven, and Todd.

5:30 Doors Open
6:00 Registration & Networking
6:20 Welcome and Introductions
6:30 Presentations Wave 1

• Renny Gleeson: What is Ignite?
• Steve Morris: How to put together an investor presentation
• Urban Scout: Rewilding. The process of undoing domestication
• Adam Duvander: Simplicity, create killer products and live a saner life
• Audrey Eschright: Why knitting is a good hobby for geeks
• Kevin Tate: Emergence In Business
• Scott Huber: I know more about Russell Davies than I do about my boss sitting across from me.
• Crystal Beasley: How to make a proper southern meal
• Scott Kveton: Free beef and clean bathrooms: the irrelevance of Web 2.0

7:20 Break and Networking
7:35 Door Prize
7:40 Presentations Wave 2

• MJ: Unicycling for a wicked-good time
• Selena Deckelmann: Are surveys useful?
• Bill DeRouchey: The History of the Button.
• Keith Gerr: Identity and brand development strategies for a wired world
• Sarah Gilbert: How keeping chickens will save your life
• MarcoPolo: You Give Good TXT: How to Talk to Someone Romantically Online
• Justin Kistner: Decentralized social network standards
• Hideshi Hamaguchi: How to live like Japanese in Portland
• Douglas Wolk: The Complete and Utter History of the Numa Numa Dance

8:30 Networking