Internet Tech Boston

I occasionally smoke cigars. I’m not a cigar aficionado, there’s too much to learn and I don’t really have the time to get a full education. This is not a post about cigars. But, I know what I like and a like a good smoke every so often.

You can get good cigars cheaply online (surprise!), and I’ve become a regular shopper at JRCigars.com. There’s a lot of places you can get good prices on cigars, but I keep going back to JR because I like him. I’ve never met JR, but I like him just the same. How? Because everything JR sends me is dripping with his unique personality – every flier, every mailer, ever product catalog.  He’s completely transparent. Take this headline on the front cover of his 70plus page Fall catalog – “Business stinks . . . so here’s a golden opportunity to save on name brand cigars, AND get 5 extra cigars Free with every box.” Like I said, I don’t smoke that much, and I already had a box of cigars, but immediately thought – “Hey, the economy stinks, he’s probably not selling a whole ton, maybe i should pick up some cigars on the cheap.”

Sure, there’s a “Crazy Eddie” feel to JR and it’s a bit schlocky. But, he is who he is, and he’s not afraid to put himself out there. I’m reflecting on JR and what we hear these days about the important of being “transparent online and in business.” If you follow any of the social media gurus, you’d think this novel concept was invented by them. But, you’ll also see a ton of accomplished, successful business entrepreneurs asking the gurus questions like “How do I become transparent?” My (private) response to this question is always the same,  ”Do you really not know how to be yourself?”

I’ve come to realize that a very common cause of  people who don’t know how to be themselves is that they don’t really know who they are in the first place. Continuing on from there, a person doesn’t know who they are, because of a central lack of self-confidence which manifests itself in self-doubt. Connect my armchair psychiatry together and you get this realization – there are people who do not allow themselves to be transparent.  If you are constantly doubting yourself, it makes it impossible to be transparent to your friends and co-workers, never-mind the whole world on social media.

For me, this was a shocking epiphany. There are highly paid C-Suite execs that are so riddled with self-doubt that they are hiding in their office afraid to have an online discussion on a blog because people might not like who they are, or what they stand for. Since these folks can’t give themselves the permission they need to be themselves, they’re seeking that permission from someone else. You can guess how successful that operation will be. I’ll end this post with an incredibly schlocky statement of my own. Self-confidence comes from within – only you can give yourself the permission to be yourself.

So, you want to take your organization’s use of Twitter to the next level by organizing an informal gathering of people interested in a fun, informal, and informative networking event? Good – you should do this every 3 months or so, to get out there and meet people, let them put a face to your brand, and answer any questions they might have.

Strictly speaking, the word “TweetUp” is defined as a gathering of Twitter users. It came into existence after Twitter first took root in the web and people needed a way to actually meet the people they were following online. Now, the phrase describes any kind of meeting, formal or informal, whose purpose is to make real world connections between people and is most likely organized and promoted with social media tools.

Sounds complicated? It’s really not. It takes some work, so don’t expect to pull this off in one day. But, if you’re considering hiring a consultant to organize and promote your TweetUp – you’re missing the point entirely. My advice would be to create a simple, targeted campaign around an informal networking event. Here’s how I do it:

Before the Event

1. Pick a date that works for people, and there’s not already a big event happening at that time.
2. Find a pub or restaurant that’s a central venue and contact them. Most pubs are willing to donate some appetizers or even a drink ticket to each guest, in exchange for you bringing in a couple dozen people to eat and drink there.
3. Keep the purpose of this Tweetup simple, so people understand it, and there’s no need to prepare anything. I would strongly suggest something like a “Dreamforce AfterParty – After a long day at Dreamforce, come RELAX, have a few drinks with your Sales 2.0 peers, and MEET new people.”
4. Try to get some money from your boss(es) to pay for a drink ticket for each guest, and a couple of decent door prizes.
5. Look for people or organizations that can help co-sponsor your tweetup event with. Pick the organizations that fit the theme or purpose of the event. If you sell second hand clothes, find the local tailor to be your co-sponsor.
6. Setup an event registration site at EventBrite with the details around the event, and directions to the location, etc. Have the logos of the pub and all sponsors prominently displayed.
7. Promote your event registration site on as many social media sites as you can – Twitter, your blog, Facebook, LinkedIn, Alltop, – EVERYWHERE. Just one post will not be sufficient. You need to create a storyline that people can follow. This is important. People will see your first tweet, and be interested – but they won’t take action until it seems like there’s enough buzz, and it’s the right thing to do.
8. On your blog post about this event, be sure to include a “Tweet This” button so that everyone who reads the blog post can easily tweet it for you.
9. Get as many co-workers, friends, and colleagues as you can to register at your event site and retweet and help promote. This makes it look like the party is huge.
10. Once you get a dozen or so people signed up, approach local, key influencers on a 1 on 1 basis  via email, phone, Twitter, etc, and ask them “you’re coming to the big Sales 2.0 afterparty at Dreamforce – right?” By now, it looks like they might be missing out on something, so they will say – Absolutely. Make sure they sign up at your event site. The event site will list everyone who is registered to the event, and it will draw a bigger crowd if the key members of your social media community are there .
11. After you get  the “big names” registered, use that as a moment to REALLY kick start your promotion. Example Tweet – Wow! Anneke Seley is going to be at the big Dreamforce Afterparty. Sales 2.0 people don’t miss this one!

During the Event

1. Continue the promotion on Twitter right up to and DURING the event. Most people don’t think about what they’re going to do at night until that moment approaches. You want people who are asking “gee, where should I go for dinner tonight” to be told – well, did you here about that event? Let’s check that out. A “live tweet stream” of the tweetup throughout the event also helps bring in people.
2. If you have doorprizes, take business cards.
3. During the event, be the host with the most. I would avoid trying to corner one or two people and rope them into long conversations. Instead, act like you’re glad they’re they’ve come, but you have many people to see, meet and talk to.
4. During the event, make introductions between people. Find people, meet them, and introduce them to other new people. Everyone will think you’re special and will WANT to talk to you.
5. Take pictures and video of the event.

After the Event

1. After the event, post all your pictures and video on your Facebook page, Flickr, and your blog.
2. Create a special offer for only those who attended the event – a whitepaper, consultation, free month, whatever, and send it to them.
3. Connect with everyone on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc!

There it is in a nutshell – 19 steps to TweetUp success. From beginning to end, the whole thing should be a two week project. If I left something out, leave a comment below and help build this list. In the meantime,, get out there, meet your community, and have a little fun – and be sure to invite me to all your TweetUps, too!

Keith Cline is the founder of Dissero, a recruiting firm focusing on emerging growth companies in the Northeast. I’ve known Keith for five years, and respect his ability to find the right people to fit the right jobs in emerging technology companies. For those who’ve been tasked with hiring talent for a web tech company in Boston – you know how hard this is to do with success on a regular basis.  It takes a deep understanding of the technology, but also the personalities of everyone involved.  That’s why I was intrigued when Keith launched VentureFizz in 2009,  a destination website focused on all things Tech in the Boston area. From the start, it was clear that VentureFizz is much more than a job board. It’s a community site dedicated to bringing together the talent, the technology, the jobs, and the entrepreneurial spirit in this great technology hub in Boston and the northeast. I sat down with Keith to learn more.

Mamet: What is VentureFizz and what prompted you to start it?

Cline: VentureFizz is a destination website where people can find all that is buzzing within Boston’s technology community from one spot. There is a tremendous amount of great content out there and our goal was to help pull it all together for people in our industry. For the past seven years, I have been running a recruiting firm called Dissero, which is focused on VC backed technology companies in the Boston area. I speak with several people every day and I always ask the question – “how do you find information about Boston’s tech industry.” The responses are typically varied and it seemed apparent that a site like this would be a valuable resource. Thus, VentureFizz pulls all of this information together. Our features include: Company Research (over 800 companies, tagged and searchable), Job Board, Networking Calendar, VC Funding Activity, News, Blogs, and our Twitter feed.

Mamet:  What’s happened since you launched it? things you were hoping for? things you didn’t expect? any stats you can share with us?

Cline: One word – WOW – I have been overwhelmed and encouraged by the amount of support and positive feedback from the tech community in Boston. So many people have sent me emails saying how much they appreciate the site. The venture capital community has also been very, very supportive of the site. Firms like Matrix Partners, Flybridge Venture Capital, Venrock, Highland Capital Partners, etc. have all helped out in one way or another. Every week, the traffic continues to grow at a steady clip and we currently have over 6,200 people receiving our weekly email newsletter. The newsletter has been a very popular feature, since it provides an overall snapshot of information from the previous week. We also highlight innovative companies, jobs and upcoming networking events.

Mamet: During your “day job,” you help tech companies find talented technology workers. How do you see technology, venture capital / funding, and entrepreneurship blending to change the shape of the “recruiter” role?

Cline: In the recruiting industry, there are always new ideas, cutting edge technologies, or new business models that are looking to change the face of recruiting. Some of which have been venture capital backed and very successful. For example, LinkedIn has made an enormous impact on how recruiters source for talent. Bullhorn is a Highland backed company which has created a SaaS Applicant Tracking System for staffing firms. Each company is filling a critical need in a major market where there is a significant revenue opportunity (for a VC to fund the business). On the flip side, I see a lot of “solutions” that seem overly technical and complex, where they are trying to automate too much. A lot of recruiting comes down to experience, knowledge, personal touch, and instinct.

Mamet: How does VentureFizz fit into the ecosystem of great tech communities here in New England like Scott Kirsner’s Innovation Economy, David Beisel’s Web Innovator’s Group, and Bobbie Carlton’s Mass Innovation Nights?

Cline: VentureFizz is a perfect compliment to the overall ecosystem. We are all working towards the same common goal in terms of increasing the awareness of all the great things happening, as well as encouraging innovation throughout the region. WebInno, Mass Innovation Nights, MTLC, MITX, etc. are all included as part of our Networking Events page. I also help to promote specific events, such as the QUEST for Innovation, which has a featured listing and logo on our site. I have always been a big fan of Scott Kirsner, as well as Mass High Tech & Xconomy. I hope that VentureFizz is introducing their great content to some fresh eyes.

Mamet: What does the future hold for VentureFizz? What next big steps should we be on the lookout for?

Cline: I am happy with the positive feedback from the first release of the site, but I already have several ideas for the next release of VentureFizz. My goal is to make the site more social and interactive. At some point, I would like to roll out VentureFizz to another city…but I am focused on making the site a major success in Boston first.

Keith Cline is Founder, VentureFizz & Dissero. Keith has over eleven years of experience in the technology and recruiting industry. In 2009, Keith launched VentureFizz, which is a destination website focused on all things Tech in the Boston area. Seven years ago, Keith also started and continues to run Dissero, which is a leading recruiting firm focused on working with venture capital backed companies in the area.

I was able to attend the Inbound Marketing Summit with Mike Lewis from Awareness, to stream and record an interactive panel discussion from the floor of the show. This was a joint effort between our two companies, as well as the organizers of the Summit – New Marketing Labs. This was one of the best panels to get on video. Featuring the top thought leaders in the social media space, the goal of this session was to discuss actual B2B marketing case studies of companies – large and small – that put an emphasis on content creation as the core of their digital marketing strategy.

The discussion features an all-star panel of individuals in the social media space: Jason Falls, Paul Gillin, C.C. Chapman, Chris Brogan, and Brian Solis. I’m interested in your comments below. Did they achieve the stated goal of “cutting through the hype of social media?”

The Power and Peril of Online Communities

This past Friday, August 7th, I went down to the main office of Communispace in Watertown, MA for another cool and exciting Social Media Breakfast (SMB). This was the 15th SMB in Boston organized by Bob Collins, and they just keep getting better. SMB15 was all about “The Power and Peril of Online Communities,” and presenters included:

• Bryan Person, Social media evangelist at LiveWorld and Founder of the Social Media Breakfast series that now features 28 chapters across the world.
• Rachel Happe, Principal at The Community Roundtable. Rachel’s talk on the “Community Maturity Model” was far and away the best presentation of the day, in my opinion.
• Diane Hessan, CEO of Communispace Corporation told a great story of the history of Communispace which was fun and engaging. She is clearly a tremendously capable leader, speaker, and expert in Online Communities. At the end of her presentation, you felt you knew her and her company like old friends.

I was armed with my trusty FlipCam and was able to record most of the event. Enjoy!

Here’s another great post that came out of an email conversation. This one was between myself and Mike Lewis, VP Marketing at Awareness, social media guru, and all around great guy.

We were discussing the creation of a hashtag. For those of you who may not be familiar, a hashtag is a simple way to classify information posted on the internet. The reason why this is done, according to Wikipedia, is that “Labeling and tagging are carried out to perform functions such as aiding in classification, marking ownership, noting boundaries, and indicating identity.” They’re most commonly used on Twitter, because there’s no other way to group tweets from different people together. As with anything that involves Twitter, it’s pretty simple. You simply put a pound sign (#) in front of a word, and you have  searchable hashtag. No brainer, right?

Well, at the risk of overcomplicating it, I think there might actually be a real formula for making a good hashtag. Your hashtag should be:

1. Unique. The purpose of a hashtag is so that people can search for, and find additionally content, related to your topic or event. When people search for your hash tag, you don’t want to get mixed up in other people’s content. Good: #dowant – Simply, stuff that people would want. Has taken off as a little meme of it’s own. Bad: #ims. All due respect to Chris Brogan and the team leading the Inbound Marketing Summit, but #ims content is usually about Indy Motor Sports.
2. Short. Hashtags are used all over the internet – from blogs like WordPress, to picture sharing sites like Flickr, to video sharing sites like YouTube, to file sharing sites like Slideshare. But, they are used most heavily on Twitter. We’ve only got 140 characters to play with on Twitter, so we don’t want a huge hashtag. It will prevent people from being able to effectively Retweet your content. Or, they’ll Retweet your content and just drop out your hashtag to save room. Good: #nyt – everyone knows the New York Times.  Bad: #p2/liberal/progressive – It’s a hashtag, not a map to a directory on your computer, folks.
3. Descriptive. It’s gotta make some sense that the hashtag describes the type of content or event or location that you’re writing/tweeting/shooting video of. That way, you can actually work it into the content of your post, rather than just appending it to the end of your tweet like a footnote. Good: #followfriday – On Friday, people share the names of people worth following. Bad: #073109 – huh?

In conclusion, before you settle on a hashtag that may have to live with for awhile, do some simple searches on Google or on Twitter’s Search page, to see what other content is out there, and do some tests in a Twitter client to see much your tweets will have to be shortened, in order to include the hashtag. You’ll be glad you did. You may also want to check out hashtags.org – the definitive directory of hashtags.

What about you? Share your Good and Bad examples of hashtags in the comments!

This morning, TweetDeck v0.21b was released, providing a boatload of small, but much needed, user interface improvements. For those of you who don’t already know TweetDeck, it is a Twittter client. It’s different from some of the other ones out there, in that “it aims to evolve the existing functionality of Twitter by taking an abundance of information i.e twitter feeds, and breaking it down into more manageable bite sized pieces.” TweetDeck is my Twitter client of choice.

But, for those that know and love TweetDeck, the biggest drawback has been its management of empty space and overall width of the application. The UI was just a little on the “clunky” side. It looks like the development team heard these complaints and have addressed them in the latest release. Aside from overall “compactness” in the standard layout, this version of TweetDeck now comes with a setting for “narrow columns” which is pretty handy, reducing my application width by a full 20%, allowing me to add a new column into my display at full screen, if I choose to.

Another nice improvement is an apparently new integration with a site called TwitterCounter.com. This provides an auto-generated @ reply sent from TweetDeck Services to you that provides follower statistics and, even cooler, projections of follower counts based on current rates. Here’s what my first TwitterCount message said: “@msmamet followers 193, added since yesterday 3, average growth per day 1, predictions: tomorrow 194, next month 223 (twittercounter.com).” It doesn’t look like this is a true @ reply sent through Twitter, but rather it’s generated by the application and put in your “Replies” column – so it’s private. I suppose if you like to brag, you could always Retweet it.

I’m still exploring the list of changes, including a new spellcheck feature, but overall it looks like this release has made the application markedly better. I encourage you to download it and try it today. What are some other Twitter clients that you use and like? I’d like to know your thoughts about it!

Last night I had some fun with the local Boston Twitter community at the NogUp at Tommy Doyle’s in Harvard Square – not the Tommy Doyle’s in Kendall Square. I saw some folks I had met before, @recklessstudio and @girlgamay, and was able to put a few faces to names – folks like @jeffcutler and @cmajor.

It was a small, low-key crowd. The Monday before Christmas and immediately following a 1 to 2 punch snow and ice-storm definitley kept the Twitter masses away. But, it was a nice time just chilling with a few beers and getting to know some folks I don’t know all that well.

Of course, being a TweetUp, many of us spent a good amount of time Tweeting the whole shebang. Check out the shenanigans! Highlight of the evening was Jeff Cutler playing Santa Claus and giving out a few gifts to those who attended.

Thanks and looking forward to the next one!

I just updated to WordPress 2.7 and right off the bat, I’m pleasantly surprised. First off, upgrading was a breeze. All my plugins are working just great. Second, the amount of new features and UI improvements is quite significant for a “minor” numbered release. One of the new features I’m currently using is the “QuickPress” box right on the dashboard that enables you to quickly jot down a blog post in a small window. This reduces a couple of clicks and, an obstacle, to creating posts – enabling me to generate more content. In short – a good use of UI to solve a problem. I’m also enjoying a NetVibes-like customizable admin, that lets me move blocks of information around and organize as I see fit. Very nice! I look forward to exploring more of the features available in this release. Good work so far!

How about others using WordPress? Share your thoughts on where it hits (or misses) the mark in the comments below!

This morning on LinkedIn, I saw that the application platform that was originally introduced earlier this year with a few LinkedIn-specific apps such as People you may know, custom people search results, and job search, has been rolled out large scale and now includes applications built by 3rd party developers. There are now 9 applications that can be added to your profile, and each application has a short video describing how it can be added and used.

The predominate usage of LinkedIn is to network with people. Many people use it to find jobs, find new employees, or as an additional PR / marketing channel. With that understanding, the top 2 applications of interest are the twitter search integration (who’s talking about me or my company), and the WordPress blog integration (let others more about what I’m talking about).

Getting my blog syndicated on my LinkedIn profile sounded pretty nifty to me. But, as with many brand new product features, it doesn’t really work 100% of the time. I tried to install the WordPress app several times and it failed in both IE 7 and FF3. I guess we’ll have to wait for a maintenance release before it gets bullet-proofed.