Tags: Attention, Beth Kantor, Buzz, Collaboration, Conference, Google, Live Tweeting, Noise, Nonprofit, Press Conference, Real-Time, Social Media, Social Web, Talking Points, Twitter, Ustream, Web 2.0, Youtube | Edit
Web Design / Social Media Consulting: (609) 365-0123 or martink@martinkelley.com
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MartinKelley.com is a web design house based in Hammonton, South Jersey. Owner Martin Kelley has twenty years of real-world experience and practical advice for small businesses and nonprofits.
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Tags: Attention, Beth Kantor, Buzz, Collaboration, Conference, Google, Live Tweeting, Noise, Nonprofit, Press Conference, Real-Time, Social Media, Social Web, Talking Points, Twitter, Ustream, Web 2.0, Youtube | Edit
I once read an insightful observation about the geo-location revolution that came about with the popularlization of cell phones: In the old days of POTS (your landline, literally "plain old telephone service") when you dialed a number you knew where you were calling but you didn't know who was going to pick up. With cell phones that was reversed: you knew who you were calling but you had no idea where they were.
Only, this wasn't quite true. To find someone you'd have to call their house, their workplace, their cellphone. What you were really calling wasn't the person but one of their phones. Much of the time you'd end up with voicemail.
Well, the promise of the geolocation revolution has been taken to its logical conclusion. I've finally gotten my invitation to Google Voice, formerly Grand Central, the personalized telephone switching service that the big-G is opening up to U.S. customers this summer. It's free and it gives you the ultimate in virtuality: a phone number that is not connected to any phone. When people call your Google Voice number, any number of phones start ringing. Which one you answer depends on your geography and convenience.
I have three phones set to ring on Google Voice calls depending on the type of call: my cell phone, my home phone and my computer (a Skype plan with it's own incoming phone number). If I'm dissatisfied with the phone I'm on I can press the star key to have all my phones ring anew and transfer the call seamlessly (a very addictive past-time). It's a fascinating evolution of the phone into a virtual communication device.
Intrigued? You can sign up for a Google Voice invite from its site. It's not a perfect system. To use it most effectively requires changing your phoning habits and making a very serious switch. I suggest Lifehacker's guide "How to Ease Your Transition to Google Voice" as a good place to start.
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Practical 2.0
Only, this wasn't quite true. To find someone you'd have to call their house, their workplace, their cellphone. What you were really calling wasn't the person but one of their phones. Much of the time you'd end up with voicemail.
Well, the promise of the geolocation revolution has been taken to its logical conclusion. I've finally gotten my invitation to Google Voice, formerly Grand Central, the personalized telephone switching service that the big-G is opening up to U.S. customers this summer. It's free and it gives you the ultimate in virtuality: a phone number that is not connected to any phone. When people call your Google Voice number, any number of phones start ringing. Which one you answer depends on your geography and convenience.
I have three phones set to ring on Google Voice calls depending on the type of call: my cell phone, my home phone and my computer (a Skype plan with it's own incoming phone number). If I'm dissatisfied with the phone I'm on I can press the star key to have all my phones ring anew and transfer the call seamlessly (a very addictive past-time). It's a fascinating evolution of the phone into a virtual communication device.
Intrigued? You can sign up for a Google Voice invite from its site. It's not a perfect system. To use it most effectively requires changing your phoning habits and making a very serious switch. I suggest Lifehacker's guide "How to Ease Your Transition to Google Voice" as a good place to start.
Tags: Google, Google Voice, Lifehacker, Skype | Edit
MartinKelley.com, 364 North Street, Hammonton NJ 08037
Email: martink@martinkelley.com
Phone: (609) 365-0123
Instant Messaging: martinjkelley (Google, Yahoo, Skype, AOL, Live/MSN)
Free Initial Consultation:
Initial phone/email consultations are free: I'll work with you to figure just what kind of website you want and what sort of features you need. I take this information and pull it into a proposal with price quotes. I only start charging after we agree on the general outlines. I cover my pricing philosophy in some detail over on my design blog.
If you need an on-site visit, you can set up a consulting house call. If you subsequently decide to use my services, half of this charge will be credited toward your project deposit.
Rates
Projects are billed at $75/hour.
House Calls
Need help with your website? Want to meet before committing to a project?
Local House Calls: $100 first hour, $75/hr additional.
Philly Metro House Calls: $150 first hour, $75/hr additional.
My Kitchen Table: Just the $75/hr.Local is South Jersey within about a half hour's drive of Hammonton, NJ. Both rates: one hour minimum. Additional time charged by the half hour.
Typical costs:
- Basic blog set-up: $600
- Analysis of a commercial site's SEO: $1200
- Small business or nonprofit web redesign: $2000
- Customized social media networking or news aggregator site: $3500
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If we've entered a contract or you need to pay off a balance you can pay by credit card (payment processed by Paypal).
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Beth Kantor's nonprofit blog has an good article asking about the possibilities for real-time web interaction and asks whether it's possible for the web to let someone be in two places at the same time:
For me, the eye-opening moment of real-time collaboration came last winter when I was planning a conference with two friends. The three of us knew each other pretty well and we had all met each other one-on-one but we had never been in the same room together (this wouldn't happen until the first evening of the conference we were co-leading!). A month to go we scheduled a conference call to hash out details.
I got on Skype from my New Jersey home and called Robin on her Bay Area landline and Wess on his cellphone in Los Angeles. The mixed telephony was fun enough, but the amazing part came when we brought our computers into the conversation. Within minutes we had opened up a shared Google Doc file and started cutting and pasting agenda items. Someone made a reference to a video, found it on Youtube and sent it to the other two by Twitter. Wess had a secondary wiki going, we were bookmarking resources on Delicious and sending links by instant messenger.
This is qualitatively different from the two-places-at-once scenario that Beth Kantor was imagining because we were using real-time web tools to be more present with one another. Our attention was more focused on the work at hand.
I'm more skeptical about nonprofits engaging in the live tweeting phenomenon--fast-pace, real-time updates on Twitter and other "micro-blogging" services. These tend to be so much useless noise. How useful can we be if our attention is so divided?
Last week a nonprofit I follow used Twitter to cover a press conference. I'm sorry to say that the flood of tweets amounted to a lot of useless trivia. So what that the politician you invited actually showed up in the room? That he actually walked to the podium? That he actually started talking? That he ticked through your talking points? These are all things we knew would happen when the press conference was announced. There was no NEWs in this and no take-away that could get me more involved.
What would have been useful were links to background issues, a five-things-you-do list, and a five minute wrap-up video released within an hour of the event's end. They could have been coordinated in such a way to ramp up the real time buzz: if they had posted an Twitter update every half hour or so w/one selected highlight and a link to a live Ustream.tv link I probably would have checked it out. The difference is that I would have chosen to have my workday interrupted by all of this extra activity. In the online economy, attention is the currency and any unusual activity is a kind of mugging.
When I talk to clients, I invariably tell that "social media" is inherently social, which is to say that it's about people communicating. The excitement we bring to our everyday communication and the judgment we show in shaping the message is much more important than the Web 2.0 tool de jour.