An old college friend who avoids social networks addressed an intriguing problem recently:

“I’ve just decided what it is I don’t like about Social Networking… it’s the idea that it, when push comes to shove, my people can bury your people… Please, tell me I’m wrong, that the end result doesn’t allow those with the most connections to dominate society further for their own benefit at the expense of those with the fewest connections. Much like the rich vs. the poor struggles of yesteryear, only now we can rise above money – look, it’s purely about fame and how well you’re liked.”

As an indirect middle finger to bullies of the past who gained advantage by physical body size, bullies in the social networking world are often the geeks! One of the reasons people are racing to Google+ is that it’s easier and more natural to organize friend groups based on the way humans naturally organize themselves rather than feeling like you’re a database admin trying to maximize the efficiency of a friend database.  

Somewhere deep within Facebook are the tools and settings to make sure the people you care about show up before the “bullies.” Also, perceptions are skewed when Facebook’s algorithm tends to give people exposure simply for talking more rather than saying something you’d necessarily care about. Google+ Circles seem to move this in the right direction by making it easier and more intuitive to share certain info with specific groups.

I’m not 100% sold on Google generally, as it often behaves as one of the biggest bullies out there. I think all of this is perhaps the greatest social experiments we’ve ever witnessed, certainly the most public. And like all things, once our fascination with the technology wears off we can just get back to being people. Until then, I agree that human nature seems only to fight against the true potential of this technology: to bring us together and make people more efficient and benevolent. It unfortunately tends to provoke paranoia, greed, and ego as well.

Humans and other primates are intoxicated by celebrity. Social media has elevated many of us to a level of semi-celebrity, but still lends power to those with means and connections above the masses. I’m not sure this will ever change, as I do believe it’s part of our very nature, for better or worse. I share the dream of technology enabling collective good, but feel that we are quite far from fully realizing it.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Marketing, Social Media, Technology, Web

I wrote previously about the coming exhaustion of IPv4 addresses and we’ve been seeing the next steps play out.

On February 3 the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) had a ceremony to commemorate the distribution of the last available blocks of addresses to all five of the world’s Regional Internet Registries (RIRs.)

And now word comes that the RIR for Asia and the Pacific Rim, APNIC, has released all of its addresses earlier than expected.  A portion of those addresses are being kept in reserve specifically to assist in IPv6 transition which is still happening at slow pace.

Next step is World IPv6 Day on June 8, when dozens of major Internet players including heavy hitters like Google, Facebook and Yahoo will provide all of their content over IPv6 connections to raise awareness of the need to implement IPv6.

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Tom Hickey Categories: General

While I’m a frequent traveler to Austin, TX, for music events and family, this was my first time at South By Southwest Interactive (#SXSWi). SXSW is divided into Interactive, Film, and Music festivals, each world-renowned for the quality of talent, content, and fun.

SXSWi is the height of Tech geekery, mostly focused around Web and mobile apps related to social media, such as Foursquare or Twitter. This is my crowd, for sure, and our social media guru Rachel Yeomans was even more plugged in than me due to her incessant and productive use of Twitter.

I dusted off my Twitter account just for the occasion. While I was one of the first people on it three years ago, I’ve found it difficult to keep up, which is a common issue for our clients to which I can relate! I’m glad I brought it out, though, as much of SXSW takes place on Twitter. This isn’t a surprise considering that Twitter essentially launched at SXSW years ago, but what did surprise me was the advanced and consistent use of hash tags to create interactive audience feedback for every session. Moderators would monitor the Twitter traffic for that session and involve the audience as they could.

Most of the big tech brands were present, as were most of the geek celebrities. A highlight for me was getting to meet a childhood geek hero, Guy Kawasaki, who was there supporting his new book, Enchantment. I fondly remember reading Guy’s column in MacUser magazine in the early 90s. As Chief Evangelist for the Mac when it was first released in 1984, he was there right at the beginning. Now he turns much of his attention to helping entrepreneurs, writing, speaking, and VC’ing. I got to meet him at his book signing, pictured below!

The learning, networking, funning, eating, and yes… drinking, all made for a dense and highly worthwhile experience, starting with legos. When we first arrived at the conference center, I found three huge tables full of legos, which immediately put me in a five-year-old state of mind. Perfect! No, we didn’t spend the whole time there, but it was a good way to get the juices flowing.

Me and my amazing creation…

And our friend Miguel Cano, from JSH&A, working on his own…

Presenter highlights included Chicago friend Jenni Prokopy (ChronicBabe) talking about building better health communities. An interview with publisher Tim O’Reilly gave us a glimpse into the future of digital. I learned about everything from social media metrics to text donations for nonprofits to web typography to mobile optimization to user experience process and more. I did make it one film event — a panel with Rainn Wilson for his new movie, Super. And somewhere in there we even made it to a couple of parties!

The food trucks are a highlight of Austin, particularly in the downtown area. Rachel, Miguel, and I walked until we found one with a short line — Turf N’ Surf Poboys. Yum…

Major sponsor and Foursquare competitor Gowalla was heavily represented, though I stuck to Foursquare personally. And vowel-challenged startup SCVNGR had everyone running around finding things for various types of rewards. All this served as real world preview of what is being largely hailed as the “next big thing” — the gamification of pretty much everything. What’s that? Well, it basically means that technologies with built-in game mechanics are more successful at getting people to actually use the technology. The best app in the world is useless if nobody uses it.

Foursquare, in my opinion, is the most successful example of merging game motivation with real-world advertising. While I’ve been using the mobile app for nearly two years, I’ve never seen such an intense concentration as I did at SXSW. People were checking in to everything, everywhere. Every room, event, party, and sometimes cars. I hit a new week record of 403 points! They released a big update to the app for SXSW, so it now tells you lots of good tidbits related to your own data, such as how long it’s been since you were at that location. This intrigues me since I purposefully choose not to broadcast my location to very many people.

The Foursquare people were everywhere as well. Forty of them came to SXSW, including co-founder Dennis Crowley, who I saw interviewed by Mashable SEO Pete Cashmore. In a particularly humbling moment for Dennis, an enormous print of his GAP ad was brought on stage and offered up to the audience member with the best question.

Dennis spoke about the future of Foursquare, and his vision to help you remember and find that coffee shop your friends were telling you to visit when you go to San Francisco, for instance. I also had a nice chat with Foursquare General Manager Evan Cohen after a smaller discussion he led with Lisa Bradner of Geomentum about the future of geo-related marketing and advertising.

Saving one of the most amazing moments for last, Rachel suggested we check out a live recording of The Nerdist with Chris Hardwick podcast at Esther’s Follies, a really fun local venue with lots of history. Fifteen minutes into the recording, Chris said it was time to bring out their special guest, who was none other than John Oliver from The Daily Show! Rach and I just about fell out of our chairs, as we’re both HUGE fans. We were treated to more than an hour of John hamming it up with the guys.

We’re looking forward to next year! Hope to see you there, too.

 This post was featured in ePiphany, Astek’s Monthly Newsletter |  Other ePiphany Articles 

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, ePiphany Featured Story, Fun, Gadget, Marketing, Social Media, Technology, Web

This past Sunday’s CBS Morning News show featured a brief segment on business cards. According to those being interviewed, the business card is extremely important for businesses…still. With today’s technology, many people say that the business card is becoming ‘old marketing’. However here we are, still exchanging cards as a form of professional follow-up after a conference or used as an ice breaker at the beginning of an association lunch.

Even from the more technological side, sometimes I admit I ask for someone’s Twitter handle before I ask for their business card. There are people who feature QR codes on their cards. Even start-ups such as Hashable take some of the hassle out of the business card exchange (and in many cases, the business card memory loss). What is your view of the business card?

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Rachel Yeomans Categories: Marketing

Direct Dialing

When I was a kid growing up in the suburbs outside Chicago there was only one area code that you needed to know: 312.  It was one of the original 86 area codes issued in 1947 as a part of the North American Numbering Plan and it covered the entire Chicagoland area, city and suburbs.  Every area code represents 8 million possible seven-digit phone numbers (we would intuitively expect that number to be 10 million since seven digits can go up to 9,999,999 but since phone numbers can’t begin with a zero or one we lose 2 million of those.)  By the late 1980’s that number was running low given an increase in population, homes and businesses adding multiple phone lines and phone lines dedicated to fax machines and pagers, etc.  So, in 1989 the suburbs of Chicago were split off into area code 708.  This allowed for more phone numbers to be issued and had the added benefit of allowing snobby city-dwellers to refer to suburbanites as “708’ers.”  (I may have been guilty of this at one point or another.)  That didn’t solve the problem for very long (think: cell phones) and in 1996 three more area codes were added: 847, 630 and 773.  Similar expansions continued to happen all over the country and those original 86 area codes have now more than tripled to 270.

These numbers have been on my mind lately because, if you haven’t heard already, a similar shortage is occurring on the Internet.

Give or take a Billion

The IP (Internet Protocol) system is something that most computer users are lucky enough to avoid dealing with.  The Protocol establishes (amongst other things) a unique addressing system for devices attached to the Internet.  An IP address looks something like this: 128.64.32.16.  It’s composed of four 8-bit numbers which, taken together, add up to a 32-bit number.  This means that an IP address can theoretically represent 2³² or about 4.3 billion unique numbers.  But, just like the first-digit-cannot-be-one-or-zero rule for telephone numbers, IP addresses have their own arcane restrictions and limitations so the actual number is closer to 3.7 billion.

That seems like a lot of addresses to burn through but not when you consider that they’re meant to service the entire planet and that, historically, they haven’t been allocated very wisely.  Back when the Internet was still largely a wilderness patrolled by academic and governmental institutions, large blocks of IP addresses were assigned to corporations which proved to be extremely inefficient.  Since the late 90’s a system of Regional Internet Registries overseen by an organization called ICANN have handled assigning the remaining address space.  The ever-wonderful nerd web-comic XKCD has a well-known (to nerds) illustration of IP address allocation circa 2006 that reflects this.  Most of the green areas in that illustration are now accounted for.  Current estimates suggest that the last free available IP address will be taken sometime early next year. The nifty little plug-in below paints a more vivid picture of the situation:

A technology called Network Address Translation has eased some of the burden.  Instead of assigning an IP address to every computer on a smaller network the address is assigned to the entire network.  This is similar to an office having a single phone number that you can call and then dial an extension for a specific phone.  A useful trick but one that only goes so far.

The solution: the entire Internet needs a small upgrade.

Numbers so large they don’t have names

The current Internet Protocol that most of the world has been using for the last thirty-some years is version 4.  All of the IP addresses I’ve been discussing up to this point are technically IPv4 addresses.  The newest version of the IP is 6 (version number 5 was assigned to a streaming internet technology that never matured) and it essentially quadruples the number of digits in an IP address.  This means that the number of possible IPv6 addresses are 2¹²⁸.  In decimal representation that’s:

340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456

At the risk of stating the obvious: that is an extremely large number.  That address space is so large that (I love dumb statistics like this) you could assign every square millimeter of the earth’s surface 667 quadrillion unique numbers.  We will not run out of these any time soon.

The only problem is to implement it.

Get ‘er done

For most of the world the move to IPv6 should be relatively transparent, but for actually networking professionals the move is a bit tricky.  It requires many, many changes to network infrastructure.  Most of it software related but a good deal of hardware as well.  Most new networking equipment and operating systems already support IPv6 but it has yet to be implemented widely and companies are dragging their feet, choosing to tinker with new strategies to extend the life of IPv4 instead of taking the v6 plunge.  Vint Cerf, one of the “godfathers of the Internet” and one of the men credited with designing the TCP/IP system that the Internet actually uses to transmit information, recently suggested tax-incentives for businesses who take the lead in the transition to IPv6.

As Cert puts it: “There is an IPv6 in your future.  Resistance is futile.”

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Tom Hickey Categories: General

Road trains look like a very encouraging solution to automotive transportation. Essentially cars using wireless signals to automatically follow a lead car. I’ve long felt that if all cars were somehow connected and able to start and stop together that we’d all save a lot of time and headache on the road! Have you ever noticed how much time is wasted just waiting for the cars ahead of you to start moving?

Imagine how much better life would be if we could have transit time to do whatever we wanted. Work, sleep, read, you name it. I’m sure it will be awhile before they are ready for prime time, but I personally can’t wait.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Fun, Gadget, Green, Technology

Starting Saturday at 12:01 a.m. Eastern, Facebook will allow users to personalize their Page URL’s (the web link people use to access profiles and fan pages). Not only is it a nice touch for Web users and brand promoters, it will help with search engine optimization for your brand since Facebook gets so much traffic. Though chances are Facebook is a top hit for your page already. Telling someone how to find you on Facebook will be easier, since you can provide an easy URL rather than telling him or her to search for you.

You must have had 1,000 fans on your page prior to June 1 to be eligible. Be sure to secure your name or brand before someone else does!

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Andy Swindler Categories: Fun, Social Media, Web

I recently got a message on Facebook from a friend letting her friends know she was leaving Facebook:

Subject: Goodbye Facebook

Hello Friends,
It is time to say goodbye to Facebook. (I have the song from “Spelling Bee” going through my head.) I gave it a try but it is not my cup of tea. Please stay in touch. I am including my contact information below. If you could be so kind as to send me your info, I will put it in my address book. Until then…

So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodbye,

——

I’m not 100% of her reasons, but my guess is that it just consumes too much time compared with the value she gets. Call it personal return on investment, if you will.

What’s alarming is that it wasn’t enough just to stop using the service or ignore it. She had to shut it out of her life completely and provide friends with alternate (traditional) contact info. Is Facebook really so insidious and distracting that we are going to start seeing people tipping off the other way now? Wait and see.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Social Media, Web

We get this question regularly enough that I wanted to share a few quick talking points you can use to convince your boss that engaging with social media is not optional. The longer you wait, the more you’ll miss. A common reaction to social media is that companies don’t want to use another marketing channel, or they don’t have time to join yet another social networking site. Well, it’s time to make time. The good news is you can control how much you get involved — just be sure to get involved.

1. Low cost of entry

The key thing to realize with social media is that it costs very little to get started. Free tools like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are available to connect directly to people and get your message out. Free services like Google Alerts give you a glimpse into what people are saying about your company. Free blog hosting makes getting started easier, though we usually recommend spending a nominal amount on some custom branding and consulting so that your blog stands out and is found on search engines.

Rather than money, what social media requires most from you is time: time to participate, time to contribute, time to engage. If you are fighting an uphill battle in the office, then you may have to consider investing your own time off the clock to get the ball rolling and produce some tangible results. Try one or two services at a time until you become comfortable with the medium. You are better off fully engaging with one or two social media tools than signing up for all of them at once.

2. The conversation is happening. All you can do is join.

Social media is less about delivering a one-way message and more about engaging with your clients. The fact is that people are out there having public conversations about your company or products. Social media is your opportunity to meet them on their own turf to talk about their experiences, complements, and complaints. Think of it as an opportunity to gain insight into the mind of your clients rather than a burden.

It’s important to listen before you join a conversation, as you would at a party. Make sure you understand the conversation and represent yourself honestly and transparently. Be sure to disclose your relationship with the company and express your genuine opinion, update, or concern. People will often tell other people about the interaction just because you bothered to reach out. Word of mouth is the most powerful form of marketing.

3. Demonstrate credibility

You are good at what you do. Your boss is even better. Your clients know that, but bringing in new business requires convincing new people that you have what they need. Starting a company blog and/or podcast, commenting on other sites such as forums and wikis, contributing to the body of social expertise that is being constantly updating and expanded are all ways to show people who you are and how you think. And chances are you offer services with which even long-standing clients aren’t familiar, which could lead to more business when they see what you publish.

What results can you expect?

People respond positively to increased customer service with responses to comments wherever they are, access to real representatives from a company not hiding behind phone banks, and direct timely expertise in the form of blogs and commentary. These are all tools that work together to deliver leads and expanded trusted networks.

As long as you consistently represent your brand and exercise full disclosure, people will remember where the information came from. It won’t happen overnight, but over time you will see benefits as people become more deeply aware of what you offer, whether or not you’ve done business yet. If you combine social media with traditional relationship building, you’ll increase the chances of earning their business.

This post was featured in ePiphany, Astek’s Monthly Newsletter | Other ePiphany Articles

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Social Media, Technology, Web

There has been a lot of discussion recently about URL shorteners, which have exploded in popularity due to the limited character count in Twitter (140 characters). Rather than wasting precious message space sharing a long URL, turn it into a small one that redirects people to the proper place.

TinyURL was the most prominent one initially, but many have sprung up, each offering various services and features. The allure is being able to track the specific URL that you created, which means that you can track your social influence by seeing who passes on your version of the particular link.

Bit.ly is one that does a good job of providing metrics and analysis to help you figure out where your link has travelled, but Digg.com is getting into the game. They have devised an elegant approach where you simply put a URL after “http://digg.com/” and it automatically turns it into a shortened URL, displays the site you linked, and a toolbar across the top with more options. Try it out:

http://digg.com/astekblog.com

URL shortening doesn’t come without implications for the structure of hyperlinks, which still rule the Web roost. Adding one more layer of interpretation has the potential to slow things down, cause more errors, or just complicate the system. Additionally, you should be aware that search engines place a substantial amount of weight on the keywords that you have in your URL, so if you are relying on inbound links (and who doesn’t?), it’s worth considering that search engines will not count these shortened URL’s in the same way as the permalinks you’ve worked so hard to optimize. For example, notice the category and title keywords in the URL for this blog:

http://www.astekblog.com/index.php/marketing/try-diggcom-for-url-shortening/

I see URL status moving in two directions, which should each be considered and used appropriately. 1) Permalinks (links that search engines see and won’t change like the one above) will continue to be essential in creating and classifying content on web sites. We will use search engines to reach these links. 2) In the social sharing world, shortened URL’s will gain more popularity as people start tracking their individual influence. It’s natural for Digg to get on this bandwagon since the entire point of Digg was to give people credit for “digging” URL’s, sharing them and gaining notoriety for finding cool things. Perhaps one or the other will win out. If it’s the latter, then sites will need to start building this social tracking capability directly into the permalinks themselves, which must be short enough to share.

It’s not going to take long for monetization to enter this game, where people receive more than social currency for initiating a link chain. One’s social network will become an even more valuable tool as advertisers begin to see the value of tracking recommendations amongst individual people. These recommendations will be more directly attributed to sales, which gives companies incentives to offer cash compensation or commissions to people who did the referring.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Social Media, Technology, Web