5 Commandments for Community Management

Aug 28

Posted by Andrew Machado in Personal, Technology

1. Be Fast
Google, Facebook and others often write about how important being fast is. Speed in any business is important. In community management responding to any support emails, questions or quickly letting the community know you are aware of the problem is imperative.  The reason speed is so important above everything else is my eyes is it leaves people with an impression about how serious you treat them.  Constantly I hear “Wow amazingly fast response!” or tweets like this.

2.  Know Your Product

This may  seem simple.  It isn’t.  When I say know your product, I mean know it better than anyone at the company.  In the case with Apture I pride myself on attempting to know more than @tristanharris (he has an insane ability to find things) when it comes down to bugs, general usage and workarounds to common problems.  The reason this is so important is it plays into commandment one, but it also frees up your engineers to keep working on larger problems.  When you know your product well a great majority of gripes users have can be solved without an engineer.  When you run a small shop engineering time is imperative, slowing them down should be avoided at all costs. One issue I’ve seen pop up since the launch of Apture Search is where users may install our javascript twice on a page.  When you know the entire installation process, how to read html, etc you can quickly walk the user through a solution to this problem quickly.  They’ll love you for this.

3.  Always Be Closing

As a Community Manager your job is to “manage the community” well a big part of this is growing the community.  You can only grow the community so much by being quick and knowing your product.  Start looking for potential new customers who you think would love it.  A quick tip for this is find a target on Twitter send them an @ message about how you have an awesome product for their site and you’d love to send them a demo.  They’ll usually reply. Who doesnt want to see a demo?  You can do contests and things to drive participation, but I’m a firm believer especially in new companies you need to use brute force to grow your business.

4.  Be Yourself

You probably spend a great majority of your day inside GetSatisfaction or inside your mail program replying to customers.  When communicating with people who are having problems be yourself, feel more like a real person than an automated reply.  If I’m talking with someone who runs a sports site, I’ll mention something about an article I read on their site or a player from a sports they like.  These types of things I believe break the ice with someone and give them comfort in knowing a capable person is on the other end, but they are also cool :)

5.  Connect on Twitter or Facebook with your customers

If someone has a great experience with getting help from you find them on Twitter or Facebook and connect with them.  You should not only build your community for your company, but increase your circle of connections.  Now when I go to SXSW or BWE I can say hi to Kate Buck Jr, simply because after talking with her a few times over Twitter about Apture we are now friends.  Relationships with people are not only beneficial personally, but if I need help promoting something for Apture I’m always going to reach out to her.  Just don’t post crazy pictures of yourself on Facebook or they may see them :)

I hope these tips help you become a better community manager.  If you have any questions or comments do not be afraid to reach out on Twitter or leave a note below.

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If You Could Change One Thing About Facebook Places

Aug 22

Posted by Andrew Machado in Technology

If I could change one thing about Facebook Places I would allow users to pin locations to photos currently within the Facebook Universe. Right now their isnt a whole lot to be had on Facebook Places pages for business’
Facebook Places for Apture
But imagine if you could pin the location of photos already within Facebook to Places locations. Instantly the social graph would start associating content with places not just people. In the future we’ll obviously see Facebook tap into the meta data smartphones are pinning on photos (location, but for the millions of photos already on Facebook) this would certainly be valuable.

If you could change one thing about Facebook Places what would it be?

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Apture Highlights, Chael Sonnen and Open Home Pro

Aug 14

Posted by Andrew Machado in Personal, Technology

A lot has been going on between Apture, a new venture I’m starting on the side and life, but figured no time like the present to update the site.

1.  Apture Highlights

Back in March Apture launched the Magic Search Bar, we’ve currently been distributing it to thousands of sites.  The key piece of the product has been the contextual search engine allowing readers to explore videos, photos and Wikipedia without leaving the page.

We received tons of feedback from users via surveys and emails about how awesome the search is.  88% of users surveyed said they would be somewhat or very disappointed if the product no longer existed.  When we dug through the numbers, we decided that with that kind of feedback we wanted anyone to have a chance to experience Apture.  Enter Apture Highlights.
Apture Highlights is a browser extension for FireFox, Safari and Google’s Chrome browser.  With Apture Highlights installed you the reader can highlight any text on any webpage and instantly explore.  Check out the video below and install it today.
2.  I recently added UFC 117 at the Oakland Arena.  It was my fifth live MMA Event and I have to say it might just have been the best.  It was one of those rare fights where it blew away the hype for the match.  Chael Sonnen was before the fight considered a decent fighter, not great.  He’d won the title shot after disposing of 3 opponents in a row notably Nate Marquardt and Yushin Okami.
What was most surprising is going into the fight Anderson Silva was between a -500 and a -600 favorite.  Chael obviously didn’t buy any of that judging by his repeated trash talk for 5 straight months.
And on August 7th Chael walked into the ring and did exactly what he said he would do.  He beat the living crap out of the invincible Anderson Silva for 23 straight minutes, winning some rounds 10-8 and then he got submitted in a triangle choke.  It’s the third fight in UFC history to ever end in the 5th round.  Only the third ever.  It was simply epic.


3.  Ever since my girlfriend started her job with Vanguard Properties I’ve been trying to find ways to make her more efficient with potential clients.  After brainstorming I came up with an idea and shockingly actually decided to get it built.  It’s called Open Home Pro and should be debuting very soon.


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iTunes in the cloud?

Jul 6

Posted by Andrew Machado in Technology

Lately there have been a lot of rumors about Apple finally leveraging their acquisition of Lala to move iTunes to the “cloud”.  In a nutshell move iTunes entirely online meaning no matter if you have your iPhone, your Laptop or say for example an iPod touch you could with internet access not only your entirely library but possibly the entire iTunes song catalogue.  I’m less interested in how it how it will function to the consumer, but very intrigued technically about how this service will exist.

1. Wireless Syncing

I assume what will happen is wirelessly Apple is going to sync your music libraries across devices.  How it will do this is to check your iTunes database file and see if any changes have been made to it and then pass the file to each device.

itunes wireless syncing

On my computer these files are a total of 22 megs and I have 10,000 songs so its not a huge pain to sync these even over 3g.

2.  What if New Songs are purchased/added?

My prediction here is Apple already gets users library information via Genius.  I believe its done anonymously, but obviously its linked to your iTunes id.  Apple probably will look to see that you are logged in with your iTunes ID, check to see if there were any modifications to the database file and make references to the song files.  They’ll need to do a bit of magic here.  First off if the songs were “purchased” from iTunes I assume they’ll just wirelessly stream them from iTunes servers to your device.  If the songs were ripped from cds or download from the internet they will probably over the internet access the files if available and allow you to wirelessly stream them.

3.  How will AT&T Handle This?

With the rise in bitrate for song files (Apple has moved from 128aac files to 256files) songs are now quite large.  An average song is probably about 8 megabytes.  Passing that over AT&T’s network isnt horrible, but say you listen to 20 songs a day on your iphone you are going to go over your 2 gigabyte limit and have to pay AT&T a bit of extra dough :) My assumption here is Apple has a very good idea about how often people plug their iphone into the computer and will have easy ways for people to sync songs across devices so they don’t always have to be streamed over the internet.

4.  802.11?

Right now Apple’s new Face Time video conferencing solution for the iPhone 4 only works over Wifi.  Thought streaming songs requires a lot less bandwidth than video conferencing I could see Apple doing a couple unique things when they detect your iPhone or iPod device is connected via Wifi.  What they could do is if the user is connected via 802.11 and they load iTunes it could prompt the user and say hey we see you have some songs on your computer that your phone doesn’t have yet mind if we transfer them.  Within minutes the library will sync and all your new songs will now be on your device.

5.  When Will iTunes in the cloud launch?

My prediction on this is fall alongside a remodeled iPod touch (with a video camera), a larger iPod shuffle and the official death of the normal iPod Classic :(  Apple has a music event every year and its the perfect stage for the debut of iTunes in the cloud.  If I had to guess a slogan it will be Itunes 9.5 Your Music Anytime. Anywhere.

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