Posts Tagged Apture

5 Commandments for Community Management

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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Quora, Faithless and Stats Reports

As I mentioned last week I’m going to try and do one of these posts every week.

1.  Quora

I’ve covered Quora before.  I think their search is fantastic.  This week I’ve found myself late at night asking questions and getting answers to things I’ve always wondered from Search Engine Optimization to debating Instrumental Groups.  Well this week I asked a question to the community if Firefox would have Double Digit Marketshare in 3 to 5 years.  Within a day I had received countless replies from the current CEO of Mozilla John Lilly to the Co-Founder Blake Ross.  It was a pretty “magical” experience to have people directly related to the product responding, but was even crazier was TechCrunch found the question and wrote a story about it…sadly not giving me credit :(

2.  Faithless

The new Faithless CD dropped yesterday titled “The Dance“.  It’s pretty terrible.  I’m really dissapointed how a group can make so many epic songs then release something as derivative as this.  Luckily the lead single is great.

3. We are finally mailing stats reports to user of the Apture Search Bar.
What is cool about this is delivered to our customers every week is a detailed report showing them pageviews, popular queries, share numbers and engagement provided from Apture.  We’ve gotten lots of praise and only one complaint…make it less wide :)
statsformaynewsletter

If you haven’t signed up your site for the Apture Search Bar what are you waiting for?

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The Game, Keane and Apture Extends it’s reach

I’m going to try and do one of these every week I’ll be covering everything from technology to music from around the internet.

1.  Dewey’s interviews with The Game

My buddy Dewey interviewed the rapper Game and its a fantastic piece covering everything from making music to beating Brandon Jennings at basketball.

2.  Got the new Keane album

Always been a big fan of Keane and their latest album Night Train is a bit of change for the band adding guest appearances and the sound shifting.  You can watch the latest video Stop for a Minute below.

3.  Apture going live on a wealth of new sites
We recently launched the Apture Search Bar on Macnn, iPodnn, Electronista and CyclingTips. I’ve pasted shots of their bars below and man are they pretty.
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technology-gadgets-mobile-phones-ipad-dvr-gps-camera-music-news-electronista

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How Important Speed is in Applications and the Web..

Over the last few weeks we have been investigating speed at Apture. I’ve been most curious in the effects of speed when a user browses the web or interacts with applications. Today I wanted to focus on a few applications and sites I’ve noticed where speed makes me not only use the product more but really wonder how they did it.

1. Quora.com
Quora.com has the single fastest search engine I’ve ever seen. The way it recommends data in real time to me is astounding. I found myself typing random phrases into its system just to see it keep recommending topics. Let’s take a look at it.

Apture CEO Tristan Harris recently inquired on Quora’s site how they got the search engine so quick and accurate. Their response from Adam D’Angelo, Quora Founder “It’s a service written in C++ designed to be fast and designed for prefix matching. Normally autocomplete interfaces on websites are backed by database queries, or by search engines like Sphinx or Lucene that weren’t originally designed for prefix matching or designed for speed, which makes them slower. There’s a lot more that goes into the autocomplete results than just the query to our backend service though”

This type of speed and presentation makes the service feel so game like. It can not be understated how important it is.

2. MyTown (iPhone Application)
MyTown is an iPhone game with over 500,000 users. It is designed by ex-Blizzard employees and centers around Checking into venues ala foursquare or gowalla, but with a twist. You can buy the properties you often check into and get rewarded money and powerups as your level up and people check into your owned properties.

What made me fall in love with this app besides it being game like was the speed at which you could navigate the UI and quickly check into places. My friend Kirk recently completed the game over the last 3 days due to addictability, but without the speed at which he was able to navigate he wouldve given up.  With simple finger swipes you can navigate through properties, results for local business’ load quickly and the experience feels seamless.  The game has gotten so popular even TechCrunch covered it recently touting that Booyah’s game has received 31 million checkins to business’.  Amazing.

3.  Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

Modern Warfare 2 recently topped $1 billion in sales equaling over 15 million copies.  Astounding.  What blows me away the most about this game from the fun combat, clever leveling system is the speed at which you can get into a game.  I dont just mean how fast from the title screen till when you are in the battlefield, but the speed at which the game boots up on my PlayStation 3.  I’ve never seen a game of this caliber with such speed from boot to playing.

Whats really impressed me is mind share wise I find myself when having a free 10 minutes convincing myself that I can get a game in because I know how fast the game boots and is ready for me.  This has lead me to put in over 40+ hours on this game since getting it in November.

Speed is imperative to consumer success.  Just ask Google.  In tests they conducted reducing the average search results by .400 ms caused a drop in searches of .6%.  You spread that number out of over time and it can matter. Speed changes how people think of your product.  Make sure you are quick.

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