Apr
19
New on FX: The Riches
The Big in Japan team has been working hard on community tools for the hit new FX Network show, The Riches. Turns out the show is a hit. Check out a preview:
Apr
19
RSS Feeds, partial or full?
Robert Scoble has some great advice to anyone considering delivering partial versus full feeds. Robert and I hate partial text feeds. Lots of folks think it helps click through if you offer a partial feed. Feedburner suggests they are wrong. Robert explains why partial feeds are a bad idea even if there was a a difference in click through:
The thing that partial texters are forgetting is that the other 900 people will find out about you from an influencer. Someone who will tell them. So, your traffic growth will be far slower if you only offer partial text feeds. Many of my friends who are journalists or bloggers just won’t deal with partial text feeds anymore. You certainly see that I link to mostly full text feeds on my link blog.
John Battelle realized this after he polled his readership about this issue: “From the results of my very unscientific poll, I’d clearly be alienating at least a very vocal minority.”
Apr
19
Case Study: LEGO and Blogs
LEGO is one of Big in Japan’s most important social media clients. This 75 year-old toy maker is a great example of a company that has used social media to re-invent their business. Bill Tompson gave a great presentation at WOMBAT3 titled, "LEGO: Using Blogs to Speak With – Not At – Your Customers. Josh Hallett blogged about the presentation in a post of the same title. He explains,
They have an extraordinary community. LEGO fans make Star Trek fans look like lightweights. Recently LEGO embarked on a program to update the Mindstorms product. They asked their fans what they wanted and listened. The conversation loop is an ongoing process. They ask, listen, prioritize and respond, then start again. With tools like surveys, forums, blogs and profiling they learn about their customers. With their platform they can quickly gather feedback from customers on a variety of topics. Not only do the validate certain programs they also rate/rank them. Not only can they look at overall data, the can look across segments.
[photo credit: Josh Hallett of Hyku ~ our favorite social media guru]
Apr
19
Blog as Resume
Adam Darowski makes a great point suggesting that "the blog is the new resume." Adam is dead on with this one. Joshua Porter makes several good points including:
- Your blog represents you.
- Your blog is serious business.
- Your blog is an archive.
- Your blog isn’t the only mirror of your life.
- Your blog is your unedited version of yourself.
I have been blogging for a couple of years (Texas Startup Blog) and it has been a very interesting exercise. I have lost track of the number of job offers or inquires I have received as a direct result of my online writing. Adam explains:
Blogging is the perfect way for a candidate to give an employer a more detailed sales pitch—to show they can “talk the talk” (as opposed to just fill a resume with buzzwords). I can’t think of a reason for any serious tech professional to not have a blog. Not only does it serve as an excellent notebook for storing ideas and links, but it can come in handy in a job hunt where what interviewers really want to just know what, professionally (and somewhat personally), engages you on a day to day basis. How often do you look at a resume and wonder what exactly the person’s role on a project was? Well, if the person blogged about it then you would have a better idea—and you would know if the role would fit in with your team.
Good stuff…
Apr
18
New Look for Big in Japan
We are playing with a new look for the Big in Japan website and blog, let us know what you think. The current design is beta as well as the internal pages (i.e. they are currently being written or rewritten). We figured we could wait until everything was perfect, but decided to open source our site development.
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