Written on July 1, 2008 – 9:01 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Although most people are slowly getting used to the idea of Web 2.0, the third version of the web is knocking on our doors. The last couple of years, we’ve embraced the wisdom of crowds - inviting anyone to create content and guide us through the web. Yet now most of us feel it’s time to manage that overabundance of content and ask for experts to give us a hand while discovering the web. With experts I mean people who have proved to know more than average about a certain subject. Call them mavens if you want. Mahalo and Topicle are examples of services who already embraced these people, Swiss conversations online tracker coComment is about to do the same.
Matt Colebourne at The Next Web conference
For those of you who don’t know what coComment is, CEO Matt Colebourne has sent me a short summary of what they do: “The core functionality of coComment is to enable users in managing their conversations across the web. Additionally, users can utilize coComment in discovering conversations they want to participate in or people they want to follow, as we track over 17 million conversations across 280,000 sites.”
The discovering part, that’s where the experts come in. The new community features include ranking and rating of comments by user and by tag to make it easy to find specific conversations or people. “This”, says the press release, “enables the best conversations, rather than simply the most prolific, to become much more visible and accessible”. So coComment users can qualify comments based on the reputation of the commenter. Therefore, people can find the best discussions and conversation by following certain people who function as conversation leaders, simply because they add the most value to a discussion.
A nice extra for bloggers and publicists is that they can check whether visitors like the discussions about their publications. This way, coComment offers us more insight in the value of the much-discussed phenomenon of online conversations.
I hope you like that post!
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Written on May 29, 2008 – 1:01 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
At several of the conferences I visited this year, I saw Matt Colebourne from CoComment on stage, telling business people to participate in the online conversations. Rather than just ignoring or hiding from them, companies should surprise the bloggers and their readers by showing them that they’re listening.
Some companies really get this. When co-editor Patrick and me had a bad travel experience with Venere, Renée De Meo from the booking site responded to my blog post and proved it was the mistake of the hotel. That’s the kind of alertness a company’s communications division needs.
So tracking blog posts is fairly simple, you either use a service like CoComment or Google Alerts. But how do you follow the thousands of discussions on Twitter? The conversations there are almost as influential as the ones in the blogosphere, as Nate Elliot proved during the Next08 conference. TweetScan and Summize probably look a bit too obscure for your average communications manager, but a new Get Satisfaction service might help the companies out.
The support-experts from Get Satisfaction developed Overheard, a feature that discovers what customers are saying about a given company on Twitter. On top of that, they make it fairly simple for not so savvy people to respond quickly. And if you’re familiar with Get Satisfaction, you’ll know the design is customizable to the max (take a look at the FAQ page of our sponsor Wakoopa to see what I mean).
Although participating in conversation is of the utmost importance for companies - bloggers, Twitter users, and readers are still happily surprised when you actually do so. You’ll really make an impression, so consider to give Get Satisfaction and similar services a try. It’s time to embrace the 2.0 mind set.
Written on February 8, 2008 – 4:56 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
A few weeks ago I interviewed Matt Colebourne. He’s the CEO of coComment, a service that makes it possible to keep track of all the comments you make and discussions you’re participating in. Today he captured the attention of 700 LIFT08 attendees when he spoke about the importance of social networking and conversations for companies and bloggers.
Colebourne is the kind of speaker that grabs your attention and won’t let go. “Who’s stressed?” he asked the audience in enthusiastic way, “Don’t worry, I’m here to make you feel good”. He then asked us to imagine that we’re the marketing director of a big brand. “You have a pleasant life, everybody thinks you’re brilliant.” Well, you can guess where this is going. In comes the angry visitor who leaves an ugly comment on the website. It gets picked up and the social media train is gathering steam. Before you know it, the comment ended up on the Digg frontpage. What happened?!
“Opinions are everywhere, people are saying what they want. Whether you like it or not. Trouble is here”, Colebourne said. “Markets ARE conversations, you can view that as trouble or you can engage, excite and use it yourself.” Some more one liners by Colebourne: “Listen to the good, the bad and the ugly” and “Interaction sometimes make your brand more memorable”. And his most important message: “You cannot control, keep talking and listening, don’t be scared”.
“You cannot control, keep talking and listening, don’t be scared”
So to sum it up, Colebourne urges companies and organizations to participate in online conversations, instead of running way from them. It’s a message that would do pretty well at a regular marketing event, yet I think that most LIFT08 visitors were already aware of this revolution. I mean, everybody has read the corporate blogging book Naked Conversations by Robert Scoble - who was sitting front row by the way.
Colebourne is a gifted speaker and I really like coComment, but next time I hope his presentation is inspirational because of the content itself, and not just for the way that he presents it.
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The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show of, the future of the Web. (
