Three Conversation Tools Wanted! What will be needed to keep conversation valuable and relevant!
Everyone is talking about how to scale ‘Conversation Spaces’ like Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook. How are we as humans supposed to catch all of the relevant conversations and engage and respond to those asking questions or starting conversations? How do we remember to take action on an opportunity delivered to us by a tweet or a direct message? How do we keep up response times as a business or individual when most of us have other things we need to be doing? Frankly, I have come to the reality that it is currently not possible and that the tool sets that we have at our disposal are not robust enough to handle our needs. I am going to put out a call to action as well as what types of tools I think we need to help us solve the problems that many of us are facing. Please add your suggestions and ideas in the comments and I will follow up with a blog post that incorporates your ideas.
Action Items
If you are sent an idea, proposal or opportunity that you would like to remember to act on wouldn’t it be great to have tools that will allow you to go beyond starring or creating a favorite? I would personally love a tool that can integrate with my current software packages like Batchblue to capture and create an action item. If nothing else, I would like to save that item back to a desktop folder or application where I can review and take action.
We need to advance beyond conversation and create tools that allow us to act efficiently on opportunity and ideas.
Advanced Filtering
I have talked in the past about bringing real time conversation into an RSS reader. This is a great way to scan for content based on keywords and phrases that are relevant to our objectives. However, this system is flawed. I was talking to an individual about spam recently and he told me that he is constantly scanning the term “Real Estate” and that he has to sift through piles of spam before he can find anything of value. Is there a way we can place advanced filters on our conversational searches so that we may filter out a screen name, or specific words that would be attached to a thread? For example you might see a tweet that comes in saying “Make 1,000 a day with my system”. You may want to filter out that exact phrase or keywords like “make money” providing you with a much cleaner and low noise stream of data.
If we want companies to buy into social media and it’s usefulness we must create ways to filter out noise and hone in on the value.
Affordable Integrated CRM
I used to work with a chef that would constantly say that hey forgot more recipe’s than all of us in the kitchen had ever learned. Recently, I’m starting to feel like I have forgotten people that I wish I hadn’t forgotten about! What’s the point of generating relationships in the social space if there is no way to effectively and easily create a database? How cool would it be if there was a tool that allowed us to click on a drop-down menu and add notes about that person as well as add them to a database segmented by interests or profession? This may sound automated and not human, but it’s unrealistic to think that your mind can operate at a level where you never misplace a thing!
If being successful in social spaces is about being helpful to others then we are going to need tools that allow us to build custom databases.
My suggestion to the folks that are creating these types of tools and sitting at their whiteboard brainstorming is to get together and create something that is not silo’d. We see new Tweetdeck and Seesmic Desktop like tools come out almost on a daily basis, but I fail to change because none of them have added more value; they have simply reorganized. Myself and many others would be willing to pay for a well integrated tool that goes beyond facilitating conversation. What do you think?
Keith Burtis is a social media and digital marketing professional. If you or your company are looking to REV THE ENGINE on your digital efforts contact Keith today! Specialties include: Blog design/Integration, Custom Facebook Pages, Social, Digital and Interactive Content strategies.
Comments
Keith,
You’ve hit the nail on the head again. I’ve found numerous tools that do pieces of what you’re talking about – but don’t integrate around how I behave. For example, I use HighRise to manage customer relationships, but I use Gist to see what those people are up to.
For action items, I love Evernote. I use it on my iPhone and Macbook (both synch).
John
John Haydon´s last blog ..Why Twitter lists kill #followfriday dead 
For CRM, if you’re OK with a server-based solution, SugarCRM is Open source, and there is a free community version available. It is written in PHP and is designed to be very extendable and customizable.
If someone were to write some social media modules (e.g. twitter plug-ins for search, and follow-up/task creation) it could be a very compelling solution.
John Meadows´s last blog ..Episode 80: Playing what they live and living what they play
Keith – great post. I too am in favor of finding solutions for the three problems you’ve outlined above (particularly the advanced filtering). By the way, I’ve heard great things from Susan Bratton about BatchBlue. Obviously it doesn’t solve problem number one but helps at least centralize some of the data.
Thanks,
Aaron
Aaron Strout´s last blog ..Content is Still King: Interview with AOL CEO & Chairman, Tim Armstrong