Mark Kolier’s Blog

Archive for August, 2011

Our office was without full power in our office for nearly 48 hours following the aftermath caused by Hurricane Irene. We had lots of company. Local municipalities have gotten smarter about communicating with residents during major local events like snowstorms or hurricanes. I wish I could say the same for utilities.

In no way do I mean to knock the efforts of all the great linemen that have come to help restore power after the hurricane. But these people are seemingly forced to run around like chickens with their heads cut off to help wherever it’s needed. Why are things done the way they are when it could be so much better? It’s not like they did not know a hurricane was on the way.

For example – crews came into the Northeast both in advance, during and after the storm. I asked one of the crews near my office how they were receiving information on what to do and where to go next and he shook his head and said that he received many different contradictory messages from various levels of authority. Now it was my turn to shake my head. Today’s technology allows for the lightning fast creation of small topical websites, mobile distribution lists and even groups that could act as an aggregation platform for local community, county and state communication for officials and crew before, during and even following significant events.

It cannot be a question of expense. The cost/benefit of having a centralized communication platform for disaster relief is tremendous and at times could be life-saving. With all the money available for state and federal disaster relief I cannot believe that the cost of creating a simple website combined with a small team to aid in administering it to monitor and send out messages would more than pay for itself in helping teams be more prepared as well as efficient.

Adding a mobile site would be a great way to communicate since SMS texts could be deployed to communicate with everyone in the field or sent to individual people or crews on demand. Every lineman on every crew has a mobile device that would support SMS campaigns. For those that have smartphones they could easily be directed to the mobile site for more information.

I don’t expect my thought here is anything revolutionary but I am amazed that it’s not already SOP – standard operating procedure. Maybe it is SOP in some locations but it should be universal.
Do you agree?

If you are anywhere in the Mid-Atlantic toward the Northeast you have woken up this Monday morning to at least some partial disruption to your normal routine. Here in Connecticut more than 750,000 ‘customers’ are without power. Being that there less than 3,500,000 total residents in the entire state the impact is going to be historic – in part because it could be days or even a week before power is fully restored.

During the storm mobile phone networks were active and Facebook and Twitter (much like they were during the east coast earthquake last week) kept people in touch and apprised. Radios again became important for those that had their cable, satellite or other television connections taken off-line.

For residents of Westchester County north into Duchess County as well as those in Connecticut – Metro-North is out until further notice so on this beautiful post-storm Monday the conditions are somewhat akin to that of a snow day with regard to power outages and work disruptions – except for 80 degree temperatures and bright sunny skies.

David Meerman Scott writes a great blog and had a good post today on the pre and post-Irene performance of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg http://www.webinknow.com/ – and I agree that Mayor Bloomberg did a good job of communicating during the entire event.

We’ve all come to reply so much on technology in order to perform our daily work tasks. I said many times that nature always wins and once again we were all reminded of the truth of statement. If there is no power or no internet service much of the technology is neutralized.

If you are not in the areas impacted by Hurricane Irene (ok it was a tropical storm when it hit the New York City area), be patient with us this week – things do not appear likely to get back to normal for at least the better part of this week.

It took our now college age daughter to suggest using Facebook video chat instead of Skype. Up until now Skype has been my video chat go-to option. Two nights ago we video chatted on Facebook and it was impressive in many ways. It is simpler within the Facebook application since permissions are already taken care of. If you’ve not tried it – you should. I learned later that Facebook is using the Skype platform for the service and I cannot understand how the results could be so different.

The download was fast and easy – we were actually corresponding while entering the request for video chat, and the download took less than one minute. The next thing I saw was a real-time video of my daughter and the quality was the best I’ve experience when it comes to video chatting. It was as if we were looking at each other right in person.

There is also a group video chat function that works just as well. Important to remember is the fact that you need to be FB ‘friends’ in order to engage in FB video chat – so it’s not as if it will replace Skype or other video chat applications (like ovoo.com), but for my friends that I wish to video chat with, Facebook has become the new default choice.

Here’s a questions – why doesn’t LinkedIn have a video chat option? It may not be appropriate for most LinkedIn interactions but it seems like it would be a simple yet high value enhancement for that platform. Keep in mind that should you wish to not video chat, you as the operator always have the option to decline to video chat.

But for family and friends that are not nearby, video chatting is better than – well than not having video chat. Facebook has done a really good job here and I am very surprised as to how I was unaware of that feature up until now.

How about you? Have you used video chatting? Do you like it? Is Skype your normal choice? Have you tried FB video chat? And if not what else might be you be using?

How do I know this? Our daughter is a freshman and is interested in joining a sorority. She told us that all of the girls that are already in sororities and charged with recruiting incoming freshmen have to deactivate their Facebook accounts during sorority rush. If that does not demonstrate both the ubiquity and power of Facebook, nothing will.

Even with social networking ‘Greek’ life on college campuses around the United States have retained their appeal to many students. The friendships and connections can last a lifetime. It is a uniquely North American ritual most popular in the United States. While ‘pinning’ has gone by the wayside, the Greek system is representative of many of the things that take place on Facebook and other social networking sites, except that it is not virtual. However if you are familiar with hazing in real life you should also be familiar with virtual hazing on social networking platforms. It happens and it’s not good.

The fact that sorority recruiters are forced to deactivate their Facebook accounts (one assumes that for now Google+ accounts are allowed much to Google’s chagrin?) demonstrates the way college students interact. Mark Zuckerberg doubtless would be proud and aggravated at the same time.

A Ryan Tate article Monday on Gawker http://gaw.kr/oqbE0y highlights how colleges and schools can turn people into Facebook maniacs. I assume that asking current sorority members to deactivate their accounts during rush is some sort of defense against turning the rushing frosh’s into maniacs. I presume that fraternities are not doing the same thing but maybe that’s my gender prejudice.

While Greek life during my undergrad days was very popular I chose to not participate yet had many good friends who enjoyed their experience so I am not judging the positives or negatives of being in a sorority. Up until now I have given little thought to how online social networking might impact real-life social networking. The power of Facebook has met with the power of the Greek system. Facebook appears to be the loser in this round. Or is it?

Being a regular user of Foursquare I have been wondering for quite some time when the ‘Beta’ emblem would disappear. Last week that happened along with a host of other reported changes (Lists, events, photos – all of which I am not likely to use but are kind of cool in and of themselves). Betabeat wrote about it last week – http://bit.ly/oCgLRj. Unfortunately, the GPS is still fairly inaccurate and you can still check into places that you have not entered – this has to be fixed and Foursquare is working on it.

The offers at nearby places on Foursquare are slowly getting better and more frequent. Yet in the lighting fast world of the social web I am surprised at how long it is taking for a truly enhanced version of Foursquare (for users) to be offered. CEO Dennis Crowley seems to be focused on creating value for merchants – he would be wise to keep in mind that the users might be getting a bit impatient with the slow rate of progress toward what I think is still a good platform with strong legs.

One big question I have is how much more social Foursquare will get. Aside from checking into places where friends might ‘meet-up’ and offering nearby potential customers a reason to come into a particular establishment I am not sure people will embrace and interact with yet another social media platform. Mr. Crowley and his team are counting on that – what do you think?

While Foursquare was making its changes location based Yelp.com made a few changes in its application as well. I use Yelp when looking for nearby eateries, bars, or movies wherever I am in the United States (it does not work outside the U.S. nearly as well).

Last week an update to the application popped up and I installed it but since then the application has suddenly lost its ability to recognize where I am currently located. Good thing I am not depending on it. And before you go asking – all my other GPS based applications are working just fine and I changed nothing in my Yelp profile. Not good. In fact I ended up using Bing to find a restaurant near me this weekend and it worked out satisfactorily. For Yelp that is also not good.

In order for social media applications to continue to gain in value they have to deliver the basics – they have to work (always), be fast and accurate. Once users lose confidence in a social media app’s ability to enhance their lives the downward spiral is underway. I hope that Foursquare and Yelp respectively fix what ails them.

Are you using Foursquare or Yelp?