Mike MacLeod

How To Be The Coolest Kid in Your Network

// January 2nd, 2009 // Comments // Journal

How would you like your contacts to view you as the guy that always keeps in touch – and the one that also remembers the details of what they are in to?

If you’re like me you have many online contacts and you have every intention to stay in touch with all of them. But before you know it, months (or years) slip by without talking. When you do get around to dropping a line, you’re left to ask some generic, boring question that tells them you don’t remember many details about them.

Zentact offers an idea to solve this problem all while you go about surfing the web. Users load their contacts into Zentact and then tag each one with unique keywords that are of interest to that person. When the user comes to a site that relates to a keyword, the contact pops up with a reminder.

For example, let’s say Eric Trekford is in my address book. I have him tagged with topics that would be of interest to Eric, like web design, Austin, jazz, or market research. Then, while reviewing my feeds, I discover an article on the SXSW festival in Austin, TX. If I have Zentact’s Firefox plugin installed, an alert will pop-up suggesting that I contact Eric. In the pop-up, Zentact tells me the last time I contacted Eric, and lets me know why the site might be interesting to him. I can even send an email directly from Zentact along with the URL and a message from me.

Eric now thinks that I am the greatest, coolest person he knows.

You can also sync Zentact with your Twitter account so you can @reply to someone instead of emailing.

Yet another instance of “why didn’t someone think of this sooner?”

You currently need an invitation to join Zentact. You can get one by signing up here.

What are People Saying About You?

// December 21st, 2008 // Comments // Journal

Who is talking about your company or your brand? Or better yet, who is talking about you? And what are they saying?

Startup SamePoint plans to provide just that information by aggregating results from social networks, Twitter and blogs. It also attempts to hilight positive and negative discussion about a topic by identifying complimentary and critical words.

User-generated discussions are typically not indexed by major search engines, such as Google, as they do not reside on static pages. SamePoint converts these discussions into permalinks and organizes them within a tag cloud.

Displayed here are some results from a search on WPP, who has had a lot of press lately about their acquisition of TNS.

SamePoint has a long way to go in features and aesthetics. However, this type on social media data mining is on the verge of exploding.