Floxee

Recommend People for a Directory

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 15:28:00 -0500

We’ve added an exciting new feature to Floxee. Now you can add yourself or recommend another user that should be added to a Floxee directory. Just enter the Twitter ID then tag them. It’s that simple. Admins of the Floxee directory can approve or ignore the recommendations.

Fabulous Floxee Features

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 09:38:35 -0500

A couple of weeks ago we introduced Trending Topics for your Floxee directory. Some of those trending topics were, “yeah, about, the, a, for”. You get the idea. To remedy this situation we implemented “Stop Words”. We have a default list of stop words that won’t show up in Trending Topics and we give you the ability to add your own custom stop words. This will come in most handy for our international users.

Next on the list is our most requested feature, Links Admin. That’s right boys and girls you can now add your own links directing people back to your blog or website. Link Admin should make for tighter integration into your existing web properties and make your Floxee Directory more convenient for your users.

We have also included a nice little feature that will allow you to see Tweets for certain segments of your Floxee Directory. For example, if you chose the democrats tag on Tweet Congress and then chose the California tag, you would see all the Tweets of every democrat in California. Cool huh?

We’ve got some really great stuff coming next week. Stay tuned and we may even give you a sneak peek.

Tags

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 11:24:03 -0500

Tags are a very powerful yet under utilized tool in Floxee. With this post, I will explain how to go about adding tags to group members and the benefits of using tags on your Floxee site.

Tag Creation

There are two ways to tag group members via the Floxee admin tool.

1) Go to edit an individual member and add a comma delimited list of tags in the “Tags” field.

2) Go to People -> Import and upload a CSV (comma delimited list) file that has a column heading of “tags”. The tag list should also be comma delimited and surrounded with quotes. Spreadsheet tools such as Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice should do this for you if you save a spreadsheet as a CSV. The uploaded CSV file will add new members with tags if the Twitter screen name does not already exist in your flock or it will update the memberss tags if they do exist.

Tag Use

Once you have your flock tagged and you browse to your Floxee “List” page (e.g. http://tweetcongress.org/list), you will see two groups of tags. The first “Top tags” are the most abundant tags used in your flock sorted by the number of members tagged with that tag name.

The second tag group will list all of your tags in alphabetical order.

Once a user clicks on a tag, a third groups of tags will appear titled “Related tags”. This will list all of the tags for the list of users that was filtered by the tag that was selected. A user could then drill down further by selecting a related tag which will subsequently narrow down the related tags list.

For example, in TweetCongress I can click on “Texas” which would result in this list of related tags:

Clicking on “Tweeting” would give this:

Then clicking “Republican” would result in this:

If I click on “Senator”, the “Related tags” list is gone because there are no more related tags for that user list. (In this case, John Cornyn is the only Texas, Republican, Tweeting, Senator in our database and that is his entire tag list.)

You will also notice that every time you select a tag, not only is a breadcrumb style list of tags added to the top of your list page, but you can “X” out any of those tags and get back a new corresponding list.

Tags are not only a great way to drill down into data, but they are a great way to slice data to get member counts. For example, in the above example, after I selected the “Texas” tag in TweetCongress, I immediately know that there are 12 Democrats, 22 Republicans, 32 Representatives, 2 Senators, etc. in the TweetCongress database for Texas. Clicking “Republican” shows me that 20 Reps and 2 Senators (9 of whom are Tweeting) who are Republican congress people in Texas in the TweetCongress database.

Tags Type Suggestions

The types of tags you may want to use will probably vary by your group. Here are some ideas by group type.

Businesses:

Title (CEO, VP, developer, consultant, geek herder)
Department (accounting, marketing, IT, etc)

Conferences:

City / State / Country
Interests / Hobbies
Speaker?
Languages Spoken

Local Organizations:

Part of town they are from
Interests / Hobbies
Kids?

Floxee Tags In The Wild

Attention Current Beta Testers

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 15:41:47 -0500

For existing Beta testers there are a couple of things you need to do to get your Floxee Directory working on the new architecture. It’s pretty painless but there are a couple of steps.

1. Choose the Twitter ID you would like associated with your Floxee Directory. So don’t use your personal Twitter ID if you are setting up a directory for you company. From Twitter follow the people you would like to show up in the Tweetstream of your Floxee Directory.

2. Log in to your Floxee Directory with the Twitter ID you have chosen, using the “sign in with Twitter” button in the upper right hand corner.

3. Send us a tweet to @floxee from the Twitter ID you would like to use as the system ID for your directory. Include the name of your directory in the tweet. We’ll send you a tweet back once it has been activated.

Sorry for the hassle, but as they say in East Texas, “Thems the breaks”

- posted by @curvezilla

Floxee Beta Round 2: What to Expect

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 15:17:46 -0500

If you were lucky enough to make it into the first round of the Floxee Beta then you will be seeing some big changes. One of the major changes will be the themes. In round one we had three different themes to choose from. In the second round we have removed the themes, but fear not, they will be back soon. So what this means for current beta users is your pretty cloud theme will be gone. To soften the blow we have added a ton of new features to Floxee.

Photos and Videos: We pull these from the tweets of people you have selected to be in your Tweetstream.
Trending Topics: You now have Trending Topics for your Floxee Directory. So it’s easier to find the cool things your flock are tweeting about.
Tags: You can now tag the people in your Floxee Directory with any key words you like. This should make it easier to find people who share your interests.
Custom Logo: Want a custom logo to brand your Floxee Directory? You got it.
Powerful Search: Search the tweetstream and have your results returned with the highlighted search term in the tweets they match.
Admin Screens: Now you’ll be able to manage your Floxee Directory! Add new people, change the search term to populate the Community, add tags and custom logos.
More Secure: We are using OAuth now, no reason to give us your user name and password.

We’ve also included ads in this version. I know most people don’t like ads but we’ve made them as non intrusive as possible. We can’t wait to hear your feedback and make Floxee the best Twitter Directory around. Stay tuned because we will be launching very soon.

- posted by @curvezilla

Brand Management and Twitter

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 12:36:23 -0500

As we near the launch of our second beta round of Floxee with many new features, I’ve found myself thinking quite a bit about what makes the tool an attractive option for companies looking to really brand their piece of the Twittersphere.

Obviously, we think we have a lot to offer with features that will provide customers with an enhanced, yet brand centric interaction with the company and its collective twitter accounts. However, it also occurred to me that some brands will really benefit a lot more from this type of tool than others.

Trader Joes, a “boutique” grocery store with locations in various parts of the country has a ravenous following of hugely loyal customers. We’re talking the equivalent of the Cult of Mac here… check out what this person was considering just a few minutes ago…

A quick search for Trader Joes on Twitter reveals some pretty good stuff. Almost 100% positive comments relating to the company and its products.

Trader Joe’s should be maximizing the heck out of this pretty big stream of positive community feedback. How? Well first they would need to take control of the TraderJoes twitter account, which doesn’t appear to be an official company outlet at this time. Step 2 would be to integrate Floxee with their website (ie, twitter.traderjoes.com) to bring all of that goodness into one place. Step 3 would be to follow the Zappos model and encourage all of your employees (from corporate to cashiers) to tweet.

This would be a hugely powerful and positive outlet for the brand to engage and interact with former, current and future customers.

If you’re not already, it’s high time your company takes a long hard look at the power and advantages of harnessing and branding social media interactions. Twitter, and of course Floxee, would be a great place to start!

- posted by @bradleyjoyce

Custom Designed Floxee Directories

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 13:34:00 -0500

It seems that custom designed Floxee Directories are big on the wish list. 61% of people signing up for our beta have expressed that they would like a custom design. We wanted to find out a little more from you guys what level of custom design you would like.

More great info from HubSpot on using Twitter as part of your...

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 17:04:00 -0500

More great info from HubSpot on using Twitter as part of your Social Media business strategy. Slide 27: Create a Company Page.

What a great idea! But why stop at a single page.? Why not give them more - a Twitter directory, grouping, statistics (and more!) with Floxee? Tell us about your flock and get into the next beta round.

HubSpot also posted their presentation video.

Tweets from @mashable team members, writers & community.

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 09:48:30 -0500

Tweets from @mashable team members, writers & community.

Twitter for business

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 16:02:17 -0500

Even Twitter-savvy businesses will find this TWTRCON 09 keynote from @pistachio useful:

TWTRCON Twitter 101 Keynote

How will they find you?

Unless you are your brand your business quite likely has it’s own Twitter flock. How are you helping your customers (potential and current) find them? A Floxee directory is the easiest way to let people find and follow everybody in your group on Twitter.

Host the conversation

Twitter excels at facilitating conversations between you and your customers. Why not host the conversation and put your brand on it? Floxee directories not only provide a searchable, historical tweetstream for everyone in your group, you can also add a community backchannel so that everyone can see what people are saying about your brand.