JetBlue’s Social Media Strategy

June 30, 2009

Last week at the Enterprise 2.0 conference I sat in on an interesting session entitled “Does Social Media and Marketing Mater?”  The moderator was Peter Kim of the Dachis Corporation and the panelists were Greg Matthews of Humana,  Ben Foster of Allstate insurance and Morgan Johnston of jetBlue.  Each of the panelist discussed how they were using social media at their firms.

After the panel I grabbed Morgan from JetBlue and did a short video.  I’ve broken the interview in two, the first part talks about JetBlue’s social media strategy and how its working and the second part addresses the tools and channels that they use.

Check it out…

Part 1: How and Why does JetBlue use Social Media?

Some of the topics Morgan tackles:

  • Started the social media engagement back in ’07.
  • The four reasons JetBlue uses Social media: 1) monitoring, 2) engaging, 3) informing and 4) humanizing.
  • Social media can serve as “a canary in a coal mine.”
  • The importance of vetting and confirming information before reacting.
  • FYI if you want to sneak a folding bike on a plane you no longer need to claim its art or bike parts.

Part 2: What tools, technology and channels does Jet Blue use?

Some of the topics Morgan tackles:

  • When engaging with customers and communities its important to remember that you are a guest of that community and dont try to bull your way in.
  • They have a Flickr channel which is populated by crew members and helps to humanize the brand.
  • JetBlue has a YouTube channel where they feature videos generated by JetBlue
  • Twitter is their biggest channel (@JetBlue).  When I did the interview last week they had 730,000 followers, today they are at 780,000.  This is a great way to monitor customer feedback and disseminate information.
  • Morgan is looking forward to seeing how people adapt and evolve existing tools to fit their own needs.

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Stephen O’Grady on Red Monk — The Un-Analysts

June 29, 2009

Last week at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston I caught with Stephen O’Grady, co-founder of analyst firm Red Monk.  I’ve always been very impressed with this boutique firm whose influence on their clients and other analysts, seems inversely proportional to their size (they are now up to a whopping four analysts).

I’ve split our chat in two parts.  The first deals with the firm itself, and the second with a couple of areas in technology that Stephen is particularly interested in.

The History and Philosophy behind Red Monk

Some of the topics Stephen tackles:

  • Founding a firm that does things differently (the un-analysts as I like to think of them)
  • Being open with their opinions and breaking down “pay walls”
  • “Offices” in London, Seville, Portland (Maine) and Austin, TX.
  • Stephen’s “Money Ball” approach to hiring
  • Their impressive client list
  • Is Red Monk going to IPO?

Stephen’s thoughts on Cloud Computing and Google Wave

Some of the topics Stephen tackles:

  • Cloud computing: overhyped but still a fundamental trend
  • Google Wave: redefining a document, what it is and what’s it for

Extra-credit reading:

  • Stephen’s thoughts on the Enterprise 2.0 conference

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Thanks to Tim Bray I’m an Honourary Cheeky Brit

June 25, 2009

Reg_Podcast_Logo I was quite chuffed to find that my first freelance piece for The Register was featured on the front page.  The piece is a 17 minute podcast and accompanying intro article that covers the conversation I had with XML co-developer and really smart guy, Tim Bray.

Tim was a great interview.  Not only is he very knowledgeable but he answers questions very lucidly.   Take a listen and see for yourself.

>> Listen (17:24)  mp3 version | ogg version

Why's Tim so Jazzed about 20 year-old Swedish Telco language (other than the cool graphics)?

Why's Tim so jazzed about a 20 year-old Swedish Telco language (other than the cool graphics)?

Some of the topics Tim tackles:

  • The state of the web today.
  • The evolution of Twitter: Ruby on Rails + Scala + ?
  • Dynamic languages that rock Tim’s world:  PHP? Python? Ruby on Rails?  Closure?
  • And speaking of dark horses, what about Erlang?  dealing with wider CPUs and concurrency.
  • Is Google’s Wave the next Twitter or the next Lotus Notes?
  • What’s happening in browser land?  And what about HTML5 (video and canvas)?
  • Opera’s recent announcement and the value of web hooks.
  • Tim’s been “Kindled.”  What other web business models are working out there?
  • What most rock’s Tim’s world: 1) Databases duking it out – what’s the right way to persist data at scale and 2) Mobile platforms: Android, iPhone, Palm Pre — all very different approaches.

Shout outs: To Terri Molini for setting this up and Paul Bonser of X-team for introducing me, over beers, to Erlang.

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

James Duncan: From Reasonably Smart to Joyent

June 23, 2009

I’m attending Enterprise 2.0 here in Boston and although it’s relatively small, I’m finding it pretty interesting.  Case in point, James Duncan, Joyent‘s Director of platform strategy.  James is staffing Joyent’s pod at the event and an hour ago I dragged him away for a quick podcast.

Some of the topics James tackles:

  • How James got into the cloud in the first place.
  • From Fotango to Zimki to Canon to Ski bum (and his connection with Canonical’s Simon Wardley).
  • How a bad experience with Ruby and an epiphany with the Git version control system made him “Reasonably Smart“
  • Open Source and JavaScript
  • Being Acquired by Joyent
  • What he see’s happening in the cloud in the next 12-24 mos.
  • How he enjoys the immediacy the cloud brings of taking a concept from idea to deployed app in hours rather than days and how, at the push of a button, it allows you to “hang your bits out for judgement.”

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

RightScale Part 2: Why the cloud? Apple Fanboys and Server Suffrage

June 18, 2009
Tuesday I listened in on the RighScale webinar: How to Build Scalable Websites in the Cloud.  This is part two of my thoughts and notes from the event.  (Note: it doesn’t look like it’s been posted yet but it should be available here soon).
The clouds providers that Right Scale works with.

The clouds providers that Right Scale works with.

As I discussed last time, RightScale acts as a management platform between cloud providers and Apps.

Which Cloud Providers do they work with?

If you double click on the IAAS bit in the yesterday’s slide you get something like the above.  Right Scale works on top of Amazon, coming soon to Rackspace’s Slicehost, Sun/Oracle’s cloud), Eucalyptus theEC2-compatible open source alternative that allows you to set up “private clouds” (BTW as anyone who attended Austin Cloud camp knows I’m using “private cloud” under duress, Gordon Haff does a good job explaining my heartburn) and VMWare.

Linux more robust than Windows

When asked about OS’s supported the answer was Windows as well as Ubuntu and CentOS.  Their CEO did admit that currently Windows support is not as robust as Linux.  They actually began with CentOS and according to one of their team have recently begun supporting Ubuntu more fully.   When I asked about other Linux flavors, Debian, SuSE etc. they said that there were “licensing issues” standing in the way.  I should have asked about OpenSolaris :)

Animoto, the well used example of how server demand can explode.

Animoto, the well used example of how server demand can explode.

Why do you look to the clouds?

During the webinar they polled the 200 odd attendees: “what’s driving you to the cloud?”  The results (as you’ll notice, you were allowed to vote for more than one):

  • 80% Scalability
  • 73% Cost Savings
  • 59% On Demand access
  • 28% Back-up and recovery
  • 06% Other

Not surprisingly Scalability came in number 1.  As if to underscore the point they brought out everbody’s favorite case study of exploding demand, Animoto.  Thankfully they had another example of uneven demand, iFixit (see below).  As an aside, one example I’d like to see charted is the attendee who mentioned that their agency is responsible for posting election results and were “not prepared for the interest worldwide, for Proposition 8.”

It was interesting to see that cost savings came in a close second, its always hard to measure particularly over the long haul but the perceived cost benefit is definitely strong in most folks mind.

iFixit's traffic could be said to be a tad "spikey."

iFixit's traffic could be said to be a tad "spikey."

Right Scale fighting for Server voting rights

And in conclusion…I’m always intrigued with the way English language morphs and evolves so I thought it was really interesting how the word “vote” is being used in the cloud (or at least by RightScale).  Basically they use a “voting process” when scaling.  Here’s how one of their team explained it.

Once a machine hits the scale up threshold  it places a vote to scale up.  When enough machines vote to scale up i.e. 51% if that that is what the decision threshold is set at, then new servers are provisioned and configured.  The same goes for scaling down.

Don’t know if this usage is new or a throw back from mainframes or from some other industry but I like it.

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

RightScale part 1: Mickos joins and control moves up the stack

June 17, 2009

Yesterday I attended a webinar that RightScale put on entitled: How to Build Scalable Websites in the Cloud.  It was basically a welcome to RightScale, welcome to the cloud presentation but overall interesting and credible.

The presenters were their CEO, their head of marketing and a mini team of techies.  Below is part one of some of my thoughts and takeaways.  But first a slight digression…

Enter the Dolphin Master

One thing I noticed during the presentation and which warmed my heart was that MySQL played prominently in a bunch of the slides.  It was only today when I was poking around the RightScale site that I saw the press release from a few weeks ago announcing that Marten Mickos, former MySQL CEO and Sun employee joined the RightScale board of directors.  Its interesting but not surprising to note in the release that Marten calls out Sun and Canonical (the commercial sponsor behind Ubuntu) as two strategic partners helping to expand the RightScale ecosystem.

Where Right Scale fits within the tri-sected cloud.

Where Right Scale fits within the tri-sected cloud.

Where they play in the Cloud(s)

RightScale positions themselves as a cloud management platform or as I like to think of it “a cloud tamer.”  If you split the cloud in three — software as a service, platform as a service and infrastructure as a service — they play in the last space. Basically Right Scale sits on top of Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS) and can handle all the tricky bits so you don’t have to.

Choose or choose not to choose

For those who want more control over their infrastructure RightScale will allow you to “choose among a variety of development languages, software stacks, data stores and cloud providers.” For those less intrepid in the cloud they have server templates that you can start off with.

One of the key benefits they stressed was getting rid of vendor lock-in, “so that you never get locked in to a single provider.”  You’ll notice on the X axis above they show lock-in decreasing and portability increasing as you move to the right.  My question however is that with Right Scale aren’t you simply locked in to a different layer of the cloud?  Doesn’t the control point simply move up the stack?  Just wondering…

Tune in tomorrow for part deux!

Extra Credit Reading/Listening

  • What is MySQL founder Monty Widenius up to post MySQL/post Sun? The Open Database Alliance and his MariaDB – May ’09
  • An interview with Marten Mickos, the day the MySQL deal with Sun closed — Feb ’08.
  • An interview with Marten Mickos after he keynoted Canonical’s first (and last) Ubuntu Live — Aug ’07.

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

My Presentation and Interview from Cloud Camp

June 16, 2009

My blogging has been a bit anemic lately.  We had our big Blueprint launch in the middle of last month accompanied by the post launch clean up of all the stuff I had designated as “get to it after the launch.”  And then there was strep throat and visiting relatives…blah…blah..blah.

So here I am back in the saddle and finally getting around to posting my slides from Cloud Camp Austin where Lombardi Blueprint was a gold sponsor.  You’ll notice in the transfer to slideshare, some of the formatting is off and in slide 6 you don’t get to see the great build where the poor person collecting the process data gets buried under a mound of random documents – but you’ll get the idea.

To get some of the narrative behind this and more, check out the interview Redmonk’s Michale Cote did with me at the event.

But wait, there’s more…

For those brave enough to go beyond the last slide you’ll get a special bonus slide of all the cheesy 80′s bands used as code names for Blueprint’s releases right up to the the most recent, “Survivor.”

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Got 3 minutes? See what Blueprint’s all about

June 1, 2009

A little over two weeks ago the latest Blueprint update, the Spring ’09 release, was loosed upon the world.   We took the opportunity of the launch, which included launches for our other products and services, to overhaul our web pages.  In the specific case of Blueprint we created new pages for Overview, Features, Resources and Success Stories.

You gotta see it to believe it

For the top of the Overview and Features pages we created the following video that presents a 3 minute and 18 second overview of Blueprint. (I recommend you click the full screen button so you can see the details).  Check it out and let me know what you think :)

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

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