I will be the host of the next #SAPChat, an interactive panel discussion carried out entirely over Twitter. It’s scheduled for 9am PST / 18:00 CET on Wednesday February 29th, and the subject will be “Business Intelligence Best Practice”. We will be discussing how best to implement business intelligence projects successfully, with an emphasis on people-focused hints and tips rather than technical discussions. And with only 140 characters available, the advice is guaranteed to be succinct!

You can participate in the discussion by asking your question over twitter, by including the hashtag #SAPChat, or just tune in on the day to watch the information flow. You can use your favorite Twitter tool, or join the action at http://tweetchat.com/room/SAPChat. The goal is to make the discussion as interactive as possible – don’t hesitate to answer questions from other people, or expand on the points made.

If you’d like an idea of what the chats look like, take a look at the transcripts from previous sessions such as SAP’s CIO Oliver Bussmann on the Consumerization of IT and a deluge of questions around SAP HANA.

For the session, I will be accompanied by two world experts on the topic of successfully deploying business intelligence projects:

Alys Woodward

Alys Woodward is program manger for European Business Analytics, Enterprise Collaboration and Social Solutions at IDC. Alys has been in the business analytics space since 1995, and an analyst since 2003. I’ve shared many stages with her over the years, most recently in Russia, and I have been consistently impressed with how much I’ve learned in each presentation. You can find out more about IDC’s research on making BI more pervasive with this research sponsored by SAP:

Improving Organizational Performance Through Pervasive Business Intelligence:

An increasing number of organizations are making BI and analytics functionality more broadly available to all decision makers inside and outside the organization. Internally, more pervasively available BI solutions lead to greater accountability by all employees and greater consistency in performance management. Externally, relationships with supplier and partners can be strengthened through effective sharing of key performance indicators (KPIs). However, having pervasive BI means more than having the appropriate BI tools distributed to all stakeholders. In pursuit of pervasive BI, organizations should focus on the five key factors that can be directly influenced to increase diffusion of BI. They are:

• Degree of training on the data, tools, and analytic techniques
• Design quality of the BI solution
• Prominence of data governance
• Nonexecutive involvement in promoting the design and use of BI solutions
• Prominence of a performance management methodology

You should follow Alys on Twitter: http://twitter.com/alyswoodward

Cindi Howson

Cindi Howson is the founder of BI Scorecard, a resource for in-depth BI product reviews, based on exclusive hands-on testing. I have known Cindi ever since she was the manager responsible for rolling out business intelligence at one of Business Objects’ largest customers, many years ago. Cindi carries out a key industry survey each year which gives insights into how successful organizations are with their business intelligence efforts. Cindi is a TDWI (The Data Warehousing Institute) faculty member and a contributing expert to Information Week. She has been now been advising clients on BI tool strategies and selections for more than 15 years, and wrote my favorite BI book:

Successful Business Intelligence: Secrets to Making BI a Killer App.

Business intelligence has the power to change people’s way of working, to enable businesses to compete more effectively and efficiently, and to help non-profits stretch their dollars further. The book draws on exclusive survey data and real-world case studies of BI success stories to identify proven BI best practices you can put to use in your organization, including:

• Gaining executive support and aligning your BI strategy with business goals
• Organizing BI teams and experts for success
• Choosing the best BI tools to meet user and business needs
• Improving data quality so decision-makers trust the BI solution
• Finding the relevance of BI to all employees, including front-line workers
• Using agile development processes to deliver BI capabilities and improvements at the speed of business
• Measuring success in multiple ways

You should follow Cindi on Twitter: http://twitter.com/BIScorecard

As you’re thinking of questions to ask, take a look at some of the great blog posts on the SAP Analytics blog and the Decision Factor blog.

Finally, if you’re interested in this session, you’ll be interested in this presentation I did late last year called “Why BI Products Fail and What To Do About It” (also available as slides: Why BI Projects Fail — PowerPoint Version)

Update: as part of this year’s Social Media Week, I hosted  one of the sessions at a free one-day event held at SAP Palo Alto on February 15th. Accompanied by a star-studded lineup of guests (meet the panelists) we discussed how companies can make better products using social media — here’s a link to the recorded panel session: Social+Products=Better Products. 

In this post, I’d like to share some ideas about why I believe that there are now fantastic new opportunities to improve all kinds of products using social media techniques.

Introduction

I believe that we’re still in the era of a “horseless carriage” version of social media: we added a motor, but kept the rest of the carriage.

In other words, while we understand how the new technologies work, we’re still tending to bolt the new social techniques onto our existing processes, rather than fundamentally rethinking those processes in the light of the new opportunities.

This tends to be true of all new technologies, of course. But for some reason there seems to be a bigger gap than usual – perhaps it is because the “trees” are so obvious (social media analytics, enterprise collaboration, etc.) that they tend to obscure the “wood”: the opportunity to sweep away existing bottlenecks in our business processes.

Social media is too often a marginal activity that people are happy to leave up to a dedicated team elsewhere in the organization, rather than embedded in everything we do. This post looks in particular at how social media techniques can be applied to the process of product creation.

Social / Product Trends

Why introduce something new? Why can’t we just keep doing what we’re doing today? Let’s start with some of the background trends:

Transparency: Whether you have a great product or an awful one, prospective customers can get the information they need directly from unbiased peers. This means that traditional product sales and marketing is being marginalized, and that core product quality becomes even more fundamental.

A great product – one that customers are delighted to own and use, and talk about to other people – can now take off at lighting speed, with almost no promotional cost. And news about product problems or poor service can spread even faster. The good news is that product creators can communicate with their customers more cheaply than ever: we may be naked, but we have a megaphone. It has to be used wisely. Honesty and credibility are essential values when talking about your products to the market.

Direct Contact With Customers: In large product organizations, there’s often a big communications gap between the people creating products and the people using them. The creators and designers of software, for example, have typically had to rely on other people to research the needs of potential users. The researchers then pass on that information in the form of “consumer profiles”, “personas”, or “ethnographic research”, which is used as a basis for creation. Something often gets lost in the translation, but is often seen as the only feasible way to operate.

Software engineers (for example), frustrated by this limited visibility, complain how hard it is to get access to customers, who are often protectively fenced off by sales teams (perhaps worried that developers might let too much of the truth slip out about product bugs or delays).

The advances of social media means all this can now change: vast numbers of potential users are only a few mouse-clicks away, participating in industry forums, complaining about alternative products, or talking about their favorite features.

Network Leverage: There are now socially-enabled running shoes, socially-enabled cameras, socially-enabled toys, and socially-enabled enterprise software. Almost any product can now be “social”, and hence experience network effects that may outweigh the other product features.

Extended Ecosystems:By embedding more use of social techniques into product creation and selling, we’re inevitably creating more complex, interactive networks of ecosystems around our products, with customers, partners, suppliers of social networking, etc.

How do “Social” and “Product” Interact?

I believe there are three main ways in which we can create new or better products through social media techniques. It’s clear, however, that there is still a lot to learn before these techniques become commonplace — in each section, I’ve added some of the questions I believe need to be addressed: again, any feedback you have is more than welcome!

Social-improved products

First and most obviously we can use social media to improve the way we create existing products. New techniques include:

Social Research. It’s now easy to find data about new opportunities, such as customers complaining about business problems or competitor products. And it’s easy to get customer feedback on problems with our own products. Given the potential for better products, I believe we should be investing extensively in these new areas. Questions:

• What valuable data is available now that wasn’t before?
• What are the costs and opportunities associated with these new techniques?
• How much time should product creators spend communicating with communities vs. creating products?
• How do systems have to change to ensure that this type of research is consistently integrated into the product creation process?
• What are the real-life limitations of such research? i.e. what kinds of important data can we not get with these processes?
• What social research tools can we build into the product experience? (e.g. making it easy to invite others when using the product, and tracking success, or an online game maker tracking the price of different virtual weapons)

Ideation. One of the most painful parts of any product creation process is prioritization – we can never make a “perfect” product. There will always be some compromise in terms of functionality or cost. New ideation platforms, such as SAP’s Idea Place offer an opportunity to ask customers and potential customers to give their feedback directly on possible new features and what compromises to make.

These opportunities are not limited to software or technical products – consumer goods companies can run surveys on online forums, authors can ask online discussion boards for plot ideas for their next book, etc. This gets us closer to “crowdsourcing” the creation and improvement of products. Questions:

• When is ideation not appropriate?
• What types of products and features work best for ideation?
• How can we motivate our customers and prospects to participate?
• What level of transparency is appropriate?
• How do we handle rejection of non-chosen products and features?
• What are the dangers of competitors seeing the data, or gaming the results?

Social Prototyping. Basic ideation isn’t enough. I’m sure we can all think of an experience where we didn’t realize we wanted or needed a particular product until we tried it out. Product designers, after all, can have great ideas of their own, based on their deep market knowledge. One key problem today is that somebody in a company may what they believe is a fantastic idea for a new and different product. But in order to pursue the product, they need resources and permission of several layers of management.

Those managers may not have any real frame of reference to determine if the new product is a real opportunity or not, and may not be incented to take any risks. This can result in some combination of dissatisfied product creators (if the idea is rejected), wasted time (slow decision-making at each level ), or wasted money (if the idea is accepted, but the product fails). But using social media, it’s now much easier to create fast prototypes (mockups, concept version, wireframes, etc.), and then make them available to customers for testing and feedback.

The benefit is that it’s much clearer whether a product really does appeal to customers or not, helping the prioritization process. The car industry has long done this with “concept cars”, and SAP has tested these techniques with through its SAP Research Prototyping group. Ideas such as integration with Google Maps were shown to be extremely popular (and so were rushed into production) while some ideas weren’t interesting (and the person proposing the new feature had a learning experience). Questions:

• How can we introduce more extensive prototyping and social feedback into our product creation processes?
• How do we decide if a prototype is successful enough to productize?
• Are there any other benefits to this type of process? (marketing, thought leadership, etc.?)
• Does this approach cost more or less than existing methods?

Social-Enabled Products

We can integrate social media into products to improve their usefulness or effectiveness. Games you can play with other people in your social network are more interesting that games you play on your own. Our devices are increasingly wired to be able to share information – you can buy applications and shoes that share information socially on platforms such as RunKeeper. Runners can use the social-enabled devices to share data with a coach, boast of their achievements, embarrass themselves into improving their times, or let relatives track where they are during a marathon. And if you’re logged into Facebook when you visit the site, it will tell you which of your friends are already using the products.

Hybrid cars can keep track of your fuel consumption, so you can compete with your friends about who is the most sustainable driver. Restaurant guides can give us information based on the ratings given by our friends and other restaurants we’ve visited on foursquare or “liked” on Facebook. Enterprise software vendors can build collaboration into existing business applications, letting people apply social media techniques to supply chain collaboration or track the progress of sales deals. Even Lego is becoming social.

• What are your favorite examples of social-enabled products?
• How important is social enablement compared to other features of a product?
• Do product creators have to be aware of new power-players in the social eco-system?
• What other products should include social but don’t today?
• What about the limits of social privacy when using such products?

New Products On Top of Social

There are opportunities to create new products “on top of” social networks, or as by-products of them. Companies such as LinkedIn have been able to create new “products” based on the data gathered in their networks, such as “Talent Match” or “Jobs You May Be Interested In”. New tools could help improve the success or failure of a big merger by analyzing the different social networks within the two organizations over time. Companies could develop more sophisticated “friends and family” offers for their products. Car-sharing services could leverage social networks to improve usage rates.

• What are some other good examples of leveraging social networks to create new products and services?
• Is this something that the rest of us even need to think about?

Conclusion

We’re a long way from “build it and they will come”, but we’re not yet at “come build it with us”. I look forward to your feedback!

Interested in Social Media? (and everybody should be, because these techniques are changing EVERY business process, not just marketing). Come and join us!

As part of this year’s Social Media Week, SAP Palo Alto will be hosting a free, day-long non-SAP-focused event on Wednesday, February 15th with a glittering array of industry experts discussing a variety of key social topics:

Just some of the participants: Maggie Fox, CEO of Social Media Group | Ray Wang, CEO of Constellations Research|Jonathan Becher, Chief Marketing Officer of SAP | Barbara Holzapfel, SVP & Managing Director of SAP | Rachel Happe of The Community Roundtable | Srini Tanikella, SCN community member |Kimarie Mathews of Wells Fargo | Deirdre Walsh of Jive Software | Brian Ellefritz, SAP Social Media Strategic Services | Lisa Joy Rosner, Chief Marketing Officer at NetBase |Dave Brockington, Product Marketing & Strategy, StreamWork | Me!

You are invited to attend on-site if you’re in Silicon Valley, but the sessions will also be available through online streaming on the SAP Facebook page.

I’ll be hosting the last session of the day, on Social Media and Products – more details about that session in a separate blog post: Social+Product=Better Products.

Please join us! Click on the links below to find out more and to sign up to attend one or more of the sessions (sorry, to attend the whole day, you have to sign up four times…)

SAP Social Media Day, Wednesday, February 15th

Location: 3410 Hillview Avenue, Building 1 Café, Palo Alto

Hashtags #SMW12 #SAP, and find event-related blogs on the SAP Community Network and SocialMediaWeek.org.

Here is a season’s greetings dashboard that shows off some of the latest features of Xcelsius 2008 SP3. Tweet the color you’d like to see in the garland. The dashboard updates every 30 seconds. How long Twitter search takes to recognize the tweet can be pretty variable – but most of the time, it’s less than a minute.

How it works:

1. I set up an Excel XML Connection that grabs a feed from Twitter using the search term “#twitterlights”.
2. The top three (most recent) tweets are parsed to identify the color, using a vlookup table of the first three characters (if no color is found, it defaults to red / lime / yellow)
3. The SAP greetings card images are shown using the Slideshow component
4. The buttons launch a browser window, using an URL that automatically presets a Twitter status update, ready to be tweeted (starting the tweet with @votebytweet means that followers don’t see it by default, but you can leave it out if you want, and you can use the rest of the tweet to tell people how awesome/useless this demo is… )
5. I use two timers, to cycle the colors around the image and to change the slides. I wracked my brain for ages trying to do this, but then realized there was an easy and elegant method using the history component. You simply chose an input cell and single output cell, then put a formula in the “input cell” such as “=output cell+1”, and set the timer. Every interval, the contents of “input cell” are put into “output cell”, so the contents of input_cell will tick up by one every period.

Here’s a copy of the XLF file if you’d like to see how it works. Have fun!

The sessions featured interaction with Twitter very heavily, using the #sapsummit hashtag. One of the interesting opportunities in this area is sentiment analysis on top of tweets, using SAP BusinessObjects Text Analytics – here’s a taste of what that could look like (demo data).

You can read more about the Summit, and how it compared to “Le Web” here.

Resources

• The PowerPoint twitter tools based on SAP BusinessObjects Xcelsius allow you to see live tweets embedded in your presentation, and let you “auto tweet” out your key points.

SAP Influencer Summit

Let’s start with the SAP Influencer Summit. You can see the full list of recorded keynote sessions here (registration required). If you’re interested in SAP Web 2.0 technology, you’ll find examples in the presentations by Jim Snabe, Visha’l Sikka, Marge Breya and John Wookey.

And take a look at one of the featured videos, about “Real Real-Time Computing”, a subject that came up regularly throughout the sessions:

Several hundred people attended the event in Boston, and there’s been lots of coverage, from the analysts and bloggers who attended – here’s a small sample:

• InformationWeek: SAP Outlines Five-Year Enterprise Plan
• ITBusiness.ca: SAP Wants to Transform its ERP Image
• SearchSAP: SAP: We’re Serious about SAP On-Demand
• InfoWorld: SAP plans to open up on-demand development platform
• Ray Wang: Event Report: 2009 SAP Influencer Summit – SAP Must Put Strategy To Execution In Order To Prove Clarity Of Vision
• Oliver Marks: The Clear Path Forward for the SAP SuperTanker
• Merv Adrian: SAP Promises Acceleration on a “Clear Path” – Will it Be Enough?
• Mark Smith: SAP Broadcasts New Enterprise Software and Applications Strategy
• Michael Krigsman: SAP ByDesign: Taming the Multi-Tenant Beast
• James Governor (@monkchips)’s post SAP: Out with the Old, Shrugging Off The Tag
• And a whole collection of articles from the Enterprise Irregulars and other bloggers

There was also a full virtual conference set up using the inXpo platform. I’ve used this platform several times in the past, when it has been used to recreate a “virtual show floor experience”, and I’ve found it to be a frustrating experience.

On this occasion, I think it was used much more successfully, to show the keynote presentations live and to host “ask an expert” sessions.

But crucially, there wasn’t any attempt to use the platforms closed communication tools – the backchannel was kept firmly in the open, where everybody could see it. There was a clear hashtag announced in advance (#sapsummit), and attendees were encouraged to use it.

It was clear in advance that Twitter would be the key backchannel for the event. The Enterprise Geeks did put together a public Google Wave for the event and encouraged others to help summarize content. But as Mark Madsen remarked:

“Tried to use Google Wave at #sapsummit, found that the UI is terrible, abandoned quickly”.

And — at least at the time of writing this — the resulting Wave is a lot closer to a messy email thread than a tidy wiki page.

Many of the invited attendees were Twitter users – in the Web 2.0 world, an active stream of Tweets is rapidly becoming considered essential part of doing business (at Le Web, technology evangelist Robert Scoble got very angry when he heard French Tech CEOs were too busy to have a Twitter account).

The #sapsummit conversation opened as people announced their travel plans, and quickly accelerated as the sessions opened on the first day. If you’re interested, you can see all of the tweets here in an 8Mb pdf document, from http://wthashtag.com/sapsummit.

Rather than just being a discussion forum for the audience, SAP employees used Twitter to clarify points made by the presenters, monitor feedback, and reacting it. And as the presenters came on stage, several of them mentioned that they had been watching the feed, and then addressed any points that had come up. As I tweeted early on:

“Looking at twitter feed from #sapsummit, I get the impression the “backchannel” is becoming almost the front channel…”

Jonathan Becher, SAP Executive VP of Marketing and host of the event gave his impressions in a blog post about the event.

“When I was asked to be the “official” blogger for the SAP Influencer Summit, I assumed that it would end up following a similar flow as I used for SAPPHIRE 09 earlier this year.  That is, I would write up some short observations after each of the morning’s keynotes and post them throughout the day.  Later in the evening, I would provide some more general observations about the event, with perhaps some on-site tidbits to share with those that couldn’t attend in person.

It didn’t turn out that way at all.

I wrote the initial post [about the Summit] during the relative calm of the night before the Influencer Summit.  I planned to write my second post during the break after Jim Snabe’s and Vishal Sikka’s morning keynotes.  Since we expected that the influencers to be very active on twitter, I also decided to monitor the #sapsummit hashtag live during the morning keynotes.  If specific issues came up, I could respond to them myself and, if anyone made any relevant comments, I could refer to them during my slots between the other presentations.

I knew that I was going to be busy but I wasn’t quite prepared for the firestorm of tweets… [not] just from the attendees in the room but also from those attending virtually. All of this meant I had no time to write the second blog entry…”

During the Q&A session with John Schwarz (left in the photo above), Jonathan also had an earphone and an audio feed that could give him feedback of audience reactions.

As I remarked on Twitter,

“#sapsummit is the first I’ve seen that comes close to using the possibilities of real-time Twitter”

And not just in real-time. The tweets themselves are a valuable resource that SAP can use to collect and study reactions to the presentations. As Vinnie Mirchandani (@DealArchitect) mused :

#sapsummit wondering if SAP or someone else is mining the huge tweet stream – lots of instant reaction from so many watchers

And he went on to hope that SAP would summarize the feedback as a follow up to the summit. One of the interesting opportunities in this area is sentiment analysis on top of Twitter, using SAP BusinessObjects Text Analytics – here’s a taste of what that could look like (demo data).

And a couple of days after the event, Jonathan Becher tweeted on progress:

Working on sentiment analysis for #sapsummit: OnDemand & ByD top mentioned terms, keyword with most positive mentions: BusinessObjects

Le Web

The annual Le Web conference in Paris is a much larger, general conference, focused mainly on consumer web technology. It also featured (excellent) live video-streaming of presentations (using USStream), and also had a very active Twitter channel (#leweb), with over 15,000 tweets from over 5,000 different people.

But interestingly enough, there was a much clearer separation of the presenters and the audience. I didn’t watch all the sessions, but the backchannel – although very active – seemed to stay firmly in the background. There was no obvious interaction between the people on stage and the people watching and tweeting – the closest I saw was the tweets that both Queen Rania, and Nathalie Kosciusko Morizet sent just before going on stage.

Even sessions all about Twitter, such as the Twitter Apps Panel didn’t actually use Twitter in any way as part of the presentation – when it came to Q&A, they used an open microphone in the session room.

The Future of Conferences

There’s been a lot of interest recently in Open Space meetings, Bar Camps, and other types of Unconference, where the audience takes a much larger role in the planning and delivery of conference materials. I suspect it’s going to be quite a long time before these take over from the more traditional conferences, at least enterprise software.

Both conferences included lots of real-time Twitter, and live video streaming. Attending conferences virtually becomes a real possibility – certainly compared to the hassle and expenses of actually being physically present. As Utku Can put it:

“Hello we’re the #leweb attendees. We’ve paid €1500 to sit together and check Twitter.”

Although, of course, it can never completely replace the real thing. As  Andy Bitterer put it:

“Attending an event virtually like this week’s #SAPsummit still not the same thing as being there. Miss the live interaction.”

I believe that in the future, more conferences will start to look like the SAP Summit, which is just part of a much longer ongoing dialog with a group of “stakeholders”, that also plays out through SAP’s Developer Network, and other regular meetings and communication, including platforms like Twitter.

Audiences are going to find it increasingly easy to get information before the event, and less patient with the rephrasing of messaging they’ve already heard before. The sessions are going to get more interactive. The audiences will want to ask more questions, earlier, and will expect their comments on Twitter or other channels to be included. Presenters will have to be more flexible, adapting their contents in real time to the audience.

Resources

• The PowerPoint twitter tools allow you to see live tweets embedded in your presentation, and let you “auto tweet” out your key points.

Another round of updates to the PowerPoint Twitter Tools, including:

• Auto-tweeting
• An additional feedback slide
• An option for secure internal use
• A customizable text-zooming tool
• The ability to set up values in advance (for example, to add the tools into a conference template)

To access all these tools, please go to the main download page: http://timoelliott.com/blog/powerpoint-twitter-tools/. Here’s some information about each of the new features:

PowerPoint AutoTweet

The PowerPoint AutoTweet functionality, available as a PowerPoint Add-in, lets you automatically update your twitter status during your presentation.

As you go through your slides in presentation mode, any text in your note pages between the tags [twitter] and [/twitter] will automatically be tweeted when you reach the appropriate slide.

The plugin uses Microsoft VBA (visual basic for applications), so is only supported in PowerPoint for Windows (the idea is based on similar functionality already available for Keynote on the Macintosh).

Checking the “Display success status of tweets” option will show a dialog box during the presentation, telling you whether the tweet was successful or not. It will close automatically after a second or so (the actual time may vary depending on the vagaries of Windows processing).

You can use the twitter feed to reinforce the points you are making in your presentation, or ask the audience questions related to your content, and include a feedback slide later in the presentation to review the audience replies.

New Feedback Slide

Here’s another feedback slide tool for high-tweet locations (web 2.0 conferences, etc.), showing twice as many tweets as the original. Like the original, it auto-refreshes every 30 seconds and supports pagination and custom feeds (for example using a service like http://TidyTweet.com for a moderated feed, or any other atom-based feed).

Secure Internal Use

What if you would like to use the PowerPoint Twitter Tools for an internal meeting, but don’t want to blast your critique of executive strategy over the internet?

One option is to use the open-source microblogging platform from Status.Net (motto: “Your life and your business are your own. Take control of your status.”). You can see an example of this product in action at www.identi.ca

To use the product, you’d need to install a server inside your organization, invite your employees to register, and then use a custom feed such as:

http://yourinternalserver:1088/api/statusnet/tags/timeline/thetagyouwanttofollow.atom

The two feedback slides and the ticker bar all support the use of custom feeds. Unfortunately, some of the status.net feeds don’t include the avatars link, so you only get the text updates using this method (e.g. see the screen shot below using the public feed for the “enterprise20” tag from identi.ca: http://identi.ca/api/statusnet/tags/timeline/enterprise20.atom).

Zoom Text Tool

This tool doesn’t connect directly to twitter just yet, but it’s a nice graphic effect that you can customize with your own words. Here’s a glimpse of what it looks like (this text moves towards the viewer, and you can click on values to move them to the center)

Support for Predefined Values and Templates

Do any of these apply to you?

• You’re tired of entering the same keyword values each time you open the presentation?
• You have a technically-challenged manager, and you need to set the values in advance?
• You’re scared that the audience might – gasp — see the mouse on the screen? (this is a surprisingly common fear among conference organizers)
• You’d like to set up a conference template for others to uses

The answer to all these is to use the setup variables, now supported by most of the tools. To set variables in advance, simple right-click the tool in PowerPoint and add them to the end of the movie name. Here’s a quick list of the variables available:

• “keyword=yoursearchterm” (use %20 instead of a space if you need two words)
• “locked=1” hides the bar for the search term, effectively “locking” it to whatever you’ve pre-set
• “votes=10” to set the maximum number of votes
• “customfeed=1” to enable a custom feed
• “customfeedurl=http://yourcustomfeedurl” to set the value of the custom feed
• “days=4” increases the number of days votes are valid for
• “percentageorvalue=1” to show percentage by default (0 to show value)
• “choice1=YourChoiceText” for the hover-over text on the voting charts (choice1 through choice6, as appropriate – and use %20 instead of a space if you need two words)

For example, if you wanted to set up the feedback slide so that it automatically opened with a search for the tag “#sap”, you can simply right-mouse click on the movie, and add “?keyword=#sap” to the end of the “Movie” Parameter (note that in theory you should use URLencoding of values, e.g. %23 instead of #, but it seems to work anyway)

And here’s an example of the text to add in order to get a locked-down, custom moderated feed:
“?locked=1&customfeed=1&customfeedurl=http://timoelliott.tidytweet.com/SAPWeb20.atom”

Here’s the result – note that the search term can no longer be changed:

To see which values are valid for which movies, click on the “embed” button, and view the options for the embedded HTML:

To access all these tools, please go to the main download page: http://timoelliott.com/blog/powerpoint-twitter-tools/

New tool: PowerPoint Crowd Meter

When you want to take a break from using Twitter for interaction, try the PowerPoint Crowd Meter – monitors and displays the noise of the crowd in the room, and shows the maximum volume over the last ten seconds – use it for crowd voting!

New Features

“Quiet” Voting. A new option avoids all your followers having to see your votes. Simply use the format “@tweetbyvote 1 myvote”, where myvote is the ID you’re using for the vote. Try using “xcelsiustweet” if you want to do testing.

More Voting Options. There’s now a choice between seeing the voting results as either percentages or vote totals, with the numbers displayed on top of the bars, and you can click through to a Twitter web page to see the actual votes cast.

Automatic Refresh. The feedback slide and the voting slides now refresh automatically every 30 seconds. Beware of keeping them open for too long, or you may run into issues with Twitter Rate Limiting.

Easy Access to Instructions and Embedding. The widgets now all include information and embed icons that give you access to the instructions page on this site, and the HTML needed to embed the widget in web pages:

Predefined Values. For advanced users, the widgets now include support for Flash variables for predefining certain options, such as the search text that appears in the lower left, the number of votes to be counted, etc. Examine the code available through the embed icon, or see the instructions page for more details.

Please keep your feedback and feature requests coming! http://twitter.com/sapweb20 or timo.elliott@sap.com