Red Room News: You can finally "friend"/ connect/ email each other on Red Room!
Hey everyone in the Red Room community,
Did you notice the little "Mailbox" at the top of the screen next to your name where you're logged in?
We rolled out our social and professional networking tool last night, so you can finally invite your Red Room neighbors to connect with you! You can specify what type of connection they are, keep them in an address book, and email them directly through Red Room. I'm so glad we finally got this feature rolled out...it's the number one thing people request.
Figuring out what categories to use (we settled on "Fan," "Red Room Neighbor," "Family," Friend," "Colleague," "School," and "Oh, We've Met" for now), based on what people have told us about what they like or don't like about Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social networks and how they do it. Each category has a brief explanation next to the category type so you make the right choice when inviting people.
Please start using this feature today (now?) and email all your feedback to support ("at" symbol) redroom.com, or post comments here--just keep in mind comments posted here last forever, which is why we prefer feedback to be emailed privately and we can make the problem go away. Either way, we want to hear what you like and don't like so we can improve it.
Right now, it's easier to find the new white "add connection" button on the right side of the Member pages than it is on the Author pages, but it's on everyone's page, just scroll all the way down on the right on some Author pages to find it. That button allows you to invite the person whose page you're on to connect with you (you don't press the button on your own page). That button language and its placement will improve, too. This is version 1.0.
Huntington Sharp, our wonderful editor, blogged about it in more detail. But let's get started connecting and sending him feedback, which he will bring to me and the engineering team so we can make improvements.
I hope you love it! I have really been waiting for this.
A few of the things I like about it:
You can say someone is a "Red Room Neighbor" who you enjoy visiting with online but have never met. There's a category for people who want to connect and you can say "Oh, We've Met" which indicates you had a nice conversation in person but really isn't on a par with "Friend." You can adjust the privacy setting to hide your "Family" connections if you want to keep that private. You can note someone is a "Colleague" without meaning you worked together at a specific workplace, since sometimes you never worked directly together at a company. You can include "School" so people know someone could have been a classmate twenty years ago, or a professor, or student, without being forced into using a category for them (like Colleague or Friend) that isn't really accurate. There's a way to connect as a "Fan" that doesn't require the person's permission, for people you don't know but you like them or their work. And you can put people in multiple categories, since most people I know fit into two categories, not one. You can also change what category someone is in.
Another thing we did is made it so you can either accept a request to connect, or decline and ban that person, or just politely ignore it.
We want this to be the very best social networking framework on the web, so please give us the feedback we need to improve it further to get there. We want it to be all the things and give you all the options that mirror real life, and that you wonder why the other sites don't do, so we become your favorite and eventually your primary social network.
We love feedback on features (and on our customer service), so help us get there. Now please start inviting me and each other to be your Red Room Neighbor!
Ivory Madison
Founder and CEO, Red Room
"Never give in...except to convictions of honour and good sense."”
—Winston Churchill, 1941
About Ivory
Chief Executive Officer and Editor in Chief Ivory Madison founded Red Room. Madison is a writer, editor, and entrepreneur living in her hometown of San Francisco. A former management consultant to startups and Fortune 500 companies, Madison combines...
Connections
I realize this will reveal
I realize this will reveal how out of touch I am about certain cultural developments but why would I want to participate in this? What does it do that regular e-mailing does not? Please feel free to treat me like an electronic age ignoramus and beat me over the head with the obvious. It's the only way I learn. I was the last kid on the block with a word processor, cable, a fax machine -- and I still don;t have a scanner or flat screen tv.
Hi Bob!
Bob,
First of all, I'll have you know I am wearing a fully-licensed, un-subversive, Mickey Mouse t-shirt right now. (For readers not familiar with Bob's work: check out his published works on Red Room.) I'll take that as a sign I should write back. And please don't apologize for not seeing the benefit in something that hasn't demonstrated any benefit to you yet. I understand. We're asking you to help create the critical mass that will eventually deliver value--you shouldn't be convinced yet.
Now speaking of social networks, two old friends of yours and fellow Red Room Authors, Norm Pearlstine, and my dad, Richard Milner, say hello to you from New York. I saw them last week while I was there on business trying to raise more investment capital for Red Room. My dad wore his full Darwin costume to breakfast at my hotel. I saw Norm separately, and he was in a normal outfit.
As I just demonstrated, people keep in touch for a variety of reasons, personal and professional, and have developed various ways of transmitting messages. You and I mostly use email and phone as our primary way of communicating with our social network, and yet we remember when email was new and seemed unnecessary, but now it's vital. We even remember before there were answering machines to catch all the messages, which also now seems vital. Remember thinking you didn't need a cellphone?
The latest thing is online social networks and they are becoming vital, too, but it only gets our attention when it has a big positive impact on our personal or professional life and we see the benefit.
That hasn't happened to you yet, but it has happened to a lot of writers who want more people buying their book, more people showing up at a reading, more people to help them with their career or research, more old friends and colleagues and new friends and readers they'd like to easily keep in touch with.
For example, my dad called me today to tell me that there's a Facebook group about Darwin that apparently posted some of his videos singing about Darwin (note to other readers: my dad, as you may have gathered from the note about breakfast, is a Darwin expert and performs a one-man musical about Darwin), and something like 250,000 people viewed it. That's the largest audience my father has ever, ever had for his work. He struggles to get 100 people to a performance by sending flyers and emails.
Facebook works (provides a serious tangible benefit to their users) because their user base has reached critical mass, even in esoteric areas of interest. Now that my dad has been put in front of this many people who specifically are interested in Darwin, he'll instantly have more people signing up for his mailing list, going to his shows, and ordering his new book. It's easier to find your fans and like-minded people on a social network than in any other way that exists right now. Better than advertising. It's word-of-mouth but highly targeted and on a huge scale.
The results come from finding your tribe, the right community within a community, and Red Room is a platform for published authors, aspiring writers, journalists, agents, publishers, editors, booksellers, reviewers, readers, thinkers, bloggers, teachers, librarians, and everyone else in the ecosystem surrounding the world of ideas put into writing.
The greatest thinkers, leaders, and artists in the world are writers, and I believe we are building the greatest community online that anyone can even imagine. It's a real community of interest, a high-quality community, and your community, just doing what we do more effectively, online. So it would follow that once our social network is robust with users, you'll see the benefits.
The benefit might come when a new reader finds you on Red Room and buys your book, signs up for your mailing list and then shows up at your next reading, or someone on Red Room wants to pay you to write another book, wants to work with you, wants to meet you, wants to interview you, etc. It could be when you find a new friend or an old friend or the answer to a question from an expert you respect. Maybe you get to meet your hero, maybe someone tells you that you're their hero. But at some point you'll find someone (or thousands of someones) on Red Room and see why it's worth it. The easiest benefit you might see right away is that you can contact and send a message to someone on Red Room who you otherwise don't have their email or a way to contact them at all.
No one wants to have multiple social networks, multiple email accounts, multiple address books, multiple email blast programs, multiple online profiles, etc. Right now, while we're growing, some users will. But we'll eventually build both the best technology solutions you find elsewhere and that combined with the best personal and professional community for people in our community, should result in fireworks.
Also, I sometimes forget to mention this: It's fun to send messages and accumulate friends and colleagues.
Hope that helps! Now I'm going to invite you to connect as a Red Room Neighbor and see what you do, Bob.
Ivory Madison
Founder & CEO, Red Room
I hope I did this right.
I hope I did this right. (And, yes, I remember when i thought cell phones were the last thing I wanted. Now I think they're terrific, though I usually don't answer unless it's my wife calling.) By the way, I am hoping to see your Dad when he brings Darwin to the SFJCC next month. And I didn't know Norman was still at Red Room. When i sent him an e-mail to alert him to my blogs about Penn, where we were classmates, it came back undeliverable.
Norman
He switched jobs (and therefore his email) and probably didn't update his email on his Red Room account. Thanks for letting me know. I'll get that updated. And ask him to blog something recent.
And yes, my dad performs on March 26, 2009, 8:00PM at the San Francisco Jewish Community Center at 3200 California Street. I think tickets are $25 each and there are some left. I'm bringing my whole family.
By the way, we don't have a flat-screen tv, either. And I don't have an ipod. We have a Victrola, actually!
Ivory Madison
Founder and CEO, Red Room