Skimmer - a social media dashboard

skimmer

A very interesting strategy and beautiful adobe air application were launched by fallon today. Skimmer allows people to see all their social web accounts in one well-designed place.

http://www.fallon.com/skimmer

The application is customizable and looks terrific - a very well done venture that also doubles as a social media dashboard for fallon employees globally. So instead of posting paragraphs about people on the web site, their life stream is displayed realtime with the help of skimmer.

http://www.fallon.com/weare

Three quick thoughts about skimmer:
1) Its a great tool for anyone to see all their social media (or lifestream) in one place.
2) Its a covert way to ’skim’ data off the top of users ‘click-streams’. This shouldn’t be THAT big a deal, fallon is an agency and needs to add value to their research and clients. But, this expectation might need to be called out a little more clearly - it’s briefly stated in their FAQ and mentioned in their privacy.
3) What a great way to embrace the social web for fallon’s own brand; to boost perceptions of innovation and harness the power of their own internal ambassadors.

And one additional thought as I was scanning this presentation on fears of social media. One essence being if you trust your employees to talk to your customers - you should trust your employees using social media. Fallon is showing they are not afraid of their collective representation. I’d be curious to see if they instituted any kind of ground rules similar to the way Intel encouraged smart use of social media (also in David Griner’s presentation).

“Provide unique, individual perspectives on what’s going on at Intel and in the world”
“Post meaningful, respectful comments.”
“Reply to comments quickly, when a response is appropriate.”
“Respect proprietary information and confidentiality.”

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You’re currently reading “Skimmer - a social media dashboard,” an entry on Justin Powell | Interaction Design and Strategy's blog

Published:: 03.24.09 / 1pm

Category:: Branding, Conversation, Design, Digital, Discovery, Ideas, Innovation, Interaction Design, Marketing, Social, Strategy, Technology

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Justin Powell provides interaction design and strategy for Two West - a transformation design firm in Kansas City and Los Angeles. He is currently pursuing a MA Interaction Design from the University of Kansas. Justin is inspired when beautiful design meets technical functionality. His portfolio of work can be found at www.justinpowelldesign.com

Matt C 03.24.09 / 6pm

I’ve been testing out the flock browser, which is trying to do the same thing.

justin 03.25.09 / 10am

Flock is a wild browser, and yep they’re capturing click-steam data, demographics, etc. with their service too. Only they can see your social habits across the entire web - here is the information they collect.

I think these kinds of applications have a right to scrape and bundle their information to better their products and generate revenue as long as they don’t share specifics. And if you don’t think of yourself as a total lab rat the tools are really cool!

Chris Wiggins 03.31.09 / 11am

Thanks for the kind writeup, Justin. You obviously get where we’re coming from with this app.

As regards your point #2, it may come as a surprise, and is perhaps hard to believe, but the only reason the privacy policy makes mention of the right to make use of user’s information is simply to protect us from getting in a fix in the rare event that something calamitous happens and we need to use it for ongoing management and administration of the app. We will not be shareing any user information with clients, partners, or anyone else whose sole purpose for having this information is anything more than the required ongoing management and administration of the app. We’re going to be amending the privacy policy to say as much.

Also thanks for noticing the bravery required to allow all employees direct access to the corporate site. Wasn’t easy.

justin 04.03.09 / 1pm

That’s great, then skimmer really is an app for the people - not some covert data skimming experiment. HA. I was really pulling for it to be a legit application, especially seeing how it was positioned in the tech blogs as a helpful piece of software. A lot of people didn’t even know that fallon was an agency - how wild is that!?

But, seriously. Thanks for the response Chris, its cool that you’re clarifying the use of data - more for emergency purposes only. And awesome to see an agency introduce services like this, as well as trust their collective community to represent them online!

Skimmer - a social media dashboard

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