You’re friendly neighbourhood Social Media SpinVox Chap reporting in… How goes it readers?

I’m just plugging back in after a whirlwind tour of spreading the SpinVox gospel far and wide - taking in Nokia’s Openlab in Helsinki, the Web 2.0 Expo in New York, the Blog World Expo in Las Vegas and finally ad:tech London in… er… London!

There’s lots to catch up on before I dive back into this blogging malarky - (including some more thoughts on the whole Hierarchy of Communication thing from a few weeks ago) - but first, just a few notes and learnings from my travels to lands afar…

First up - WOW! Just WOW!

I cannot express my happiness enough to find out how well respected SpinVox was any and everywhere I went. It completely humbled me at times; meandering up to a group of bloggers (what is the collective noun for bloggers? anyone know?) and introducing myself along the lines of “Hi, I’m James Whatley, from SpinVox”…

I actually lost count of the amount of times I got back the following response: “SpinVox?! Cool! I love you guys!” ..or variations thereof.

Really, really made me smile!

One of the great things about embarking on such travels is that you finally get to put some faces to some of the names that you see bandied around daily on teh interwebz, I managed to say hi to a few of them too…

Big hellos to C T Moore, Matt Singley, Guy Kawasaki, Mark Burstiner, Brian Solis, Chrissie Brodigan, Brett Petersel, Gary Vaynerchuk and of course, one of my favourite peeps right now, Chris Brogan, (see below).

We clearly both have a love of great shirts…

As I mentioned - there’s a huge amount of correspondence I need to get through since returning. Spending nearly three weeks shaking hands with some of the best in the business can sure take it out of you!

Thanks to all, for making me (and SpinVox!) feel so darn welcome!

Watch this space - there’s more to follow soon…

JW.

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You pick up the phone, you make a call. You’re ‘The A Party’.

My phone rings, I answer it. That makes me ‘The B Party’.

With me? Right.
Get comfy, it’s time for some meaty thinking.

A couple of months ago, shortly after I posted my response to Mike Arrington’s ‘Think Before You Voicemail‘ post, I started to really examine the way SpinVox had changed the way I communicate…

And before you all start - really, it has.

In the original post I said something along the lines of:

“Whenever I call anyone with a ‘traditional’ voicemail box (voicemail 1.0 if you will, natch) I certainly think about what I’m going to say - most of the time, if I’m honest, I hang up.”

But, what I also point out is that, when I encounter SpinVox… Actually no… Past tense..
When I’ve encountered SpinVox… i.e.:

Once I’ve been pushed through to the mailbox, left my message and then hung up…
I leave the call knowing that my message will be delivered.

My callee - the ‘B Party’ in this instance - can’t give me the usual schtick of:

‘Sorry, I never checked my voicemail.’

…because I KNOW that, through SpinVox, the message HAS got there via SMS, (and/or email).
I know that the callee ALWAYS checks their SMSs and I also know that they place the same importance over their emails.
So either way - my message gets delivered.

Y’see, there seems to be a lack of importance placed on voicemail messages these days which is thanks, in no small part, to the hideous amount of work you have to do to retrieve them, I’m sure…

I mean really, someone is calling you RIGHT NOW that means they clearly have something to say to you RIGHT NOW. Right?

With SpinVox Voicemail YOU make the choice as a voicemail recipient - as a ‘B Party’ - that your Voicemails will be captured, converted through SpinVox and delivered to the destination of your choice. That’s great. But by doing so you also restore confidence in the calling party, the ‘A Party, that their message will get through to you.

Already this changes things…

Ok, if you’ll indulge me for a second while I show a scale that I knocked up on the white board last week;
Call it my ‘Hierarchy of Communication’:

I say ‘my’ hierachy, because it applies to me. Yours maybe different.

…in fact - draw yours now, you’ll need it later on.

A Party on the left and B Party on the right. The importance you place on how YOU like to communicate against the channels you allow others to communicate with you.

- A call comes in, I answer it - if not, push to Voicemail
- SMS, I check these quite quickly
- Then Twitter (or ‘Social’ in this instance), as they sit in with my SMSs
- Email follows after that
- Then finally, we meet on Voicemail; Traditionally the last thing we all check

If you’re a SpinVox user you know that any message converted through SpinVox, (be it a Voicemail or a Memo or even a Twitter), arrives at its destination with our little Quotation Marks wrapped around it…
Hang on a minute, I’ll call myself and show you what I mean:

These marks, aside from coinciding with our rather lovely branding, mark out this message from the others. A visual representation, if you will, that this message is different from the rest. Why?

Because it was spoken.

Now - how does that affect our scale?

Well, for me, this one small change has an immediate effect on how I prioritise my incoming messages…
Let’s take a look:

Suddenly things change.

SpinVox messages takes prioirity over my SMS.
Well. Kinda.

So a SpinVox Voicemail is delivered to my phone via SMS and sits in there with the other ‘unreads’…
Now, when it comes to checking over these text messages my eyes immediately jump to the message starting with the quotation mark.

Why? Well, I KNOW that this message was SPOKEN, right? So I know that, when that message was left the caller, the A Party, had something to say to me RIGHT NOW, (or right THEN, as it were)…
…and not only that but also what that person had to say was that important that they felt compelled to pick up the phone and speak.

Not text, not email… Speak.

That denotes a certain amount weight. Speaking a message makes that message personal. There was moment in time that someone wanted to share with me. Be it an experience or an emotion or just merely impart some knowledge. Momentous or not - something made that person want to pick up the phone and Speak.

As they say -

“If something is that important, it needs to be said.”

Empirically I’ve noted that this happens with my email too…

If I’ve been away from my desk (and - shock horror - away from my phone too) and my email inbox is the first thing I check, my eyes will always, ALWAYS jump straight to the emails from ‘SpinVox Voicemail’.

Again, spoken messages taking on this strange level of importance. Their currency has a higher value, if you will…

…

Ok - so now we pause for a second - is everyone still with me? You at the back, can you hear me OK?

Everyone following me so far? Good Good.

Now, how about we take this new found knowledge and apply it to the rest of the scale…
Like so:

By inserting SpinVox into each of these channels, the entire communication landscape changes, both inbound and outbound…

Spoken messages, no matter their origin/destination, take precedent above all of the others…
Take a moment to think about that
Really. Take it onboard.

Changes things a little… Right?

So - opening it out - What about you? Has SpinVox helped you prioritise your incoming messages?

What about our outgoing messages?
What if ‘SpinVoxing’ someone becomes an ‘A Party’ decision?
What then?

There’s a small shift in communication power there… small, yet somewhat significant, wouldn’t you say?

What do you think?

What does your scale look like?

How does SpinVox change your priorities?

Does this new prioritisation of messaging restore the primacy of voice?

Readers, it’s over to you.

Greetings SpinVoxers,

How you doin’? Life treating you well? Gooooooood.

Just droppin’ by because I’ve got some news for you.

As you may or may not know recently we’ve been having a few problems with our Twitter through SpinVox service…

Rubbish!

Basically a couple of nasty little bugs on our side of things combined with a few ongoing API issues with Twitter meant that anyone trying to use our Social Networks through SpinVox service could only(?!) speak their posts to their Facebook and Jaiku pages.

Thusly…

Oo.. New Facebook Look!
And of course, my personal fave, Jaiku…

Lovely stuff

Well - as you may have guessed from the converted messages above - I’m extremely happy to report that we’ve finally ironed out all of the niggles, bugs and problems etc…
…aaaaaaaaand Twitter through SpinVox is now up, running and firing on all cylinders once again… YAY!

Ta da!

So what are you waiting for?!

Go and sign-up for your account on our dedicated page or, if you’re really fancy, jump straight over and install the facebook application directly and get Twittering through SpinVox today!

Oh - and I really must, must must, give some big love to everyone that helped get this sorted out -
You all ROCK!

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Yes - that’s right, you heard me - and it’s as simple as making a phone call!

Basically all you have to do is call 0151 266 8283 (UK only) and tell us which accents you love (or hate) the most and why. Your message will then be posted directly to the brand new (and quite sexy) Moblog site -

We Love Your Accent

The best caller will win a brand-spanking new Nokia N82!
ROCK!

To be honest - that alone is a pretty awesome prize -but wait there’s more…

We’re also throwing in a year’s free subscription to both SpinVox and Moblog!

Yep. That’s right… MORE FREE STUFF!

What?! What’s that?
You want MORE?!

OK OK OK!

How about we chuck in 250 Moo cards too huh? Would that suit?!
Yeah?!

YEAH!

Awesomeness - Great prizes for a GREAT Competition - How’s that for a slice of fried gold?

That’s pretty much all you need -  but just in case - I grabbed the press release for you too - have a look see…

______________________________________________________________________________

Speech is one of humanity’s greatest gifts – but it has now been revealed that almost three quarters (73 per cent) of people in Britain don’t like the sound of their own voices.

Given the chance to change the way they talk, most Brits would prefer to sound like the Queen, whilst only one in twenty would like to speak Cockney.

The problem is at its worst in Birmingham. Brum, made famous world-wide by foul mouthed Ozzy Ozbourne, not only tops the league of regions where people dislike their own accents, it is also bottom of the league of voices other Brits would like to exchange for their own. Only one per cent of Brits would choose to speak like a Brummy.

Said Tony Robinson, SpinVox linguistic expert: “It seems Britain is being gripped by an epidemic of Accent Envy and Accent Self Loathing. After decades where dialect diversity has been celebrated, the majority of Brits now aspire to Received Pronunciation (RP) and to share the sound of their voice not only with The Queen but with celebs like Liz Hurley and Hugh Grant.”

A poll* of more than 2,000 people around Great Britain, by voice-to-content company SpinVox, found that after the Queen’s accent, most Brits would choose an Irish accent, followed by Scottish.

When it comes to who actually does like the sound of their own voice, the Scots, Geordies and Welsh take the podium positions.

Overall the Queen’s English is the most popular accent in Great Britain.

Tony Robinson continued: “Accents are intricately tied into our own sense of identity. It’s interesting that those with distinct cultural or class identities are more satisfied with the way they speak and it’s precisely those accents that the rest of us want to acquire. The fact is that English as spoken in the UK is incredibly dynamic, precisely because of the regional variations in the way we speak - we are still seeing new words being added to our D2 system’s dictionary at the rate of thousands a week 70% of those words are not even contained in published English Dictionaries.”

Tell us your favourite accent and win!
We’d love to know what your favourite accent is and why, just call 01512668283 and tell us in under 2 minutes and our favourite call-in wins a Nokia N82, a years free subscription to Moblog, a one year free trial of the Spinvox voicemail service, and 250 free Moo cards of their choice!

Visit http://lovetheaccent.com to listen to the nations favourite accents and add your own.

http://lovetheaccent.com is powered by the mobile blogging site Moblog. Moblog lets you easily upload and share images and videos you record on your mobile phone, and even keep a voice blog using SpinVox.

`Voice-to-Content`, the process of automatically converting the spoken word into the written word is one of the fastest-growing telecommunications trends of 2008. In less than two years, SpinVox has converted over 50 million voice messages in four languages and on four continents, delivering them as SMS texts, emails, blogs or posts on social network walls and spaces.

GET CALLING!

Greetings Adventurers,

How have you been? What have you been up to and what have you seen?

Me? I’ve not been too bad thanks. I’m writing to you today to let you know that the SpinVox Speech Mobsters have been out and about on a few adventures of their own lately.

First I get an alert telling me that they’ve been ‘roughing’ it down in Pilton at the Glastonbury Festival, (of all things), assisting all and sundry Love the Farm by making sure they Leave No Trace…

Good on them!

…Then, word reaches my ears that they have also been off gallavanting around San Francisco TAKING PRIDE in supporting certain events that MAY have something to do with a certain MTV campaign entitled: Stand By What You Say

Make of that what you will… Scandal?!
All this talk about sex, shocking.

More. Soon.

Undergoing MyBlogLog Verification

And so it was, just over a week ago now, a bunch of like-minded folk from the Club of Tuttle - aka The Social Media Cafe - came together to talk about what the future holds for that thing we take for granted so much and yet defines us in such a multitude of ways, Voice.

That’s us there look ^ just before it all got very deep and intense!

- Pic Courtesy of RachelC

James Scroggs, VP of Consumer Business here at SpinVox, kicked things off with a quick psycho-metricgame for everyone (is that what you called it James?), which while not only being a lot of fun it also turned up some nice surprises about one’s self. I won’t go into the details here lest the game be ruined for you if you ever get a chance to play. Needless to say - it certainly broke the proverbial ice.

The results of aforementioned activity served as quite a nice segway into James’ introduction -
James - over to you:

“I’ve long held that people have lost their voice – call it the stuttering of the democratic process, not in having a right to vote or the mechanic to do so, but the real sense that a person’s voice can count for something, be purposeful, weighty, and heard amongst the din of Rice Crispy culture and politics.

I spent five years at MTV striving to have a 25 year old brand continue to earn its place as a platform for young people to have a voice in a formalised broadcast environment, while YouTube and the new social nooks and crannies became the new playground.

Now I find myself in the realms of a brilliant system, SpinVox, that can make the human voice matter again. How? Because SpinVox takes a voice – literally the energy in motion of particles in the air - and converts it into text data. That data can then be posted as content into the digital world.

It’s a revolution: for me, voice is the last human faculty that has not been obfuscated or complicated by the advances of science. It remains entirely naked, and therefore a pure expression of your ID, your self.

If only 30% of the language processed by our system is Dictionary-documented, then the complexities and personalities contained in the spoken language and vernacular suggest that the voice continues to be an immensely powerful tool for us all to emotional connect with each other, create and find social order.

So what is the future of voice?
What’s is its summit of its mountainous journey?”

And lo, the discussion began.

Would it be crass to say that towards the end, as the two hour session came to a close, my brain genuinely hurt. I kid you not. Some of the future-thinking being thrown around the table was simply extraordinary.

Things like -

(and this is just stream of consciousness stuff that I wrote during the session - so excuse the randomness)

Homogeneous. Tribal. Individual. Tagging conversations. Semantics. Granularity. Language switchers. Addressability. Capturing voice. Search voice. Indexing. Projection. Personas. Same message, same language, same person, different voice. Meta tags. Waves and particles. Habitual. Instant Capture. Capturing original thought. Reference points. Sociagraph => Vocal-graph. Having something to say. Having the right to say something. Naming conventions. ‘Blogging’ is alien to most, writing a diary isn’t. Speaking a blog, more alien. Speaking your diary? Potentially easier. Timelines of speech. SpinVox as a social tool. Enable = Empower.

There’s so much still spinning around upstairs - a lot of thought around voice/speech/personas etc -

While that’s stewing - why not have a read of some of the other output that has hit teh interwebz since last week…

First - starting off lightly - Francine talks about her game interpretations.
Next - getting deeper - Terence nails some of the open questions that have got him thinking
Then - Sizemore, on behalf of the Tuttle, hints that the event itself may’ve ruined his day (in a good way)

Also - and this was just lovely - Ben Robinson - who sadly couldn’t make it on the day - has put up his thoughts over at IntoMobile. Nice one Ben.

Finally, big thanks to all that attended:

Roger, Rachel, Sizemore, Terence, Ciaran, Ewan, Laura, Jay, Rob, Benjamin, Lloyd, Francine, Toby, Anne Marie and…
…if I’ve missed anyone off please shout!

The feedback has been great and I think there is definitely scope for a similar event at some point in the near future…

Watch this space.

PS - If you’ve got anything to add, (or if you’ve written up your thoughts somewhere), let me know in the comments and I’ll amend accordingly!

Today at The Tuttle Club was ‘What is the Future of Voice?‘

But elsewhere in London the big question really was ‘Who’s it going to be, Boris or Ken?’

By the time you read this, you’ll probably already know the answer - but that didn’t stop our Speech Mobsters hijacking a London Black Cab for the day and spreading the SpinVox love around the electorate…

More on what happened at The Future of Voice after the weekend - In the meantime however, have a great Bank Holiday Weekend…

…and Enjoy!

What is it and what does it mean? Want to join the debate? Well you can!
This Friday, why not join SpinVox for a coffee and a croissant at the Social Media Cafe, London.

The Cafe itself, or The Tuttle Club (as it is often fondly referred to as), runs from 10am ’til 1pm above The Coach & Horses on Greek St.
Not far from Tottenham Court Road, (map here).

Afterwards, (once the coffee has been finished and the croissants have been munched), SpinVox will be staying on for a couple of hours to host a discussion in and around The Future of Voice.

What are we talking about?
Well…

SpinVox converts VOICE into TEXT. This much we know, but let’s examine it further.

On one side of the table you’ve got what is fundamentally, a basic utility service that every phone should come with and will one day (very soon) be as ubiquitous across handsets and networks as SMS and email.

Great stuff, but on the other, if you follow the rabbit hole a little deeper, put some meaty thinking around it, what else does it mean?
What else does ‘voice to text’ enable?

Well - SpinVox captures spoken moments which before, without SpinVox, would’ve been lost into the ether.

Capturing your words, your *voice*, and storing them at a place of your choice, for as long you need/require is something that is still relatively new, somewhat esoteric and yet also extremely exciting.

Keeping these thoughts in mind, once your voice IS written down, when you can really see it, what does your voice actually look like?

No I’m not talking about sound waves or pretty patterns on an oscilloscope, but your actual VOICE. The words you use to articulate your thoughts are similar and yet also completely different to those of the person sitting beside you.

Your canter, your meter, your lexicon, your vocabulary, your linguistic gymnastics that you may or may not choose to engage, the way you throw your words together, all of that… They define who you are.

If you saw your voice written down, could you place it?
Could you tell yours from someone else’s? Could you spot yours at a hundred yards?

This literal voice recognition is something I’ve come to enjoy when I’ve received ambling, meandering voicemails (converted into text messages) from my friends.
And it surprises the hell out of them when often I send them the same message back…

If you lost your voice and you had to put up a ‘missing’ poster, what would it say?
What does your voice actually look like?

On top of all that lofty thinking you need to understand that this kind of stuff is happening right now. Millions of people are doing it every week and now, out of the blue, the term ‘voice to text’ is changing slightly…
Suddenly it becomes ‘voice to content’. Your words become searchable. SEARCHING VOICE. That’s something quite special.

It is oft-said that ‘Only by truly enabling something, do you truly empower people to do anything’.

We’ve enabled the notion of ‘voice to content’ – now what does that empower you to do?

If you’re interested in coming along (to the SMC and/or to the discussion afterwards) please either sign up at the LondonSocialMediaClubWiki or email me directly here: james.whatley@spinvox.com

See you there!

So I had this super duper, uber-fantastic CTIA blog post that I was just about to hit ‘Publish’ on…

…when all of a sudden this video lands on my desk.

Brilliant.

SpinVox @ CTIA - c/o our friends at Heist Projects - Cheers!

Tony Carter, it’s over to you…

Still recovering from the madness that was CTIA in Las Vegas, (more pics and stuff to come later today), can you imagine how happy I was to wake up this morning to an email from friend of SpinVox and all round nice chap, Neil Bird, from iGadgetlife.com:

“Dude! Gadget Show! SpinVox! AWESOMENESS!“

Well - something like that anyway…

Anywhoo, Neil (the absolute star!) not only recorded the whole thing on his Sky+ (it’s the UK version of TiVo) but also uploaded it to the web for the whole world to behold!

Cheers Neil… And of course, HUGE thanks to The Gadget Show!

I don’t know - last week Radio, this week Television… Next week: The Internet!…no, wait!