From Wikipedia: An ombudsman (conventional English plural: ombudsmen) is a person who acts as a trusted intermediary between an organization and some internal or external constituency… An ombudsman is an official, usually appointed by the government or by parliament, who is charged with representing the interests of the public by investigating and addressing complaints reported by individual citizens.

I’ve never been appointed anything by the government, but I’ve always been an ombudsman in some form or another. The year is 1995 and I’m slaving away, answering phones in the TV newsroom in Santa Barbara. As a news assistant, much of my day was spent serving as a glorified secretary. If I was lucky, they would allow me to write a few stories for newscasts. Although I may not have been a central figure on the staff, (I didn’t become a reporter there until 2001) I played a key role in the newsroom’s culture. Without me, lots of things wouldn’t get done. Faxes wouldn’t be brought to people. Scripts wouldn’t be run to the anchors, producers and directors. Much of the public might be ignored or underserved. Even in that time, there weren’t enough employees to handle the workload, so even news assistants, noobies to the business, were thrust into key roles that may have been handled by a true employee with a pension just a few years before.

A typical interaction on the phone went like this: A semi-polite woman on the other end of the phone asks, “I saw a news story about the homeless shelter last week. Can you send me the video?” It was my job to figure out during which newscast that piece of video aired, find it and make a copy for them. This was of course after they sent a check for $50. Yes that’s right. We made people pay $50 for a copy of a news story. With policies like that I am not surprised that so much of TV has gone out of business and so many people have lost their jobs. But I digress.

The point of this post is that publishers still have to serve as ombudsman for the public, even on social media sites like Facebook. If you work at a TV station, you know very well that some people still want copies of TV stories. They can now ask for it on social media sites as well as their phone. I recommend to all newsrooms, whether they be TV, radio or print, to place newsroom or other phone numbers clearly on your Facebook and Twitter profiles. The goal at the very least should be to funnel all the activity to a number where it can be handled by a person and done in an efficient manner. While working at Village Voice Media, I noticed that every paper received constant ongoing requests for phone numbers, Web site links, contest tickets and advertising information. Make sure that all of those departments are listed.

If you run a site with any semblance of a community, at some point you are inevitably going to have to help a community member by fetching something for them because they cannot do it themselves. This may be drudgery in your eyes, but grin and bear it. If your site is displaying a slideshow of an event and the person contacting you has been told their picture is online, help them get it. Go find it. Send them the link. It may take 10 minutes out of your day, but people will remember the small bit of courtesy and it may create a longtime return visitor.

Maya Angelou said, “…people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” This applies to online life as well. It can be a tough, daily grind to build, nurture and grow your Web site’s community already. Don’t spoil all your efforts by failing to bring positive customer service interaction. It’s your bread and butter. Actual interpersonal interaction is a key part of the foundation of any site’s success.

MOFILM runs a series of competitions connected to festivals around the world, from Cannes to Rio. Nascent filmmakers choose one of the sponsors (at Cannes, they included including Coca Cola Zero and AT&T) and create a commercial for it according to the requirements laid out by the company. The winner of each category gets to go to the festival to collect their prize.

“The Keeper” is one of the Cannes winners this year, and is the sponsored video below. Chris Bailey and Jake Naish made it for Santander, which issued a debit card statement and asked for the back story of three to five of the transactions on it in the short film, telling the customer’s story.

This video, from Jamal Dedeaux, won the grand prize for Microsoft, which wanted a short film showing how a Windows 7 PC “is at the core of a student’s life.” I empathized with the guy’s poor roommate.

And this one, made for Coke Zero, tugs a bit more at the heartstrings. Made by Pete Williams, “Dance Tommy Dance” tells the true story of how a young man made his dream come true. These entries could be up to 3 minutes but had to tell the story of a person or a group “changed what is possible to something real.”

All the grand prize winners got $8,000 and a trip to the Cannes Lions Festival, where they got to meet Jesse Eisenberg (star of “The Social Network.”)

I’m not going to go into the specifics of how exactly EA works. Learn more here and here. The best way I can describe it is that it’s a “social media stock market” combined with Klout. It lets you rank your personal brand through a score, not only determined by buying and selling activity on the site, but via the activity on your social network accounts, which are linked to your profile.

Big Whoop, most people say. “Who Cares?” Here’s a direct quote from a very good friend who’s opinion on these matters I respect much: “So…silly…don’t care. Seriously virtual stock markets? I don’t even like the real stock market ” That pretty much sums up what EA is up against. Regardless of what people say though, the service is in fact vital to me for two main reasons. Here they are.

Empire Avenue has Expanded My Social Media World View

Not since the glory days of Digg (and to some degree Reddit’s current renaissance) have I found the level of community excitement and joy that currently exists among the denizens of EA. Facebook groups of all kinds have popped up bringing the latest and best stock deals to the table every morning. I personally have discovered new friends at a pace I have not seen since 2009 when Twitter took off on a grand scale for the first time. For me a huge part of the reason for participating in these networks is the interaction with folks I never would have met before. There’s some thought that EA is only at the beginning of its rise. Seeing the level of community activity at this point makes me hope it’s possible – and that’s exciting to be a part of.

EA Serves as an Effective Social Media Dashboard

Perhaps my favorite aspect of EA isn’t the buzz of having a lot of money to spend because I made some great stock transactions (buying low and selling high). It’s the fact that you connect your Twitter, FB, Linkedin, YouTube and Flickr accounts to your EA profile. When you do that a number score is assigned to each of them in dashboard fashion at the top of your profile. (This in turn provides much of the information that determines your overall stock value.) In my case, I have been able to notice number scores that are unimpressive or low, and work on them so that they rise.

For example, my Facebook score was only at number 10 (out of 100) for much of my early time on EA. That caused me to reengage my FB friends on a higher level. That had the effect of letting my FB score rise to 36 and higher, which has bolstered my overall stock price. More importantly, it has had the effect of letting me be more effective at what I do for a living, (attempting to engage communities on social media), all because I had a wider, clearer vision of what I was doing. EA served as an easy-to-understand dashboard that made this possible.

A Final Note

There is some criticism floating around regarding Klout in connection to EA. Some people in the EA community have expressed dissatisfaction with Klout because the “social media score” it gives to folks doesn’t have an interactive element the way EA does. “Klout determines its scores without the transparency that EA provides,” one told me.

I am of the opinion that the two are separate and should be looked at differently. Klout, to my mind, gives an important, if sometimes somewhat vaguely determined estimation of what someone’s social media influence amounts to. EA may give a better indication of how the score is derived, but it is heavily influenced by the actual activity on the site. So inherently the score isn’t going to be viewed, at least by most people, as the end-all-be-all determination of what someone’s influence is. Some people would also be of the opinion that the whole enterprise is a waste of time. “I’m too busy working to build the community for my site and I don’t have time to measure how fricking great my influence is. All I care about is driving traffic and bringing quality content to people.” I think all sides have to be examined and taken into account, and it’s inevitable for people to seek out things like Klout scores or EA stock prices in order to gauge personal online effectiveness. One thing I do know is, EA is a fun way to spend some time and the “addiction” has improved my ability to do my job.

In the past several days, engineers at Digg rolled out some changes on the right-hand site of the front page designed to highlight the site community. The most recent change occurred just below the top-right medium rectangle advertisement, where a “Top Comment” widget appeared. The comment box includes at least a few of the most highly rated recent comments on the site.

This is an idea that has potential, but one that was poorly executed. I commend Digg for thinking on the fly. It has been noted that significant portions of the site community have taken off for what are perceived to be “greener” pastures like Reddit.com. It’s only natural that the folks at Digg would want to build commenting on the site by giving the most vociferous users a bit of recognition on the front page. The Digg team rolled out the idea without warning, perhaps as a demonstration to their developers and engineers that their voices deserve trust, that their ideas should be seen and given a chance to succeed in front of the entire community.

Unfortunately, Digg swung and missed on this one, at least out of the gate thus far. First of all, they placed the widget at the topmost portion of the right hand side column of the redesigned site, just below the advertisement. This has for years been the location of arguably the site’s number one attraction, the Top 10 stories of the previous 24 hours. That “Top in 24″ widget was pushed further down the page to the point where the unique visit referrals it generates were decimated recently, according to several top publishers. Since Digg has made it clear that the referrals it delivers to publishers are of high importance to them, this move appears to have hurt an important part of their mission as a site — that of maintaining relevance to users looking for traffic.

Secondly, the widget itself also suffers from issues that make it almost impenetrable to average and new users. Each comment is listed without enough context, so that it is nearly impossible to easily tell why the comment was made or what it was made in reference to. Why we care about any given comment in the widget is often very difficult to discern. Unfortunately the widget comes across as a series of random sentences. Very few people have the attention span or the energy on the social web these days to do detective work in determining how or why a random sentence was uttered. In this light, it seems a bad idea to replace the long-worshipped “Top in 24″ widget with such a thing.

Is there a place for this type of feature? Definitely. I would say that the top comment thread of the day might warrant highlighting in this manner. But that type of widget would have to be chock full of context. It would be important to include the title of the post being highlighted, and at least two boisterous comments that make sense given their relation to each other. I would also recommend that any comment widget be given second or third billing on the right rail. It should most definitely be below the “Top in 24″ feature, which again is perhaps the most important feature on Digg.com. I am of the opinion that “Hot Stories” and “Top Users,” would always live below “Top in 24″ as well, but belong above a comment widget.

All of these widgets on the “right rail” constitute an excellent effort by Digg to recapture the spirit of interaction and commenting that was once so strong on the site. The rollout of the comment box also shows a nice agile streak in the thinking of the top brass at Digg. It’s a good idea to periodically give hard working staff like developers and engineers a shot at breaking out a successful new feature. However it just did not work this time. Here’s to hoping that more features are rolled out in the future and that they don’t harm visitor referrals or confuse users.