One of my favorite things about attending We Media, is going in consecutive years. I love catching up with familiar faces and hearing about what they’ve been up to in the past year. I learn about new technologies, new functionality on existing products, and even entirely new companies being created out of the ashes or on the shoulders of what I previously associated with the people who attend.
This year, I caught up with Ben Berkowitz, founder of SeeClickFix, which won the for-profit category of last year’s PitchIt! competition and empowers anyone to report and track non-emergency issues online. The service is having an effect on many local governments as it enables ordinary citizens to easily and efficiently hold them accountable.
As a believer in the opportunities provided by Twitter, I quickly registered the account @SeeClickFix while Ben was up on stage accepting the prize with his team. I apparently startled him a few minutes later when I told him that I grabbed it for him and - well perhaps we should just let him tell the rest of the story.
During a break between sessions last week, and the morning after a sleepless night of helping this year’s finalists refine their pitches, Ben talked about how they’ve been able to use Twitter to help their site grow, where branding fits in and the importance of being genuine.
Ben Berkowitz on Twitter, branding and the importance of being genuine from Genuine Interactive on Vimeo.
GENUINE INTERACTIVE: So a year ago you just won the PitchIt! competition and you had no idea about Twitter? Is that right?
BEN BERKOWITZ: Haha ya, I had no idea. But really I knew what Twitter was, I just didn’t know the purpose of it. So we won, we got off stage to visit the restroom and when I came out there was an eager gentleman by the name of Chad. "I got your Twitter tag!" I thought "Holy shit this guy is holding this thing for ransom." But he was kind enough to give us the SeeClickFix Twitter tag and our presence in the Twitter- sphere was born and it’s been really valuable using Twitter since.
In the last year we have been able to assess the potential competition and our position in the market place, and we have been able to put our stake in the ground to let people know we are here who would not have known that we were in their network. Most recently we used Twitter to send messages to the city of San Francisco 311 department, so we are actually using it as form of communication for generating service requests and they tweet back at us on those issues.
So Twitter has had many implications. It was interesting to see there has been much less tweeting this year (at We Media), I think there are changes happening, last year there was certainly more back channel, but maybe more people are paying attention in real life, so that’s good that more people have their heads up off the computers than last year.
GENUINE INTERACTIVE: I wanted to ask you a question about the growth and the evolution of SeeClickFix, I’m guessing it kind of went from building, building, building with your head down, to looking at a much more branding focus. Is that a fair assessment?
BEN BERKOWITZ: I would say that would be a fair assessment of the next piece. We did a redesign in August and we got a user group and focus group and it really, really helped us. I think there are still a ton of things with the UI that could improve and so we have tackled a lot of the engineering fees like translation and smart phone applications and across most of the smart phone platforms. Now I think there is a battle of these big things and then you have to simplify all the big things and then add more big things and then simply. At least that has been our experience and process so far. I think the next couple of months of SeeClickFix we will be simplifying and making changes to the content we have out there and making the tools more accessible.
GENUINE INTERACTIVE: In terms of your audience, is being genuine important to maintaining your audience?
BEN BERKOWITZ: Yes absolutely. I personally have been an evangelist for the open government space as well as a participatory media and community web 2.0. to use a cheesy term. I think if you don’t believe in your world, and sing it from the roof tops or be celebratory every time it happens, you know it’s not going to be genuine. You absolutely need to be genuine and I think that there are people that have thought about participating in our space and it was clear they were not genuine and it has affected their potential reputation.
GENUINE INTERACTIVE: What has been your biggest accomplishment in the last year?
BEN BERKOWITZ: God, there have been so many. I think collectively, if you look, I sent a tweet out when we were about to be on stage of the SeeClickFix challenge month with IBM smarter cities, it was about 40 posts of people who have used the site SeeClickFix and have had some very positive experiences where some part of their life or community was improved because of the site. It’s a really nice testimonial section, really representative, there have been a ton of specific moments. For example a neighborhood in New Haven that addressed a mugging situation, not by freaking out and running away but by forming on SeeClickFix over the concern of muggings, then forming neighborhood groups in real life and then rallying around SeeClickFix in real life to get the mayor to implement better lighting in the neighborhood. I think those are the kind of stories and it’s what keeps us waking up in the morning.
GENUINE INTERACTIVE: Great!
BEN BERKOWITZ: It has been really exciting!
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