Social Media to Support Causes > Haiti Positive Impact

One of my startups is centered around creating group sites. Group sites can be used for many purposes such as Marketing, Support, Sales, Loyalty and Causes.

Our group sites are like ning but are more super charged for business using Online Meetings, Email Marketing, Social Analytics and other industrial strength web tools. As a test for our new platform capabilities (and also to help support the Haiti Crisis) we created a site that brings information, context, understanding and the ability to spread the word.

I encourage you to check it out and join to show your support.

Visit Haiti Positive Impact

Exchanging Education Everywhere - academiacs.org

As I mentioned in my last blog post, I am revealing many of the sites I have been working on in the past year in this blog. This one has been in stealth mode and in hardcore development. I think it has one of sexier business models and is timely for the market. We are beta launching early next year. We have been busy integrating several powerful opensource frameworks together (Moodle, DimDim, Drupal) to create a new education platform for the world. Think facebook for education with realtime teaching tools. Not your typical educational offering as it's "Student Friendly".

Below is a snippet lead in to the opportunity from our stealth website...

"Most educators, administrators, and parents would agree that the access to a quality education has been uneven and unfair. More can be done for the creative and talented students that are often stifled by lack of budgets, high achievers kept from advancing because there was no place for them to go, and ESL students struggling to learn their lessons while at the same time learn our culture and language. On top of all this, there is the increasing pressure to get into College and University - not just in our country but all over the world. Demand for a better education globally far exceeds the supply of it. Most of the teachers we have are caring, qualified and committed. Unfortunately, there aren't enough of them and the ones we have are often under-paid and over worked."

The Solution

An open educational platform for the world. It provides a virtual swiss army knife of free tools and resources and is completely socially enabled. While its free to use, it also allows educators to charge for their services by providing them the ability to securely transact with their students. Can be leveraged by institutions, teachers, students and those that want to give back to society.


Homepage





Realtime Educational Tools




This is a sneak peak, stay tuned for more details...

Living Social Archive - Wereyouthere.com

Over the past year I have been working on building out several very interesting new startups. In this blog I want to begin to introduce some of this work to my audience.

Wereyouthere is a timeless site concept about creating a living archive that captures and connects us around the memories that matter most in lives. As the web is in UGC overload, it's increasingly apparent that the content that is most cherished (the experiences we share together) are being lost and hard to find. Wereyouthere provides a platform for us all to experience and share our posts in the "Ourkive".

When posting to wereyouthere, we ask that the content fits these criteria:

• Will your story, photo or video interest strangers, and not just friends and family?
• Will it stand the test of time a year or more from now?
• Is your story told from your point of view?

So in the age of microblogging, buried blog posts, and the web's numbing echo effect, the time has come for quality places where we build lasting and human connections. Please take a moment and check this site out and feel free to share a life experience or two.

Be warned, this is a highly addictive site.

Great Products in an Uncertain World

To achieve success in today's ever-changing and unpredictable markets, competitive businesses need to rethink and reframe their strategies across the board.

Large companies today often get too caught up in chasing revenue and lose touch with what their customers actually want. Smaller startup's today are passionate with ideas, adrenaline and dollars-signs-in-their-eyes - but they often go to market with no ability to adapt and listen to their users. They cannot "sense and respond" to evolve their products.

1. Unrelenting Chaotic Marketplace

Today's business climate in virtually every segment is in flux. Uncertainty and confusion has arrived. Technology and social trends have turned many business models either upside down (Music) or into some state of radical transformation (Travel). I believe that this is not just a phase, but that you can pretty much assume that things will continually be continually changing. And you can not "easily" predict it. While some can (Steve Jobs), the vast majority of us will struggle to understand where things will be just one year from now. We are living in a new world of complexity, transformation and disruption.

The good news is that change brings opportunity. Smaller, newer and smarter players can challenge industry norms and seize the day. The key now is to change your ways and embrace the new world order.

2. Companies Must Adapt

Companies must develop a new set of organizational competencies: qualitative customer research to better understand customer behaviors and motivations; an open design process to reframe possibilities and rapidly translate new ideas into great customer experiences; and agile technological implementation to quickly prototype ideas, getting them from the whiteboard out into the world where people can respond to them.

Pragmatic Marketing is well known for its popular "Market-Driven" approach to building products. When applied this can be somewhat verbose and can take a "manufacturing view" of building products which is more suited for larger product or software companies (HP, Kodak, Sun). This process is holistic and weaves together all key driving requirement inputs (Sales, Marketing, User, Competitive, Consumer Research) into feature sets and release plans. But this verbose process is increasingly getting difficult in today's fast moving and dynamic consumer market where it’s hard to guess ahead of the curve what the right product should be.

My recommendation is that we take queues from some of the new companies that are doing it right. Flickr continues to be a great example of a better way to do this. Yahoo originally had their own "Yahoo Photo" service and this could not keep up with sheer velocity of the and new aggressive Flickr (they wisely bought them). You can go to Flickr's about page and get a sense of how they do this. They start with a vision, strategy and a process to get there. Then over time the feature sets evolve to support this. This is truly an agile product process.

3. Evolving Your Approach

My point is not that companies need to scrap what they are doing today, but more, rethink think a bit and particularly the part where you incorporate customer insights into the design process.

Outside-In - Tim O’Reilly has a term called “Outside-In”. This is where the experience is a key driving force into the product process. The converse of that is where a brand wants to take itself into the market (Inside-Out approach). The key is to take a more balanced approach of both. Bottom line, experience can and should be a major driver in strategy.

Human Complexity - Think of the messy complexity of real human life. We need to treat people more holistically, treat them as people not as some market opportunity or as an over simplified market segment. The user is not only a potential customer and revenue opportunity but have all the depth of a real person with many levels of motivations and goals. Where we would traditionally do user centered design and surface a user’s Goals and Tasks. It’s important to go even further here and understand their daily life realities and explore factors such as emotions, context and real meaning.

Key to achieving this is studying your customers as real people through qualitative and quantitative research. I have found that very few startups are doing this today.

Product Simplification - Sometimes, Products are structured, the way the organization works. Think major government, bank or a telco. Have you ever interacted with Verizon and they deal with you a separate person across their different divisions and groups (Wireless, Broadband)?

Another pitfall is cramming complexity into one product, instead of keeping simplicity as a main theme. Companies keep bloating there offerings thinking more equals better. Someone once said “Simplicity is complexity resolved”. Google is a great example of a company that has become very large in scope, but still maintains a simple (almost no graphics) user start experience.

Because consumers are very busy and fickle they prefer to deal with brands that have more usefulness (utility) and have limited brand experience. This is one of the lessons from the Web2.0 phenomena.

Embrace the complexity in the market. Deliver radically simple (sorry Eloan).

Design as Activity - Design is often thought of as ascetics or the rock-star savior. It’s the creation of "that thing" that the kids with cool shoes do. And we do it every now and then when its needed. Design should be a core competency, and a facilitation role that delivers experiences. Business, Technical, Creative and User’s are all involved in the design process. Great design is felt, and has a wowing effect, but also can be seamless and beautifully subtle. Great products also repeatedly Wow us with each release (think iPod, which delights us continually overtime).

Design is a core competency.

Final Words

Successful companies should be adapting the ways they think about their products and customers. Embrace complexity by staging releases over time to reveal a greater vision. New technologies and highly iterative roadmaps make it easier to start to create more consumer centric experiences.

Do you have a product process that allows you to continually deliver "wowing" customer experiences?

CrunchBase Information

Google

Flickr

Information provided by CrunchBase

STARTUPS: Consumer Engagement Framework

In today's world of Web 2.0 startups there seems to be a formula that goes something like this - Get Users, Drive Usage and then Monetize. How far and how fast and how much money you might need depends entirely on your situation. I am developing a handbook for startups which lays out an approach on how to establish a successful focus for building product capabilities, marketing plan, launch strategy and of course - establishing a profitable revenue model. The following is a generic framework that can be used to help plan your company and establish a dashboard measurement program to optimize your efforts. The entire focus revolves around satisfying and delighting your users, so they come back and also recommend your offering. Once this milestone is achieved - your monetization programs will be easy to turn-up.

(Click on the diagram above to expand it.)

5 Steps for Consumer Engagement


1. Acquisition

Determining which marketing channels (marketing mix) will provide the lowest cost and the highest percentage of conversion will be a critical first step. This is also called your reach programs and will evolve through an ongoing series to executions, tests and optimizations to find your optimal targets and learn how best to effectively attract them. Don't assume that because you built it, they will come.

2. Activation

Just because user's have landed on your site does not mean they are convinced or even understand what you are offering. Getting users to try your service will be a learning process. Try landing pages with A/B testing and iterate continuously. Certain segments will respond to certain messaging and user experiences. Determine your most meaningful user segments and targeting rules will strengthen your competitive position.

3. Retention

Your company should have an engaging and exciting pulse. Consider the natural rhythms of this.. event based, daily, weekly or monthly. Every touch point with you brand demonstrates your company's personality and soul. Apple gets this, you should too! Try to find the right touch frequency and consider having something to say of value that is relevant or personalized in your emails, newsletters and alerts. Have the right message at the right point in time to the right customers. Remember that you are in a two-way conversation with your customers and should facilitate experiences that allow free flowing communications.

4. Referral

This is your most cost effect marketing tool - Your customers. Once they are "enjoying your service", make sure they have tools to promote it. Make it super easy to share and in a variety of ways. Viral and referrals is increasingly becoming an important channel for marketers as peer and social influence is more trusted then traditional corporate marketing.

5. Monetize

In the day's of Web 1.0, lots of attention was put on this area, with little success. Today, the models of advertising, commerce and subscriptions are well established and accepted by the marketplace. Please be cautious though, if your Web 2.0 Startup focuses too much initially on monetization you may never capture the consumer 's trust thus preventing your company from getting out of the starting gate. Conversely, if you don't have a plan to monetize your business, you may have a phenomenally popular site but it can't easily be monetized.

This framework is meant to be customized for your specific user and business situation. There is no one size fits all here, but there are some common engagement strategies that have been proven by many of the newest internet companies (Google, Facebook, Digg etc). Learn from their successes and go forwards with yours.

IDEAS: Platform for Community Collaboration

My Crazy Company Idea

What do you get when you combine Wiki, Blog, Podcasting and other OpenSource social media technologies into an integrated framework that can be configured and deployed in a hosted service?

You get my next generation business model idea. Major companies are looking at how to grow, engage and “control or guide” their community bases. This is not a new idea, but it is an idea whose time has come. Checkout ProductWiki, a product catalogue that is editable by the public.

This looks like an interesting move in several ways:

• It could sell more because each product listing can have vastly better levels of information.
• It provides shoppers greater depth of content that bypasses marketing spin.
• It provides checks and balances to what can be seriously flawed product reviews.
• It introduces the emerging concept of customer collaboration to a massive audience.

This got me thinking that any company or market segment could leverage this approach for their respective products and services. Even though Wikipedia has started this trend, they are too generalized to fully satistfy the depth of information that community demands. There is an opportunity to create specialized Open Community Forums that are targeted at areas of interest such as Music, Movies, Books, Electronics, Sports and any other topic with hot interest. My idea for a new company is to provide the hosted community engine service that enables this to blossom. Remember "communities.com", well this is the next generation of collective shared intelligence.

Who's in?

TECH: New Design Patterns = New Opportunities

I just finished reading the new book “the Google Story” and have been thinking about "Web 2.0", "The Long Tail" and the rise of "Remix Culture". There is definitely something significantly different about today’s internet and now begins the hard work of separating the Hype for the Reality. Is the new web landscape going to be profitible for the smaller and nichier businesses? Is the playing field begining to level as services are freely exchanged in a more organic fashion. Is this the end of the microsoft era and the beginning of the.. google era??? I would venture to say that every marketing machine is reving up it's respective “Web 2.0” story, which is interesting as there's still a huge amount of disagreement about just what Web 2.0 means.

From a technical standpoint there is clearly a new set of "Web 2.0 design patterns" and technologies (Web Services, RSS, AJAX, OpenSource). New user paradigms such as Collective Intellegence, Social Media and all things living ditigally online. The business models can monetize the long tail market through ad revenue or upsell services from their free base offering. Google has shown that using algorithms to automate all aspects of the business model is essential to scale and survival in the long term. Something is clearly happening here.....

Shedding More Light with the following 3 concept illustrations:

1. Web 2.0 Examples (Source: O’Reilly)

Web 1.0		Web 2.0
DoubleClick	-->	Google AdSense
Ofoto	-->	Flickr
Akamai	-->	BitTorrent
mp3.com	-->	Napster
Britannica Online	-->	Wikipedia
personal websites	-->	Blogging
evite	-->	upcoming.org and EVDB
domain name speculation	-->	search engine optimization
page views	-->	cost per click
screen scraping	-->	web services
publishing	-->	Participation
content management systems	-->	Wikis
directories (taxonomy)	-->	tagging ("folksonomy")
stickiness	-->	Syndication

2. Web 2.0 Visualization (Source: O’Reilly)

You can visualize Web 2.0 as a set of principles, practices and technologies.

3. Web 2.0 Check List

• Give us your email address, we'll let you know when it's ready!
• Public beta alpha
• Tags
• Feeds for everything
• Built with Rails
• Sprinkled with Ajax
• Yellow fade
• Blue gradients
• Big icons
• Big fonts
• Big input boxes
• REST API
• Google Maps mashup
• Share with a friend
• TypePad blog for a peek inside the team
• Feature screencasts
• Hackathons for new features
• Development wiki
• Business model optimized for the long tail
• It's Free!/AdSense revenue stream

BOOKS: Disentangling technology, legal and economic threads

Booking reading update:

In my continuing effort to better understand all sides to the technology sector, I am currently reading this book that covers the Internet bubble and the dynamics that are setting the stage for current and future internet and software business models. This book has a strong “law and economy forces” perspective and details how these disciplines are shaping of the Information Economy. It is well written and gives great insight into the new rules. Below are comments from the publisher on this book.


Digtal Phoenix: Why the Information Economy Collapsed and How It Will Rise Again

by Bruce Abramson

While we were waiting for the Internet to make us rich — back when we thought all we had to do was to buy lottery tickets called dotcom shares — we missed the real story of the information economy. That story, says Bruce Abramson in Digital Phoenix, took place at the intersection of technology, law, and economics. It unfolded through Microsoft's manipulation of software markets, through open source projects like Linux, and through the file-sharing adventures that Napster enabled. Linux and Napster in particular exploited newly enabled business models to make information sharing cheap and easy; both systems met strong opposition from entrenched interests intent on preserving their own profits. These scenarios set the stage for the future of the information economy, a future in which each new technology will threaten powerful incumbents — who will, in turn, fight to retard this dangerous new direction of progress. Disentangling the technological, legal, and economic threads of the story, Abramson argues that the key to the entire information economy — understanding the past and preparing for the future — lies in our approach to intellectual property and idea markets.