Kuhr Strategies

The Family Travel Blog for Families That Want to Travel Off The Beaten Path

2019-01-21T15:56:00.004-08:00

There are so many family travel blogs out there. Apparently, there are quite a few mom's and dad's that can write, and also travel with their kids.

One blog, however, is really about traveling off the beaten path: My Travelling Circus. Yes, it's spelled correctly - it's the English way to spell "travelling". If you aren't interested in the usual destinations for young kids (nothing wrong with Disneyworld except the tens of thousands of other people visiting, of course) this blog is a must-read!

From the many Ancient, New, and Natural Wonders of the World: Macchu Picchu (with kids), the Great Wall of China, Angor Wat, Petra, Jordan, and more. You'll also understand first hand how kids can celebrate the loudest New Year's in any country in Rejkavik, Iceland, exploring the mountains of Bhutan (with kids). The author is so well-travelled, you'll be amazed that she has time to raise a family and write at the same time.

Is Mobile Video Advertising More Effective Than TV Spots?

2013-02-26T10:15:00.000-08:00

Mobile video advertising, and short-form video advertising in general, is and will continue to be more effective than most TV ad spots. This is true for online video and mobile video. And when I say most, it I mean everything except live events, especially sports.

Here's why: a captive audience.

The video ad viewing results shared today by TapJoy go a long way to proving this. While TapJoy ads aren't representative of most video ad networks, they are predicting where the market is going:

For a telecom campaign, for instance, the Tapjoy videos produced a 48% higher recall, vs. 22% for TV, and the mobile campaign generated 25% brand likeability vs. 11% for the TV spots. Source: MediaPost

If a viewer wants to watch a video badly enough and they are forced to watch pre-roll, they will. And because they know the length, they know there's only one ad, and they know the won't be bothered again, they'll do it. They've actually been doing it, and watching pre-roll video ads will continue to outpace TV for engagement, ad recall and brand recognition simply because they can't skip through it, and it's short enough where they won't try to multi-task to something else. The format, the form, and the length make these ads truly make users watch them.
Now, not all videos are of equal consumer value, and the views on a single average video are nowhere near the volume of a single TV show. But this is clearly quality over quantity right now. But, equal quantity is just a matter of time as the walls breakdown between interent-based and cable-based video distribution.

Consumers implicitly understand this ad tradeoff now - "I watch a video ad (which I might even be interested in), I get the content I want to see".

As long as publishers / advertisers don't start loading more than one 20-30 second clip, and the video ads are contextually or personally relevant to me, this tradeoff really works out. Video ads are only going to get more engaging, and that's better for consumers and brands alike.

Distribution & Conversion: The Fusion of Marketing and Product

2012-05-31T11:02:00.003-07:00

Chief Marketing Officer: What’s in a Job Title?

The Product Management function for Internet companies is a Marketing function. If it’s not under Marketing in your company, it’s simply time to move it.

Marketing people can't do viral marketing.

Today’s "marketing" - viral marketing and word-of-mouth marketing - is built into the core of the product, and without the ability to design it in, marketing will continue to be expensive and sub-optimally effective, holding back the value of your business.

Today’s Chief Marketing Officer must not only straddle the fence between product specification and traditional marketing, but to be successful, remove the fence.

This isn't the Mad Men type marketer your mother warned you about - it's completely different sort:

"Marketing people can’t do viral marketing. You don’t just build a product and then choose viral marketing. There is no viral marketing add-on. Anyone who advocates viral marketing in this way is wrong and lazy. People romanticize it because, if you do it right, you don’t have to spend money on ads or salespeople. But viral marketing requires that the product’s core use case must be inherently viral." - Peter Thiel, Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup - Class 9 Notes

Marketing -- that job of creating awareness and finding new customers / users across a variety of media and channels -- is now less about paid media and more about earned media. The thing that’s changing the shape of the position is that the online product or service itself is now the biggest driver of earned marketing impact. (Note: ecommerce remains very different - you're selling products online, not selling online products)

When people ask what I do, it’s almost impossible to communicate succinctly. As chief marketing officer, or senior vice president of marketing AND products, it’s complicated but critical to tell both stories and how they’re intertwined. And the value that I personally bring to the table is that I understand how and why they’re so intimately connected and know how to manage both sides synchronously.

If I explain that I’m in marketing, they get it the advertising part - but that’s only half my job (less these days). When I say I run product management, too, I get blank stares. I have to explain product management and that it’s not a coding position, but a general management position. (It’s somehow unique that software product managers, unlike the product managers at Proctor and Gamble, Mattel and Nestlé (who are the general managers of their products) don’t run into the same quandary.)

But, that’s changing - and it’s about time! Product Management needs more recognition as a critical function, even for startups. It’s usually the CEO or the CTO who’s the head product manager - it’s just not part of their title.

Take Instagram. Their focus on creating a passionate user network, rather than new features or platform expansion, turned that company into a tidy little acquisition. CEO Kevin Systrom understood the value of users, and [relentlessly] focused the technical team on that over all else. There were no Google Adwords campaigns, no SEO links, no paid Facebook campaigns, and hardly even a website – every bit of "marketing" was embedded the app.

As an accomplished Chief Marketing Officer for multiple Internet and software companies, building market awareness is largely reliant on a great product / service experience - and happy customers who can and want to tell their friends about it.

The customer drives marketing now. Marketing isn’t something you do. it’s what your customers and users do for you. If they like you (your product or service), it will grow (with well-executed coaxing and encouragement, and viral product design). If they think it’s OK or don’t like it, growth is slow, painful and expensive. It’s why so many companies fail – customers just aren’t delighted.

Not sure about your company? Give yourself a litmus test – run a customer survey to captive email addresses and your website to get your NPS (Net Promoter Score). Ask just one question:

How likely are you to recommend this product / service to a friend or colleague?

The results will tell you how much work you have to do on your product experience with the goal of getting users completely enthused about it. (Make sure your scale is 0 to 10, not 1 to 10, otherwise you’ll be getting good information but it won’t be a comparable NPS score.) An aggregate score of 70 or more is great - you're on your way.

Today’s successful Internet head of marketing isn’t a corporate marketing wonk, creative advertiser, or a brand builder – the traditional emphasis of a CMO. Marketing is not about paid media, brand advertising or even direct advertising. This new breed of CMO must orchestrate a blend of integrated online, social and email marketing programs that drive word of mouth and online recommendations and referrals. That means finding and leveraging happy customers as brand ambassadors and harnessing their inherent goodness. These programs are part of the product and service experience, intrinsically sharable and leverage the power of the network (and yes, the social graph). But how do you differentiate this CMO from the 'old version'?

Combining the “Chief Product Officer” and “Chief Marketing Officer” into a single role is the right call for early-stage Internet companies. My naming dilemma of the day is finding a new title for this role that encompasses both marketing and product management in a way that’s descriptive, intuitive and creative.

Chief Experience Officer?
Vice President of Distribution?
Head of Customer Experience?
SVP of Advocacy?
VP of Customer Mobilization?
VP of Customer Experience?
Director of Social Sharing?
Growth Hacker?

I could use your help – can you think of a job title that represents both product and marketing?

Marketing Your Brand on Pinterest - Better Than Facebook?

2012-03-21T11:04:00.000-07:00

There's a lot of talk about Pinterest lately due to it's crazy-fast growth (faster than Facebook): What is it good for? Why is it growing so quickly? Who's on it? And, how should brands should use it? Here’s a little insight into how consumer brands can use Pinterest effectively to drive traffic and sales as an integrated part of their social media marketing mix.

What does “being on” Pinterest really mean?

There are two ways for brands to be on Pinterest. One is passive, one is active:

Get Pinned. Optimize your website's content so others can easily Pin It, share it, discuss it.
Maintain a Pinboard. Create and update a brand profile on Pinterest.

Get Pinned. Optimize Your Website's Content

Even if you decide that creating a brand profile on Pinterest isn’t for you, you can and should still leverage Pinterest passively. How? Make it easy for Pinterest users to get your content to their Pinboard so they can share it. All legal and copyright issues aside, when it comes to marketing, the more people talking about your products the better.

Step 1: Identify the products on your website that people will covet.

The Power of Pinterest
(Click for Full Infographic)

That’s right, covet. There has to be some sort of “drool factor” to get things Pinned on Pinterest. If one person finds it desirable, many people will find it desirable and then Re-Pin it. Re-Pins are the rocket fuel of Pinterest – the more you have, the more mindshare you've built, the more traffic you'll get.

You should treat each and every Pin as an object of desire – from the photo, to the description, to the link back to your site. Here’s where working with your web development team comes in – you need to make sure photos on your site can be Pinned. Make sure photos are not rendered in Flash (if you’re still using Flash you’re missing out on many other social media promotions and SEO as well). Give each photo a caption (title) that is easy to select and copy (and then paste into Comments). Make sure photo URLs are static (not on a CDN like Akamai).

Next: you can encourage visitors to create Pins. There’s a Pinterest PinIt button (see button below the image to the right). You should put that next to every photo or once on every page that has one or more product photos. A good place for the PinIt button is right next to your Facebook Share and Tweet This icons in a nice red/blue/light blue grouping.

And, don't forget to include the 'Follow Me on Pinterest' button next to your Follow on Facebook / Twitter buttons if you've set up a Pinboard.

All these buttons are getting making pages pretty crowded, so you might have to think about redesigning them into an appealing but unobtrusive graphical container.

Lastly: test it! Make sure you can create Pins quickly and easily yourself. If you can’t do it, then your customers and potential customers surely won’t.

Create a Pinboard. Your Brand on Pinterest.

The discussions about whether or not to maintain a brand profile on Pinterest are ongoing. Large consumer brands that are used to push marketing and brand marketing are having a hard time figuring out what to do. Pinterest (and social media in general) is so…well, personal.

Does curating Pinterest content enhance a brand? Does it makes sense to do with all the other social media channels you’re maintaining? If you represent a B2C product company - as long as you're not more than 80% male oriented - the answer is "Yes".

“For brands, Pinterest has the potential to connect inspiration to purchase,” said Matt Wurst, director of digital communities at 360i. “People know which websites to go to if they want to buy a specific product or type of product, but sometimes they need a spark of inspiration to help them make a decision…Retailers can use Pinterest to drive traffic to their e-commerce sites, whereas CPG marketers might use it to curate recipes around their products…”

Here’s a great flowchart infographic on whether or not you and your brand should bother with creating and account and maintaining content. I can’t speak to the effectiveness of Pinterest for B2B use, but for B2C, Pinterest can be very very powerful.

The Pinterest Audience

Contrary to everything else you might have heard, marketing (and especially social media marketing) is about story telling. Pinterest is story telling through pictures – and since 60% - 65% of people in the world prefer to take in information visually (read more about NLP) Pinterest is wildly appealing to a large part of the (female*) population. If you’re targeting females, especially between the ages of 20 and 50, this is a great place to find and grow an new audience and keep connected to an existing one.

[* Why not males? Like most things that require day to day attention - we can’t be bothered and we don't have anything close to a nesting instinct. Not scientifically proven, but after talking about Pinterest with many different people, both male and female, guys just don’t ‘get it’.]

Before you get all excited and move forward, realize that maintaining Pinterest is going to be like maintaining Twitter – you need to have multiple posts and interactions every day. You need to share, like and comment on other people’s Pins. It takes time, it takes creativity, and it takes dedication to maintaining the account. An inactive account might as well be a dead account. If you can’t put at least 30 minutes a day into it, reserve your name now but wait to use it until you have the time.

Your Pinterest Account

OK, so you’re managing a B2C brand that appeals to women between 20 and 50, and you’ve decided to create a Pinterest account – how should you set it up? What I’ve seen work the best throughout social media is personal recommendations, rather than brand recommendations. Even though social media brings people closer to brands, they’re still brands and not real people. Nominate an employee, use an executive, or create a persona to setup your account – each business will be different, but give your profile personality and a person’s headshot along with a logo, not just a big logo. People, especially women, want to feel an emotional connection. You can’t do that as effectively with a corporate brand presence.

Your Pinterest Content

What should you post?

Remember, this is story telling through pictures. Start with your company’s history and products – it’s usually the fastest and easiest. Start pinning your own products from your website to create a visual product catalog. Create the right topics or categories, and group the things you think people will (or do) covet. Don't Pin every product, or every color variation. Only Pin photos that make the item look as desirable as possible, and be selective.

IMPORTANT! You should NOT Pin all of your products / content all at the same time! The power of Pins is appearing at the top of your follower's feeds, and the subsequent benefit is social sharing, or Re-Pinning. Pins show up in feeds for a moment in time – they will only be visible to your followers for an hour, a day, or a few days depending on how many people they are following. If you Pin all your content at once, you’re throwing away most of it. And if you don't have any followers, you're throwing away just about all of it!

Instead, create a following first. As soon as you create your account and Pin a few products (5 - 10), start following people who seem to have the same tastes or interests as you and you’ll get reciprocal follows. Create a base of followers this way. Like and comment on other peoples’ Pins. Also, link to your Pinboards from your other social media channels to get your existing followers / fans to follow you on Pinterest, too. If you've done a good job there, you'll have a Pinterest following in no time.

Then, you’re ready to start a steady stream of Pinning – one of your products every hour or three. Trickle the Pins in over time, and you’ll get much more traction, many more Re-Pins, and a lot more followers.

Your Story, Your Lifestyle

While you’re posting all the content that’s fit for Pinning from your website, it’s up to you to tell a story about your brand. You're representing a lifestyle and trying to really identify with your core consumer. Your "lifestyle" is really theirs - what else does your consumer do? Based on your research, what else are they interested in? Most importantly, what do they aspire to do? What do they aspire to own? What do they covet?

Your story is yours alone, and this is where having a personality represent the brand can make it easier (unless your brand is really interesting). Every person has tastes and interests. If you’ve chosen your company founder as the personality, for example, they have hobbies. They have interests. They have food they like to eat, cars they like to drive, shoes they like to wear.

Create those categories and give your brand life beyond the products it sells. Give your followers an emotional, non-sales connection to the lifestyle and tastes of your founder. Create categories on your Pinboard for other people's content that essentially describe how those Pins reinforce your brand and messaging.

Become a Curator
Become a curator of a certain thing that is a direct benefit of your brand, educates about an area relevant to you, is focused on a charity or cause you support, or is in some way complementary to what you do. Make it pretty broad to attract general interest. People might not know about your company or product, but they might find you because of your lifestyle Pins. This is hard! Here are some examples:

You're an interior designer, create a Pinboard for new ways to use old things as furniture, decor, or art.
You sell jewelry, educate your audience about gemstones, metals, and where they come from to reinforce the fact that your only use the best quality materials.
You sell vacations, create boards about travel gadgets, luggage or recipes for cultural foods to reinforce that you're knowledgeable about travel in general.
You're restauranteur, find all items that are trendy to reinforce your brand as trendy and hip - curate things your customers will covet.

This is storytelling at its finest. Curating your visual story builds trust in your brand and your people in a subtle and genuine way. After you build a base of followers organically this way, when you do decide promote that next new product, people are more likely to pay attention/. They will like, Re-Pin, click through, and buy because they “know” you, trust you, and relate to what you represent. In the end, you represent them.

Private / Flash Sale Site Update: TravelTipping

2012-03-19T14:56:00.000-07:00

New Private Sale Site for Travel - New as of March 2, 2012

TravelTipping (www.traveltipping.com) has a simple email-only registration, so it’s vaguely private, and they don't seem to email too much, but it's early days. Prices “up to 75% off” hotels, resorts, villas, tours and cruises - this is not a room-night-only service but sells multi-day vacations.

TravelTipping has kind of a funny cow logo and alliteration in the name, but I’m not sure how cow tipping has anything to do with travel deals. A bit of a stretch if you ask me.

The site enables you to select regions rather than showing you a list of everything, and has limited availability for hotel stays which have a set # of nights. The packages are available until they sell out, rather than being on sale for a fixed period of time. You can select the check-in date, but the length of stay is fixed. Looks like there are 10-30 packages available for any one hotel, so if there’s enough volume, deals will sell out.

Updated the growing List of Private / Flash Sale Sites for Travel.

Travel Flash Sale News: Jetsetter, Andrew Harper, ThailandFastDeals

2012-03-13T09:34:00.001-07:00

There’s been a bit of a retrenchment in travel private sales – not a lot of newcomers lately, but some notable news:

Jetsetter
Jetsetter continues to innovate and leverage its audience by becoming an expert travel site and moving revenue away from only flash sales. They also state they’re seeing success from non-hotel offerings (villas, etc) which is probably true. They’ve got the ear of Techcrunch anyway.

Andrew Harper Travel
I missed this in January, but Andrew Harper, the members-only luxury travel site, announced a private sale offering. It’s different than their regular Auctions offering, which is members-only, because you don’t bid, you book directly. A bit late, but they’ve jumped on the bandwagon.

E-Booking.com
Looking very similar to everything else, e-booking.com is a very un-inspiring name for a new private sale site I first heard about through this blog's comments. "Up to 40% off, luxury hotels you won't find anywhere else." The company is located in Switzerland, and is already on the death row watch list as they haven't updated their Facebook or Twitter since December 2011.

I’ve updated my complete list of Flash Sale Websites for Travel here.

Thailand Fast Deals
And last but not least, the first vertically (challenged) flash sale website for travel, created by the Tourism Authority of Thailand. ThailandFastDeals.com is a bit different because in addition to hotels, it offers flights, tour packages through Thailand’s travel partners. It also makes all pricing visible without registration, so it’s not a members-only site, just a clearinghouse for good deals.

It will be hard to keep people engaged the same way other sites offer a broad selection of destinations to a captive email list – how often does the average American go to Thailand? But, globally this might be an interesting play, especially if they can get it to rank in organic search results and find travelers actively looking for Thailand vacations.

How to Start a Flash Sale Website

2012-01-30T09:43:00.000-08:00

It seems that everyone and their brother is starting a flash sale website - why can't you?

Well, there's the issue - there are SO many flash sale websites out there, how can you get another one off the ground? It's not so hard mechanically to build one, it's hard to get mindshare, and even harder to do it profitably. The mega flash sale company The Gilt Group (as well as Rue La La and Lot18) just did a round of layoffs as they aren't achieving profitability like they thought - even with a ton of sales throughput. In this business, margins matter, and the margins on discounts are razor thin.

I speak to flash sale subscribers every day and more and more of them are telling me they are unsubscribing from their daily emails - essentially forgetting about the service - because they're inundated with too many mails, too many sales, too many products to buy.

When there are only a few flash sale sites, it's easier to navigate the landscape. All the products seem good, there aren't too many emails, and the quality is high. We've gone so far off the deep end with shop, shop shop all the time, and it's starting to reach it's overhyped peak. How many discount massages or workouts do you really need each week?

And now, even the national media companies are offering their own "local" deals, too, thinking they can get their media consumers to sign up to buy from them, rather than buy directly from the vendors advertising with them. Why go through a media-company-middleman who has no experience in this arena? Anyway, I digress. If you feel you really need to jump on the flash sale bandwagon, you can make some money, or at least get your site and audience to the point where it's a nice acquisition target for Groupon or LivingSocial, who love to purchase smaller companies to grow.

#1. The first step to starting a flash sale site is: have an angle. Don't do what everyone else is doing - if it's not interesting and unique, don't bother. Find a niche that has a big enough audience and is underserved by the current players. It could be a geographical niche, demographic niche, product niche or something else, but you can't expect to win without something that's a little different in this crowded market. You need to give people a reason to sign up for your service over everyone else out there.

#2 Your website. People have to buy from somewhere - your website is where they will they manage their email subscription, keep their credit card on file, see their shipping status, and make those purchases. The flash sale website is your central communications tool, so make sure it's customer-centric and customer-friendly. My advice is find a great product manager with proven e-commence experience to design it to be simple, easy to navigate, and easy to check out with the goods. Even though it's a single-product system per purchase, the basics of landing page optimization, user pathing and checkout optimization.

#3 Which comes first, the product sources or the audience? Definitely the audience. You need to start somewhere - with an opt-in email list so you have a base to start selling to. The right lists can be hard or expensive to come by. You could pay on a per name basis through email co-registration programs, market directly to other peoples's lists and try to gather responses, run a contest or two that you promote through social media, buy a list on the black market - there are a quite a few options. You need a few thousand subscribers to start, at a bare minimum, assuming that you know that those people are really interested in what you plan to sell them.

#4 Decide on frequency. You need to determine out how many deals per day or per week you're going to offer at the start, so you can align your sales team (you?) to schedule at least 2 weeks in advance of the sale. You could go with one per week - that's not too few. Quality is the most important factor, in the beginning, middle and end. Volume is important when you're established, but quality is your first priority. People won't buy things they aren't interested in and aren't a good deal. It's bad when they don't buy once, but not performing two or three times in a row will cause you will lose your captive audience - they will unsubscribe.

#5 Products. Getting vendors to supply products for your flash sale is a true sales job - it's especially tricky when you don't have a (large) audience. When you go to your first set of vendors with the pitch of 'We don't know how many we'll sell because we haven't tried yet.' you won't get a lot of takers. Talk it up, give them great terms - don't expect to make money on any of the deals until you have a rhythm going. Make sure there's something in it for the vendors - give them a reason to play.

#6 There's more... but that's it for now - check back for more details on staring your own flash sale website.

New Travelocity Travel Daily Deal Flash Sale

2011-08-30T08:18:00.000-07:00

New Flash Sale Site O' The Day
It seems that Travelocity is now in the daily deal / flash sale business too. It took a while. They were clearly taking their time to think of a great name, and have decided on "Dashing Deals". Nothing like name-choice-by-committee to really create a zinger.

So, what does it do besides tap into the millions-strong Travelocity customer base? Oh, something totally different: “Travelocity’s Dashing Deals program provides customers with deep discounts at great hotels,” said Carl Sparks, President and CEO, Travelocity Global.

Thanks Carl - that's nifty. (Sarcasm is 100% mine)

Oh, and they show you if the room is actually available before you buy. Read more here. Nice job!

With all that going for it, there's no way I'll miss out on signing up for this "me too" "also ran" daily deal. On second thought, I'm sure I'll avoid it.

Keeping track? Here's a complete list of Travel Flash Sale Sites.

New Flash Sale Site for Travel: Orbitz Insider Steals

2011-06-30T13:00:00.000-07:00

Only a matter of time before all the OTA's get into the travel flash sale game. They have emails of millions of customers, why not put them to use?

Insider Steals from Orbitz is the latest in travel sales, you need to register your email address in a normal Orbitz account to sign up. Exclusive? No. Good deals? Probably. Leading the market? Not at all.

I think the Expedia / Groupon combo Groupon Getaways has more potential for success.

CheapTickets.com has also launched weekly (not daily) members-only flash sales called very creatively: “Members Only Prices.” So original.

Who's next?

Travelocity? Hotels.com? Lastminute.com? My money's on Travelocity.

Keeping score? Here's a complete list of Travel Flash Sale Sites.

Modular Social Features - The Time Has Come

2011-06-29T18:00:00.000-07:00

How many websites are built with social functionality from the ground up? I have an answer (of course): very few.

I'm not talking about "friends" and "social networks" - things that only Facebook really needs to do at this point, but social features - the things we're starting to take for granted on the market-leading sites across all verticals, like Amazon, TripAdvisor, Yelp, and Huffington Post. User-generated content (notes / blogs, etc), ratings, reviews, content sharing, top ten lists, photo galleries, recommendations, etc. are all social features.

When the CEO says 'we need some of that social stuff on our website', what do most web teams (that aren't Amazon) do? Spend a lot of time and money building the same functions that everyone else has, of course. There's very little innovation because just replicating this functionality is hard enough, and there is very little ability to "bolt on" this functionality for 2 reasons:

Social is built around users, and every website has their own interpretation of a visitor, user, login, and account.
Social needs to be built into the fabric of the site. It needs to bring life to a one-way conversion. It's not suitable, appropriate or successful when a company builds a social area that's completely separated from the site content, so seamless integration is a must.

"Social" to me means focusing on people instead of pages. Expecting that everyone is the same just isn't good enough anymore - people are different and websites should recognize them as such.

Some sites already do a great job at this, including a past customer that rhymes with Bluffington Host. Understanding the behavior of their logged in users and rewarding them and incentivizing them is key to their success. Analyzing deep behavioral data is a different challenge, but getting the mechanisms on the site to push people in the right direction is the first step, and is too hard to do today. I'd call this advanced functionality, and it's a key strategic advantage for this publisher. Unless you have really smart people on your product team thinking about this strategically, it's not going to happen. The reality is people working on most 'normal' websites, including ecommerce sites, just aren't those people.

Basic social functionality, however, doesn't need to be the re-creation of the wheel each and every time. There's a science to social, paradigms to be followed for the best results, and the modules / widgets / functions can be very similar from site to site. It all depends on how they're "built in", and that's why just about every website that "adds social" has to do it internally as part of their proprietary code. If this part were easy, more people could devote time and resources to the deep data analysis and the advanced part of social.

I think the time has come for a modular system to solve this problem. Most websites that are making money or driving leads today are not clean - they're messy, with years of code behind them. Starting from scratch or re-architecting is not an option, so integrating functionality that's actually designed for spaghetti code is required.

A framework that developers can work directly with that uses object-oriented concepts and enables developers to take pre-designed but configurable and skinnable modules and plug them into their site is the next step in the evolution of social as part of everyday life. Such a framework would create the required database tables, and integrate directly with proprietary user data, transaction data, and visit/event data through a robust and open API. The calls within the code must would be able to display statuses and activities and actions of each visitor, and be modular so they can be accessed across heterogeneous sites, different coding languages, and different levels of formatting and styling.

Integrating social functionality is increasingly important - if you don't have social functionality yet, you're already behind (and, just to clarify, this does NOT mean displaying a 'Follow Us on Twitter' button).Building it efficiently, quickly or cost effectively is hard while you're trying to keep your current site working and re-writing isn't an option. Making it easy is what I'm thinking about now.

Complete List of Flash Sale / Private-Sale Sites for Travel

2011-06-16T13:46:00.001-07:00

Last Update: March 19, 2012

More flash sale sites focused on travel & hotels every day

How easy is it to start a flash sales site or private sale site focused on travel? Pretty easy, apparently. Let's see how many of these flash sale travel sites are still around in two years as:

Consumers get burned out on too many daily deal emails in their inbox
The economy improves and the lowest deals with their accompanying restrictions aren't sought after quite as much
Hotels and travel suppliers find that dealing with some of these companies just isn't good business.

What's the difference between Flash Sale and Private Sale you ask? A 'private sale' means membership is exclusive - you to be member to get access to see the deals. Membership can be exclusive where you need to get an invitation from the site or from a friend, or it can be open where anyone can join by filling in a form.

A flash sale is a limited-time sale with limited inventory that can get sold out. But access to see the sale isn't necessarily restricted - some sites are open, some are members-only. Private sale sites are generally flash sale sites, but not the reverse.

This is a definitive list of flash sale and private-sale travel sites, and the list is continuously appended as I find more (I'll add a date next to new additions). I might even write more about each as time permits. The list is split between travel-only sites and sites that also sell goods and products as their primary business.

Top Travel Private Sale / Flash Sale Websites (dedicated to travel)

Vacationist - private sale site focused on luxury hotels - both domestic and international - that has exclusive membership and isn't open to the general public. Vacationist is a joint venture between Travel+Leisure and Luxury Link and is by far my favorite.
TravelZoo - the original flash sale, these guys have been sending lists of 'curated' deals (paid for by vendors) out since the 90's. They don't have exclusive offers, but rather connect consumers directly to suppliers.
Jetsetter - flash sale site focused on upscale travel, owned by the Gilt Groupe
SniqueAway - part of the TripAdvisior / Expedia group, this flash site offers more local, drivable US destinations.
Voyage Privé - division of the largest travel private sale company in Europe, based in France. Now growing their membership in the US. Now partnered with Ideeli.
TripAlertz - members-only travel site where prices go down as bookings go up. "Groupon for Travel"
Tablet Hotels - some nice upscale and trendy properties, but prices aren't super discounted. More hip than substantial.
Overstock Vacations - with text big enough for a senior to read without glasses, Overstock's vacations and prices are visible to the public.
Off&Away - Private Sales, launched July 2010. Discounts of up to 50%. Fewer sales each week (3-5), thin descriptions of the hotel - very focused on booking. Calendar looks like Vacationist. (updated 7/10/2011)
Itinerie - a specialized site that offers savings on customizable luxury vacations in South America. Good looking site, complete tour packages - not just hotels.
Travesse - another 'me too' private travel site with "luxury" hotels and holidays focused on UK residents.
Trazzler - a website trying to be a bit more hip and social, they provide info as well as deals. Membership required only to book.
Trippo - exclusive getaways, half the price. With a hippo as a mascot, doesn't look too upscale, but hasn't quite launched yet. UPDATE 3/12/2012 - looks like this company is no longer. It ends before it begins.
Yuupon - seem to be positioning themselves like the Walmart of flash travel. Downscale accommodations in all areas of the US. Anyone can see prices, anyone can book. I'm sure this will do well, but I'll never use it. Just like Walmart.
Trippr - it was coming from Tippr, but haven't seen anything yet. Tippr requires a minimum number of buyers in a local market to 'unlock' a deal.
HotelTonight - not quite a flash sale, but a way to book highly discounted last minute travel on your mobile. You need to download their app. Perfect for road warriors without admins, or people stranded in airports.
InsiderTrips - Out of Business. This site is now for sale - whatever traffic they have goes to the best offer. (update: June 23, 2011).
HotelYo - my favorite name so far, yo. No, not really. They say discounts of up to 80% on 4- and 5-star hotels, for UK and Italian customers.
SecretEscapes - discounts of up to 70% off each week, focused on UK customers.
Vamoose.in - travel for people on the Indian sub-continent. Prices public and in rupees.
Spire - NEW! (June 23, 2011) Travel flash sale site, run by the people behind Perfect Escapes and Travel Intelligence. According to them: guaranteed lowest prices with a minimum of 30% off prices found than anywhere else. Also allow cancellations for up to 72 hours after a trip is booked, minus a $29 fee.
Orbitz Insider Steals NEW! (June 27, 20011) is the latest in travel sales, you need to register your email address in a normal Orbitz account to sign up.
CheapTickets.com Members Only Prices launched weekly (not daily) members-only flash sales. Not separate from normal registration.
Travelocity Dashing Deals NEW! (August 29, 2011). Discounted hotel rooms shown on the Travelocity website. Big differentiator: not a voucher, but actually like a travel flash sale.
e-booking.com NEW! (November 22, 2011) A Swiss private sale travel company stating savings of "up to 40% off" and no notable features, we're guessing this site won't last very long.
Andrew Harper Private Sale. NEW! (January 9, 2012) Members-only discounts on luxury hotels, an add on to the company's members-only luxury travel auctions.
ThailandFastDeals.com NEW (March 1, 2012) started by the Tourism Authority of Thailand, this site offers hotels as well as flights and tour packages through Thailand’s travel partners. It also makes all pricing visible without registration, so it’s not a members-only site, just a clearinghouse for deals. The first destination-focused private or flash sale site I've seen.
TravelTipping NEW( March 2, 2012) has a simple email-only registration, so it’s vaguely private (and they don't seem to send too many emails). Prices “up to 75% off” hotels, resorts, villas, tours and cruises - this is not a room-night-only service but sells multi-day vacations.

Top Flash Sale Sites (with a travel component / brand)

Living Social Escapes - moderately priced, upscale hotels, part of the growing Living Social kingdom.
Groupon Getaways - Groupon announced a partnership with Expedia, we're waiting for this one to launch in July. It could be big, most likely it will continue to fuel the revenue growth in ponzi-scheme-like style for the daily deal 8,000 ton monster.
HauteLook Getaways - acquired Bonvoyou then was acquired by Nordstrom. Not sure if travel is key for Nordstrom, we'll see what happens.
Ideeli Travel - created a new division with partner Voyage Privé, launched today: "Up to 100 of the most-wanted domestic and international destinations each month, all at ideeli members-only pricing of 30% to 75% off" (Updated: June 21, 2011)
exclusively.in - for residents of India, offers both travel and consumer products (and saris).
Bloomspot Travel - more local deals, with some decent upscale hotels
Rue La La - partnered with the Virtuouso luxury travel agency to provide travel deals next to their designer fashion products.
Facebook Travel Deals - no, not quite yet, but it's just a matter of time until they add travel as a category to their new Deals section. (Update, 3/12) - still no travel.
Mamapedia - a site focused on, you guessed it, Moms! Hotel deals are part of the everyday mix of goods.
FamilyFinds - another Mom focused site, with lots of local deals & some actually great travel deals designed for families.
Zozi - local deal site focused on activities, not products, with a travel section. One of the only sites with a money-back guarantee. Most others are no-refund deals.
Vaniti - not yet launched, but coming in "2012". I'll keep an eye out.

Your site not listed here? Let me know.

Social media #FAIL #2 - Social Media is Constantly Changing

2010-07-05T19:48:00.000-07:00

Why Marketers and Companies Continue to #FAIL at Social Media Execution

Social media can be defined as communication by people using digital tools to have conversations with one or more known or unknown parties - individuals, groups, companies, brands. These conversations take place on social media sites like Facebook, but also on millions of blogs through comments, on microblogs (like Twitter), through smartphones, through mobile apps or Facebook apps, and even through “old school” tools like discussion boards and forums.

Many marketers who have excelled at traditional advertising – online or offline – have a hard time getting their arms around social media and what it means to them and their business.

Not just because it’s a different channel. And not just because it’s a discussion rather than a one-way push of information.

For many marketers, the difficultly exists because the definition of social media and associated tools are morphing and changing and being used differently on a weekly basis. And they're proliferating.

Getting your arms around the world of social media is a challenge that requires constant attention, constant change and constant learning – very unlike any other form of marketing or advertising.

Advertising has become pretty structured. Take TV, print, radio, outdoor, and even online display. There are agencies, buyers, creatives, producers, ad sellers. They all have their place in a tightly integrated world, delivering their piece of the puzzle and taking a cut along the way. Measurement is straightforward - there are standard metrics, measurement tools and services at the ready with comparisons to well-defined baselines.

Search engine marketing was the first push in a very new direction – where the rules of the game are dynamic, in motion, and can change on a dime. Search engine marketing (both PPC and SEO) needs constant attention by experts to get any sort of decent result. Marketing through search engines isn’t just about producing a creative, buying space, and running the creative for a month or two. It requires designing and developing many creatives (ads and landing pages), dynamic bidding, growing a network of links, and optimizing results based on metrics. Incorporating changes every day. It's a marketing campaign with no end date (except when your PPC budget runs out).

If Google changes their ranking algorithm, page rebuilding ensues.
If a competitor bids double what you’re paying for an effective keyword, new thinking and restructuring is a must.

If you thought search engine marketing caused you grief, social media is will be a monster.

How many social sites are there? Facebook, LinkedIn, Live, MySpace (yes, still there), Orkut, sure. But what about the millions of blogs out there, and microblogs like Twitter? What about new group sites like Gravity that gather people with similar interests? Yelp, where you might be interested in only one listing? YouTube, and the Break Media sites that encourage community feedback and conversation? Yahoo and Google Groups? Specific interest sites like OleOle.com focused on a single, but controversial topic, where multi-media contributions are part of the fun?

How are they different? How many are completely unique? What can be carried across them? What is the new one that just cropped up this week? What device(s) are people using to access them?

Your brand might be discussed on any one of these sites or tools. It might be important to you to get into that discussion, or maybe just monitor it. There are so many different places that people can have a digital conversion, and they are new sites every week, new iPhone apps, new IPTV services.

The first step in getting a grip on social media is to go into learning mode. Learn about the sites you need to understand. Learn how advertising works on those sites, what type of voice you need, how friending or ‘fanning’ works. How people exchange information. Each site is somewhat unique. Learn and read every week. Setup profiles. Make "friends". Know what's going on with each tool. And then keep learning.

Then, once you know how a social media site really works, develop a plan for monitoring, setup KPI's, understand that this list will continue to change, and most likely continue to grow.

Social media’s “unstructured-ness” is why people like it so much. The new sites are the new cool, and the trendsetters are always looking for that “cool” factor they can introduce to their circle of friends. Some sites will catch on, some won’t, but there will always be a new offering out there as entrepreneurs and VC’s look to find the next thing to entice those people looking for the new cool.

Working with social media requires a child’s curiosity to continually explore, learn, challenge, and adapt quickly to the results. Keep reading, keep learning.

PART 2 in a series.

Part 1: Social Media is NOT A Marketing Channel Unto Itself

Social Media: Why Marketers and Companies Continue to #fail at Social Media Execution

2010-06-12T14:38:00.000-07:00

One of the things I’m seeing now as the buzz on social media marketing and measurement is increasing in volume (not quite a vuvuzula levels but close) is that people (marketers in particular) are treating social media as a new distinct marketing channel. Of course we’ve seen some companies run single-channel social media campaigns, but the medium wasn’t “designed” that way, and only a few hip B2C brands can actually pull that off.

I see five primary reasons why social media is so disruptive to marketing departments, and difficult to get a grip on for so many companies - both large and small:

Social media is not a distinct marketing channel unto itself (below)
Social media is constantly changing
The marketing department is no longer in charge of messaging
Social media requires entire businesses to become more transparent and truly authentic
It is both less and more measurable than any broadcast advertising

There are plenty of articles out there on the tactics of social media, social media suicide, and the top things that marketers need to not do when trying to leverage social media, but these are symptomatic of these big picture problems.

I’ll cover each of these big picture items in subsequent posts, starting here with #1:

Social Media is NOT A Marketing Channel Unto Itself
It’s an Extension of All Channels and Departments

Social media is a direct conversation with the public. It is an extension of the entire business and it complements every other channel and every other department. This is a huge distinction from traditional media, email, outdoor, print, etc. It’s all about two way communication, not defined one-way messaging.

I just read this MediaPost article recapping a survey that found that most companies that are ‘doing’ social media don’t have a social media strategy. Having a strategy where social media efforts compliment other integrated marketing efforts through direct conversation is just as much of a plan as running a distinct social media campaign. In fact, that is probably better for most companies. But, I’m not that nuance was captured in this survey.

Social media should alert people to things the company is doing, from promotions, to product, to customer support, to partnerships. It’s the voice of the company, and it doesn’t require a ton of money to use effectively. Even worse - it requires internal coordination and communication! It’s much harder for companies to agree on a single voice than it is for them to spend gobs of money to overcome public perception or competitive pressures.

The first thing that marketers should do is educate their company that using social media means that whoever’s in charge of the social media team needs to know what’s going on – company-wide. In that way, it’s very much like PR, but the information has to flow at both the macro (company to customer) and micro level (customer service rep to customer).

Getting this information to the social media group in a timely manner is critical so discussion that compliment print, coupon, banner ad promotions can be timed effectively. Customer service information can be incorporated intelligently into conversations. So that special social media-only promotions can be run in conjunction with campaigns of any sort. So customer raves can be posted. And so that any backlash, criticism or crisis control can be effectively discussed, without backlash or additional controversy.

To set an example for the company on communicating effectively, marketers should plan a social media component into every campaign (no matter how small the campaign or component) until it becomes second nature. The CMO should also ensure that someone in each channel has a direct line of communication to a centralized social media team, again providing a clear example of how he's like this function to work with other departments.

Social Media is changing the landscape of the company, and it starts with the marketing team. More to come...

The Future of Media

2009-09-23T13:11:00.000-07:00

The future of media isn’t about technology or channels, it’s about delivering an experience.

As I was sitting eating a couple of slices of authentically good mushroom pizza in New York, and reflecting on the panel discussion I heard earlier that morning at Ad Week on the “The Future of Media” (thanks for the invite Jon @Mediapost) I realized that content and technology are the wrong things to pay attention to – the future of media isn't technology or advertising, it's bringing exceptional experiences closer to normal people.

It wasn’t just the endorphins released by the pizza, but the things going on at the same time. In my quest for good Italian pizza, I just happened to wander past Grand Central to 3rd Avenue where there was a throng of cops, FBI agents and other protectors of the commonwealth ensuring stability, as the UN and Obama met to hash out the same old things. I wandering into a throng of Iranian demonstrators on the side sidewalk chanting “Hey, Ho, Ahmadinejad has to go!” and a small collection of Tibetans holding polite signs telling China to leave their country. They were eating pizza, too.

But it was actually seeing a picture of Neda, the woman who was shot and killed while peacefully protesting in Tehran, on one of their signs that jolted me – the media, including new technologies and crowd reporting, brought these people around a central topic of interest and made them closer to it - almost part of it. And when I say media, its TV, radio, print, Twitter, YouTube and every other technology and distribution channel.

The disruption that’s happening to ‘big media’ isn’t on content, it’s on speed of delivery. It’s not about print v. video, it's about personal experiences. It's not about any one technology, it's about how technology is becoming immersive and personal and connects people directly. It's still broadcast, but it's not mass market. Monetizing a special experience will continue to drive media, just as it's driven entertainment.

On the prestigious panel were Mark Cuban, Martha Stewart, Reid Hoffman and Judy McGrath the CEO of MTV. McGrath explained how they leveraged technology the MTV video music awards this year to actually increase their audience size as the program went on, due to the now famous Kanye incident. She saw people in the audience like Pink start Tweeting as soon as it happened. Videos were posted to YouTube immediately. New technologies have enabled the speed of the message (experiences happen in real time), and provided the appearance one-to-one personalization (individuals are now empowered to be their own broadcasters every media - text, video and audio).

Separately, Mark Cuban spoke about how the Internet and social media are mature from a platform perspective and there is nothing new going on. While that’s true technically, the adoption of technology across the mass market is different. He's kind of right, the Internet and social media were here a long time ago, but it's not connecting to the masses yet. But what he actually focused on is how cool the new Dallas Cowboys stadium's massive video screen is, and how that is the next platform that media companies should be looking at to deliver their content. That's super for the 10 $40M screens in the next 10 years, but isn't the near future. What he didn’t say explicitly, but described nonetheless, is that the immersive experience that the display creates / provides is a huge differentiator.

People want to be a part of experiences that don’t directly involve or even pertain to them. In another great presentation I saw at the IAB / MIXX conference by MeVIO, its founder Adam Curry, former MTV vee-jay, described the growth and success of MTV as bringing people closer to icons and rock stars (and brands). Commentary and interviews and simply video of stars performing, rather than just audio, was a new experience that fundamentally changed music. This is a diferent spin on the same thing - immersion and connection through media. You could even argue that the Beatles and Elvis on Ed Sullivan was the start of this connection, but MTV brought it to the masses 24 hour as day.

Not to say that the paparazzi and glamorization of celebrities is a ubiquitous goal, but sharing an experience in a way that enables us to have a deeper understanding and deeper comprehension of what it's like to be there is the key. Entertainment understands this, the challenge is for non-entertainment media to provide deep connections while being neutral, and monetizing their unique, special experience.

The more senses we immerse, the more we feel like we know it. It’s escapism just as much as it’s realism. We can’t be everywhere, we can’t be part of everything, but media will continue to get us closer and closer. If media can embrace this and deliver it better than individuals, people will pay for it. Bring them into a conflict, be part of a demonstration, eat lunch with a movie star. And that, delivered in an easy-to-consume format, is worth paying for, regardless of the technology or platform.

The Future of Media?
Maybe the world timeline of media looks like this, where media is both the creation / editing / delivery of content, entertainment, rumors, and news. Taking a look at the world, you can see different groups aspiring to move from one level to the next, and the historic events that shaped each step like the 1st amendment and the fall of the Berlin Wall.

No information
Word of mouth information
Single source “official” information
Multiple source “official” information
Approved information
Multi source, multi-channel information
Too much information!
Information I want to see only
Recommended information
Becoming part of the events that drive the information

If the Web is Now Real-Time, Where are the Real-Time Analytics?

2009-07-23T17:20:00.000-07:00

If the web is going real-time (seems that way according to all the recent hype) why are marketers and Internet companies still using old, slow data warehouse technology to analyze interactions?

If Web 1.0 means replicating "old" systems online - a push of information from originator to consumer, then Web 2.0 is the next step - a back and forth discussion between originator and recipient.

Web 3.0 is here, and it's subtly different on the outside (which is why there's no fanfare), but it's impact on Internet infrastructure is massive - the conversation goes from originator to user, to groups completely outside of the originator's understanding, intent or control. Conversations are completely decentralized, and rise and fall based on networks, not the source. Twitter, re-tweets, and completely asynchronous, unorganized group messaging is a new paradigm and makes interactions hard to follow, and the data they generate much more difficult to capture and understand at a high level.

Web marketers, online advertisers, and content distributors can't rely on data warehouses to provide analysis of these conversations - they are very complex and unbounded events. Business intelligence systems were designed as back-office applications and meant for data mining well-known data well after the fact. They are completely unsuited for this role. But we're using 'em because "that's what we got and that's what we know."

When you think about it, it's silly that you can have a million users visit your website in a day, but you have no idea what happened until a day later.

Business intelligence is much different from "Internet intelligence" or "social web intelligence" (you heard it here first). On the now social Internet, you need to know what's happening now to make an impact, optimize, or re-target based on activities. The next day, when a data warehouse could deliver that insight, is far too late.

Open-source projects like Hadoop and MapReduce that eschew relational database storage techniques are a different way to tackle the problem. They break data up into manageable chunks that distribute and speed processing. But the basic idea that data must be pulled out of production systems to process and analyze across dozens or hundreds of servers - then re-centralized and shoved back in - still doesn't fit with the need to process data as it's generated. These systems still have significant lag times (hours or days), and are really complicated to manage. Internet intelligence requires analysis within the production environment, in real time - whether or not action is actually taken in real time.

There are a lot of smart people out there, so why hasn't anyone been able to solve this problem? Well, to be fair, it's only gotten to be a real problem in the last few years. Before that, in Web 1.0 and 2.0, the volume of data being generated was manageable and understanding interactions could wait until tomorrow.

Today, many well-funded vendors are trying to solve this problem (getting immediate analysis from massive amounts of data in a cost-effective manner), but it's a very hard problem to solve. Some Internet companies are building their own stuff (Facebook, Google, YouTube, Yahoo!), some are leveraging the fastest third party data warehouse products (Teradata, Netezza, even Oracle). But, whether it's all based on the idea of batch processing, and whether it's being built in-house, or it's one of the super-scale data warehouse vendors, it's REALLY expensive ($2 - $10m just to start off with a Teradata system), and it goes up the more data and the faster you want results.

I found one company, Truviso, that stands out from these other vendors - they are actually able to deliver real-time data analysis in a production environment in a cost-effective manner. They haven't figured out how to make a data warehouse faster, but instead they process data in a different way.Truviso's Continuous Analytics software processes data in real time before it's stored in a database, so it completely eliminates the lag time in batching and loading and indexing, or chunking and distributing data across clusters. Analysis is done on the fly, decisions based on data can be automated, and people can actually see what's happening on their websites - and across conversations - at any time.

Truviso has created a scalable data analytics system for Internet production environments with real-time data analysis problems. Online ad networks, CDN's, social networks, and online video companies are producing massive amounts of data that they need to analyze to deliver better experiences for their users or customers. Their business depends on the analysis of this data for revenue generation - it's vitally important to them. If they can make a change today instead of tomorrow, that could result in tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional revenue.

This type of Internet intelligence analysis is going to change the status quo. Once companies realize they don't have to wait for analysis anymore, there will be no going back. They'll expect it. They'll want it all the time. And that's the right way to go, especially since the group-discussion that defines Web 3.0 aren't going to go away.

Die IE6, Die. Everyone's Got To Go Sometime...Your Time Was 2 Years Ago.

2009-07-16T13:41:00.000-07:00

Dealing with people still using Internet Explorer 6 is a nightmare - so much extra coding and QA to get even basic webpages produced. I can't agree enough with Ben on his recent Mashable post.

Engineering productivity levels wouldn't double but it would probably go up by 35% - 45% to accommodate these 20% of Internet users who just won't upgrade. There are much faster ways of coding, doing quality checking, and assurance that teams can't use because of IE6.

The lowest common denominator of IE6 users is hurting progress in developing great, useful, fast and high-interaction AJAX pages. Maybe the seeming immortality of IE6 is one of the reasons we're still looking at pageviews and CPM for measurement in advertising. Everyone knows that with AJAX and FLASH, pageviews become meaningless since a page can be refreshed over and over, and a user can be shows dozens of ads without actually changing the URL of the page. So, a single pageview, but a complete user experience. But AJAX is very very slow and doesn't work a lot of the time on IE6, so as the browser that just won't go away, IE6 keeps development and user experience restricted.

Web developers - stop building for IE6, and throw up a huge note to tell users to upgrade. If content disappears, IE6 users won't have any options.

A call to all IE6 users - UPGRADE! IE8 is out now, nevermind the fact that IE7 is actually OK. Or use Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome. They're both better than IE anyway.

You were great at one time, but please go away IE6, it's time.

Goodbye Geocities, cu l8tr

2009-06-02T13:34:00.000-07:00

Sorry To See You Go, Free Personal Website

All good free things come to an end, and Geocities (part of whatever the hell Yahoo360 was supposed to be) is next on the list. I've had my Geocities site up since 1998 or so. It first held my first website ever, all about my wedding, and had tons of great pictures of guests wearing funny hats.

I used it to learn the basics of HTML and creating beveled, multi-state buttons in Photoshop, as much an exercise in fun and learning as it was about making my wedding viewable by all (can you remember when Flickr and the Kodak Gallery didn't exist?).

Next, I created an 'about me' site and learned advanced table syntax and even some Javascript. That pushed the boundaries of my scripting ability and reconfirmed that I was meant to market and find value in technology, not create technology. How can developers remember where everything is? Anyway, my personal profile site has been up for 9 years or so I think. Not sure what to do now, but I think I'll just copy my bio and published articles into a new blog post, take a few screenshots, and have a sorry and mournful goodbye.

What's Worse than Yahoo360? Well, the new Yahoo Profiles.
But, before I get the tissues, I wanted to heckle (scold?) Yahoo! for what could have been a great transition to get everyone to their 'new' preferred platform. They've failed miserably! Why would anyone commit to a platform that sucks all the way back to 2002?

This is is the hilarity, directly from their blog:

First you shut down Mash, now you shut down 360—why should I give profiles a shot?
We understand you might have doubts—in the past few years, you’ve seen a couple of social sites come and go, and it means a lot to us that you’ve stuck around while we’ve tweaked each experience. Know that we’re committed to having a universal profile across Yahoo!, and we’re committed to working with you to improve and evolve this profile to make sure it’s what YOU want to use. That doesn’t mean we can implement every piece of feedback you provide, but it does mean we’re listening, and we are going to do our best to make sure your interests are incorporated into future releases and versions of your profile.

What about customization and photos? On 360 I can change the look and feel and upload multiple photos—can I do this with profiles?
At this time, your new profile does not have all the features and functionality of your 360 profile. However, we are looking at incorporating new ways of expressing yourself through your profile.

In regards to uploading multiple photos, your profile on Yahoo! allows for only one primary photo for now. This is also something we’re looking at improving/expanding based on your feedback.

OK, you don't have nearly the same featureset, you can't upload multiple pictures, but we're working on it? You can do better than this, Melissa Daniels (and you NEED to do a lot better than this Carol Bartz)

So, after July 13, this blog is the new official freestylin' home of Tom Kuhr...until Google decides blogging shouldn't be free either...

Good Feedback is a Product Managers Best Friend - UserVoice

2009-05-19T15:04:00.000-07:00

I ran across a company called UserVoice today and it looks like they've got their act together. I don't know how long they've been in testing / beta but have done a great job with making their website clear and their customer validations prominent. Apart from website envy, the concept of the company is great and I hope they're able to monetize it and stay in business.

UserVoice makes it easy for companies to collect user feedback in an organized, social way. How many times have you received the same feature request over weeks or months, only to lose it in the feature prioritization shuffle?

UserVoice lets users discuss features and bugs but submit their own, and rate (vote for) features that others have suggested. It's leveraging the power of the crowd to do feature prioritization for the product. Of course, this is still customer feedback and needs to be evaluated alongside product portfolio and market strategy, but its certainly much better than anything else I've seen.

UserVoice started off selling its service to start-ups but has expanded to big clients such as Intuit Inc., the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Facebook Inc., Nokia Corp., Nielsen Co., Genetech Inc., Blackbaud Inc. and University of Wisconsin. - WSJ Online

Generally the "developer tools" market isn't sexy or that profitable unless you're catering to large companies, but this seems targeted to organized marketing and products groups rather than small startup software development groups where the technology is the innovation. This is funded by the ubiquitous Dave McClure and the Founders Fund, who see this problem all the time from the boardroom - what do customers really want and how can we really be sure? Credible, first hand data would certainly help VC's call BS on those CEOs hiding behind the curtain of personal bias.

I'll use UserVoice on my next web project and see how we get on.

Text Search v. Structured Search - The Difference Between Facebook and MySpace?

2009-05-07T08:53:00.000-07:00

Talking through the current success of Facebook and the defection of users from MySpace, it occurred to me that the way users search on both sites has a lot to do with the changing of the guard. So here's a functionality view rather than a strategy view.

Facebook's structured search, with the ability to find different types of pages based on
1) auto-complete
2) form-field searching is designed to find and identify specific people
3) search results grouped by content type

When you type a name of a friend or a Page, you get an 'auto-complete' which gives you a list to choose from of all your relationships. This is a very structured search, pulling real (and guaranteed) results from the database. Having a real ID in Facebook helps this immensely - first, last and location are required, where on MySpace your real name is quite optional. Structured text search and structured results allows you to search for specific information in specific fields, and see the results in content-groups. Friends, Apps, Pages, Networks are all groupings of results by content type. So if you're looking for a Bob Marley Group, you don't have to look through Apps or Profiles to find it.

MySpace was designed to connect people with bands, and enable people to meet online and new friends. The Search function, for better or worse, leverages Google's free-text search to find people based on name, phone number or alias. I'm not sure the choice of Google was thought out from a product perspective, but it was definitely driven by a 3 year Google ad revenue deal.
Using Google's free-text searching finds results based on an entire page of text, so the search picks up main profile info and URL keywords, but also friends' names on the profile, comments, descriptions, etc. This leaves the user with a large, unstructured list of potential matches, which has to be picked through. There's no way to say "the name field is the most important." All results are weighted using Google weighting parameters - inbound links and keyword relevance, the same stuff that's tweaked in search engine optimization. For example, my name might be Tom Kuhr but if if my hero is James Bond and I write about James Bond all over my profile. When a user searches for James Bond - presumably intending to find a friend of that name - my profile will show up much higher in results than James Bonds just because of this keyword repetition, even though that's not the searcher's intent.

There is a Browse function on MySpace, which enables a structured search based on profile parameters, but you can't look for a specific person this way - it only allows browsing on attributes.

Finding a friend becomes immensely easier and faster on Facebook. When I sign up as a new user, I'm able to quickly identify friends and build my lists. On MySpace, I can hunt around in Search, but the experience is challenging and slow and I need to page through results, constantly refine my search, and my network grows much less quickly. I think the use of Google for search on MySpace has contributed to the company's inability to maintain the leadership position as a social network, and is further driving its move to become an "interactive" entertainment company rather than a network.

Don't be Dogmative - Be a Great Listener

2009-04-04T22:24:00.001-07:00

I've identified a characteristic of managers that has been discussed many times before, but I don't know if it has a name so I'll just make one up: dogmative. A dogmative person that only cares about their black and white view of the world, their dogma. (As an aside, it sure is hard to come up with a good domain name nowadays!).

You know these people. It could be the CEO, a product manager, the VP of marketing or director of engineering. A dogmative person forms opinions very quickly and does not want to discuss, debate or understand different viewpoints. However, they're not confrontational about it. In fact, unless you think about it, you might not even notice that they're so set in their thinking, because they are always asking others what they think!

This ingenious strategy (I think most do it without thinking about it this way, so its more of a personality trait than a strategy) let's them seem like the best team players. They form an opinion, and go around and ask everyone what they think. Rather than looking for consensus or new ideas, they are only looking for someone to validate them. They will hunt far and wide for one other person who agrees, and they'll use that validation to continue to perpetuate their own thinking. It's certainly easy in a company surrounded by Yes Men, but should be a lot harder to get away with it a meritocracy like an early stage tech company. I still see it more that I'd like.

I worked with a CEO once who is the very definition of dogmative. He has no real basis for UI design or functional requirements, and could barely read a spec. But, he wanted to be involved in just about every UI, navigation and screen design. He would pay consultants, contractors, and design firms to come in and do (expensive) work. Experts in their field. But, when they differed in opinion, he'd find a new one. We churned through contractors and burned through money. Smlarly, he listened to new employees for a week, maybe two, and after that started ignoring their input, as if they didn't actually have the expertise they were hired for. Like they just lost it somewhere. It was a very frustrating and pointless work environment, devoid of any delegation. Every decision rested with the CEO; morale was horrible; the company burned through about 3x the money it should have. Most dogmative managers aren't this bad, but in the extreme, this behavior is poisonous like a hemlock shake.

In product management, dogmative behavior wastes time and leads to products that don't solve problems. Thinking that you know what an end user is going to think or want without asking them is a huge mistake. No matter how much you talk to users, the very moment you stepped into a role as a product manager, you separated yourself from a real user. Be humble. Don't pretend you know the answers. Don't let your ego get in the way of gleanng customer insight by listening to real customers.

Social Media is Based on the Real World - MySpace is Starting to Get It

2009-03-31T10:19:00.000-07:00

The Future of Social Advertising? MySpace and Citysearch jointly announce "MySpace Local"

Social media, especially social networing sites like MySpace, started as an deluxe online forum or bulletin board and just took those concepts to the next level. They are based on the concept that people went online with aliases and met and interacted with other people online. It was all about the cyber-world, not about the real world.

While MySpace has been trying to become the social entertainment capital of the net, Facebook (and now Twitter) has seen lightening growth based on a different model - the real world. People of an older generation, more practical people, and teens (it seems like just about everyone who's not a geek) have embraced the concept of using their real name and their real connections to real friends, real networks, real businesses, real schools and are voting with their mice and signing up in droves. It's the online version of you, rather than an online avatar or what you wish you were.

MySpace, because you don't have to be you, is anchored in a previous era (6 years is an era?) and just wasn't built on that real-world network of connections...of course you can add friends, of course you can indicate your hobbies, of course you can use your real name, but you can also be friends with pretenders, rockers, and movie stars and parts of cyberspace groups. The premise of Facebook is you are somehow validated as really being who you say you are. It's not a virtual world or bazaar, it's a representation of a person's real life, something that I daresay more people are comfortable with.

Where am I going? I think MySpace has made a move in the right direction - to the real world. They just announced a partnership and integration with CitySearch to enable the combination of social commentary on the real world listings and information of a very comprehensive contained in the CitySearch yellow pages. And your interaction with these listings will show up in your activity feed - letting others know immediately what you like, what you don't, what you recommend. It's a pre-cataloged slice of Twitter - talking about your preferences when it comes to activities, restaurants, hotels - without the inundating stream of consciousness of Twitter. A practical application - and what could be a model for social advertising. This isn't what page I joined or whom I'm a fan of, this is me and my experience recorded around a real thing, a real place, a real preference.

I really like the concept - I hope it's one of many steps in this direction that MySpace takes to become relevant again.

What Kills Site Conversion? Focus on Content, Usability and Empathy

2009-03-03T08:45:00.001-08:00

I wrote a few thoughts on what kills website conversion for Patrick Neeman on his great blog Usability Counts. Patrick used LinkedIn to solicit answers from his network, which I thought was a great idea to come up with blog material.

You can read my thoughts here.

http://www.usabilitycounts.com/2009/01/29/the-linkedin-edition-what-kills-site-conversion-2/

Use Cases: A MUST HAVE for any internet or software company

2009-02-07T08:33:00.000-08:00

"Everything for Everyone" = Nothing

Use Cases seem so obvious to me but are commonly overlooked by so many technologists, entrepreneurs, and even VC's. A few companies I've worked with recently have built products without any clear picture of who the buyer is or who will actually use the product. Sure, they want all IT directors, or all marketing managers to jump at it, but these are market segments, not users. Use cases are built from personas, and personas are built from market and user research, and are VERY specific. (If you haven't read this book on personas and use cases, you simply must.) Without both an understanding of one or more users and the specific detail on what they need to do / what they want to do, products end up doing "everything for everyone", rather than solving specific problems (with actual value) for certain types of people under certain conditions.

Use cases aren't easy to come up with, and they can be very narrow. They require someone to sit down with 5-20 people that match the persona, and understand how those people are solving their problem today - what steps do they take inside software, on the internet - but most importantly what steps do they take outside of technology to solve their problem. Technology is best applied when it can automate or assume the duties of haphazard or time consuming offline tasks. Understanding all the choices, decisions, variables and time frames that go into problem solving or goal achievement is the only way to develop a clear picture of how a technology can fit into those peoples' lives in a meaningful way. People don't like to change, and making the product or service"fit" better by describing a single use case will focus the development team on a path of least resistance for adoption, regular use and word of mouth marketing.

But, "everything for everyone" sounds great on the surface. Why wouldn't we want to build it for as big a market as possible? Why would you want to limit the number of potential buyers? I had a (insane) CEO tell me his product WILL be designed for ALL people in every country around the world - as if each citizen, as if each language, as if each culture were exactly the same. Those coarse gradations are obviously different, but even people in the same community, the same company, the same department are different - personas and use cases must be very specific to build a great product.

The R&D group typically loves "everything for everyone" because the product will be a big hit, and any features that they think up will only make the product better. Investors love looking at the huge market segments that the product will appeal to. Upper management thinks that with 'all my friends' and family validation they're on the right track ("Sure, sounds like I'd use that" couldn't be more different than "Yes, that would solve a problem I have right now and I'd pay $XXX for it because my alternative would cost 5x times that much"). But, in reality a broad product scope and an "everything for everyone" mentality translates to nothing quite right for anyone. In essence, zero mindshare and market share.

If a product only 1/2 solves a problem for a specific type of person, or 1/4 or even 7/8ths, it's not a complete solution. It might as well be labeled incomplete and not come out of alpha. If it can't take the place of an entire problem set, or at least specific section of a linear problem set, solving A to C or F to M rather than the full A to Z, it just isn't going to see the adoption that the company expects. It won't succeed if it solves A, D, and G. In the eyes of the intended user, which are the only eyes a company should use to evaluate its products, it doesn't solve a problem. I, as a user, am not going to mess with something, and especially won't pay for something, that doesn't meet my needs.

How do you change this? Usecases. Develop personas for the people you expect to seek to and the people you expect to use the product. Outline in detail what they do, what their challenges are, what makes them tick, how much time and patience they have, how much technology skill they have - everything that would influence their ability to use a product in a real situation. Frame the persona so well that the development team understands them to be a real person, NOT a demographic. Building for a demographic, or target market, leads directly to "everything for everyone". Here's the hard part - the thing CEO's and VC's hate to think about, and don't ever want to embrace: focus on one persona and don't worry about the rest of the market.

That is a huge step for anyone - an entrepreneur with dreams, a CEO with ambitions, a VC with committed funds. It makes sense because once you fine-tune the product to solve a complete problem for a specific type of user, you'll see the target adopt extremely rapidly and tell their friends. There will be incredible overlap with other types of users that haven't been considered. Those users will adopt too. They'll also need slight changes, additions, and new functions. That's OK - they're using it! And, you'll be selling so well to the original target, you'll have time to build the additional things to appeal even better to your additional (prioritized) personas. The fear of not being appealing to an entire, diverse market segment at launch has been the downfall of countless companies. This is really product focus - ensuring that the personas and use cases you start with are well thought out in the beginning, and the product meets those expectations and guidelines at launch.

Valuation Lessons: Market Makers v Product Sellers

2009-01-21T14:41:00.000-08:00

I attended a fantastic presentation at an Access Executive Network event last night. This is a great group of technology leaders who want to better themselves and also give back to the Southern California tech community. The speaker was a former Clearstone VC partner, Phil Ressler, who is now the CEO of BigStage Entertainment, a pretty cool personal avatar company just starting to get some market traction. Phil, as it turns out, is one of the only VC's (or former VC's in this case) that I've had the privilege to meet who understands software company operations, but more importantly understands how to find and appeal to a buyer.

I wrote about buyer personas last week and how I thought most VC's just didn't do enough homework before investing to determine if a company's product is sellable, and if so, who exactly they'd be selling it.

Phil Ressler, in his talk entitled "Communications are Strategic", went into quite a bit of detail about his personal experiences at three different software companies (Nantucket, Gupta and Callidus) and how he was able to transform these companies at a very early stage by changing their focus in the buying process, and using clear messaging and communications to creating a market need. He explained that at all three companies, the founders and early exec teams were very technology focused and understood marketing to be product marketing - talking about products, performance, and features. He was able to add a messaging layer on top focused on creating a bond with a buyer. These communications described the brand and tied prospective buyers to the company emotionally, rather than descriptively. It gave them the 'big picture' of the company.

Phil outlined very eloquently what I've always described as the promise to the customer. When you take away the debate about product features, speeds and feeds, and instead focus on understanding a customer's real problems, you position yourself as a trusted partner to help them solve them. That promise to the customer is something that most tech companies don't have, and can't possibly think of because they haven't identified the real buyer of their product or their motivations for buying. The promise is the 'big' vision that the company has, and it's also usually the most simple and clearest elevator pitch - it's not too detailed and conveys the end benefit to just about everyone.

Ressler provided 14 separate tips to help the audience understand how to become a 'market maker' and create demand, rather than remain a product-centric company selling into an existing, well defined space. A few things really stood out for me:

First, startup success isn't about selling a product really well, it's about creating market value. I've not heard it phrased quite so simply, but companies that have more buzz, more market presence, more mindshare, and more vocal customers get sold for a much higher valuations than companies with great technology or who are building a solid business quietly. That means creating company value, not just product value. It means providing solutions to solve a problem, including product, services, support, and a partner ecosystem. It means keeping that promise to the customer and exceeding expectations.
Next, successful market makers invest about 10% of their resources in engineering and technology and 90% into making the market - public relations, market education, public speaking, business development, awareness and becoming the perceived market leader. Market makers build the perception that their company is much larger than it really is, and talk about a problem as if everyone needs to solve it. If prospects think their peers are working on something, they won't want to be left behind. Creating a market need will drive business to come to you, rather than you having to seek the business.
Companies that are focused on creating value also understand that value has a time limit, and value actually goes down at some point. I think that inflection point is when buzz and mindshare about the company is at its highest. Its at the time of the greatest percentage in growth, rather than greatest real-dollar growth. The growth trajectory is the most important - it will level out at some point, but the most value is right before that when the company is 'hot' and seemingly unstoppable. At that time it becomes an emotional sale for the buyer - they've got to have it - and there's less attention paid to revenue, customers, and products due to this intangible aura of success. Companies who know their end-game is an acquisition must sell at this point and not continue to build an empire in the hopes of getting sold for more. Founders who think they will get more money later because they will have more revenue do an extreme disservice to shareholders.
Lastly, companies that build value offer multiple products. Even if the different products are varieties of the same core product, cutting out features is a great way to create an instant product portfolio and multiple price points. This is interesting because it does a few things: It gives customers a choice, it enables the maximization of revenue , it allows the sales team to close more deals that would have been lost due to price points (improving that growth trajectory), and it makes the company seem bigger than it is. Companies with one product can't go it alone at some point, especially in enterprise software - it becomes to hard and expensive to scale. Companies that have multiple products become a) more appealing to potential buyers b) have a greater chance of stand-alone success which in turn c) makes them even more appealing and valuable to potential buyers. Companies who have the choice to continue stand alone become more coveted, increasing their value in the eyes of a buyer.

Thanks for a great talk Phil, I hope I captured your thoughts accurately!

Advertising Growth Challenged Because of Social Networks? Rubbish.

2009-01-15T16:07:00.000-08:00

If this is a problem we're all in real trouble. I read this article in the Financial Times yesterday with disbelief and awe that someone could draw such a ridiculous conclusion. The report seems to be asking the wrong questions to come to this statement.

The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, which will publish the “Social Media Futures” report compiled by Future Foundation next week, has warned that advertising agencies face growth of just 1.2 per cent a year by 2016 if the industry fails to tackle the changes to the media created by sites such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

Of course the landscape is changing! Social networking and personal recommendation for products is ensuring that word of mouth "advertising" is becoming a much much larger factor in product evaluation and decision making. That does NOT mean that less money will be spend on brand promotion, but it does mean that agencies that don't know how to market in the new world will get much less of it. Darwin's law will prevail again - there are agencies that have/will adapt and they will thrive and grow on that same hoard of cash. Industry growth will not be hampered, but wealth will be redistributed.

Movie studios have known about word of mouth and its direct influence on product success for years. That's why there is so much drama about release dates, pre-release advertising, pre-release availability, limited distribution, press screenings, etc. If your movie is going to suck, you want as many people as possible to pay and find that out first-hand rather than hear it from another source.

Online, personal recommendations are nothing new either. It started with eBay's seller ratings, CNET's gadget reviews by customers, and Amazon's comment system. It's been going this way for years. Just because social media has accelerated it and made buyer recommendations more trusted and more personal doesn't mean that word of mouth hasn't been influential, it just means that ad agencies are in denial and too comfortable to do anything about it.

Agencies who can't adapt or haven't started to adapt to this should go out of business. Advertisers that think creating a 'brand' is about commercials, imagery, spokespeople, graphics and point of sale communications are done. Even in Marketing 101 they teach you that a brand is the whole product experience, but in so many companies, this is completely forgotten. Branding means spending advertising dollars the "right" way to gloss over any product deficiencies, to ensure that products that are just OK have equal time in the eyes of potential buyers. In the 1960's (or maybe I've watched too many episodes of Mad Men) this worked - products relied on awareness and distribution to be successful. Today, distribution is free and awareness through traditional channels isn't the same - there's too much noise, too much hype, too many Tivo's, and people have become cynical about the promise of a brand. Rarely does a product or brand live up to it's billing, so everything is taken in with filters. And when a brand does keep it's promise, you want to tell everyone you know about it - it's that exceptional!

Where'd the FT dig up this guy? He's clearly clinging on tightly to his pension, and should be canned immediately:

“I don’t think [social media] is a replacement for paid-for media, it is just going to be a challenger for [consumers’] time and attention.” - Moray MacLennan, IPA president and chief executive of M&C Saatchi Worldwide.

Social media is not going to compete with anything - everything online (and soon on TV) will BE social media. There will be no alternative, it will be pervasive - it's already starting. And it will cost just as much to market successfully - but the spend will be on skilled people and interaction, not on broad media buys.

Advertising (promotion of a product) isn't going to stop, it's not going to decrease, but its going to change. Promotional dollars will move out of 'traditional' advertisers hands and to ad agencies that 'get it'. Ad placement is definitely going to go down online, and probably offline - it will hurt both publishers and agencies that make significant income on media buying.

Agencies that "get it" understand that they need to become the first-person voice of the brand, not the third-person. They know they need to become a partner with the company they represent and actually contribute to closed-loop product improvement. Interactions with customers are centered around building trust - building web presences that provide authority and interest beyond the product, that create discussions about the high-level problem with transparency and authority.

Successful brands will become trusted advisers for their domain. Consumers will turn to brands for answers that are honest, even if they means that the brand calls out deficiencies or weaknesses in their product, or actually admits they have competition. This is the transparency that consumers crave, and agencies that can drive companies towards this will be hugely successful. Marketers will get honed feedback about their products that they can then incorporate into the next product version and improve their market share. Customer feedback and iteration will happen much much faster than it does now with CPG brands, much more like the software that makes rapid networked communication possible.

I see a bright future for agencies that understand things are quickly moving toward a "personal" trusted relationship with a brand. Projects will be different (the report the article quotes points to consulting services, creating new forms of web content, and analysing data). Social marketing won't look like display advertising. It won't be interruptive. It will be communicative and transparent, and results will make for better products and more loyal customers. This will in turn lower marketing and promotion cost by reducing brand 'switchers', and make forward-thinking agencies tomorrow's heroes.