An Honest Opinion

In 2005, we gave an InfoCommerce Model of Excellence award to a company called ValueStar. We described it as a "for-profit Better Business Bureau," which doesn't capture all the nuances of the service, but gives you the general idea.

What stood out to us at the time was that while it relied heavily on user ratings, ValueStar went to extreme lengths to assure those that were rating a vendor had actually done business with the vendor. It seemed like overkill at the time, but with so many sites now drowning in user-supplied ratings (many of which are of suspect origin as merchants realize the power of their reviews), ValueStar's concept of validating user input looks prescient.

Last year, I wrote about another company, Tablet Hotels, which had announced it was adding user reviews. No news there, but Tablet Hotels upped the ante in the travel category by limiting reviews to those it could confirm had actually stayed at the hotel they were reviewing. While Tablet Hotels didn't publish the names of those who submitted reviews, it required that users identify themselves when posting their reviews. That might seem crazy to those publishers seeking to build a large volume of review on their sites, but I argued that Tablet Hotels was actually quite clever, because its approach removed all credibility issues while forcing users to take responsibility for their words by asking them to identify themselves.

Just yesterday, I was speaking with Mike Ortner of Capterra, an online buying guide for software. Capterra has gone where few publishers dare to tread: letting its users provide software reviews, including the products of its advertisers.

The process Capterra has devised is highly controlled. Users are required to identify themselves when providing a review, and their company names and job titles (but not their names) are published along with the review. It has purposely built a lengthy review submission form, the better to weed out those who are not serious and engaged. Capterra advertisers are allowed to preview all reviews of their products before they go live, and can challenge factual inaccuracies or reviews from users who aren't customers. There's much more to what Capterra is doing in the area of reviews, but my point here is a basic one: while all publishers are eager to have as many user reviews as possible on their sites, smart publishers are realizing that quantity at the expense of quality is a mistake. Reviews that can be trusted, submitted by responsible parties who are willing to identify themselves, have much more impact and value - even to advertisers, the group you would think would be least interested in seeing unvarnished reviews alongside their advertising programs.

Model of Excellence Awards

We are pleased to announce that Unigo LLC is a finalist for an InfoCommerce 2009 Model of Excellence awards.
Review Unigo's Model of Excellence profile here

Hear Unigo Founder & CEO Jordan Goldman at DataContent 09
DataContent 09: All Roads Lead to Data. Full program here.

Labels: capterra, table hotels, valuestar

Getting the Message

What do email, instant messaging, RSS (generally associated with blogs), social media (I am thinking in particular about such platforms as Linked-In and FaceBook) and Twitter have in common? They are all messaging channels. And each one grew rapidly in popularity after the then-dominant messaging channel became over-used, and thus less effective, particularly for marketers.

Email was the first of these messaging channels. Its low cost, ease of use and lack of rules turned out to be a two-edged sword, spurring rapid adoption, while attracting a tidal wave of marketers, spammers and others whose mail volume soon swamped one-to-one email communications. Users fought back with aggressive spam filters, usage conventions and even legislation, largely taming the channel and adding lots of marketing constraints.Blogging then went supernova for a while, in part because one could attract an audience at low cost, but more importantly I would argue, because it was closely tied to RSS. The great hidden value of RSS was that it bypassed spam filters and landed messages directly on the users' desktop.

Next up: social networking platforms, such as Linked-In with its Linked-In groups, which created privileged communications channels that are still growing in popularity. And now there is Twitter, which is also growing rapidly.

It seems that once a popular messaging channel becomes too clogged with extraneous messages, a new message channel emerges. Once it generates spectacular rates of adoption, marketers, spammers and others seeking to monetize the channel pile on, creating noise, clutter and a commercial tone that many users reject. This sets the stage for yet another new messaging channel to emerge.

The implication for publishers? They should jump on these new messaging channels as quickly and early as possible, which is when they yield maximum benefit. At the same time, publishers need to be cognizant that it's risky to develop dependence on these channels because their marketing half-life will become increasingly short. The messaging channels that prove durable will be the ones that impose rules and technological barriers that limit their value for marketing purposes. The ones with the fewest restrictions are likely to flame-out relatively quickly.The bad news and the good news in all of this remain the same: the message remains more valuable than the medium, and there is no durable short-cut to building an online audience.

The Best Never Rest
Model of Excellence Award Winner
iJet Intelligent Risk Systems
to Speak at DataContent 09

A 2004 InfoCommerce Model of Excellence Award Winner, iJet has tranformed itself several times to take advantage of new opportunities and emerging business needs, while never losing sight of its core competencies and value proposition.

iJet CTO Greg Meyer will be on the highly popular "Excellence Revisited" panel at DataContent 09 where he'll talk candidly about what iJet has learned about what it takes to succeed in the business of business information, hard-earned lessons you can take to the bank!

DataContent 09: All Roads Lead to Data. Full program here.

Labels: ijet

Risky Business

It’s hardly newsworthy that the Internet has been enormously disruptive to both well established businesses and business models. It’s also not news that the Internet enables disintermediation by making it easier to both buy direct and do-it-yourself. We’ve also seen that the Internet has enabled “electronic commons” through social networking and user-generated content.

What happens when you combine all these combustible characteristics in one package and apply them to our global financial crisis? You get start-ups like freerisk.org.

Freerisk wants to challenge, if not replace, the major credit ratings agencies (e.g. Moody’s, Standard and Poor’s and Fitch) by letting users build and run their own financial risk models. As I understand the plan (and the venture is still very much a work in progress), Freerisk will aggregate public company financial data and provide an interface that lets users pull the data into their own risk models with the hope they will publish their findings on the Freerisk site.

Freerisk is explicitly gunning for the major rating agencies. It’s unlikely they’ll make a short-term dent in the revenues of the big three players, each of which operates with governmental imprimatur, but the risk is that Freerisk over time calls the credibility of these entities into question, a potentially more damaging outcome, and one not outside the realm of possibility. Ratings agencies aren’t the most popular folks these days, and if this young upstart embarrasses them with a series of prescient calls, it could be enough to topple this highly profitable oligarchy.

The lesson for content providers: there’s no room for complacency. New competitors spring out of nowhere, and the web provides them with near-equal footing with you. Further, the economics of the web not only reduce barriers to entry, but they enable even failing businesses to hang in for extended periods of time, causing you pain all the while. Indeed, it’s not unusual for a website to launch with no revenue model (some plan to figure one out down the road; some don’t ever intend to generate revenue).

The solution? The best offense is a good defense. You can’t anticipate these new competitors, and you can’t (and generally shouldn’t try to) fight them. All you can do is stay close to your customers, deeply understand their needs, give them tools that they come to depend on to operate their businesses, and oh yes … always sleep with one eye open.

Labels: freerisk.org

Searching for Quality

I'm in research mode for a client project right now, and that's all it takes to re-introduce me to the sorry state of site search - the capability a publisher provides for users to search just within the publisher's own site. The only conclusion I can draw from what I see is that publishers view site search as an expense to be minimized, and programmers view it as not worthy of their time and talent.

That's a big mistake.

Visitors to your site who use your site search capability are engaged users. They're investing time to probe deeper into your site because you've convinced them you are relevant to their interests and needs. These are prime visitors who you can monetize through advertising or a la carte sales of content. These are also visitors who'll likely come back again if you provide a rich and rewarding experience. Yet despite all this upside, site search is typically an afterthought. Here's my list of top offenses:

- Limiting yourself to low-cost or free site search software without regard to the kind of experience it delivers to the users of your site.
- Failing to integrate site search results into the site's style sheet and theme (usually because the designer is long gone before site search is implemented). Besides the jarring visual disconnect to those searching your site, your site screams "we don't care" which brings the value of your content into question.
- Providing only global site search capabilities. If your site contains different types of content, let users limit their searches. If I am on a newspaper site searching for a restaurant review, I don't want to wade through classified ads, news stories and obituaries in my search results.
- Not using content tags for searching. Most publishers are tagging all their content inside powerful content management systems to improve the front-end site experience, but I see little evidence that all these powerful CMS capabilities are being used to improve the back-end (i.e. site search) experience.
- No power searching capabilities. There's nothing more frustrating than reviewing results in order of relevance when date order is what you really need. Just a few simple options like this can radically upgrade the site search experience.
- No dates. A personal pet peeve of mine, there's nothing more frustrating than finding an absolutely on-target article through a site search and having absolutely no idea what month, year or even decade it was written, immediately rendering it worthless.

When you also consider that because many publishers hold their archives in database form meaning they are not typically visible to the big general search engines, site search gives publishers one shot at unlocking the value of this content. Instead, most are shooting themselves in the foot.

Fill 'er Up

A new launch by Picaphone, which aims to create the first international phone directory, caught my eye this week so I decided to check out www.picaphone.com.

After dozens of searches for all types of companies, big and small all yielded no results, I was pushed to an inexorable conclusion: this database nothing in it.

Back to the press release again and I noticed the statement, "The success of this ambitious project depends on the cooperation of web surfers all over the world." Yes, it's all about user-generated content, but with the remarkable goal of trying to collect every telephone directory listing in the world. Imagine how many listings would have to be contributed (and maintained) for this to become a site worthy enough for users to return to repeatedly.

I certainly have no beef with this company's audacious business objective. My point is that the window is rapidly closing for online data ventures that set up shop with a user interface and back-end database and then say to the world, "fill 'er up." Why? Very simply, the novelty factor is gone. That's why last year's Data Content Conference featured companies such as Snooth and BrownBook. Both these companies see user-generated content as integral to their success, but both started out supplying an initial dataset that delivered value while encouraging users to augment this information. With this approach, these companies deliver value to users immediately, rather than hoping magic will happen and users will do a credible (and rapid) job building out the database from scratch. I'd go so far as to argue that the bigger the scope of a user-generated database product, the more important to provide an initial dataset.

But what about companies like Jigsaw and Linked-In you may properly ask. These two very successful databases were built entirely from user-generated content. To this I would respond that these companies caught the wave of early excitement around user-generated content, so they had great timing going for them. I'd also argue that these databases, while they certainly became more valuable as they got bigger, were still able to deliver value to users while quite small. Think about it: both Jigsaw and Linked-In could deliver some value to users with 50,000 names; a database claiming to be a global telephone directory cannot.User-generated content certainly isn't dying; in fact where user-generated content augments a publisher's existing database it is very much alive and well. User-generated data products where the database starts completely empty are also lacking much promise.

Labels: brownbook, jigsaw, Linked-In, Picaphone, snooth