June 2007

If you’re interested in business technology and the internet, and you’re not reading Fred Wilson’s blog, you should add him to your reader right now.

He has a knack for understanding where technology needs to go, and a knack for agreeing with me, both of which are important.

Today he wrote a post about web ad functionality, and as usual he’s 100% correct:

The advertising industry needs to take some lessons from social media. Clicking isn’t the only engagement with media that matters on the web. Commenting, favoriting, tagging, sharing, and many more engagement actions are important.

I remember a while ago there were DICE ads that let people add their own job complaints to the flash-based ad-bar. It was way cool, and memorable because of the interaction.

Fred thinks that advertisers should look for ways other than clicking to interact with the audience, and I think that doing that will dramatically raise your impact.

Imagine if FM served ads on two sites - mine and Fred’s - and I saw an ad I liked on his page. What if I could tag that to show on my own blog? What if I could send it to a friend like a NYT article? What if anyone could vote on how cool the ad was, and the coolest ones would get more screen time?

The best ads will automatically get the most exposure. What a cool idea.

It’s clear that in the era of social media, traditional customer outreach is no longer a viable strategy. Ben Edwards, publisher of Economist.com and former new media guru at IBM has spent years staying on top of the trends and technologies driving conversational marketing. In this session, Edwards will deliver a personal narrative about where the customer participation model is taking businesses and how smart organizations can leverage this new paradigm for competitive advantage.

• Engaging with your audience
• Gathering input and sentiment
• “Gradualism” and being guided by your customers
• Optimizing for the medium while staying true to your brand.

I spent the cramped and sweaty duration of a Southwest flight between Midland, TX and Seattle, WA, reading a copy of Fast Company that I picked up at one of the numerous concourse news stands. I don’t normally read magazines cover to cover, but this is the first issue of FC that I’ve ever picked up and I was pretty impressed.

I remember a column about branding tucked somewhere in the middle that ruminated on the value of making your business a talking point.

It’s well worth a read. I guess basic idea is that it’s a lot harder to generate “buzz” about your product if your product is inherently boring.

The cool part is that having “personality” is enough to get yourself talked about. Giving out cookies at a hotel check-in counter. Or I’ve always liked the snarky copy on the side of Vitamin Water bottles.

If you want to join the ranks of talked-about companies, a blog is a great way to give your company a personality.

Remember what Scoble was able to do for Microsoft? Transforming it, for many people, from a gigantic, faceless monolith into a slightly geeky, good-humored guy you could leave a comment with. Personality! Every company should have one.

Yesterday’s big, fat, $5 New York Times had a nice tasty article on Google’s secret sauce: their search algorithms. Actually, it was mostly about how nobody really knows what actually goes on inside the secret Google box, not even Rupert Murdoch.

But something that caught my eye in the article was this telling statistic:

And media sites are discovering that many people are ignoring their home pages — where ad rates are typically highest — and using Google to jump to the specific pages they want.

Since our first conference in 2004, we’ve been saying the home page is dead. It still bears repeating: The Home Page Is Dead. People are jumping (slightly annoyed) right past it, to where all your useful content is.

Coincidentally, the best way to get 90% of your information into the hands of your customers every time they hit your site is to make your “home page” a blog. Permalinks let Google guide users to specific answers when they want specifics, and clicking on your domain brings them a wealth of up-to-date information framed by your sidebars.

When people stop landing on useless “home pages” and start showing up at dynamic, useful blog pages, your traffic will spike, Google will crawl your site more often, and people will end up happier. Everybody wins–except possibly Rupert Murdoch, who just lost some MySpace traffic to your business.

We’re going to cover the how-to’s and what-nots of building a useful “home-page” blog at the next summit. Make sure you’re there to check it out.

Online social networking aficionados have always known that the future of the medium would include third-party developers. For example, when Friendster opened up their network to a few select developers late last year, their month-over-month unique visitors increased 17.76%. Allowing users to make additions to a social networking site’s functionality adds value and gives the community more say in how the site works for them. With Facebook’s launch of the new “platform” functionality, the proverbial chickens have come home to roost.

These open APIs create numerous opportunities for businesses and organizations by enabling them to reach millions of passionate users without buying advertising by simply creating a useful application that adds value to a user’s experience of their favorite social network.

In this session, you will learn:

• How the big online social networks work, who their users are, and which ones have APIs for you to use.
• What other organizations have done and what the results have been.
• Finding the right developer to work with the API
• Adding real value rather than just peddling your product or service

Need to understand your target market better? Want to develop products that resonate with customers? Experienced bloggers know that their readers can provide them with a treasure trove of valuable information to assist in product development efforts.

In this session we’ll focus on the practical strategies and tactics that bloggers use to leverage reader comments and cross-postings to affect how messaging, features, and packaging of products can be optimized.

• “Comment farming”: Writing posts that drive reader participation
• How provocative posting works
• Determining what “acid test” questions to ask
• Getting your organization behind weblog-based research