Blogging is going the way of the Dodo, or is it?

You should give a read to the Community Guy’s post in response to a recent article in WIRED. Jake contends that the state of the blog is not dead and that Paul Boutin misses the mark. Blogs are not what they once were. But that doesn’t mean they are dead. Twitter may sound great in tech circles but most people I talk with don’t get it and don’t want to get it. Facebook isn’t much better, but they make connecting to other easy which does provide the intimacy Boutin says is lacking in blogs today.

Blogs are morphing and it is time to think of them in a new light. This mentality that everyone would subscribe to family or personal blogs via RSS readers was never going to be a reality. Blogs can be used for a number of different things than they were originally intended serve. Boutin is looking at blogs they way they were initally intended to be used. Nothing on the web ever stays they way it was originally planned. We are doing things on the web today that were though virtually impossible ten years ago. For example the idea that we could use spreadsheets in an online application like Zimbro was just a pipe dream ten years ago and even then it was thought that clientside Java would be the platform independent vehicle to make it a reality. Things change.

Blog stats continue to show that they have a limited shelf life in most cases. This would suggest that users give up on the concept as it isn’t easy to write something compelling for others to read regularly or they serve a specific purpose for a limited time. I suspect it is a combination of the two. Events where groups of people congregate for a short period of time can share and collaborate in a central location during the relevant time period makes sense to me and you don’t have to mess with Facebook or MySpace it is just open. This is where Ning is playing.

Finally, Boutin contends that video is the wave of the future. Sure it is easy to do video, but having graded many student video projects over the years I am not looking for amatuer video. If you think it is hard to write something, try composing a compelling shot with a camera! Then you still have to write and collect your thoughts, worry about how you look, deal with external distractions, editing and the list goes on. Talking head webcam video is dismal and bland. It may be exciting to Boutin now, but over time this will continue to dimish as professionals provide better and more polished content.

What if Cars were websites? Part 2: Approach

I debated breaking down this series of posts by car company then by brand and vehicle offerings. But this blog is about websites, right? Besides all of the really relevant data I would use to breakdown individual offerings is not always publicly available. Instead, I’ll provide an initial approach to how I would remedy the situation.

Assumptions are that external factors will improve in 2009. The credit market is in order so people can buy cars. The industry really doesn’t have much control over this and despite the best efforts of Washington the changes have not really taken affect for autos. Added to this is the assumption that the economy will improve limiting the impact of job losses and potential layoffs.

Ford: They are best positioned at the moment. Looking at the models and market research may provide some insight into how to adjust the offerings. Keep focus on the core and don’t get lost in new products.

GM: These guys are in a tough spot. Serious attention to duplication of models across the brands needs to be examined. Selling the same model with three different badges isn’t going to work. In the web world you would lose search position either by duplicate content or by diluting the market. So consolidate and shuffle the offerings of the brands to be appropriate. For example, Chevy shouldn’t offer vehicles from under $10k-over $70k.

Chrysler: You need a draw to get customers to view your products. A 2009 version of the K car or Minivan. Perhaps it is time to scale back to a niche car company. Models like the Viper and Prowler were great for those that can afford it. For the rest Minivans and Jeeps are solid. Get back to basics.

Beta get it right or else…

I’m a fan of “The Cranky Product Manager“.  In one of her recent posts she talks about beta testing and boy did it ever hit close to home. As I step into my way back machine I’m reminded of many early products that could have used a little beta TLC before launch. Back in the days of Netscape and Mosaic the idea of beta testing wasn’t really discussed. In fact there are many things we did back then that would not be wise to repeat.

In fact, gazing into the distant past I recall my first job building websites. I was working on a website for a Major League Baseball team. I had been with the company all of about a two weeks so they had the new guy checking the support email. We had bunches of mail from fans looking for the team schedule on the newly designed site for the 1997 season. The number emails that came in asking this very simple but straight forward question should have prompted a quick response. But we sat on it for a little while thinking people were just clueless. No kidding this was one of the links from the global nav, c’mon people!

Ultimately a change was made to the homepage that included a more prominent link in the body of the page. I can’t help but think we could have avoided a hefty infux of confused and desperate fans with a beta test. Our internal testing was really around whether the links worked and if the pages displayed properly on PC’s. Usability was really just our best guess at how we would use the site. We were all experts back then!

What if Cars were websites? Part 1: Overview

Multiple Brands/Models are diluting the market

I have long struggled with the notion that the big three really need to make the same basic vehicle under different brands. I recently noticed that GM is selling 93 different automobiles. Once you start to look at the breakdown you see duplication not just in the same brand but the same basic model between brands. There maybe valid reasons for this, but I can’t come to one from a web perspective.

Imagine a conversation in our world like this:
Brand Manager(BM): I want a website just like the one I have now.
PM: Great, so we are going to move your existing site to a new one?
BM: No, I want two! Keep the one I have but I need another site that will have the same content. Maybe a couple of changes, you know, logo and a photo or two. Ooh, and flash we have to have that.
PM: Uh, okay, so you want to duplicate the site you have now with another one. Who is this other site for? An older demographic? Impulse buyer?
BM: Oh, no nothing like that. We are going to target the same customers.

I could go on, but for web products this would seem silly. Imagine if Twitter said the same thing as above. We would laugh them out of the building!

What is your brand identity? Who is your customer?
This would seem simple enough, but I wonder if the US auto makers haven’t lost site of who their core customer is for each of their brands. Look at the vehicle offerings for Pontiac and see if you can figure out who they are trying to sell to. Compare that with Scion and you see there is a significant difference in the marketing approach to the brand and the cars.

Innovation is more than a fancy new model.
Sorry to pick on GM, but innovation is more than coming up with a fancy electric car. This might generate interest, but if the business doesn’t change then it is all for naught. The Volt really looked kind of fun early on, but has fallen prey to blasé styling. Not that I was ready to buy one anyway, but I wonder if Chevy was the right brand for this vehicle. Doesn’t GMC and Cadillac bill themselves as the engineering brands? The innovation needs to be in the structure of the organization.

Imagine another conversation with web products:
BM1: I want to have a new shopping cart with Flex technology to display everything.
BM2: No way, you customers barely know how to click on a link. They won’t get it. Let me go live with it.
BM1: You’re jealous because my customers spend more money with me.
BM2: Whatever, you’re a jerk. Give it to me.
PM: I have to agree with BM2 here. We can launch the product there and work out the kinks. Then migrate it to the other brands.
BM1: Absolutely not, I’m running this show. If you don’t like it I’ll find a vendor that will do it for a six pack and discount.

This will not end well. The product would launch on the wrong site. You know what happens next. The product launches to the wrong demographic, conversion are down, finger pointing begins and the old site is back up.

Next time a closer look at GM.

What if Cars were websites?

I have a deep love for cars. From the time I was a little kid I used to quiz my dad on every “cool” car I saw. My dream car is a 49 Mercury chopped and dropped with flat black paint. If I can’t do that I’ll take a Porsche 911 GT3 RS…but I digress.

I don’t claim that I can cure the ills of the auto industry. Certainly GM and Chrysler are in dire straits and Ford is not far behind. But I wonder what life would be like if we looked at the insdustry from yhe approach we take when it comes to working on web products. So in the interest of science or just my fascination with cars, I’ll take a look at the big three and see what, if anything, we can conclude from this approach.

Generally speaking this is just a fun excercise and should be viewed with all due skepticism. Expect quite a few assumptions in the next few posts. You have been warned.

Adobe Zoetrope

I would do a disservice to the Adobe and University of Washington team that worked on the Zoetrope Project if I attempted to explain how this works. The video will do a much better job than I could hope to do.

The amazing thing that this tries to do is pull time sensitive data that could be unrelated into a more relational context. You will see an example in the video of a user that sees a spike in gas prices. By researching the date further the user notices a drop in price of oil on another website and yet third website highlights a story where Congress voted on a spending bill for Iraq.

For those that know what they are doing I think this will be a great tool. The danger is in making inferences where a relationship does not exist. Imagine if someone suggested that the price of gas spiked in the example above because of a solar flare. Tracking this information would be difficult as you could falsely conclude just about any cause/effect relationship you want.

This leads me to think about a site like Farecast and how they might leverage something like this to build an even more accurate system to advise users on airfare cost. How will something like this affect sales of market driven products and services? While this is still a pretty far out concept the day is coming where the relationship between price and other data are brought together. I am not certain the average user will use this, but rather the gatekeepers who will disseminate to the social networks.

Recommendations Just for You

I love the Amazon system that creates relational recommendations based on purchase history. I’m a regular reader of a great consumer advocate blog, The Consumerist. You can learn quite a bit about consumers via their site. It is scary to see how resourceful many readers are in that they can work complex systems using shared knowledge. The other is how clueless some consumers can be.

This post refers to a tough situation where the recommendation spoiled a Christmas gift for a customer’s wife. I see two problems in this situation. First, the issue of the user leaving his inbox visible for his wife to see is a no-no. If she had access to his email she could easily have gone into his inbox and found the order confirmation anyway. Sorry, brutha, you have to hide that junk.

The other problem is around the concept of when to remember a purchase and then make recommendations. The ability to remove an item easily must be part of the shopping process. I love the ability to see related items that may interest me for my personal decisions, but when it comes to gifts for others I’d rather you just keep those out of my recommendations or provide a separate “gift” recommendation section.

You know the next evolution of this concept is to relate a gift to a user. So if I purchase Art of Tuba and Euphonium for my brother as a gift then our circle of friends and family could know this was purchased and offer recommendations to them based on my purchase. If this isn’t done correctly though it could cause some problems. During his bachelor party someone got him a gag gift that kept us laughing that night until after the reception was over. Nobody would want recommendations based on something like that, trust me.

RSS and web products

Not Dead Yet

I had a recent AIM exchange from my boss alerting me to low adoption of RSS by consumers. This was based on a Forrester report that points to only 11% of users adopting the technology. Added to that is a follow-up blog post from Steve Rubel that says the end is near and marketing can ignore the technology. During the same AIM exchange my boss sent another link to a Mark Hopkins post that takes issue with the concept and flips it on its head.

I agree that RSS readers as a tool for avid blog readers is probably hitting the peak adoption. For new users there is a learning curve and it can be daunting to wade through the noise to get to the blog posts you enjoy. So 11% sounds like a reasonable number for people using RSS aggregators. Where I disagree is in the technology being dead.

Show me a Web 2.0 website that doesn’t use RSS in some form or fasion. You can even see inroads in old media companies adding the ability to send a news article to Facebook, Digg, etc. Most consumers don’t care whether the data they see is RSS, CMS content or hard coded, they expect to see content. As Mark points out the ability to market using RSS may not come via Google Reader but rather through integration with devices, platforms and websites that will allow users to see relevant content in the context they can control.

Let’s take RSS off the cart and let it live.

Dealing with the new web realities

There is a great post from the “Forrester Blog for Technology Product Management & Marketing Professionals” blog. I think you’ll find that this is a good primer for those that really don’t get the social web, community or Web 2.0. Of course what everyone is trying to figure out is the part about what to do.

My recommendation is to find a good community builder that will help provide strategies for navigating the internal issues, but also meeting readers where they are discussing your brand. This isn’t easy, but they do exist and the good thing is they really like to talk about themselves on the Web so it isn’t too hard to track down the more vocal community builders.

Now if Forrester could only make their blog a little easier to say…

http://blogs.forrester.com/product_management/2008/12/next-week-on-de.html

10,000 Apps for the iPhone, but does it matter?

In an earlier post I referred to downside of large numbers of applications in the iTunes store. I am not surprised that the number of applications has hit 10,000. Yes, you read that correctly. I like the idea of the free market deciding whether an app is worthy of inclusion, but I don’t think Apple is there just yet. But this discussion is more about the idea around the rating system in general.

Ratings Mislead
Apple has recently updated their ratings for apps in an attempt to thwart manipulation. But like ratings across the web they do not degrade over time. Think back to you days in high school when your best friend suggested an “awesome band” and you rush out and buy “International Pop Overthrow” by Material Issue and it made your summer bearable. Where is that CD now? Still in heavy rotation on your iPod? The point is that overtime the rating that at one point was really high has settled down. So what do we make of ratings?

Gimme some time
Perhaps if the rating was good for period of time the usefulness of the rating may be more beneficial to newer users. One of the problems with ratings is that it is dependent on users actually contributing to the feedback. Theoretically this should mean that over time the average will adjust up or down as user tastes change. But we know that Diffusion Theory defines different groups of adopters of a technology that display different patterns of behavior. So if you apply this theory to the ratings system then over time fewer and fewer people are contributing to the ratings.

Take this a step further. If the ‘innovator’ and ‘early adopter’ are the most likely to contribute to the ratings system but represent a small sampling of the total user base. Add to this they make their feedback on an ealier version of the application. How are issues in the earlier version of the app managed? Currently this isn’t possible.

Where to we go from here?
Naturally there isn’t an easy answer here otherwise we would already have a solution. There needs to be some context around the use of the ratings systems we have in place. What works for one product or service may not work for another. No matter what we need to think smarter about how we can leverage the use of a ratings mechanism to be relevant to new customers, especially those that fall in that last half of the Diffusion Theory S-curve.