Jeff Chausse
Digital Strategy + Design
New Book by Chris "Long Tail" Anderson Explores the Economics of Free
“FREE” sounds like a fantastic upcoming book discussing the problems of making money from digital content. It’s not out yet, but BoingBoing.net reviews an accompanying Wired article. The key thesis is this: There is no such thing as a market for digital goods, only a market for digital services.
The book/article also discusses the huge psychological gap between products that cost nothing, and products that almost cost nothing. I can certainly attest to this, as I recently signed up for JungleDisk, a data storage service backed up by Amazon.com’s “pay-as-you-go” S3 storage service. Their rates are extremely low, and I haven’t really started using it, but I did rack up a $0.02 bill thus far (you’re charged a penny per 1,000 requests to list your files, a penny for 10,000 get requests)
Even though these three cents probably have me covered for months of requests, my first reaction when seeing the two cents on my account was an instinctive “Uh-oh, am I sure I want to commit to do this?”. All over TWO CENTS. Money I would hesitate to pick up off the floor. Eventually common sense prevailed, but something in my “lizard brain” was triggered.
I’m definitely looking forward to this book. As DRM dies a quiet death, the time is ripe for this book.
[Photo credit: me! I've been waiting for an excuse to use it...]
My Thoughts on Microsoft/Yahoo.
An acquisition of Yahoo by Microsoft would undoubtedly be a boon for Microsoft, no matter how bad they bungle it, if only due to the subtraction of competition. But is it good for the consumer? Well, my initial reaction was one of fear and trepidation. Microsoft has a history of buying valuable properties, stripping them for parts, and baking them into their same old bread and butter offerings (Office, Windows, and MSN). Can you think of a single major online “brand” that has come out of Microsoft in the past 5 years? Windows Live? Maybe, but that’s a stretch.
Yahoo, on the other hand, has successfully acquired and fortified brands like Flickr and del.icio.us. “Microsoft™ Yahoo!™” is one thing, but “Microsoft™ Flickr™”, Well that idea can bring your typical Web 2.0 utopian to tears. Stripping Yahoo for parts would be terrible for the average Joe. Yahoo is loaded with so many interesting technologies and tools (Pipes, anyone?) that would undoubtedly be lost in the shuffle if Microsoft tries to pick it apart.
However, what would be good for Microsoft, and for the consumer is if Microsoft plays it smart and realizes that Yahoo is a far more relevant brand in this day and age, and doesn’t mess with it. What the Yahoo acquisition can do for Microsoft is allow it to stop their hopeless and incredibly annoying strategy of building desktop software that tries to supplant the web.
If Yahoo became Microsoft’s “bread and butter” (which would mean figuring out how to beat Google in the advertising market – no small feat), it would take an enormous amount of pressure off of Windows, which could actually once again become a useful, streamlined OS, instead of a bundle of “Look, you can’t do that on the Web!” whiz-bang eye candy features.Time will tell how this will play out. The great thing these days is that for every Yahoo site or feature that Microsoft ruins, there will be 10 scrappy startups ready to jump in and pick up the slack. And let’s not forget that Google was a scrappy startup a mere 10 years ago. Play your cards carefully, Microsoft…
Wanna Work for Me?
ZoomInfo is looking for an Information Architect with usability testing experience for our growing User Experience team, here in sunny Waltham, MA. Check out the job description, and if you think you’ve got the right stuff, contact me directly with your resume (jchausse {at} gmail {dot} com). If I agree, you’ll be in here interviewing before you know it.
Zappos.com Brings Customer to Tears – in a Good Way
This story of genuine customer appreciation is truly astonishing in this day and age. If only every company were this thoughful (or, more accurately, if only every company empowered their employees to act this thoughtfully…)
Wow.
Prove to the corporate world that this sort of outstanding customer service is to be rewarded. Go buy shoes from Zappos.com right now.
Roll Your Own Social Network
Originally posted on HHCC.com on March 2nd, 2007
It’s always been a key tenet of advertising that you need to be where the people are. These days that means in online social networks like MySpace, FaceBook, and YouTube. Marketers have already learned this lesson, and are heading to these destination sites in droves. But does your brand have what it takes to take things to the next level? Can your website become a social destination itself?
If you’d like to give it a try, there are plenty of vendors who want to help you get there. KickApps offers instant gratification in the form of a free ad-supported MySpace/YouTube clone, which you can upgrade to a paid version. Customers include TAG Body Spray and National Lampoon. Vitrue offers a slicker interface, more clearly focused on consumer generated video, but doesn’t offer any free or trial versions. Vitrue powers sites from TBS, Lance Foods and the Cincinatti Bengals. ONEsite rounds out the trio, with solutions ranging from free to $1000/mo. iVillage, ClearChannel, and Sprint head up their roster.
While KickApps, Vitrue, and ONEsite have gained the most commercial momentum, there are countless startups in the space, including People Aggregator, CrowdFactory, and the matter-of-factly named Social Platform and Social Network Server.
Web sites without social content will certainly be the “brochureware” sites of tomorrow, but whether a full-fledged social network is an appropriate add-on for most corporate sites remains to be seen. If you want to give it a try though, there’s clearly no need to go it alone.
Your Greatest Online Marketer is Someone You’ve Never Met
Originally published on HHCC.com on Tuesday, March 6th, 2007
Oh, how the Internet changes everything. The simple idea of happy customers spreading your brand via word of mouth has morphed into people creating entirely new, wildly innovative websites to promote your goods in ways you would have never thought of. Case in point: BrowseGoods.com — a Google Maps-style interface for browsing — and buying — Amazon.com products.
Sites like BrowseGoods.com are possible because companies like Amazon have invested time and effort in developing programming APIs that enable anyone with a bit of time and skill to create new ways of finding and interacting with your product offerings. New, programming-free tools like Yahoo Pipes are trying to make the process even easier. So, are you thinking about opening up your site via an API?
Well, ponder this. Worldwide, there are over one billion people who use the Internet. Let’s assume that just one percent of those folks are fans of your brand. Next, let’s assume that just one percent of those people have the skills needed to build a website. Finally, let’s figure one percent of those people have really killer ideas for a new way to sell your stuff online.
That’s 1,000 online marketers with the ideas, skills, and passion to pitch your product in exciting, innovative ways. Now, how many of them are on your payroll? Two? Three? So, should they spend the next six months building two or three really cool marketing sites, or the foundation for 1,000?
Search Wikia – The End of SEO?
Originally published on HHCC.com on Thursday, March 8, 2007
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is creating a stir in the technology press with his plans to adapt Wikipedia’s “crowdsourcing” techniques to create a collaborative search engine — technically unnamed, but commonly referred to as Search Wikia. Details are sketchy, but presumably it will allow human beings to re-order search results so that the best stuff bubbles to the top — a la Digg.
Should Search Wikia overtake Google, it would completely rewrite the rules of online marketing. Right now, the web is the only medium in which you must create content which impresses machines — your creative ambtions held in check by the tyranny of Search Engine Optimization. With Search Wikia, no machines reviewing your content = no more SEO!
But will Search Wikia actually succeed? Why not, if Wikipedia has done so well?
As James Surowiecki explains in his book, “The Wisdom of Crowds“, the summation of small pieces of knowledge collectively held by a large enough group of people will nearly always converge on an objective truth. Hence, the success of Wikipedia. However, the key phrase here is “objective truth”. Wikipedia deals in truths. There is — theoretically, at least — an ideal answer to “What is a car?” But is there one true answer to “What is the correct ranking of the ten best pages about ‘car repair’?” Of course not. Your personal answer to this question depends upon what kind of car you have and what sort of repairs you’re interested in (and whether you’re looking for how-to advice or a repair shop).
Search Wikia will likely enjoy some degree of success, but just being “human powered” will not cause its search results to leap past Google in relevance. Given a problem with no perfect solution, the conclusions of a well thought out algorithm can easily compete with with the best efforts of human expertise (think Deep Blue).
So, continue to mind your term frequency and keyword densities, SEO will likely remain with us for a long time to come. And if you think about it, if human-powered and computer-powered search can provide pretty much equal results, why not go with the one in which the most ambitious company can work the system to get a leg up — surely that passion should count for something.
The Danger of Design – How Not to Build an Online Community
Originally Posted on HHCC.com on March 12th, 2007
Craigslist pretty much defines the concept of “online community”. It is also the seventh most visited site on the web, with an employee headcount three orders of magnitude smaller than any other company in the top ten. If you’re trying to build your own online community, and want to take one lesson from Craigslist, it’s this: design does not build community.
That Craigslist has succeeded with a minimalist design is no secret to anyone who’s been around the net for a while. But could Craigslist have done as well if it had a slick, flashy design? Even if you discount practical issues such as load time and usability, the answer is an emphatic no.
The entire concept of “design” runs counter to the idea of community. Well, that’s not entirely true. Literally, design takes many forms – such as usability, universality, and affordance. All of these are important in any creative endeavor. What I’m talking about is — you know, Design — the kind of stuff that evokes such adjectives as “bold”, “edgy”, and “daring”.
Design tells users “this is who we are”, “this is what we believe in”, “this is how we want you to feel about being here” — all valuable messages for web sites looking to sell a product or an idea. But a true community should be deciding these things for themselves.
Think about where community “happens” in real life. It happens in church basements, school gymnasiums, and dilapidated town halls. It does not happen in art museums or casinos. When the venue screams “Look at me! Look at me!” people start paying more attention to it than to themselves, and the community becomes far less authentic.
Community happens when someone says “I matter here – what I do can make an impact”. MySpace succeeds because of its amateurish design, not in spite of it. It succeeds because someone looks at it and says, “I can make something that belongs here”. This is not the feeling you get from a site like MTV.com
So, what should you do when adding community elements to your web site — fire all your Photoshop and CSS gurus and build a Craigslist clone? Absolutely not. If you’re reading this blog, chances are you’ve got something to sell to someone. Your web site needs just the right amount of branding to keep people at least partially focused on that. Craigslist doesn’t need any branding because it’s a community about being a community — it has absolutely no other reason for being. Your site (presumably) does. But your design should subtly nudge your vistors into what you want them to focus on, not beat them over the head with it.
Don’t let this “no design needed” idea fool you into thinking that building an online community is easy — it’s extremely difficult. Especially because it involves skills that marketers tend to find very challenging — the ability to listen and adapt to what your community wants (eBay is extremely skilled at this) and the patience to let your community grow organically. Community requires culture, and culture takes time to develop. Compare the quality of the commentary on Flickr, which grew slowly, to the infantile gibberish found on YouTube, which skyrocketed to success overnight.
If building online community is important to you — and it should be, if you want to remain relevant in 20XX — check your ego at the door and remember that you’re building your brand’s church basement, not its church.
Adobe Apollo – A Real Solution for Advertising-Supported Software?
Originally published on HHCC.com, March 19 2007
Things seem to repeatedly come full circle in the Internet world. Flash and Ajax technology brought the power of desktop applications to web pages, and now Adobe has introduced a new technology, called “Apollo“, which brings the power of Flash and Ajax web applications to… the desktop!
Sound silly? Actually, it makes a lot of sense, and it could mean big things for interactive marketing.
While the idea of bringing desktop-like web applications back to the desktop sounds a bit confusing, it’s really a pretty significant development. No matter how “desktop-like” a web application is, there are several limitations that exist (and for good reason):
- Web applications can’t interact with your file system
- Web applications are useless when you’re not online
- Web applications can’t be associated with file types (for example, you can’t double-click a “.doc” file and have Google Docs show up
Apollo will address all these issues and more, including some major development productivity bonuses. Check out their demo of an Apollo-powered eBay application.
OK, since this is an advertising blog, what’s the message to the CMO’s? Well, by removing the typical barriers to web application adoption, Apollo could be the vehicle which finally brings advertising-supported applications to the masses. I’m sure Google is keeping a close eye on it for their Google Apps.
Also, while most web applications are focused on entertainment or socializing, people use desktop applications to really get things done — and they’re always looking for better solutions. Offering them a better way, with your name on it (say, a Timex-branded to-do list, or an NBC-branded video editor) can go a long way toward building brand loyalty.
Ian Rogers is a Badass
Ian Rogers is Yahoo Music’s VP of Product Development, and he has some strong words for the music industry.
I’m here to tell you today that I for one am no longer going to fall into this trap. If the licensing labels offer their content to Yahoo! put more barriers in front of the users, I’m not interested. Do what you feel you need to do for your business, I’ll be polite, say thank you, and decline to sign. I won’t let Yahoo! invest any more money in consumer inconvenience. I will tell Yahoo! to give the money they were going to give me to build awesome media applications to Yahoo! Mail or Answers or some other deserving endeavor. I personally don’t have any more time to give and can’t bear to see any more money spent on pathetic attempts for control instead of building consumer value. Life’s too short. I want to delight consumers, not bum them out.