I’m been enthusiastically hammering my head against the wall of local media and small business revenue models for over a dozen years.  About a year ago, I strapped on my early stage start-up skates and wobbled my way back onto the ice.

the napkin phase

A lot has changed in the 6-7 years since I was an early stage entrepreneur.  While running a 150-person local media tech business keeps you contemporary with industry knowledge, rolodex and perspective, you forget the scrappy exhilaration and anxiety of a from-scratch business formed around a shining new idea. It also gives you a near carnal attachment to a clean cap table;)

learning to lean

I’ve read with a mixture of enthusiasm and marginal skepticism the lean start-up school of thought.  The “agile + listen to your market + pivot quickly” logic is high quality stuff for any start-up to seriously digest.

creating room to pivot

One tenant of the movement I’m currently living full throttle is the “pivot moment“. I find the notions and structures contained in Eric Ries’ excellent writings to be spot on.  As you absorb early customer learning and market movements, more often than not, you realize that your original napkin picture carried some flawed assumptions. Leveraging and pivoting “on top of the learnings” is an incredibly healthy process.

This comes back to a point I picked (back) up on this weekend from Chris Dixon, commenting via RWW’s Start-up Advice Column. Chris comments in his November blog post, that start-ups make the mistake of centering their energy on proving the brilliance of their business idea.

To me, the two most critical decisions in a new start-up are #1, your core team, and #2, the space you choose to tackle.  Choosing both wisely increases your odds of success exponentially! Pivoting within a great market space is naturally much more exhilarating than pivoting inside a narrow and cluttered one.

pivoting with delight

Agility is a very special frame of mind; In my experience, it’s way more rare than people think.  There’s a lot of faux agility in start-ups that I think of as a love for the adrenaline of chaos.  To me, the greatest start-up teams blend an infectious curiosity, deep problem solving chops, and a sincere delight in the learning from customers, competition & market movements.

More often than not, start-ups thrive on the adrenaline but lack the problem solving or the thirst for driving business impact. One of the leading symptoyms of this condition is an overt infatuated with bright shiny objects and industry buzz. Falling into the trap of measuring your movements by the compass of Techcrunch is an all too common problem.

being in “your know” not “the know”

One of the things I’ve learned, which I have to force myself to continually re-visit is the difference between being in the know – aware of general industry trends and activities, versus being in your know – being deeply connected to the information that impacts your company’s value creation.

Think about the time you spend on extraneous information, constantly challenge yourself to cut it down, and increase your participatory learning in information that impacts your business.  Know your critical assumptions and test their validity every chance you get.

balance and posture

Navigating the pivotal progress of an early stage start-up presents risks and challenges that will either damage you or build you up!  Surrounding yourself with the right team gives you the posture and strength to maneuver confidently.  Keeping a clear head full of the right context will enable you to pivot with confidence to an improved vision.

Out with “fan”, in with “like”.

So, Facebook is officially mothballing the terminology of Fan, in favor of the kinder, gentler Like.  According to All Things Digital, the decision has been made.

Sometimes subtle changes in terminology can drive meaningful impact and unintended consequences.  My commentary below  is on how this might impact a Business’ Fan Page marketing.

a soft handshake?

Fan has always felt like a term derived of celebrity worship, that has morphed unnaturally into business and brand following terminology.  While I do believe Fan is far from a natural term, the act of fanning a business feels like a more meaningful statement of support than does the term Like.  When you Fan a business, it feels like an implicit statement of loyalty.  Saying you Like a business is akin to a soft handshake, positive but less committed.

As pointed out in Mashable,

The change could make it easier for brand advertisers to accumulate fans quickly. But it also means that users might not totally understand what they’re opting in to.

While building a larger social graph is arguably good news for brands and businesses, I tend to be in the contrarian camp.  This creates a new problems that I feel will make it more difficult for businesses to know how far they can go in leveraging their Facebook connections. It will likely raise the overall noise, and it introduces uncertainty as to the implicit contract with your social connection.

i <heart> follow

Personally, I prefer the Twitter term Follow, when it comes to business-consumer relationships.  To a marketer, a follower feels more like a genuine opt-in consumer than someone who likes you.  It feels like an implicit request to expect offers or news. I feel this is most acute for small and local businesses, where the majority use case for your social network interaction is around promotion and simple information sharing.

Could this move potentially cede competitive ground to Twitter when it comes to small business marketing?  Perhaps.  As the Facebook user base revises their behavior, the new ambiguity will present challenges.

Meanwhile, Twitter followers feel like a more predictable lot, when it comes to their intention.  At the end of the day, business value will be driven by performance, and predictable intention in marketing is a definitive edge.

Denver, CO April 14, 2009 – A spokesperson for the US airline industry today announced that the Inter-airline Technology Standards Committee has paved the way for solving a congestion problem that has plagued the industry for decades.  “Consumer frustration over the inflight contention for open restrooms has been mounting.” Our Restroom Contention Task Force met with our Social Technology Platform team, and eureka!,  we discovered the perfect solution, building on our new WIFI plans – Twitter!” stated Sally De Bain, industry spokesperson.

“We envision connecting bathroom sensors to Twitter – passengers simply follow the #flightnumber to be alerted when a restroom is available.  “We’re still discussing whether to trigger the alert when the door is open, when the toilet flushes or when the sink is activated.  Before launching the beta trial, we need to determine how we support premium flier models (code named “Royal Flush”), such that alerts from toilet flushes go to frequent fliers, ahead of door alerts for  economy passengers.”

heh – hey, it could happen!

The industry buzz is rapidly forming with the possibilities for Twitter to be the real time alert engine for just about anything and everything that changes state.

If you haven’t seen the marquis local small business example it’s worth a quick read.  Bakertweet profiles a London-based bakery that worked with their creative agency (located across the street) to apply Twitter to alert followers as fresh baked goods come out of the oven.

My point with the tongue-in-cheek airlines example is to point out two emerging realities of the rapidly morphing Twitter ecosystem:

1. Twitter has a meaningful shot at become the “alert engine” for a plethora of trigger events – theoretically, whenever you have a group of people who have an interest in immediate knowledge of an event, and
2. The signal-to-noise problem potential gets staggering.

I don’t have time now to really dissect the latter, but it’s near and dear to where my head/passion is these days.  Filtering and tagging of streams of conversations and alerts is a VERY BIG THING.  Both in terms of scale of problem and potential of opportunity.

In the meantime, I’d point you to a thought provoking post by Twine CEO Nova Spivack, and the ensuing debate stimulated in the comments. Clay Shirky’s astute comment also rings very true: “the problem isn’t information overload, it’s filter failure“.

Twine Blog Post: Can Twitter Survive What is About to Happen to It?

So, fasten your seat belt, there’s some potential for turbulence in Twitter’s open blue skies!

]]> http://www.evansink.com/2009/04/airline-industry-adopts-twitter-for-inflight-restroom-alert/feed/ 0 http://www.evansink.com/2009/03/twitter-the-new-thing/ http://www.evansink.com/2009/03/twitter-the-new-thing/#comments Tue, 03 Mar 2009 16:50:25 +0000 perry http://www.evansink.com/?p=258 I’m not sure if John Battelle started the momentum with his “Twitter=YouTube” prognostication, but that catchphrase now sits alongside dozens of high profile blog posts hailing the arrival of the new 2.0 messiah, suggesting even a fundamental threat to Google.  So, is this just more valley wagging or something more?

twitter: much (much) more than “what am I doing now”

image credit

It’s too easy to be dismissive of Twitter as simply an extraction of the “status update” that became the backbone of social interaction at Facebook. While the concept originated with this, it has rapidly evolved into THE place where an increasing flock of consumers AND publishers post real-time information (over 6 million users, currently).  More importantly, it’s the place where consumers congregate to consume and converse around this eclectic treasure trove of real-time information. It’s a noisy, disorganized commons, yet it feels very much the place to be.

Increasingly, you’re seeing Twitter capturing a pivotal role in content distribution, threatening to siphon the traffic position of consumer portals, newspaper websites and RSS feed readers in consumer’s news consumption habits.  Most major publishers and bloggers now immediately push content updates to Twitter as soon as the information goes live.

Might this become as impactful as to challenge Google’s dominance in Search?  Pfft, of course not.  However, as John Battelle suggests with his analogy of YouTube – it’s capturing a new dimension of consumer content consumption and participation that is drawing very real momentum.  Google doesn’t capture real-time content of any scale today, and it certainly does not feel like a conversational medium capable of engaging the consumer-consumer conversational thread.

Like YouTube, Twitter’s underlying financial model is yet to be demonstrated.  I suspect, like all conversational applications (Chat, IM, Facebook,…) ads running alongside conversations will appear as distractions, and under-perform compared to commercial search.  However, also like YouTube, Twitter’s position seems to be forming into a critical new dimension of the media landscape. Undoubtedly, the big boys are onto this, and are actively considering “taking it out” before it gets snapped up by someone else. The synthesis and leverage of the growing “conversational knowledge base” is definitely a part of the appeal of Twitter’s position.

The debate over the underlying revenue model of Twitter is driving a feeding frenzy of blogger speculation, and even triggering open competitions for the best proposal.  The founders promise it’s around the corner, and the outcome of this will be very instructive as to “where might Twitter go?”.

twitter and local media

Greg Sterling makes an interesting case for Twitter as a working example of  “social directory assistance“. Essentially, the concept is to ask a question of your followers, and receive near real-time opinions from your circle of friends.  Unlike Facebook, where your “friends” are a filtered and approved list, Twitter differentiates itself by the fact that anyone can become an interloper into your postings.  I’d guess that I probably only know 20% of the people who follow me on Twitter, versus 100% of FB friends. We are seeing very dramatic follower volumes with celebrities and celebrity VC’s. To me, extrapolating the virtues of this real time “answers from your tribe” model works “for them but not me”.  While Twitter helps you build a larger tribe, the trust factor of “near strangers” is to be questioned. Most of my followers do not live/consume in the same locale as I do, so this leverage is further limited in local value. Very few consumers have the “tribe pull” to get anything but spotty answers to many local questions in this model, I’d posit.

Bridging the gap between “friends and neighbors” you’re seeing new Twitter-like services emerge with interesting potential, such as BrightKite (the product of a couple of Local Matters’ alumni!). This expanded tribe model perhaps makes the social directory assistance model more achievable.

Twitter zealots (hey, when your blog is called MrTweet, you know it’s a fan boy thing!) point to increasing anecdotal evidence of Twitter being employed by local businesses to drive tangible growth, such as this local coffee shop story. Added participation by merchants and a growing cadre of “coupon tweet” start-ups are fueling this buzz.

I certainly am a big believer that the world of real time promotions will be reinvented in the next decade, and it will be founded on social and conversational media. However, whether this logically fits into the Twitter delivery model it a very big TBD.

ginzu steak knife or swiss army tool?

Today, the tech world is granting Twitter the birthright to a world of possibilities.  However, as succinctly pointed out by Tim O’Reilly, the simplicity of Twitter is a very key ingredient to it’s success. The bright shiny world of possibilities most commonly buckle under the real life challenges of morphing from simple products to major ecosystem players.

Perilous navigation is definitely ahead, as Twitter expands into the search dimension of real time conversations, deals with the overwhelming noise of commercial models and choking spam, and contemplates a platform role.  Wherever it ends up, it’s the deserved poster child in one of the most important dimensions of online consumer behavior.

Twitter demands careful attention and active participation.

]]> http://www.evansink.com/2009/03/twitter-the-new-thing/feed/ 0 http://www.evansink.com/2009/02/is-google-the-conversational-nerd/ http://www.evansink.com/2009/02/is-google-the-conversational-nerd/#comments Fri, 20 Feb 2009 13:08:03 +0000 perry http://www.evansink.com/?p=232

The more I immerse myself into the world of conversational technology, the more clear it seems to me that it best exists on a different plane from Search.  I’m increasingly convinced that Google wants to treat conversations as a means of parsing and ingesting conversational questions into a search answer. Converting right-brain exploration into left-brain challenges of synthesis and order – as if the entire point of a conversation is to derive an answer to a question.

Perhaps we have the proverbial nail-hammer mindset in action.  I’ve characterized Google in the past as the awkward nerd at a party.  You know the type.  A tad desperate to fit in socially, invariably trying too hard to win over the guests with encyclopedic interjections.   The conversational nerd rarely fits in, as he tries to complete every conversation with a “best answer” completion of a dialog, versus a participatory comment.

The beauty in conversations revolves around serendipity and discovery – free-wheeling dialog where questions are often answered that were never really asked.  A tremendous amount of knowledge is developed through collaborative discovery; conversational technology seems to hold the unique promise to ignite this knowledge development.  However, the phraseology of search seems ill-fitted to the party. It’s damn frustrating for someone who generally knows more to step back and let a conversation meander.

Yet, how often does the conversational nerd get invited back?

After just reading a GoogleBlog post from the SVP of Product Management, I couldn’t help but to add-on to this post, with a few select quotes that continue to build a profile of how Google looks at conversations.  I’m not one to quote ValleyWag, but their title “The Height of Google’s Hubris” seems very fitting.

From this “state of the world” posting from Google Senior Management.

…We won’t (and shouldn’t) try to stop the faceless scribes of drivel, but we can move them to the back row of the arena….

…No one argues the value of free speech, but the vast majority of stuff we find on the web is useless. The clamor of junk threatens to drown out voices of quality….

…Putting the power to publish and consume content into the hands of more people in more places enables everyone to start conversations with facts. With facts, negotiations can become less about who yells louder, but about who has the stronger data. They can also be an equalizer that enables better decisions and more civil discourse….

To me, this seems to reinforce the way Google views mainstream conversational media: the majority of what everyday people have to say is “drivel” that deserves to be sent to the “back row of the arena” while “voices of quality” are pushed forward.  Pretty illuminating commentary from the guy in charge of products.

image credit: motherjones.com

Somehow, the time feels right for some fresh/absurd, Hail Mary thinking when it comes to evolution in the troubled Local Media landscape.

When I look at the problems infecting two major sectors of local media  – newspapers and yellow pages – an idea springs to mind.  Try it on…

Slam them together into one integrated local media business.  Collapse redundant distribution and operations, re-align and trim the sales forces. Infuse the newspaper’s strength with promotion and retail into the scalable SEM/search infrastructure of the YP channel.  Construct a true local consumer portal and promotion channel that has local search and promotion embedded throughout.  Trim out the low-value display ad junk and create real local shopping applications that generate leads and solve consumer problems.

In the off-chance that you’re still reading, perhaps I can explain my thinking a bit more.

Newspapers have a deep infrastructure for collecting and publishing local content for consumers. Sure, there are increasing content challenges, but consumption of online newspapers continues to rise, their share of local usage is deep, and the brand is still meaningful to mainstream consumers.

The problem with newspapers is their defunct revenue model.  Newspapers simply don’t have the business foundation to sustain a position in the future local media landscape.

Yellow Pages print and distribute a publication whose relevance to consumers is systematically deteriorating. Yet, they are fundamentally succeeding in becoming a dominating agent for hundreds of thousands of local advertisers in commercial search, and are beginning to execute on the key growth segments of mobile and video.

If you take the traffic generating foundation of the newspaper industry, and combine it with the revenue and sales engine of YP, you may just have a sustainable ecosystem that can invest more in local online publishing, make commercial use of scads of truly local content, and actually sustain a viable local media publishing empire.

The Newspaper Picture

Newspapers have a terminally ill business model.  Feel good placebos continue to be dished out, but the effects of the disease have become so apparent that it’s not worth discussing anymore.  The classified ship has sailed, and the remaining ad math simply does not compute.

Newspapers missed Search, and the resources/effort required to catch up is fantasy league fodder – investment capital is non-existent.

The Yellow Pages Picture

Yellow Pages is not, and never was, a true consumer publishing business.  It is an amazing engine for selling, placing and distributing local advertising.  The utility and performance of the websites owned and operated by YP businesses is floundering, and long-term sustainability carries very real risk.

YP publishers did not miss the search shift.  The channel and tools are being systematically constructed for selling ad products into a scaled network of owned & operated properties, partner sites, and SEM-based distribution.

The Combined Business Case

The newspaper publishing infrastructure is something to build on. Yellow Pages has a viable business model as a scaled local sales channel, but their future as a consumer publisher is open to debate.

The improved margin that comes with owned/operated consumer traffic is critical to the composite business case. If YP cannot sustain this role, it risks a continued margin erosion to “channel-only” margins.

Add to this the fact that newspapers have the best current ad position in retail and promotion-based ad spending.  As these budgets are morphing into lead gen packages in online and mobile media, working from the newspaper’s pole position further sweetens the synergies.  Newspapers have the relationship, but lack the products/distribution infrastructure; YP fills in the blanks.  In a down economy, measurable promotions will be one of the most promising elements of online advertising.

Could this effect happen any other way? Sure, in theory, but I think you have to look inside the fabric of these organizations.  The DNA of a newspaper is editorial and promotion centric, and the DNA of Yellow Pages is sales and distribution based.    The pressures on both of these business make it enormously difficult to be championing reinvention investments from the inside.

Hey, isn’t it more fun to read wedding announcements than obituaries?

So….is this scenario really THAT far-fetched?