One talk worth sharing because in the difference in perspective is by anthropologist Genevieve Bell from Intel Corporation. As opposed to viewing data as something that is gathered and stored in a data farm, Genevieve asks ‘who is data and if it was a person who would it be like?’ to better understand the personality traits of data.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nvn_l_Vh3hw

There are eight traits of data according to Bell:

1. Data resists being ‘digital’ and represents real things.
2. Data loves a good relationship and is social.
3. Data has a country – location / context is important.
4. Data is feral – privacy, security, beyond control.
5. Data has responsibilities – telling story comes with responsibility to tell it with the right spirit.
6. Data likes to look good – people lie about themselves to make them look best to others (100% of people lie in US online dating profiles).
7. Data does not last forever – ramifications on design.
8. There will always be new data.
9. What if we design for data the way we design for people?

The points listed provide a summary but you’ll get most value watching the video.

Technorati Tags: Data, Mobile Mesh, Web2.0

Credit Score Site

Technorati Tags: Coupon Promotion, Daily Deals, Online Coupons

In an interview at NExTWORK, Sean Parker accounts for the MySpace decline in part due to the bad design and the fact that the user experience on MySpace was ‘fraudulent’ and ‘virtual’. According to Parker, “people (with profiles) were putting their best foot forward living in a fantasy world of their own construction” and the virtual self on MySpace did not accurately represent the real self. Facebook as a smaller player at the time won because the experience and people’s identity was more real.

In the same interview I was interested in Parker’s views on product suggesting that you don’t want people using your product because it’s ‘cool’, because then it’s a fad, and that what you want is “people using your product because it’s a part of their life and they can’t stop using it”.

Listening to Parker made me think about another more recent company that has captured attention in 2011 due to its phenomenal growth and promise…

So is Groupon different to MySpace?

1. MySpace design issues meant that Facebook could beat them with a better product. Do the design issues of the Groupon  business leave them exposed to competitors with better design? By design I’m referring to business trading terms, ease of competition, loyalty concerns, sustainability of deep discounts and margins.
2. Do people (including businesses) use Groupons because it’s cool or because it’s part of their life and they can’t stop using it.

My view is that the Groupon model fails on both of these questions.

By design Groupon relies heavily on a large and expensive sales force to attract businesses, and marketing spend to attract more users to their network. They also rely on significant margins from deals sold of up to 50% and let’s not forget about the loyalty to their brand.

The problem is Groupon has competitors in every market and the result is, the cost to acquire a new customer is increasing rapidly, it’s getting more expensive to attract businesses with new deals, and their margins for each deal are being reduced. Studies are also raising questions around business loyalty with less than half of businesses that run daily deals saying they would run another daily deal and of those remaining, the majority of businesses would be open to promoting on ‘many’ daily deal sites. There are also issues around consumer loyalty with migration of some customers to deal aggregator sites indicating the loyalty is to the deal on offer at that time, as opposed to the daily deal network.

Todays sale of MySpace would have been hard to believe back in 2005. There are things that they could have changed back then that would have seen them maintain their position as the leading Social Network. My view is that Groupon are in a similar position and their future will depend on their ability to adapt to the current challenges with the design of their business model…their ability to provide something that businesses and users can’t live without.

Technorati Tags: Daily Deals, Groupon, MySpace, Sean Parker

• There is little differentiation between daily deal sites making it difficult for any of them to stand out from the others.
• Loyalty by customers using daily deals is poor with 35.9% spending beyond the deal and only 19.9% returning.
• Less than 50% of businesses in the study were likely to do a daily deal again. The number of restaurants , bars and salons being well below that number.
• Almost 3/4 of the businesses would consider promoting with a different daily deal provider.

The author concludes that over the next couple of years deal providers will need to settle for lower margins and cost of acquisition will also increase. To see the full report click here.

Technorati Tags: Daily Deals, Groupon, Living Social

Gamification relates to the emerging use of  ’game play’ in business systems. A really interesting area that is driving the rewards and business models of successful online and mobile companies. It’s not just the collection of ‘badges’ as in Foursquare, but to do with the process you use to engage with your customers the moment they interact with your business or service.

Gabe Zichermann was one of my highlights and he spoke about how game thinking is used to motivate users, solve problems and engage. Some of his game tips are as follows:

• Everything in gamification should be by design, nothing to chance.
• The first 60 seconds on your website is the most important, so make it a tightly scripted experience. This goes to the question ‘What is the one thing you want people to do on your page?’
• Once the user performs the first action with success, give them another action followed by another success message and make them doing what you need/want them to do fun.

Loved the talk and if you are interested in the topic take a look at Gabe’s website.

Our discussion panel includes:

Slade Sherman, CEO, Myzerr.com

Mike Knapp, Co-Founder, Shoes of Prey

Billy Tucker, CEO Cudo

Paul Marshall, Lasoo

If you are coming along to Ad:Tech and would like a discount, I have been given a speaker discount code – ATSPC – gets you a 20% discount. Click on the image below to book.

Technorati Tags: Ad:Tech, Cudo, Lasoo, Shoes of Prey, Social Couoons, Social Media

Groupon:

Groupon bands thousands of users together to get bulk discount deals from local businesses in various cities. They have managed the most successful execution of this strategy to date and have become profitable by taking a cut from each business that offers goods or services on the site. The ability for Groupon is to tap into the concept of ‘collective buying power’ is very valuable and makes Groupon a great company.

While Groupon are very good at using social media tools to build their database, they are not a social network and their growth is limited by a number of factors. Firstly, there are reportedly over 150 competitors to Groupon and copying the model is as easy as putting on sales people in a city and developing the software (I have heard of developers quoting under $5000). Secondly, because there is only one deal per day per city, the deal is based more on what offer the advertiser of the day has and this doesn’t necessarily apply to ‘me’. Finally, as a web business their network growth is tied to theiractivity and the principle of Metcalfe’s law does not apply. So in my opinion their long term value is limited by these factors of ease of competition, relevance and limited exponential growth opportunity.

Fourqsuare:

Foursquare is a location-based game and social networking website for mobile devices. Users “check-in” at venues on their mobile handset and they are then awarded points and sometimes “badges” for their activity. The company has received much attention because marketing campaigns with popular brands like Starbucks that allow for special offers and coupons to be promoted to users. In addition to benefits like checkin validation, in-store redemption, businesses can view stats on visitors and get detailed breakdown of their activity.

When compared with Groupon I believe that as a social network, Foursquare have a much brighter future. Their value is in the database of “check-in” activity and the ability potential advertisers will have to target promotions based on this activity. Like Facebook they do face issues around privacy and the use of this information, but the ability to promote time sensitive special deals liked to location is highly valuable provided deals are relevant to the user. When assessing long-term business value, (1) it’s difficult to copy Foursquare as their value is in the network and the “check-in” activity, (2) because of the volumes of data being collected, the promotions in Foursquare will have greater user relevance and (3) as a social network there is much greater opportunity for exponential growth of their network.

One limitation of Foursquare is the low average age of its’ users. As a consumer in my 30s i can think of many of my peers who “check-in” and use their service but with over a million checkins each day I’m sure that they are happy with their niche in the market.

Technorati Tags: Foursquare, Groupon, Local Business

Six months prior to the Alice.com launch they started using social media, company blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube to connect with a list of key influencers.

Lead by Rebecca Thorman, the company developed a community of loyalists by targetting mom and frugal bloggers who provided input during the pre-launch phase and then on launch brought attention and grassroots credibility to the service.

The Alice team also offered incentives like discounts and coupons to select bloggers, so they could extend incentives to their readers to try the service.

In the first week after launch, Alice received 110 pieces of unique coverage and nearly 70,000 tweets. In early June, the pre-launch Alice.com site had 170,000 site visits — before anyone could even use the service.  At launch time in July, Alice.com’s traffic jumped to nearly 400,000 site visits.

All pretty amazing when you consider that Alice does not invest in advertising — this was all grassroots Social Media Marketing.

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

Technorati Tags: Alice.com, Social Media Marketing, Web2.0 Expo

Five lessons from Web2.0 land:

1. Get your product out there; the common message from presenters is that it’s better to launch your website and get user feedback even if you feel your app isn’t perfect.
2. Location location; the launch of the iPad and many new mobile computing devices is opening up a host of new location-based services. Knowing what you do and where and when you do it, presents new and exciting opportunities around behaviorally targeted advertising. The most important part is ensuring buy in from the consumer.
3. Embrace Open API’s; Saw a great talk by Sam Ramji discussing the importance of having API’s to allow your services or brand to be sold through other websites. In his talk Sam talks about how retail outlets like Nike, The North Face and Maytag grew their businesses by allowing other successful retailers to sell their products. He then draws parallels to how an effective Open API strategy can have the same results for emerging Web2.0 sites.
4. Effectiveness of Social Media marketing; I saw a talk by Alice.com on how they used social media and blogging to generate enormous traffic in the lead-up to their launch. A good example of companies now using grassroots social media marketing to build a brand.
5. Have a great product and deliver value; all the most popular applications offer real value over incumbent solutions. The simplest rule in business still applies.

Technorati Tags: Web2.0Expo

Not much more to add…just have a read!

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Technorati Tags: eBook, Seth