Master of 500 Hats

CommunityNext July 14th: VIRAL... Catch the Fever!

Noah & team are at it again...

the Next CommunityNext conference is coming up July 14th:

VIRAL: from Zero to 10 Million Users

schedule here, event on upcoming here.

help spread the fever... er, word.

CSS: not just for web designers (Let's Make Love + Off the Hook, by Cansei de Ser Sexy)

... and now for something completely different.

Cansei de Ser Sexy (Portuguese for 'tired of being sexy'), aka CSS, demonstrates it's still ok to Make Pop Not War:

Let's Make Love and Listen to Death From Above

Off the Hook

background info: wikipedia entry on Cansei de Ser Sexy (aka CSS), the CSS myspace page, the official CSS website, plus CSS Flickr pix... yummy.

also recent review of CSS by Gary Flockhart at Scotsman.com, including last year's concert tour finale where the lead singer disrobed song-by-song, one piece of clothing at a time, then stagedived butt-naked into a crowd of her screaming, adoring fans.  gotta love that kind of moxie.

E-commerce 2.0, or How the New New Mom & Pop Shop will beat the crap out of Wal-Mart

Jeremy Liew at Lightspeed Venture Partners just wrote an interesting post on E-Commerce 2.0 that describes how the various pieces of retailer logistics & supply chain are being web-enabled.  According to his Jeremy, now is a great time to be starting an internet retailer business -- startup costs are low, tech skills rqmts aren't high, and there are lots of great tools that enable a small team (or even individual) to run an online operation.  the playing field has been leveled, and almost anyone can jump in.

Having occasionally dabbled in E-Commerce at PayPal and also in the late 90's with my own small consulting firm, i'd have to agree we've come a long way since the birth of internet commerce perhaps 10-12 years back.  And my guess is he's right -- the opportunities both vertical & horizontal are plentiful, the tools are very good, and the technology & capital required are minimal. 

However, for those same reasons i wonder: are these really venture capital deals?  Feels more like a lot of $500k-$5M businesses that require only a small business loan, or perhaps an angel investment.  Probably not much more than $5-25K to get started, and if you play it right you could be cash-flow profitable in a few months, certainly under a year.

I guess if you really want to build to scale, it might still require a large marketing budget to create a competitive brand, and maybe that's where the VCs come in -- or perhaps, an eBay or Amazon corp venture fund?  I'm always puzzled none of the big internet retailer platform companies have started venture arms to invest in their areas of interest / expertise.  Seems like a missed opportunity.  Altho they're active on the M&A side, and Amazon has been doing some amazing things with EC2 & S3, feels like they could all be getting in the game (and helping stimulate growth of their own platform) by investing in startups aligned with their business. 

I briefly looked into getting a small $25-50M fund started at eBay before i left in 2004, but even though there was already a strategy group doing a lot of technology research & evaluation, i couldn't seem to interest anyone in putting money where our mouths were.  And yet, eBay seems very active on the buy side.  Guess they'd rather pay $200M-$2B for a few known quantities than to build 100 ventures @ $200K-$2M a pop.  i think they were wrong to not start a fund, but eBay has always been pretty conservative... perhaps that's the cultural DNA that results from being a monopoly for so long.  oh well.  in general i think their acquisitions have been good ones, if occasionally a bit expensive.

Still, corp & venture strategy aside -- i'd say this is a great opportunity for the Mom & Pop Shop 2.0 to fight back against Wal-Mart with all the advanced internet tools & supply chain optimization now available.  Rather than trying to build swing-for-the-fences $500M e-commerce ventures, i think now is a great time to be building small $1-10M internet businesses with laser-like focus on just one product line or vertical.  Focus on something very narrow & specific, and then beat the hell out of the competition by simply doing it better than anyone else.  I call this strategy "niche to win", and i think it's a great way for little guys to kick ass.  Here's hoping they do :)

Search & Social Media: Designing for the 3rd & 4th browsers

[apologies in advance for the long-winded post... if you want to cut to the chase, just read this brilliant post on writing social media headlines by Muhammed Saleem of Pronet Advertising]

This week i was up in Seattle attending the SMX Search Marketing Expo, hosted by Danny Sullivan.  The conference was excellent, and other folks cover it in greater detail than i can provide here.  It will be no surprise to me if SMX eclipses SES in a year... Danny really is the man when it comes to the search biz.

But strangely enough, it was at a conference focused on SEARCH where i think i've finally started understanding the impact that SOCIAL MEDIA (social networks, blogs, videos, DIGG, etc) is having on marketing... in the same way that 4-5 years ago, i think i started understanding the impact that SEARCH was having on marketing. 

Now i know that sounds kind of stupid, since with all the MySpace, YouTube, and Facebook hoopla over the past year or two, everyone and their grandmother should realize social media is important.  hell, i've been geeking out pretty hard on social networking since around 2001 when Ryze got started by Adrian Scott... so why am i only bringing this up now?   Well if you know me at all you probably know i'm kind of a Web 2.0 idiot-savant (or at least the first half of that anyway).  I usually have my head up my ass on all sorts of geeky subjects YEARS before i really understand what the hell i'm talking about -- it took me ~7 years to "get" e-commerce, ~6 years to really grok email marketing, ~5 years to learn the difference between SEO & SEM, and maybe after 4 years i'm starting get a handle on RSS.  i try real hard to pretend i know blogs & widgets,  but i still don't fully understand the world of affiliate marketing, and perhaps in a few more years i might figure out prediction markets.  Eventually even a blind squirrel finds a nut, n'est-ce pas?

Well anyway, there was a comment by Danny combined with one of the SMX panels that really made me think about how the web is in the midst of significant transition.  hang in there with me a sec and i'll explain.

In one of the panel discussions it was mentioned how when people design websites, they tend to ignore search engines as one of the use cases / significant audiences.  i think Danny said something about "ignoring the 3rd browser"; meaning that people design specifically for IE and for Firefox, but then forget to design for search engine crawler robots, which are essentially a "third audience" of users. 

Of course it seems rather obvious that getting your website / webpages crawled & indexed by search engines can lead to a significant amount of web traffic, right?  Nothing new there, but still i remember a few years ago when i was at Simply Hired and we were working with an SEO expert on improving some of our techniques, and i suddenly had this "aha" moment... it was important to design webpages and HTML specifically for the major search engine crawlers, in order to get properly indexed.  In fact, you could even go so far as to provide a specific flow control statement to identify the search engine user agent, and construct engine-specific HTML to be read so as to properly identify links & paths to all the key pages in your site. 

Now this is probably old hat to geeks & designers familiar with search engines, but to me it was like a light went on in my tiny little brain... there was *ANOTHER* audience that i hadn't been thinking about.  You design for (1) IE users, you design for (2) Firefox users, AND YOU DESIGN FOR (3) THE SEARCH ENGINE USER AGENTS!  (*note: no disrespect to Opera or Camino or other folks... when the market share is there, same story).  Immediately i started thinking about webpages & design differently, and perhaps i finally started grokking a small piece of what SEO was about.

Ok, same thing happened in my head again... only this time, for social media.

There was another SMX panel on social media marketing & optimization (great topic & panelists, discussion summary here).  For folks in the search industry this was obviously some new territory, and most of the conversation was focused on how to use social media to do link distribution & link baiting, ostensibly to drive traffic from social media in the same way that SEO drives traffic from search engines.

However, what struck me was a parallel moment to the one i'd had around SEO a few years earlier... the impact of social media & social networks has become so significant, you should actually be designing a separate use case for your website & content around the social media audience... or to paraphrase Danny, you should be designing for the 4th browser.  while the meaning of "design" might be up for interpretation here, the "4th browser" is very real... it's Facebook, it's MySpace, it's YouTube, it's Flickr, it's Digg, and it's Twitter.  These audiences don't have a user agent crawling for interesting stuff -- rather, the audience *itself* is the communication medium for new memes & new information.  The People have become the Machine.

Thus, with the rise of this new 4th browser, there is a requisite change in thinking about the way we design, engineer, and market for the new web.  Ok, Rafer & Sawicki: now i agree with you.  There really is such a thing as SMO (Social Media Optimization).  Neil & Cameron & the guys over at ProNet Advertising have a headstart on the rest of us... we better catch up fast.

Facebook according to Sacks: It's the Social Graph, Stupid!

My ex-boss David Sacks (former COO of PayPal, occasional movie mogul, now Founder/CEO at Geni.com) has a pretty interesting take over on TechCrunch about the importance of the "social graph", and the momentum shift from search engines (Google, Yahoo) to social networks (MySpace, Facebook). 

Last week I ran into David when he was in town for the Facebook Platform launch, and i got to chat briefly with him about Facebook, Geni, and a few other notable social networks. So it was no surprise to see him editorialize his thoughts on TC: "The New Portals: It's the Bread, not the Peanut Butter".

Now I don't believe everything David says is correct, but he's a pretty brilliant guy and someone i'd never want to face across the table at either a poker game or a chess match.  Anybody who can get a $100M valuation on their second round of funding certainly deserves, as Ali G sez, my re-SPECK.  And David has proven twice before that he definitely knows how to make money. 

Much of his article focuses on how social networks use trust & relationships to produce higher-quality information, and why Facebook is becoming an incredibly valuable property not so much because of the content (aka "the Peanut Butter"), but because of the infrastructure built around the social graph (aka "the Bread").  No wonder Yahoo was interested to the tune of $1.5B; but as David notes... also no wonder either Facebook wasn't.  Unfortunately for Yahoo, they just don't have that kind of bread. (heh)

Bread & circuses aside, Mr. Sacks is likely correct that Facebook is quickly becoming THE dominant social network, and he even goes so far as to say Web 2.0 will be rebuilt in the image of Facebook:

The potential for Facebook to layer on any feature whose value increases with the participation of friends is an incredibly broad canvas for a portal. Moreover, as each new application gains acceptance, it enriches the overall value of the network and makes it incrementally more likely that the next application will be tried. Much of what we know as “Web 2.0″ will eventually be rebuilt on top of Facebook.

Pretty strong words, and a pretty big endorsement for Facebook Platform (other folks think so too).  While i don't believe Facebook will kill all other social networks, it isn't too hard to imagine them becoming the de facto "social" social network, and a very powerful platform for developing social applications.  Dave Morin and team over at Facebook have certainly created a great new opportunity for developers looking for a big pool to wade into.

Still, call me skeptical that Facebook will completely replace my "business" social network (LinkedIn), or my "family" social network (Geni), or my "photos" social network (Flickr), or my "porn" social network… er, ahem… ok, let’s just stop right there.  Anyway my point is I won’t always share all of my info in the same social network -- even if Facebook is the biggest one -- and there will likely be a "long tail of social networks" that provide niche content & context, in addition to the more popular ones like MySpace & Facebook & LinkedIn.  And altho i'm biased, I might suggest a service like Spock.com could be a useful way to track & manage all the different social networks in which people participate.

But i do think there is some truth to what David says about social networks providing a trust-based way to communicate higher-quality information:

Not only Digg, but virtually all Web 2.0 applications which are based on the wisdom of crowds can be reconceived as Facebook apps based on the wisdom (or trust) of friends. To the extent that these services cater to publishers who seek a mass audience, such as YouTube or Flickr, the social graph will not threaten their business. But to the extent they publish content intended for friends, or if the value of their service increases with the participation of friends, these applications face only two choices: get each user to recreate his or her friendship network on their own site or migrate their service to the Facebook platform lest someone else does it first.

While i might quibble about the interpretation of Surowiecki's Wisdom of Crowds in this context, i'd agree there is likely a method of combining social networks & prediction markets that enables powerful new ways to derive information from "vertical communities". 

In fact, I wrote an article on this topic last month for O'Reilly in Release 2.0 called "Channeling Crowds" (excerpt linked).  Whether or not this type of community occurs on Facebook or on other niche-focused social networks, there are whole new classes of websites & applications which can be created by using the community's social context as infrastructure.  And if i'm a betting man, my prediction is one of the more successful of these will be Geni.com.  (Best of luck, Mr. Sacks :)