Confronting insurmountable opportunities

Jeff Jarvis: Relationships not Communication or Content

Jeff Jarvis poked at an interesting thread on Saturday.  He started disassembling the value of Internet media, stating that:

(information + aggregation) / trust = relationships

What's he trying to say?  Well, I'd suggest reading him rather than taking my word for it, but here's my interpretation:

That useful Internet media requires aggregating a comprehensive set of data / listings / news, surrounding that data with information to provide context for those listings, then allowing users to sort the information (and therefore the core listing) based on attributes that define trust.  Delivering this set of value will allow the reader / searcher to form a relationship with the lister / creator. 

I think Jeff's on the right track here.  And it links to a post Chris Anderson made back in February (more on that soon-ish - need to structure my thoughts a bit more).  However,  I think there's more to be said here than Jeff's equation.

Michael Parekh on Commerce and Community

Michael Parekh (ex-Goldman Sachs internet analyst - used to be fairly influential in his day) put together a really good post about what an Amazon blogging service would look like.  This repurposes and re-imagines a lot of the stuff I'd put together at the end of last year re: Amazon's problems with community.  As opposed to my POV - which was that Amazon, as a retail store, will never have the ability to cross over into the community space in a real way because it's brand will be a barrier -   Parekh seems at give Amazon the benefit of the doubt, and feels they have real, leveragable community assets. 

 

Regardless of whether Parekh or I are right about Amazon's brand, his points I believe, can easily be transferred to what portals can do in the shopping space.  For instance, the following snippet seems like something that portals should have done on launch of their blogging services:

"Now what if you could give the reviewer/blogger a piece of the action on a purchase, that was automatically credited to your Amazon account?  Why, this would be like something TypePad has done, in partnership with online ad company Kanoodle, where TypePad/Six-apart Pro bloggers like myself, who are paying a monthly fee, could get any ad-related dollars to credited against their monthly payment."

 

Of course, that integration does encourage click-fraud, so a more realistic end-result would / will be a conversion based revenue share approach.  But, this clearly could be done, and done quickly. 

 

How would this benefit a portal?  Well, the second link in Google's results for "Bell motorcycle helmet" is a review.  The first result under "Canon a70" is a review.  These reviews all serve to qualify traffic and drive into transactional media.  The potential upside in terms of SEO is significant (of course, only if the portal manages to optimize these reviews properly).

LinkedIn makes two moves

So, LinkedIn continues to hum along.  Yesterday they announced a "groups" feature.  Will it work?  It puts them in competition with SelectMinds.  It's certainly an interesting move.  And it's one that the folks at  CorporateAlumni.com both foresaw and probably are anguished over.  Where SelectMinds and LinkedIn continue to make strides, CorporateAlumni has languished on life-support.  Is it good to have your strategy validated (well, perhaps it's premature to say that) after you've thrown in the towel?

Additionally, LinkedIn also announced the some interesting search enhancements.  SiliconBeat breaks it down with metaphors.

eBay beats the street, Yahoo subscriptions are up

So, what does it mean when eBay revenues are up and Yahoo subscriptions are up?   Is it a sign that consumers continue to invest time in the web?  Perhaps continuing notice that web applications are the future, as opposed to Internet "media".  Are web applications and Internet media the same thing?

Why brands will mean more, but ownership of a brand will mean less

Chris Anderson makes some great points about the difficulty of owning the exclusive franchise for a brand.  He also references Surowiecki's and Hagel's arguments.  At core, the idea  is that the number of brands will explode - not that they will get less  important, but that the number of truly huge brands will decline.  Instead,  certain brands will have followers, and tastemakers will continue to drive  product choice.

Does this mean that product will become less important?  No.  But it does  mean that securing the right distribution at the right time will become more  difficult.  Instead of Nikes, you might need Pumas tomorrow.  And when you start  talking to Puma, everyone now wants K Swiss.  Suddenly, the Nike exclusive is  less valuable, since it's two cycles ago.

Where value can be captured and defended is in being the media filter,  creating the relationships to the tastemakers / trusted agents, and helping to  drive choice across a truly comprehensive set of products.

I wonder - does this have any connection to what the Yahoo! Shopping guy was talking about?

BW: The Power of Us All

Look at BusinessWeek, stealing the eBay tagline. Well, despite that, they've penned a good overview article on internet-based collaboration / social media and how it is reshaping various industries. Jams a bunch of stuff in, doesn't all fit, but creates a good starting place for discussion. Also amazing is that BW has created a "comments" section for its articles and is now not only allowing comments but hosting them on the same page as the article. Stunning turn. Of course, this stuff has been around forever online, but impressive that BW has taken this step. Welcome to 1997.

ComparisonEngines interviews Y! Shopping GM

Really insightful interview, with some hints / specifics on Yahoo's strategy. A couple of excerpts for you here:

"We currently have 250,000 merchants and 60m products" ... “Looking forward, there will be more focus on personalization and community. Yahoo has 350mm users globally and 150m registered users. We’re making a big bet on community with services like Yahoo! 360. We’ll spend the next 2-4 yrs building out community features and it will factor into the shopping experience."

...

"Search technology is the key. Inktomi, Altavista, Fast, and Overture have found their way into Yahoo! Shopping. But Yahoo! Shopping is just a 1st generation vertical search platform. Shopping search will come to mean a lot more than just products, but when you’re in shopping mode [no matter what the product or service], you want access to experts, guides, and content. Shopping search 2.0 involves things like wikis and blogs.”"

... “There are 2 uniquely qualified companies in the space; Yahoo and Google. In order [for a pure play comparison engine] to get scale, they have to ride the search bandwagon.

... “There’s a strong browsing component of the shopping experience. Walmart, Amazon, and pure retailers have done better than aggregators. We’ve done the best on the shopping side. People like browsing because they like the discovery process.” ... “We have an offshore group in Bangalore extracting attributes. But categorization goes beyond the attributes. It’s also about what kind of merchandising elements you have on the site, what kind of graphical media. ... “In the future, we hope to do more merchandising in the soft categories; an area that we have to get better at. We’ll rely on our partners on the merchandising front as they are the experts.”

As you can see, long interview, but well worth it if you're interested in vertical search.

Arizona school becomes "laptop only"

To me, this is a really "out there" experiment. At some level, it's not so crazy to me - almost everything I read is electronic anyway. But, when I was a kid, it was certainly all about books. Or rather, all about paper. With paper, there was highlighting. Taking notes in the margin. Doodling. Writing my name on the top of the book. I guess kids can put stickers on their laptops now.

(From Engadget and Rafe Needleman)

Other side of SimplyHired / LinkedIn deal

Not really careers, but the integration of Spoke into Salesforce is, to me, the other side of the Linked In / Simply Hired integration. Instead of a jobs service, Spoke is now integrated into a CRM type solution. Could easily see Linked In doing a similar type deal, tho they seem to be more consumer (rather than B2B) centric at the moment.

HotJobs starts crawling other job postings, Jobster buys WorkZoo

Charlene's got a good response to the Yahoo/HotJobs announcement that they've started crawling other sites and including those job postings in their listings. I think her take is dead-on, and in fact wrote something similar last week. Here's her money quote (IMO):

The result: Look for the emergence of what I call "social classifieds", where the ability to connect people to each other will be the hallmark of success. In a world where listings are a commodity and easily crawled, the true differentiation will be the quality of the experience. It is for this reason that Jobster's model will ring true, and why Yahoo! 360 and MSN Spaces will be core to the success of their respective classified strategies. Google may have the best technology around, but it's Achilles’ heel will be its lack of a robust social network.

Interesting to note:

• Yahoo has HotJobs and Yahoo 360 and has already demonstrated social search capabilities
• Monster has Monster.com and Tickle Social Networking
• SimplyHired has a partnership with LinkedIn
• Jobster acquired WorkZoo

The first round of Social Networking was around personals. The next seems to be a jobs applicatoin. Can some implementation of Mark Pincus' vision at Tribe.net be far behind?