Hidden Power of Online Forums As A Marketing Tool

I was at the Opsource SaaS Summit today and sat in on a preso from the Lithium SVP, Amy Lewis, who talked about the value of online forums to companies. Some of the key points were as follows.

Why have an online forum:

• Forum-ize your product line as part of your Web 2.0 marketing
  
• Forums can be used for customer support as well as for marketing
• Building a forum allows you to identify who your super users and because they are passionate, they represent a critical user group, a tribal base that are influencers.
• Consumer groundswell can be positive or negative which a forum can help manage. As a vendor, a forum allows you to be involved and make it a two-way dialogue and manage conversations happening on the blogosphere otherwise outside of your control.
• Communities can provide a powerful real-time vehicle:
• enhancing customer care
• enhancing brand loyalty
• providing support provided by users to users
• content is raw and unfiltered
• immediacy of great info
• value of having users talk to each other eg. customers share workarounds
• foster demand generation
• can serve as an online focus group eg. an setup private communities to help with product design
• value of happy comments being viewed by many users has a nice halo effect for branding
• professionalism and tone of forums have improved. Forum moderator should respond where appropriate and establish rules of conduct.
  
• ROI on support forums is a great place to start eg. call deflection
• suppport forum helps to build up critical mass
• lot to learn from customers

Social Network Usage Worldwide

The above chart identifies the leading social networks in selected high use countries worldwide. The chart shows the number of hours (in millions) users spent on social networks. Recent reports suggest that users are spending less time on social networks as a result of being bombarded by ads. However, the average time spent on Facebook continues to increase unabated, according to Hitwise. It stands at 21 minutes, 22 seconds (for the week ended Feb. 23) - 73% more than a year earlier. This is despite the fact that Facebook's market share of visits has dropped 27% from it peak reached in the week ended Dec. 29, 2007. According to the chart the top network by country were;

1. U.S. - MySpace
2. Canada - Facebook
3. India - Orkut
4. Japan - Mixi
5. Korea - Cyworld
6. Philipines - Friendster
7. Russia - Live Journal
8. Brazil - Orkut
9. Argentina - Metroflog
10. Portugal - Hi5
11. France - Skyblog
12. Ireland - Bebo

Google Now In The Biz Of Building Websites

Google would now like to help you build websites. The company has now added Google Sites to its Google Apps web office suite which allows end users and businesses to create websites. The was made possible by virtue of their acquisition of Jotspot some time back and the re-tooling of that app into this new site creation tool. Sites allow code-challenged users to build, customize, and oh yes search their websites. Users can centralize all types of information including videos and presentations and share their site with just a few people, across a company, or with the world.

"With only a few clicks, just about anyone will be able to quickly set up and update a Web site featuring a wide array of material, including pictures, calendars and video from Google Inc.'s YouTube subsidiary," said Dave Girouard, general manager of the division overseeing the new application. This is yet another attempt by Google to rival Microsoft Office and Sharepoint in this case. Dan Farber's blog over at Cnet provides this perspective: "Google now has a pretty good and easy web-page creator with some wiki features made user-friendly, and a half-hearted attempt at integrating the rest of the Apps empire using Sites. Perhaps they get it right in the next release."

A Look Inside Google Health

The doctor's in! In case you haven't seen it, here is what the much hyped Google Health interface is expected to look like.

Why is there Air - Bill Cosby versus Kevin Lynch

I know I'm dating myself, but Bill Cosby had a pretty funny routine where a PE Teacher explains that the purpose of air is to pump up basketballs and volleyballs.

Now Adobe has launched their Air product (with a matching Kevin Lynch NY Times article, and GigaOm fan dance) to allow platform to allow browser apps to escape from their little Firefox and IE prisons and flit gaily across the desktop like "real" apps.

Now what exactly are the benefits here? According to the NY Times article:

1. I can click an icon on my desktop instead of a bookmark in my browser. Yawn.
   
2. I can run an application without the browser border. Snore.
   
3. I can run an application offline. Now this is cool, but hardly new, following earlier moves by Google Gears, Dojo Offline and Mozilla Prism

Excuse me, but I prefer Bill's definition of why we need air.

As I have written, Air, Flex and Silverlight are"back to the future" approaches for Rich Internet Applications that would have us believe that the future of the web lies in a proprietary animation engine (Flash) or an ancient and proprietary fat client architecture (Silverlight).

At WaveMaker, we believe open-source toolkits like Dojo are the best enterprise Ajax choice a more flexible, open-source browser choice. To be fair, we in the Ajax community still have a lot of work to do to be truly ready to take on giants like Adobe and Microsoft - but that's where the power of the community can make a difference.

Speaking of community, you can come find out more about the the Dojo toolkit at the upcoming Visual Ajax User Group meeting. On Thursday, March 20 from 12-1:30 PST, Alex Russell, one of the co-creators of Dojo, will be talking about the Zen of Dojo - how to make Dojo development effortless for beginner and expert alike. Come in person or sign up for the webinar by sending email to rsvp@visualajax.org.

Rolling With Online Video

The majority of online video content viewed in the US is news/current events followed by jokes/bloopers/funny clips and movie trailers (previews, clips). Such videos are generally up to five minutes in length. But as David Hallerman, eMarketer Senior Analyst states, "as technology problems are solved, however, making the computer-television connection more viable and pleasurable for the average consumer, online video content will expand in both length and breadth, and professionally-produced material will account for a large part of the menu.” But until then, don't extend the length of your online videos because as a lean-forward technology, the web is second to TV for now "when it comes to elements such as convenience, control and the ability to easily find enjoyable content, TV video content wins out for relaxation, sharing the experience with friends and family and less annoying advertising than online."

When A Website Redesign Takes Flight

In the market for a helicopter?! Sikorsky Aircraft, a subsidiary of United Technologies Corp., announced the redesign of their website yesterday. When I came across this, what stood out for me is that the company seems to get what sometimes gets forgotten - that a company's website is a business tool and increasingly its "front door" to a global audience and the first experience many visitors have with your brand. As a result, they wanted to make the site a positive and memorable experience for visitors.

Given the product, it is kind of cool that they tried to mirror the offline experience online which can sometimes be tricky to do and given the medium, not always recommended. The company used a combination of video and Flash animation to bring the aircrafts to life by creating an interactive aircraft tour complete with a hangar and airfield, helicopters landing and taking off with all the sound effects, and a pilot describing them. You can get different views of the aircrafts and click on specific parts to get more info...simplified like buying a pair of jeans. They messaged their progress bars creatively; the labels were things like countdown, requesting landing clearance, and cleared for landing/takeoff. It's overall a very creative and unique way to sell such a complex product online effectively using rich media to create an interactive tv-like experience and taking design to greater heights.

Turbo Charge Your Search

Surf Canyon has released a tool that will improve your search experience and provide real-time personalization. The tool calculates instantaneous relevancies to queries and recommends pertinent search results.

The tool claims to:
1) Improve your search on Google, Yahoo! and MSN
2) Quickly locate relevant information that's buried deep within the search results
3) Provide real-time personalization based on user behavior

We have not had a chance to test drive this tool but if anyone has comments please do let us know.

Online Ad Networks Raise Big Money

Glam Media and Adconion Media plan to announce today the completion of new funding reports the Wall Street Journal. Investors have been pouring money into online ad networks that sell ads that appear on third party web sites as advertisers are looking for ways to reach target audiences.

Glam, based in Brisbane, Calif., has raised $65 million from investors to date. Glam plans to use the funding to expand its international operations and network of partner sites and to acquire other sites and advertising technology. The company is targeting revenue of $100 million this year and it is estimated to be valued at around $500 million, say sources. Glam displays ads own its own sites and on the web sites that are part of its ad network. The ads are targeted at women on topics such as style, entertainment and fashion. It also sells ads on more than 450 partner sites such as stylebakery.com and Premiere.com. According to comScore Glam reached 25 million U.S. users in January.

"Display advertising is a good area for investment because it's outpacing all other forms of traditional television and print ads as well as other areas of digital advertising in growth rates," says Samir Arora, Glam's chairman and chief executive.


Adconion, a U.K. based online ad network plans to announce that it has closed an $80 million investment. Adconion plans to use 25% of its new funding to expand its U.S. operations, 50% to invest in new technology and the rest for acquisitions. Founded in 2004, Adconion works with ad agencies and advertisers to sell ads that appear on about 350 Web publishers' sites, including the Drudge Report, Sony's video site Crackle, and Demand Media. According to comScore, the network of web sites where Adconion brokers ads reached 98.74 million unique U.S. visitors in January, or 53.4% of the U.S. Internet audience.

Goolag Unveils Tool To Hack Google

Goolag has unveiled a tool that should make Google hacking a easier for novices. The open-source software lets hackers use the Google search engine to scan web sites and sift through the mountain of data.

Goolag comes with an easy-to-use graphical interface. It is based on techniques developed by Computer Sciences Corp. researcher Johnny Long, a well-known computer hacker who has spent years documenting the way that Google's search engine can be used to uncover security vulnerabilities in the Web sites it indexes.

The group released a statement saying, "It's no big secret that the web is the platform... And this platform pretty much sucks from a security perspective... Goolag is a tool for web site owners to patch up their online properties."

Goolag is developed by The Cult of the Dead Cow, best known for creating the Back Orifice, which is a software that can be used to remotely control a Windows machine.

Martha Stewart Expands Online Empire

Today's good thing (actually Thursday's) at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia was the acquisition of a 40% stake in online wedding planning company, Wedding Wire. The union provides MSLO the opportunity to increase their digital footprint in the lucrative wedding business both on- and offline. Wedding Wire boasts a localized online wedding marketplace, planning tools, and a social community. "By investing in WeddingWire, we are assembling a robust online offering with a proven toolset to enhance our digital Weddings content and complement what is already the category's premier print magazine," said Wenda Harris Millard, President, Media, MSLO. "We are impressed by WeddingWire's superior online platform and see great opportunities to leverage its expertise across our Internet sites and bring similar tools and features to our other lifestyle content verticals. This is also a tremendous opportunity for our advertisers to reach couples engaged in the process of planning their wedding."

The media mogul's growing online empire is quite impressive. Her own site, MarthaStewart.com, is of course elegantly designed but also has a lot of Web 2.0 and new media features and capabilities that a lot of traditional tech companies lack. It is clearly designed for users and usage and around community building. It's a good thing!

Pakistan ISP Hijacks YouTube

The BBC is reporting that a censorship action by Pakistan led to a two hour YouTube global outage tonight. The BBC suggests this was possibly an attempt to keep Pakistanis from viewing YouTube videos that showed Danish cartoons deemed offensive to Islam, or a movie clip deemed offensive to Islam.

Google owns YouTube, and engineers there appear to have determined that the ISPs action corrupted the global DNS routing tables, making the site go dark for the entire world rather than just Pakistan ISPs.

Although the action is considered to be a mistake by the ISP, what remains of some concern is the degree to which sites appear vulnerable to actions by ISPs that are completely outside of their control. The DNS system represents a key aspect of the internet and appears more vulnerable to manipulation than many had thought.

Adobe Launches Platform For RIAs

Adobe announced today the launch of AIR and Flex 3 software for creating rich internet applications (RIAs) that can run on the desktop and on most browsers and across operating systems. "The ROI of RIAs is real. A more engaging product visualization experience in eCommerce applications for example, helps customers understand what they are buying, which leads to less online abandonment and increased average order size through cross-sell and up-sell visualization" according to Al Hilwa, Program Director at IDC.

Windows and Mac OS versions of AIR and Flex 3 and their SDKs can be downloaded for free at www.adobe.com/go/air and www.adobe.com/go/flex. The standalone version of the Flex Builder 3 is US$249 for the Standard edition and US$699 for the Professional edition.

Google Triggering Arms Race - Harpers

Harper's Magazine featured story "Keyword Evil: Google's addiction to cheap electricity" is about Google's infrastructure buildup in Oregon's Columbia River and how it has triggered an arms race. Microsoft, Yahoo and Ask are also building data centers on the Columbia River. As they compete to offer software, music and movies over the web in the coming era of of "Cloud Computing." Among other details, it points out that the plant is expected to use 103 megawatts of electricity by 2011 or enough to power a city the size of Tacoma. More>>

Computer Interface = Your Brain

Next Christmas I'd like an Emotiv headset, and I’m not even a gamer. This is the next generation of gaming controllers where you will control activity on the screen using signals you send from your *brain activity*.

I would suggest that the type of human to machine interaction this headset is designed to popularize is a fitting compliment to other research such as BrainGate where electrodes have been implanted directly in the brain.

This type of interface may be the beginning of what we’ll some day view as a profoundly significant era in humanity during which we increasingly merge with our own machines. Sure this sounds a bit creepy, but we’ve been integrating with machines for thousands of years.

In a fairly short time humans have transitioned from simple tool use such as spears and fashioned rocks to more complicated tools such as cars and computers. We’ve also made modest progress actually bringing tools into and onto our bodies. e.g. eyeglasses, contact lenses, corneal implants, prosthetics, cochlear implants for hearing. Emotiv style headsets are another such innovation, hopefully leading to devices where we may be able to bypass our sensory organs altogether.

CNET Reports on Emotiv over at the Crave gadget blog. Emotiv Website

Web 2.0 Sites - Who Is Really Commenting

I recently did an interview at our Web 2.0 Conference & Expo of members of the Web 2.0 user generation and uncovered an interesting finding. I asked five twenty-somethings if they commented on articles, blogs, and videos. Surprisingly, contrary to the belief that these young Web 2.0'ers are actively posting comments to blog posts they read and videos they watch, is apparently NOT the case. These young people apparently prefer to take a more passive approach as voyeurs rather than active participants. They might read blog posts and watch web videos and even read the comments but not necessarily add to them. One person said he might comment if there were a lot of comments and he really liked the story or video. Another said she would read her friend's blog to keep in touch and might post comments there. But they were not commenting on mainstream blogs or Youtube videos. As it turns out, they weren't commenting because they didn't like what they read or saw just that they didn't feel inclined to engage beyond that. They were happy to consume the content but nothing more.

This begs the question - who is really commenting on these sites?! If the so-called Web 2.0 user generation is not commenting, then who is? Commenting on most sites can be anonymous so if users wish to remain unknown they can. Other sites like Youtube, for instance, requires users to login before posting a comment but the commenters can use screen name aliases. What's also interesting is that most of the comments on these fun consumer sites are generally meaningless one worders or one-liners but the members of the user generation interviewed still did not comment.

These interviewees were not shy; they were outgoing and adventurous, some were Stanford students, and they all worked - most in high tech and a couple in the service industry. Their behavior seems to suggest that unless there is an element of familiarity/community or they felt engaged enough or felt strongly enough about something, these Web 2.0-ites simply do not comment.

Microsoft's New Attempt - SkyDrive

Wow! is this the same company that was sitting idle which Google reached US$200 Billion in market cap. Yesterday, there was the semi open sourcing of code for Windows and related applications and today SkyDrive. SkyDrive is Microsoft's online storage service. Microsoft launched the product last year giving user 500MB of free storage. Today the company announced that it is increasing that by 10 times to 5 G of free storage. Previously SkyDrive was only available in the U.S., U.K. and India. Today the service is being rolled out to 38 other countries.

SkyDrive competes with XDrive (AOL), Box.net, Twango (Nokia), Gmail (Google) and S3 (Amazon). Microsoft is eager to stem the tide of defections from Hotmail to Gmail, S3 and other online services. However, I feel the company is moving fast to stem this trend and make an announcement before Google comes out with GDrive and starts making noise.

SaaS - A Growing Trend in 2008

All things SaaS is a growing trend again. According to Accenture, software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is among one of the major trends occurring this year. "Software as a Service (SaaS) is emerging as a strong alternative to traditionally licensed software enabling new business models to buy and use software. Now, software is no longer a product to buy, but itself a service to use to deliver other services."

This model is not new. Since around the late '90s and onwards, the ASP or application service provider model of hosted web-based software solutions were all the rage. Of course, Gartner, McKinsey, and IDC and others have been predicting that Saas is a comeback kid for the last few years. In the early years, it may have been too much of a new new thing but some internet years later after this model has been more vetted, tried, and tested, the economic and business value are evident. The plug-and-play capability which allows for quick deployment and the cost savings of renting a service versus a costly outlay for purchasing software makes a lot of sense. And, for the big but - what about security?! That is a major concern for companies considering a SaaS solution - the security of their data and where it is being stored. Advances have been made in this area as well paving the way for SaaS to make a re-newed run for it in '08.

New from Google

Google is once again in the tech news today with two major product initiatives. The first is Google’s entry into the health records management business with trial recordkeeping at a Cleveland hospital. Although still in the testing phase it is clear that Google's ambition is to provide massive secure recordkeeping accessible to doctors, hospitals, and patients.
AP reports

The second Google development is adsense for video, yet another attempt to monetize video. Their last attempt, using YouTube advertising embeds, delivered abysmal results in small tests I ran and this result appeared to be confirmed when Perez Hilton’s huge celebrity site with millions of visitors had trivial revenue given the volume of downloads and views.
Perez has since switched to different advertising approaches.

Presumably Google has been learning from the poor YouTube system. Also probable that adsense will involve better targeting and probably better returns. That said, skepticism is called for here about finding a holy grail for video monetization. Unlike video, search keyword advertising offers the potential for good monetization of a person’s natural behavior - e.g. a search for camera information and camera deals also presents you with advertising you *want to see* because it’s relevant to your needs. It is much more difficult to get this virtuous cycle going with video or social networking, which to date remain pretty barren environments for advertisers.

Bungee Launches Online Web Development

Bungee Labs has released a service called Bungee Connect an on-demand service that helps developers build rich internet applications that can be hosted by Bungee.

The service includes wizards to simplify specific workflows for developers and it supports the ability to import code from different projects, style sheets and APIs. The service aims to slash the time and costs associated with the entire application life cycle.

"It's time to stop developing 'here' and running 'there.' Today, most applications are coded in one environment, then tested in another, and redeployed to yet another for production," said David Mitchell, Bungee's Founder and CTO.

Developers can use Bungee without charge to develop software, to collaborate with colleagues and to test applications. They are charged only when end users run an application that was built using Bungee. Charges range $2 to $5 per month per user for a heavily used business productivity application or fractions of a cent per e-commerce transaction.

January Search Rankings

In the January 2008 analysis of the Top 50 properties worldwide where search activity is observed, Google Sites led with 7.7 billion searches. Yahoo! Sites ranked second with nearly 2.5 billion searches, followed by Microsoft Sites (1.1 billion), and AOL LLC (903 million).

comScore Expanded Search Query Report January 2008 Total U.S. – Home/Work/University Locations Source: comScore qSearch 2.0
Expanded Search Entity	Search Queries (MM)
	Dec-07	Jan-08	Percent Change
Total Expanded Search	13,523	14,595	7.9%
Google Sites	7,165	7,735	8.0%
Google	5,651	6,181	9.4%
YouTube/All Other	1,514	1,554	2.6%
Yahoo! Sites	2,363	2,456	3.9%
Yahoo!	2,326	2,427	4.3%
All Other	37	29	-21.6%
Microsoft Sites	963	1,060	10.1%
MSN-Windows Live	927	1,024	10.5%
Microsoft/All Other	36	36	0.0%
AOL LLC	N/A	903	N/A
AOL	N/A	522	N/A
MapQuest/All Other	N/A	381	N/A
Ask Network	416	477	14.7%
Ask.com	238	286	20.2%
MyWebSearch.com/ All Other	178	191	7.3%
eBay	508	467	-8.1%
Fox Interactive Media	350	384	9.6%
MySpace	342