Kelsey Group puts on the Interactive Local Media conference every December.  While I’ve spoken at these events for Yahoo! in prior years, this time around I was happy to sit back and attend a few sessions.

It’s clear that local, mobile and social are coming together in very interesting ways.

Some takeaways from some of the panels and side conversations at the event:

• Facebook has over 900K fan pages for local merchants according to Backyard, a Facebook app provider that is set to launch.  While there are over 15mm local merchants domestically, many of these Fan Pages are concentrated in categories like restaurants and nightlife - so that coverage is actually pretty decent.  These pages are potentially disruptive to traditional “directory style” merchant profile pages.

• Kelsey Group estimates 9% of local businesses have a Twitter account.  It will be interesting to see what differences emerge for businesses as they build followers on Twitter and fans on Facebook.  One potential differentiation - Twitter for truly real-time updates (something happening now - like open late today, perishable inventory, big crowd watching the game here now). Meanwhile, Facebook might be more on the community building side of things - what do my friends think and recommend, who’s planning to go there when, etc.   Building a direct marketing channel to customers is different than playing in a community-based sandbox that happens to be about your business.  Facebook already allows admins for Pages to cross-post to Twitter. Read more »
  
  Related Links
  
  • Yahoo and Facebook Connect
  • ILM '09 Overview
  • SMB's Embracing Twitter

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I spoke about Maps and Local Search at SMX in early October.  SMX is the largest and highest profile event covering search marketing.  During the talk, I had a chance to discuss how Y! is driving more integrated consumer experiences between web search, local and maps.  In the past these  products acted like separate products.  In recent months, we have made some improvements towards converged experiences. 

A key example of this is the ability to see a map when you do a local search on Y! and then interact with business listings on that map.  For example, the user can select a business through the map markers and navigate through all the profile information, photos and reviews on the Map interface.  This happens without firing off a separate page or re-loading it.  On top of this, we add some powerful filtering options such as radial search, which allows a user to drag or alter the size of the search radius on a Map to sort results. 

There we some additional announcements in and around SMX like Google’s launch of fixed priced sponsored listings for Local queries.  Overall, this is a good development fo the market.  It reflects the simplicity that local and small businesses require in online marketing, as dynamic pricing and bidding are currently barriers for many local merchants.

Google spoke of its Local Business Center, which allow businesses to list their profiles on Google Maps at no cost — a service we’ve had for many years at Y!  Google also demonstrated Google Places, a way for users to add locations and POI’s.  Microsoft, which is making significant technical investment in the Maps area showed some bling bling - including high-res satellite imagery and 3D modeling on top of Maps.   Overall, the companies showed different but useful developments in location-based marketing and services.  We had everything from a consumer experience focus (Yahoo!) to real technology innovation (Microsoft) and user-generated content programs (Google).

There is indeed alot of ground still to cover in this sector of the web.  Some of our ideas at Y! at presented below.

Maps and Local Prezo at SMX

View more presentations from atifrafiq.

Read more »

• Google Local Business Center dashboard opens its doors
• Place Pages for Google Maps

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TC50 has been going on these last few days.  I attended on the final day of presentation which covered new apps in the Social Stream, News & Discovery and Commerce Marketplaces areas.

I love this event for the unbridled, youthful energy of the entrepreneurs and their followers.  For that rare and exciting idea, the momentum generating potential of success at the conference is huge.  Everyone here is networked and more important, willing to shout it out.  If something is compelling, it can catch fire quickly.

The hit rate on quality ideas appeared fairly low.  Are we nearing a trough for high impact web 2.0 ideas?  I think it’s a period for creating tactical businesses.  Those which fill a targeted need and do it well.  Ideas that leverage, or live within, the existing tidal waves — Twitter, Facebook and iPhone/mobile.  No game changers or companies who become verbs.   There are endless and growing number of opportunities in that domain.  I like concepts that package convenience around existing and emerging user behavior.  For example, there was a company that had a mobile app for ordering from concession stands in stadiums and venues.  The conference winner, Red Beacon, a referral and matching service for local services (plumber, personal trainer, contractor) intends to do exactly this albeit in a crowded space.  A related company that is launching which I think will do very well because of its market focus in Save Energy 123.  This site advises homeowners on energy-saving projects and matches them with local products and service providers. Read more »

• TC50 Winners
• Participating Companies

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Yesterday I appeared on Jason Calacanis’s web TV show, This Week in Start-ups.  You may already know Jason from his current gig as Founder of Mahalo and his successful start-up Weblogs, which AOL purchased. 

TWiT is a recent project by Jason and yesterday was Episode 8.  Last week his guest was a Microsoft exec discussing Bing.   

Our interview was focused on both my efforts at Yahoo as well my previous background in start-ups.  There were a few natural questions about the Local space like how we compare to Yelp and more broadly how Yahoo viewed Bing (short answer: it innovates and that’s good for industry).   We also touched on my experience as Founder and CEO of Covigna, an content mgmt start-up earlier in the decade (whew, time flies).   I enjoyed the few budding entrepreneurs who called in to ask questions.   People often ask me about working in a big company setting (I’ve spent time at AOL and Yahoo!) in comparison to start-ups.  Like I said on the show, entrepreneurship is a journey that might include various stops along the way.  It’s not a career path as much as it is a calling.  Besides that, you can find opportunity to innovate in big settings too.  Read more »

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If you’re an investor in Apple or just one of the many admirers of this iconic business, you may be closely following news about the health of Steve Jobs.  The cliché that people are a company’s greatest asset was literally demonstrated as this news surfaced — AAPL lost 5.7% of its value after his medical leave was announced.  Is this the beginning of the end for the company or just a period of transition during a time of continued leadership?  An opinion on the matter is vital to investors - should you be buying on unnecessary weakness or be gradually reducing your exposure?   To develop an informed opinion you’re going to have to do some diligence.

I’m going to offer an approach toward diligence that uses web connections to define key topics for your assessment.  Web connections are links between a story you’re following and the endless number of topics that exist in the world.  It may sound quite broad and unwieldy but there is a manageable structure we can put around the information possibilities.

Web connections allow us to explore these topics by the degree of their relatedness.  Think of it as swinging from vine to vine in a jungle of information.  You can build upon a topic of interest by knowing what else is connected to it rather than limit exploration by direct coverage of what you’re reading.”

What’s useful about these connections is they transcend the obvious information you will find collected in most articles or coverage about a story you’re following.   As I’ll explain later on, that’s not a knock on reporters but instead a natural limitation of what’s possible for any writer to cover in a single story.  Put another way, web connections extend our journey into and behind the story. Read more »

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I attended the Web 2.0 Expo last week, where Jonathan Zittrain spoke about his latest book – The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. It’s a big idea about the future of tech with constitutional implications.

The book is focused on the form the web takes as a computing platform with increasingly centralized characteristics. Zittrain believes the current trajectory of the web has the potential to spawn a network of control that has major societal and political impact. He believes centralization in the form of cloud computing is a natural outgrowth of increased human reliance on computing coupled with the risk of things like viruses and security threats. Centralized services clearly help users protect themselves in the wild world of “tethered” computing. Users will prefer the benefits centralized information services against having to manage these services on their own, which would be required under “localized” (client-based) approaches. To simplify the point, think about installing anti-virus software on computers. If your services are in the cloud, then securing those services becomes someone else’s problem. The pull to tether every variant of computing is so significant, that people will crave the stability of centralization. This entrusts the livelihoods of users to the giant e-sponge in the sky that someone else controls.

Reliance carries two principal implications. First, it furthers lock-down potential, which is the ability of a service provider to dictate rules of engagement for users and the technology ecosystem. That in turn stymies innovation. Second, lock down introduces opportunity for regulation that favors government over the individual. This introduces the potential for violations of privacy and liberty. Zittrain provides several current examples of these violations. Read more »

• Future of the Internet Site
• A Safe but Sterile Internet
• Lessig & Zittrain Talk
• Zittrain Bio
• Related Book - Network Power

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There are a number of tools available on the web that will take your documents and analyze the contents statistically to help you identify patterns. For the investment community, these technologies are not quite ready for prime time. In other words, the potential to glean insights is hit-or-miss. But, I’ve been impressed with a tool launched a year ago by IBM (IBM) called Many Eyes which does some simple stats on document contents and provides the output in various forms. Many Eyes is a visualization tool for data focused on natural language. When the data is words, as in a lengthy 10K form, I begin to wonder if some processing of these words can tell us something we don’t already know.

I’ve taken the contents of Google’s (GOOG) 2007 10K and loaded it as a data set in the visualization tool. Do you think any meaningful insights can be derived? Here’s a summary of my results in this simple experiment.

First, I loaded the Product Section of the document, which lists and discusses about 35 products within Google’s consumer portfolio. Enterprise products (Google Apps, Google Appliance) are covered under a separate section. I excluded terms/words like “Google”, “users”, “web” and others that don’t inform the analysis.

Click here or the image below to see the visualization results.

Some themes that standout include (based on term-frequency):

=> Mobile
=> Maps
=> Gmail
=> Groups
=> News

Nothing here is a surprise, as these are all product categories where Google has a significant product in the market.

Some other terms that stood out to me are “free” and [user] “experience”, two central aspects of Google’s focus and way of doing business.

One valuable thing I learned from these results is the lack of product focus on web 2.0 trends and drivers. There’s not a major role for “social networking” themes like “syndication”, “tagging”, “sharing”, “commenting”, etc. across the product portfolio. Could this speak to weakness in product breadth? Where’s the web 2.0 lingo and product focus?

Next, I upload the Risk Factors section on the hopes it would reveal patterns related to Google’s concerns. Read more »

• One Month Retro on IBM's Many Eyes App
• IBM Wants Many Eyes on Visualization
• IBM's Many Eyes Project Seeks Stats Freaks

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Ad Meter is a great cultural artifact which has been around for 20 years. It uses a live panel to record second by second sentiment about Super Bowl commercials. It works like this: 234 panelists use a device to continuously rate how they feel about ads in real time. An ad is given its highest average score at any point (second) in the length of the commercial by these panelists. I wonder why they take this approach (an ad with high highs and low lows can still win). Local avails are excluded from the eligibility for obvious reasons. Whatever you might feel about the method, it’s a uniquely fun and accessible diversion that is a loose gauge of the mainstream meme.

As you might guess, the highest rated ads are those which are most entertaining, tell a compelling story and engage the viewer. Like a show within a show. The top five from 2008:

Super Bowl commercials are the zenith of branding advertising venues and stand at the opposite end of the spectrum from search engine marketing. Of course both ends have a role and purpose in a marketing portfolio. Different spend allocations make sense depending upon the nature of a product category. In the SEM and direct response world, popularity and ratings are easy to measure - they’re measured in ad performance. That is ultimately revealed by cost of acquisition (COA).

But as brand advertising acquires some of the characteristics of direct marketing approaches such as SEM (and vice-versa), I’m left to wonder, is this the best we can do? I wonder why no one has disrupted the idea of Ad Meter (within a broader context). Read more »

• Ad Meter 2008 Homepage from USA Today
• Full List of Ads and Performance
• Nielsen's Take on Ad Ranks
• Adweek's Super Bowl XLII Site
• Game 17 vs. Commercials 3
• Apple's 1984 Classic

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Many large companies find themselves launching new businesses at unprecedented rates in an effort to maintain growth profiles, margins and leadership status. When a company pursues new markets, that can include a variety of corporate initiatives which are distinct from each other. At the highest level in terms of potential value creation is the process of vying for a new category. I call this category-creation or entry. Category-creation is different than finding a new market for an existing line of business.

In the latter case, an existing product or service is re-oriented from a positioning, capability and/or distribution standpoint beyond existing customer focus into distinct and additive customer groups. This can be a complex activity for an established business because success often leads to inertia. In other words, it’s hard but necessary to unlearn certain aspects of an existing success formula in order to make the business mix work for new sets of buyers. Expansion of existing products lines into new customer groups holds a lower risk profile than the pursuit of a new category because some aspects of these new markets leverage existing capability. But product line expansion to new segments also carries lower magnitude of order growth potential. Only truly new categories move the needle in breakout ways.

These two growth strategies are equally important — one should not exist without the other. But it’s far more likely that a company is proficient at market expansion than market creation and development. That’s why I’m going to share some thoughts on the category-creation process. Read more »

• Reinventing innovation at consumer goods companies - McKinsey Quarterly;
• How companies approach innovation - A McKinsey Global Survey;
• The Granularity of Growth - McKinsey Quarterly

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Comcast has a fantastic marketing campaign these days that you’ve probably seen on television or billboards. Building on the “It’s Comcastic” theme, the company is having fun innovating on the English language in ways that speak to digital life.

This involves devising new buzz-phrases like “snurfing” (surfing the web instead of paying attention to your phone conversation) and “Wi-fiving” (instant messaging a friend to celebrate a specific part of a TV program) that represent a merging of different words into one. Comcast refers to it as triples language.

These buzz-phrases resonate with consumers because they speak to real scenarios that people now encounter in an era of digital living.

My favorite is an advertisement about “quizjacking” where a girl is watching a game show while her brother, sitting within earshot of the TV, is looking up answers to questions on his computer. He’s spitting out answers before she has a chance to take a guess.

Siblings annoying each other is always the basis of good humor and this example was sinisterly familiar. The big picture, of course, is Comcast demonstrating how television and Internet consumption go together in ways that are novel.

I think Comcast is touching the tip of the iceberg in this exercise of digitally inspired word-mashups. I’m no William Saffire, but I’d like to add a few of my own based on observations. Here’s one to start (and more down the line as ideas come to mind): SOFTSUMERISM.

Softsumerism —-> The cross-over influence of consumer applications on the design of enterprise technologies; innovation within enterprise systems addressing the convergence of personal and professional identity. Read more »

• Comcast Triples Language Site
• Interview with Head of Google Analytics
• IBM Teams With Second Life To Build Portable Avatars
• CTIA: Microsoft Touts Convergence

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