Marketspace Advisor

Joel On Shipping

 Joel Spolsky is the CEO of Fog Creek Software and the author of an excellent blog called “Joel on Software” that I’ve been reading almost since its inception.  He recently published an excellent short article called “How to Ship Anything” that prompted thoughts on several levels.  

First, the article is an incredibly useful set of suggestions for many smaller businesses on how they might organize a mission-critical process that for many might be a step-child until something goes wrong and fragile reputations and customer relationships are damaged.

Second, it occurred that this is a great example of the kind of “consumer-generated media” firms should be tracking closely and looking to incorporate into their marketing and service materials.

Third, it’s exactly the kind of feedback that firms should be actively soliciting to refine their own business processes so that customers like Joel don’t have to experiment and discover a lot of this on their own. 

Fourth, Perhaps there are business opportunities for firms or their channels in setting up and running these kinds of operations inside small customers, just as they have done for bigger ones.  I can’t tell by looking at it if it already offers this, but why doesn’t Mailboxes, etc. offer a self-service shipping center kit one can install in a small business?  Who does?  A more sophisticated “API” that doesn’t force customers to “write their own code” to “install and run the shipping executable” could be a significant competitive weapon and drive new revenues…

TPM And You

Personalization, security, privacy are all central issues to ecommerce in particular and Internet use in general.  The Trusted Platform Module (TPM), a security chip now shipping in PC’s and soon in other devices as well, could radically change the playing field by making it possible to accurately identify an opposite number in any web-based exchange – a page request, a transaction, a VOIP call, etc.

A large industry has grown up around using cookies and clicks to help merchants and others figure out who you are and what content to serve you.  TPM could render much of this obsolete, and create all sorts of policy problems and business opportunities (Who will provide TPM registries? How will this information be shared?).  Fraud losses are a significant drag on ecommerce.  TPM could reduce this significantly.  Anonymity – practically compromised for most – could finally be all but eliminated on the Web.  Software piracy would be much harder, too.  And that’s just two minutes worth of reading and thought to the matter.

It’s been considered trite to say that we’re in the second inning of the Internet revolution; developments like this however prove the point.

A chat with Jay Walker

Earlier tonight Cesar and I attended a MITX fireside chat with Jay Walker (Chairman, Walker Digital and founder, Priceline.com). 

A couple of us spoke with Jay before the event, and we had an interesting conversation about how the formation of social networks and commercialization paths relate to biology and the formation of neural networks.  While many in the business world have been studying social networks and product diffusion paths with an eye towards replicating them, Jay takes a contrarian view that says once a path has been blazed it becomes far less effective for any product to follow that path again.

What struck me about this argument was its application to advertising.  Today, companies must continually innovate with respect to how they reach target customers, or risk being tuned out by customers who are increasingly desensitized to traditional advertising methods.  For example, check out this hilarious (but effective) tactic Starbucks recently used to reach consumers in San Francisco. It’s clear that we will be seeing more of this type of advertising and with the proliferation of digital devices, these non-traditional tactics can potentially made more personalized and measurable.

The Consumerist: Gawker Channels Customer Rage

At various points in the history of the Web, sites/zines/blogs have tried to harness and profit from disgruntled employees, investors, shoppers, etc.  Gawker Media’s Consumerist is one of the latest to tap the rage.  Since we have a professional interest in the “customer experience”, we thought this would make sense to check out from time to time, and maybe that logic applies to others like us.  But whom do the advertisers expect to reach?  The comments might provide a clue…

Jeffrey on the Customer Service Challenge in Forbes.com

 A sneak peek into the research we’ve been doing with Agency.com.  Interesting findings on email in particular.

Blogs and Social Networks: Model Cases

Friday I attended an AMA conference on consumer-generated media. One of the presentations was on social network analysis, delivered by Randal Moss of the American Cancer Society’s Futuring and Innovation Center.  (Understanding networks and how to influence them is pretty critical to their development strategy.) 

Randal described research by UVA’s Rob Cross, a specialist in the field and the author of “The Hidden Power of Social Networks”, that among other things identifies classes of people he calls “central connectors” and “boundary spanners”.  Central connectors are the fonts and hubs of knowledge within network clusters.  Boundary spanners are folks who serve as critical links between otherwise separate clusters in the larger network.  

Understanding how word spreads through (whom) in a social network seems like a pretty interesting thing to be able to do.  Randal showed an interesting social network map generated by Valdis Krebs’ Orgnet firm and his InFlow software that suggests why Apple’s iPod has been so successful, where others have not.  Equally interesting and perhaps more relevant to marketers is Buzznet.  Our friend Peter Gloor who runs the ICKN Project has a pretty interesting technology called TeCFlow for doing this.  See here for the TeCFlow movie of how an idea propagates through a network of weblogs.

Today, Rob Scoble’s blog led me to Anina’s.  She is certainly one of the more unique boundary spanners I have come across. 

What Can Web 1.5 Teach Us About Web 2.5?

I posted an entry on my personal weblog about looking back a little bit to help us predict how "Web 2.0" will unfold, or, what it will take for some of the newest experiments to survive and thrive.