The Conversation

Wired in Whitefish

Val Landi's Weblog, Monday March 27th

The flight from Jackson Hole to Whitefish took about two hours through some pretty rough turbulence caused by the hot thermals created by a couple of thousand-acre forest fires raging along the Great Divide.

My brother Walt touched his new Sirrus SR 2 down on the Kalispell tarmac like a butterfly landing on a daisy: a perfect landing. It was a bight fall day with a big blue sky; to the north were the horn-shaped peaks of Glacier National Park.

Walt is my kid brother. Not only is he about three inches taller than me and better looking, he also owns two airplanes and has a lifestyle most of us, including me, would kill for. He designs and builds Rocky Mountain mansions for some of the most successful VIPs in our industry. You’d know their names instantly if I revealed them here.

One example is the development partnership Walt’s company, High Country Builders, has formed with The Homestead at Whitefish, a spectacular 1300 acre Rocky Mountain development pioneered by Mark Kvamee of Sequoia Venture Capital.  High Country and the Homestead have signed a joint agreement with Broken Sound Productions to produce a TV segment of great homes in the Whitefish region to be aired on the Travel Channel.

On the drive to Walt’s office, we discussed how technology and Web 2.0 platforms have transformed his business to one with global reach. Walt's SMB mix includes: a T1, broadband, a small armada of PC’s and MACs, Blackberry’s, sophisticated websites, and a new world-class blog.

The next step, we both agreed, was an interactive community, a social network for high net worth individuals who either own or are looking to build a high-country home.

Walt keyed in to what I think is the next major media evolution for the high-tech industry: niched, vertical communities targeting the single most attractive market: the small to medium-sized business.

Walt is representative of thousands of successful entrepreneurs in all categories who are prime prospects for the IBMs, Cisco’s, Amex’s, Microsoft’s, McAfee’s, NetIQ’s, NetSuite’s, Intel’s, and Salesforce.com’s of the world.

Check out his weblog. If you’ve got an extra $4 million lying around, he’ll design and build you the house of your dreams.

Web 2.0 Marketing Social Networks Small Business Market (SBM) High Country Builders Sequoia Venture Capital Mark Kvamee Homestead at Whitefish

Smart Media: Web Content vs. Advertising

One of the insights I came away from a recent meeting in NYC with one of the world’s largest ad agencies was the profound shift in attitude towards the value of Web-based editorial content as a demand generator vs. classic Madison Avenue TV and print ad formats.

The meeting was with the agency’s interactive team. You sensed immediately, five minutes into the meeting that this group was attracting the firms best and brightest. The team was dedicated to creating world-class Web content in multiple formats—blogs, social media, expert-text features, podcasts, webcasts—that would establish their clients, which ranged from Fortune 50 hightech to Fortune 50 financial and consumer—as thought leaders.

Web-based educational content with high IP value is roaring past traditional print and network tv as the smart media demand generator of choice.

Smart Media Web 2.0 Interactive Advertising

Social Networks as Marketing Platforms

Val Landi's Weblog, Monday March 13

The big problem with the big socials networks –Friendster, Orkut, Linkedin, Yahoo 360-- is the very real disconnect between networks of “people” vs targeted social networks of people with shared interests, be they best business practices, fly fishing, iPods, or antique cars.

The “niched” social network will, I’m confident, evolve into a major media opportunity over the next few years. Social networks will follow a basic evolutionary law of media that says that media platforms progress from the mass to the specific, becoming ever more granular, with Google’s ad word platform serving the  Long Tail, the most advanced of the species.

Realtime will be announcing just such a new network that will launch in April. It will be a radically new media platform that integrates the best features of Web 2.0 platforms: blogs, worldclass podcasts, and a very large component of user-generated content.

This Realtime social network platform will be a major launch in the consumer publishing marketplace.

Stay tuned for more over the next few weeks.

Web 2.0 Marketing SocialNetworks

Sense, Common Sense & Nonsense

Val Landi's Weblog, Tuesday March 7

A year ago or so my good friend and colleague, Web 2.0 evangelist, Tracy Sheridan hammered me because I had never read Seth Godin’s famous marketing tome Purple Cow (Tracy was featured in his follow up ebook, 99 Cows—Companies that are Going for the Edges)

It‘s taken me a year, but I’ve finally caught up with Seth’s thinking thanks to Tracy’s post today.

Don’t miss this video of Godin at the Googleplex!

Watching the video, I see what Tracy’s passion for Seth’s message was all about. He’s not only a terrific speaker, but he’s a great and clear thinker as well. His three major takeaways are that all great marketers are great storytellers, great companies make something worth talking about, and that it’s at the edges where people notice you.

Godin goes back to 1999 and compared Yahoo with Google. Yahoo, busy establishing itself as the uber-Portal had something like 116 entries and links on it’s homepage vs. the 1999 version of Google, which is the exact same minimalist homepage we use and see today. What did Google do that was so brilliant? They differentiated themselves from the pack and in the process created a great product that was worth talking about, and they haven’t stopped since with GMail, Google Earth, Google Maps and Google DNA search all following in march step. Great stories, all.

I  agree one hundred percent with Godin in his conviction that all the serious innovation and value creation occur at the edges, that the edge is the new core. We’re seeing examples of the this Web 2.0 value creation every day for the past year on the posts at TechCrunch and Memorandum and at Fickr, del.iciou.us, 37 Signals, Skype, Pandora. All companies that make sense and provide value and offer solutions to existing problems. All are examples of pure common sense.

The Web 2.0 boom is also creating some nonsense at the edges, where VC dollars are being spent on ventures that don’t solve existing problems or adhere to a basic common sense test.

Edgeio, oddly enough founded by TechCrunch  media entrepreneur Michael Arrington and edge-guru Keith Teare, is one of the new edge companies that falls into the nonsense camp.

Edgeio offers a service that allows you to tag your blog posts with listings that let you sell personal items and or post jobs.

As Nick Carr, former editor of Harvard Business Review wrote:

“Cofounded by Michael Arrington, the madam of the great Web 2.0 brothel TechCrunch, Edgeio gathers specially tagged classified ads from sundry RSS feeds, aggregates and categorizes them, and then republishes them at its own central site. (Or, as it snappily says of itself: "Edgeio dynamically organizes listings published from RSS enabled websites making them discoverable via the Edgeio website and through an open set of web services.") So, let's say I finally decide to unload the old canoe that's been patiently wasting away on sawhorses beside my garage for the last three years. I could post a little ad on this blog, wrap the text in a special tag and, thanks to the genius of Dave Winer, it would soon show up among various other disused personal flotation devices over at Edgeio. Now, of course, I have no desire whatsoever to start sticking classified ads on my blog, but never mind that - it's the elegance of the idea that counts.”

Carr takes out his mallet to hammer the final nails of common sense into the lid of the Edgeio coffin:

“But most of all there are the two problems that Mike at Techdirt highlights: a lack of barriers to competition (the downside to building a company on "an open set of web services" is that your business model is really easy to copy) and a lack of meaningful differentiation from the customer's perspective ("We hadn't heard of people complaining that Craigslist and eBay were too centralized," says Techdirt, dryly). It's hard to see exactly how Edgeio will pry a lot of customers away from an entrenched player like Craigslist or protect itself from a head-on assault by, say, Google or Microsoft or Yahoo."

To sum up, Edgeio enters a crowded market with “a ton of pizzazz” and not an ounce of common sense.

(BTW, I went to both Arrington's personal blog, Crunchnotes,, and Keith Teare's as well. Oddly, again, neither had Edgeio listings for inflatable or any other type of personal devices, 63' Chevys, used gadgets or other sundry items).

Technorati Tags
SethGodinatGoogle
Web 2.0
Web 2.0 Marketing
Edgeio

NickCarr
MichaelArrington
KeithTeare

Smoke Signals: Business 2.0's "NextNet"

Val Landi's Weblog, Friday March 3rd

Business 2.0 has a great feature on the NextNet and the top 25 Web 2.0 platform companies.

Here's how it's described:

"The Next Net will encompass all digital devices, from PC to cell phone to television. Its defining characteristics include the ability to interact instantaneously with any of the more than 1 billion Web users across the globe. The Next Net is deeply collaborative: People from across the planet can work together on the same task, and products or tools can be rapidly tweaked and improved by the collective wisdom of the entire online world."

The top 25 are presented in four broad categories:

Social Media (Digg, Last.fm, Newsvine, Tagworld, YouTube)
Mashups and Filters (Bloglines, Eurekster, Simply Hired, Technorati, Trulia, Wink)
The New Phone (Fonality, SIPphone, iotum, Vivox)
The Webtop (JotSpot, 30Boxes, 37Signals, Writely, Zimbra)
Under the Hood (Brightcove, Jigsaw, Salesforce.com, SimpleFeed, Six Apart). 

The editors added an incumbent to watch for each category (Yahoo, Google, eBay/Skype, Microsoft, and Amazon, respectively).

The defining DNA code of this broadband-enabled ecosystem will the ability to interact instantaneously with any of the more than 1 billion Web users across the globe by evolving instant-voice-messaging and instant-video-messaging apps that will make today's e-mail and IM seem like Indian smoke signals.

The hottest, most productive space of the “NextNet” is the ability to create an endless menu of mix and match: anyone with a touch of a geek-gene and a browser can access vast stores of information, mash it up, and serve it in new ways, to a few people or a few hundred million.

The most useful sites will be those that either help mash up content from other parts of the Web or act as a filter for the overwhelming mountains of information at our fingertips.

My personal favorite is Eurekster: terrible name, but great potential. Eurekster is a search mashup, a do-it-yourself search engine, or swicki, allows you to define sites you want to search, post the results on your blog or website, and get a cut of any search ads your audience clicks on.

From a pure, marketing professional’s POV, SimpleFeed is totally cool, enabling companies to use RSS feeds as an opt-in marketing tool. The feeds can be customized to each recipient and tracked individually for both internal messaging and external marketing campaigns. RSS will be the next great ad platform. SimpleFeed is in a great place.

In exchange for your own contact list, Jigsaw will provide access to a virtual Rolodex of some 150,000 companies and managers. It sounds a bit counter intuitive to me. Salesmen's contact lists are like the books at Tony Soprano's olive oil company: there are always two sets; one for me, the real, coveted for my-eyes-only list and there's the public company, Goldmine list. We'll see...

Technorati Tags
Jigsaw
Web 2.0
Web 2.0 Marketing
Community Marketing
SimpleFeed
Eurekster