Thinkcorps

My day job currently consists of figuring out how to build a next-generation city/regional magazine site that respects the core values of both the Web as well as the company’s business model. My hobby (for now), consists of figuring out how to build a next-generation consumer magazine (call it “People 2.0“). I’m not going to pretend I’ve got all the answers, but I do have a handful of core operating principles, and I figured I’d better start writing ‘em down.

(This blog is designed primarily as a scratch pad for my thoughts, so be warned.)

Most of what passes for “media 2.0” discussion today is focused on newspapers. That’s because the “future of newspapers” has pretty easy answers. Printing on paper clearly has no future, electronic publishing is the ONLY option. Blogs equals a dead-simple publishing and community platform, so obviously newspapers should integrate those lessons.

In general (if the success of political & celebrity blogs are any indication), it’s the simple, obvious arguments that draw the most attention. You could probably create some kind of Internet rule that stipulated once a theme reached a certain pitch, you should simply ignore it because the answers have clearly been decided already, and all that’s left are the sounds of an ever-expanding online echo chamber.

Web 2.0 bubble? It’s a fact. Newspapers need to go digital? It’s a fact. Celebrity nipple slips are pre-planned (at least probability-wise)? It’s just gotta be a fact.

The story for magazines is much more difficult. Newspapers are tooled for the kind of daily content the Web loves, magazines are not.

Blogging is great, but …

Many magazines have adopted blogging as some kind of solution (or merely an experiment, I hope) to their digital woes. I’d be extremely nervous of all company-mandated blogging programs, like the one Business 2.0 just started. And clearly Business 2.0 (SEED, too) is better positioned than just about anyone else to take on this challenge. But determining success is another story.

First, blogging takes passion—the same as journalism does. I don’t think the question is, “Can we create a blog?”, it’s “Can we create a GREAT blog?” Most great blogs are targeted on a small niche a typical company would be uncomfortable squeezing into. And a company is always going to want to increase a blog’s appeal to a wider audience, thus watering down its niche appeal and effectiveness. So keeping focus is a big problem.

The second problem is one of opportunity costs. You’ve reached your position in the mediasphere by creating a certain flavor of print editorial. Forcing your editorial staff to blog is going to diminish your ability to create that great print content. You don’t fight a war on two fronts, especially when one front is as insatiable as the Web. Editors will quickly find themselves spending hours creating one blog post. Ask yourself, what does that cost your print product?

User-Generated Content

There’s a lot of fuss about leveraging user-generated content these days, like it’s some kind of panacea to the entire media industry’s problems. It’s not, trust me. UGC, as people have shortened it, is terribly misunderstood and has it’s own set of limitations.

The first is, of course, the 1:10:89 rule, which stipulates that 1% of users will create content, 10% will interact with it (participants who comment, rat, & re-appropriate), and 89% of users will passively consume. This rule has massive implications for any Web site. Without a certain critical mass of audience, certain features and programs simply won’t work.

I’d add that this rule emerged from several Web 2.0 pure-plays, meaning that there may be an additional “passive-to-active user conversion” percentage to add to the front of this rule if your site has an audience more used to passively consuming content than creating and interacting with it. The actual rule for print media Web sites may be 10/1/10/89, where 10 equals the percentage of your audience that you can convince to start using/playing with your new interactive tools (meaning 90 percent may not even look at your new comments/ratings tools). I’d guess that 10 percent is a pretty aggressive number right now. Regardless, it’s a positive number, which makes participation more difficult.

Wait, I’m not done. It gets worse. If you’ve noticed, UGC varies in quality. Most of it, unsurprisingly, kind of sucks. Meaning that if you really want your site to take off, you have to make sure that the 5% of really good user-creators (of the 1% total user-creators) is a large enough pool of content to give your 10% of user-participators something to work with. It’s not much fun rating comments or videos when there’s only 3 decent items to choose from.

In short, community is hard, always has been, and it’s easier than ever to over-extend yourself into an area you can’t support.

“Monetization”

You know we’re in trouble when people start throwing this “monetization” word around. Seriously, never trust anyone who uses this word. They will lead you down the path to ruin.

There’s a rule in e-commerce that states that every step in a transaction costs you 99% of customers. This is to be expected, since clicking costs you nothing. Most clicks are exploratory. This rule is most useful is helping you weed out those get rich quick schemes, usually appearing in the form of affiliate deals.

Now, if you’re a one-person company with a strong niche media product, affiliate deals might actually work for you. However, if you’re a typical media company, run, don’t walk, away from any talk of affiliate programs. You will never make these profitable. Never.

They sound sexy, but walk through the buying process and apply your 1% rule to every click you make. Then do the math.

Do yourself a favor, sell ads and subscriptions to your magazine and nothing else. Stick to what you’re good at.

I never really had much to add to the whole Web 2.0 debate. In fact, I was just happy we were having it and that so much of 2.0 hinged on individuals (both creators and users) driving next-generation Web apps. But there’s a limit to how far all this can go, which I think becomes clear when you look at where Web 2.0 isn’t. Mind you, I don’t really care. I’m just happy that despite all of it, things will continue to move on. :)

I think my key point here revolves around the social aspects of these new Web apps. Generally, what’s made them great is that they’re made by and for people. Individuals come first, not companies. That’s why so many of these apps are so interesting, and also why so many will fail as they try and build traditional organizations with commensurate revenue streams. Niche is niche for a reason.

There’s a huge difference between an individual and a company. We don’t make the same types of decisions, and we never will. But there are analogs: as individuals, we have friends who we love and value. A company has partners, vendors and advertisers (among others). The truth is, a company values them just as much as you would your friends.

So when you start your Web 2.0 company, you want to help or impress your circle of friends. And you make decisions independent of anything outside of what will help that circle. They’re your market, after all.

But as a company, you now have to contend with both sets of friends: your users and your partners. And that’s a delicate balance to maintain. The needs of each are very different and they’re often going to clash.

I’m tasked right now with building out a new Web presence for my company, and I can already see potential conflicts on ideas that seem great for users, but would drive companies mad.

I’m pretty user-centric myself, but I don’t need the headaches, I can tell you. If you piss off a user, you might get an angry email. If you piss off a partner, you get chewed out by the head of the company.

Now, you can say you’re going to stand firm and uphold your values, but you won’t. Because that person chewing you out controls your paycheck, and you like your paycheck. No matter how right you think you are, you are going to bend.

Look at YouTube. They’re already bending like a willow tree in a soft breeze. Same thing’s going to happen to MySpace. They aren’t communities anymore. They are corporate entities. And they cannot help but act like what they truly are.

So, it’s a battle between these two aspects of your company: the needs of users and the needs of partners. I’m not saying you can’t strike a balance. Thousands of businesses do it every day. But it’s hard work and shouldn’t be underestimated.

But you have to start somewhere, and it’s pretty clear that users have to come first.

Great ideas develop within a real market. That’s why beta is so important. Real users help you develop a real product. And these early users don’t just help find bugs, they help find features! They define you in so many ways.

But when the buzz is high and the scent of money is in the air, people begin launching companies based on the “idea of people.” There’s no time to develop organically, so the user base is extrapolated from a Powerpoint slide and a marketing budget.

When you start like this, I think you’re doomed. That was the true hallmark of the first bubble: all those projected market share slides.

I’m not sure you can really learn to love your users without spending a good deal of time solely focused on them, completely outside of the concerns of business and money.

In fact, I’d argue that what made the companies acquired by Google/Yahoo so attractive was their lack of an exit strategy. They were honestly focused on building a great product. And greatness, you can’t fake.

Some notes on the recently launched askville. I just signed up (by asking a question).

I’ve been fascinated lately with wikis, and search apps that attempt to condense and organize information in a knowledge management sense—the management of information collected over time, or “expertise” i suppose you could call it. This, I think tails with an interest in data visualization, which is also generally concerned with timeframes.

In any case, it’s interesting how seeing Askville and comparing it to Yahoo Answers helped me understand more about how these services work.

A few thoughts:

My sample question is first answered within a few minutes (I get an email notification). A lot of answers I see (including mine) are copied from other sources—a copyright violation that’s easy to track. I can’t see publishers being psyched about this.

Amazon uses mechanical turk for questions that aren’t getting answers (other people do the search for you). Though I imagine this is a temporary measure until the community grows large enough.

What occurs to me (and maybe it’s the inclusion of mechanical turk that made this obvious to me) is that what drives an answer community (besides entertainment) is not that people are smarter than you, it’s that they can perform a particular topical search better than you.

If people are really using this for answers and not just for fun (unclear at this early stage—yahoo seems very ‘fun’ oriented to me), then this implies that Google returns too many search results. So is QA is a viable alternative/competitor to search? It’s Mechanical Turk turned into a game for getting the easy answers (the assumption being that many things are “easy” with a large enough audience.)

On the other hand, I’ve often wondered what a service like Rollyo could do if it were to use its data to help focus search. With Rollyo’s data prioritizing which sites people thought were good for particular search topics, a search engine could effectively harness that “human power” and get some of its mojo back from the QA communities.

What concerns me about services like Askville, is that by prioritizing the “game” aspect of the community, they hinder the ability to build a detailed knowledge base. The game is completely focused on the “now”: users have to be able to earn points for answering new questions, even if that question has already been answered several times over. And the winning answer in a current questions’ iteration may not be as good as the winning answer of a previous iteration.

Yes, you can search old questions, but historical search is clearly separated from the primary QA process. At no point does Amazon suggest that, “hey, i think we answered that a while ago.” And that’s a problem, in my opinion.

Wikipedia, on the other hand, stresses completeness, where users are focused on filling in the gaps in knowledge and improving accuracy. Of course, Wikipedia also has much higher barriers to entry.

When you make expertise a game, I wonder how you maintain a standard above status quo “popular wisdom”. There’s really no way to gauge authority and no respect of past contributions, pushing knowledge ever further.

Users may accumulate “expertise” points, but those are clearly doled out in a haphazard fashion. I mean, if you don’t know the answer, how do you judge the best one?

It may turn out that QA is 95% entertainment / 5% useful, and I’d guess that Wikipedia would end up the inverse.

As I was walking in to work this morning, I was thinking about what my resolution for 2007 should be. I don’t usually care to make resolutions, let alone follow them, but what the hell.

Now, I’m learning Ruby on Rails at the moment, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t harbor hopes for launching a (beta) product in the next 12 months. :) I’m also excited about the prospects for SMITH, the personal media/stories webzine I started with long-time friend and colleague Larry Smith in January of ‘06. I’d also like to figure out what I want to be when I grow up.

But I think I’m going to go with “take more pictures”.

Taking more pictures would mean getting better at photography, sure, but it would also mean spending more time thinking about and creating art. And of course, it would mean being away from the computer screen, likely outdoors or in some new and interesting place.

These are all very good things, so I think I’ll focus on that.

Oh, and I’m going to try and split time between my digital camera and my old Nikon FM2n (which I love). Digital revolution be damned.

Your results:
You are Spider-Man

Spider-Man 85% Iron Man 65% Green Lantern 55% Hulk 55% Robin 55% Superman 50% The Flash 50% Supergirl 45% Wonder Woman 35% Batman 20% Catwoman 15%

You are intelligent, witty, a bit geeky and have great power and responsibility.