interaction

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Why can't you just produce and consume interaction streams?

I want to see the interaction going on at your site. That way, I'll know whether to give you my attention.

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So, I read with interest Matt McCallister's plaint last week about how long it is taking RSS to reach the mainstream. The weird thing is that by many measures, RSS is mainstream but just not widely recognized as such. After all, 31% of the online population use it, it's just that 90% of this group don't know they are doing it.

Given the gnarly technical nature of RSS, Matt wonders, rightly I think, what the sales pitch is to the average user. Why is it useful? Well, it's clear that the idea of being able to subscribe to the sites you want in your portal page is taking off. That's where the 31% comes from. But, it could be better. Instead of treating blogs and other small publishers as junior content producers for aggregation by the monetizing big boys, why not make it just as easy to subscribe to a small site's stream of interaction. I get the site-owner's data as well as the site's stream of comments and trackbacks. That's really where it's at for many small sites I deal with.

Sixapart and Blogger, two of the biggest blog providers could easily provide these streams. Their SPAM controls are adequate that the signal-to-noise ratio on interaction streams should be quite good. That way, as a consumer, I'm free to join community as I see fit without having to visit the site every day. Portal publishers should love it because it is yet more free content. Maybe their allied community sites won't though because it breaks their ownership of the community space.

Bud posted this on February 13, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Small Business: The Internet Value Proposition

For most small businesses, I think the Internet is ancillary to their central economic activity. It's easy to know what to do in that case, outsource.

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Ken Yarmosh, Oliver Thylmann, and I have been having a nice distributed conversation about the value of the Internet and, a bit more specifically, blogging to small businesses. Cutting directly to the chase, I think Ken's central point is that Internet visibility is important to small businesses largely because Internet search drives sales. Further, Internet communication can be much more efficient. Oliver and I have countered that learning the Internet can just be too costly in time for people scrambling to make a buck, and actually Ken's original post gives us some credence. He was describing accessing some material about the Internet and small business that he had just not had time for up till then.

Let me state for the record that I pretty much agree with what I have outlined as Ken's value proposition of the Internet for small business. The real question in my mind is how to achieve it.

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Bud posted this on January 27, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)

Blogging interaction — A sane posting strategy

Finally, a well-known blog consultant talks about the value of more in-depth blog posts. I have two tactical suggestions for making these work: a newspaper writing style, and editing long posts to the main message.

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I find most discussions about posting strategy boring because they are repetitive. They typically boil down to something like the following formula: frequently post short write-ups on focused topics. James Farmer gives a great description:

if you want a lot of readers, lots of links and a place in the pantheon then you’d sure as heck best be peddling frequent bite size content with a good line in cyclical stories / issues, some political drama if possible and a fair bit of ‘not the first but the first you’ve read’ linking [i.e., don't get to the original source, just link to the available source out of expediency].

The long and the short of posts - the soapie versus the soapbox

What's more enlightening is what he says next.

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Bud posted this on May 27, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Getting people to link and buy — content is king and so is interaction

A lot of people want to optimize their web content, suggesting you might want to get it right and leave it (for fear of messing up). But, many sales (particularly big ticket ones) require multiple touches, in a word “interaction”.

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The Ann Arbor IT Zone held a panel on search engine marketing and optimization (SEM/O). As one might infer from even a casual perusal of the Search Engine Watch Blog, or John Battelle's Searchblog, there was a lot of emphasis on pay-per-click search advertising (definition) such as Google's adwords and adsense. Basically, you can think of this as buying a storefront on good web properties. But, that's just paying for leads. How do you get people to come back for more (good)? How do you get them to tell their friends about you (or better, link to you)? How do you convince them to buy your product or service (best yet)?

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Bud posted this on February 9, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)