Why Your Business Needs To Focus On Relationships More and On Money Less - Dawud Miracle @ dmiracle.com -
March 4, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
(Via dmiracle.)
I’ve blogged many times before about the lack of effective monetization for news organizations on the web. It’s not just news orgs that need better ads and monetization strategies, believe me, I’ve been there.
Many of the web sites I built and sold have been ad revenue based, and none of it was easy. Some of the sites that i’ve built over the years didn’t even make much money, but they sold for more than the sites that were making twice or more. Know what the difference was? Heart, the ones that sold high I had put more time into them and they had ‘meaning’.
The web isn’t just about making money and taking names, it’s about building relationships and networks now. This is what web 2.0 is really about. It’s about the people. People make the mashable web go round.
The blog post I’m highlighting here talks about relationships and conversations being worth more than than the revenue your site is supposed to generate as it relates to businesses.
Now I understand that The Man wants to make his or her money from web ventures, but relationships and conversations can, and do, bring much more to the table. By gaining respect and ‘friends’ in the social web you’re able to use those connections and real people to your advantage.
There’s nothing quite like getting real, honest feedback from people who actually visit your site and have something to say about it.
So as you’re launching the next big web venture remember that, money is important, but the relationships are just as important, and often more important than the revenue.
Sindy Syndication
January 22, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
Contributr is all about syndication and openness and love for all right? Well, it’s harder than it looks. Over the course of the last few months the development team has had constant back and forth as to how much syndication and integration options we offer in Contributr. The concensus: spread the love wherever Contributr goes! And that’s what we’ve done.
Contributr’s flexible output is a great way to syndicate your user generated content across the web, and the best thing? Syndication is almost always free. We love free, and we know our clients will love free. Free traffic, free ad hits, free eyeballs. It all comes back to eyeballs on a page doesn’t it? oh well.
On our Contributr demo site (soon to be created by myself! Check back later if it isn’t live yet, or if it’s broken) we’ll be posting some samples of different ways you can integrate Contributr content into your existing web properties and across the web.
When Sindy Syndicates, everybody wins.
CaspioVote - Turnkey Election Guide - A Review
November 14, 2007 by Jonathan · 2 Comments
CaspioVote is being marketed as an easy-to-use election guide type drill-down, database driven tool for media companies to plug-in to their sites and have an insta-election guide.
I’ve read all pages of the site related to this particular application, and visited the only live client page I was able to find through their press release and have given my opinions, good and bad about the information that’s currently available on this just-released system.
Here’s what I’ve come up with so far:
Pros:
- It’s turnkey, pay the money and it’s an instant election guide
- No coding or other knowledge needed other than sticking a a code-snippit into your existing site
- Relatively inexpensive, which it typically the case with turnkey solutions.
- No additional staffing needed
Cons:
- It’s turnkey, this means you have little control because all the work has been done for you.
- It’s does not appear to be search engine friendly, not having a URL hierarchy is going to limit if not exclude you from the free traffic that your news organization will get because of the lack of search engine friendliness.
- No additional staffing needed, this is a great solution when you’ve got a one or two person web crew in your newsrooms and neither of which is a database or web application developer.
Some other thoughts – Here the CaspioVote Features page and my response to those items, the Features page has the bulk of the public information about the application which is why I’ve concentrated on the details provided there.
- Fully-hosted and operated by Caspio, requiring no support from IT.
- They have control over your site, if their servers crash or the software breaks, you’ve got to wait for them to fix the issue, much like if you use GoogleDocs instead of MS Office, it’s great until Google’s servers go down for a few minutes and you haven’t saved what you’re working on. You’re completely at the mercy and experience of the Caspio staff and their datacenter (having not seen a license agreement for the application, is there an SLA to provide accountability and retribution for extended down-time?)
- Seamlessly integrates with your site.
- By seamless, they mean they give you a snippit of code that happens to be a javascript call to display the information, this method isn’t search engine friendly, and tends to have difficulties in cross-platform and cross-browser compatibility.
- Covers all race levels (local, county, state and federal) and ballot issues.
- This hierarchy should be easy enough for basic web users to understand and use. Does it provide enough flexibility for those who want more information and detail?
- Visitors see local election details and candidate profiles on your site and print their customized ballot
- Print their custom ballot as seen on the only live-site sample running this application is simply a button that prints the web page that they’re on, complete with the original site navigation, images, and the Caspio frame.
- No limits on the number of counties, state and federal districts, townships, parishes, municipalities, or school districts.
- Well I would hope there wouldn’t be!
- Unlimited page views included in the annual license.
- This is only important because each time someone visits your election guide, it’s really their website that’s coming up inside yours, frankly, it’s not unlimited, what they have is tiered pricing based on your market-size, having a bigger market means you’re likely to have more web views, which in fact makes the price higher. So yes it’s unlimited page views, but at the same time, you’re still paying more for your size. This does seem to be a fair way of pricing and is quite common when working with media companies.
- Mass-email feature to help you invite candidates to complete their profiles and answer your questions
- No interference with your advertising and analytics systems so you enjoy all the traffic and ad revenues.
- It seems like this could be problematic depending on how they have the site implemented within your own.
If I were an Internet person with a limited budget at a newsroom that wouldn’t otherwise have a very comprehensive election guide of information on their site without this application, then I would be very interested in what CaspioVote has to offer.
If a newsroom were to buy into the CaspioVote program, they are getting what appears to be a basic content manager of information directly related to a specific election. I’m basing my review on the only live example site available at the time of this posting.
Caspio provides a great entry into the very basic information that every news organization should have on the web anyway, however it is greatly restricted in functionality and usability because of the single- form of navigation and the limited information provided on each page as shown by the live site using the application. The literature available on the web says that they can implement extended functionality for a fee.
On the same front as usability and functionality, by looking at how the page loads and how the hierarchy is built, I would imagine that this setup would not be very ‘functional’ for those viewers who have disabilities and use software and other assistive devices.
For one, screen readers don’t always pick up on those java calls at all, I’m not an accessibility expert by any means, but I do hear complaints from people trying to use the web with assistive technologies and struggling so I’m curious to see what testing has been completed.
There’s my first impressions of the application, what are yours? Comments are open below.
[EDIT 1- added bullets to make the post easier to read]
[EDIT 2- Edited for grammar]
A New Media Mindset
November 10, 2007 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
As I progress and increase my knowledge and interest in new-media ventures and the people who work with them I realize more and more about the organizational and staffing problems of companies, especially news organizations who feel threatened by new-media.
I’ve worked with new and emerging media for five years now, and I don’t claim to be the most knowledgeable about any of the technologies that I support, however I do have strongly-held beliefs as to what news organizations should be doing to embrace and take advantage of the tools and resources available to them.
The most common problem that I encounter in trying to support and innovate news-products with the newsrooms that I work with is the culture of fear, not in the traditional sense, but a culture of fear, of technology.
I’m constantly surrounded by editors, producers, writers, reporters, and management who don’t understand the technology resources they have and are scared to even try something new.
This self-destruction and fear does nothing to help their news organization emerge as a winner in a new-media landscape. Thank goodness there are news organizations who feel otherwise, but at least of the newsrooms I work with (one TV station and the other a small-market daily newspaper) feel compelled to constantly lag behind the industry, and innovation.
Both of the perps have people within their walls who not only aren’t afraid of technology, but actively seek new and innovative ways to present news and information, it’s those people, or people like them who need to be guiding the news media into the present and the future.
One key example is the TV station, They launched a new website 3 years ago using a huge content management system hosted in-house. The problem is, they’ve gone through one major redesign of the site (which was a very good thing) but that redesign took a year or more to complete, and other than that, they have done little to no new innovative things with their web site.
I’ve offered numerous opportunities to try new and exciting things that have been tested successfully elsewhere, but they are afraid to move forward.
They actually have someone who was supposed to make it a ‘priority’ to offer on their site podcasts of news stories etc. This may have been a good idea a couple years ago, but we can now see that podcasts aren’t as strong as we all thought they would be, and the adoption of RSS feeds to the general public is moving a lot slower than many of us thought.
Despite that, they continue to work on it, in the meantime not accomplishing anything nor moving forward with anything new that is indeed spreading much faster than podcasting.
The use of new-media tools like Flash streaming video, Twitter, Facebook, Widgets, and dare I say it, RIAs, are the things these news organizations need to be looking at to generate new revenue streams, but instead their stuck eternally in the late 90s with little to no progress.
I’m off to a meeting later today with 4 people who are working on a big converged media election project, we were making great progress for a week and a half on this project, only to have it run off the rails in the last 3 days. Now there’s discussion of using a different CMS, starting over, and other drastic, and unneeded changes.
Not only that, but the committee which has a hard enough time making decisions (as they often do) keeps growing, now I completely understand the importance of decision by committee and bringing in external viewpoints, but doing so in a fashion which alienates key players is not a recommendation I would make.
I’ll post again soon about this election project as it is consuming a lot of my time right now, and there are some very interesting implications of this project and how it is eventually developed and promoted.
Jonathan’s Twitter Updates for 2007-10-31
October 31, 2007 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
- My twitter updates are slow getting to me #
- Watching TV and working on Smart Decision #
- Awake, writing some emails #
- Going in to work #
- Ordering some lunch for me and my boss. #
- Showering after meeting with my personal trainer. #
- Going to get a haircut. #
- Stuck in line at sams club.. Scary!! #
- Smart Decision revenue streams were approved, yay!! #
- pwning Drupal
# - I just got pwned by code! but I then learned something and showed it who’s boss #
- Eating a salad for dinner #
- Working on some CSS #
Jonathan’s Twitter Updates for 2007-10-03
October 3, 2007 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
- Back from Gino’s very good pizza #
- Checked out of the hotel this morning, trying to remember who to tip #
- About to start hearing about eBay’s project ‘San Dima’ #
- Trying out Spaz.AIR an AWARD WINNING Adobe AIR application! #
- waiting for a session on monetizing mobile web traffic #
- In an Adobe MAX session about revenue opportunities on the mobile #
- at midway in Chicago. Waiting foe my flight. #
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