Octavianworld

Ecommerce On The Edge In 2010 #MITX

Yesterday morning I attended MITX's "What's Next For E-Commerce" Panel at Microsoft in Cambridge.  Flybridge Capital's Jeff Bussgang moderated a panel that included Shoebuy.com CEO Scott Savitz, CSN CEO Niraj Shah, Mall Networks CEO Tom Beecher,and Avenue 100 Media Solutions CEO Brian Eberman.

The session was well-attended and the panelists didn't disappoint. Across the board they provided a consistent cross-section of the sophistication and energy that characterizes life 2 SDs the right on the ecommerce success curve.

My notes and observations follow. But first, courtesy of Jeff, a quiz (answers at the end of the post):

1. Name the person, company, and city that originated the web-based shopping cart and secure payment process?

2. Name the person, company, and city that originated affiliate marketing on the web?

3. Name the largest email marketing firm in the world, and the city where it's headquartered?

Jeff opened by asking each of the panelists to talk about how they drive traffic, and how they try to distinguish themselves in doing so.

Brian described (my version) what his firm does as "performance marketing in the long tail", historically for education-sector customers (for- and non-profit) but now beyond that category. What that means is that they manage bidding and creative for 2 million less-popular keywords across all the major search engines for their customers. Their business is entirely automated and uses sophisticated models to predict when a customer should be willing to pay price X and use creative Y for keyword Z to reel in a likely-profitable order. The idea is that the boom in SEM demand has driven prices way up for popular keywords, but that there are still efficient marketing deals to be mined in the "long tail" of keyword popularity (e.g.,structured collaboration").

Niraj noted that there's an increasing returns dynamic in the SEM channel that raises entry barriers for upstarts and helps firms like CSN preserve and expand their position.  Namely, as firms like his get more sophisticated about conversion through scale and experience, they can afford to pay higher prices for a given keyword than smaller competitors can, and can reinvest in extending their SEM capabilities.  CSN now has a 10-person search marketing team within its total staff of 500. Since SEM is, to some degree, a jump-starter for firms that don't yet have a web presence sufficient to drive traffic organically, this edge is a powerful competitive weapon.  CSN is up to $200 million in annual revenues, and now manages the online furniture stores for folks like Walmart.

Scott sounded a different note, with similar results.  Shoebuy has focused more on cultivating its relationship with its existing customers and on Lifetime Value -- including referrals.  This focus has had a salutary effect on SEO, allowing them to rely less on SEM as it gets pricier.  Last year Shoebuy experienced double-digit top line growth and hit 8M uniques for December's shopping season, while realizing its lowest marketing expense as a percentage of sales since 2002.  They've continued to plow the savings into a better overall customer experience.  One way Shoebuy guides this reinvestment is through extensive use of Net Promoter-based surveys.  They keep the surveys brutally simple:  1)"Were you satisfied?" 2)"Whould you shop with us again?" 3)"Would you recommend us?".  Then they calculate the resulting NP scores to different things they try in their marketing mix, to give them a more nuanced insight than the binary outcome of an order can provide.

Tom described how while Mall Networks' traffic is "free" -- it all comes from their loyalty program partners' sites (e.g. Delta Skymiles website awards redemption page) -- they still have to jockey for Mall Networks' placement on those pages. (Though Tom was too polite to say so, the processes for deciding who goes where on popular pages is often a blood sport and ripe in most organizations for a more structured, rational approach.)

Former Molecular founder and CEO Ralph Folz asked about display -- is that making a comeback?  Brian indicated the lack of performance and the lack of placement control through ad networks made that a highly negative experience.  He did note that they are now experimenting with participation in real-time-bidding through ad exchanges for inventory that ad networks make available, sometimes for time windows only a hundred milliseconds long.  Jeff reinforced the emergence of "RTB" and mentioned MIT Prof. Ed Crawley's Cambridge-based DataXu (which Flybridge has invested in) as a leader in the field.

Affiliate marketing came up next.  Tom explained the basics (in response to a question): each of the 600 stores in Mall Networks stable pays Mall Networks, say for example, a 10% commission on orders that come through Mall Networks.  Mall Networks gives a chunk to the members of various loyalty programs that shop through it -- say 3-5% of the value of the order; some goes to the loyalty programs themselves, as partial inducements for sending traffic to Mall Networks, and the rest goes to Mall Networks to cover costs and yield profits.

All the other panelists include affiliates in their marketing mix, and all appeared satisfied to have them play a healthy role.  Niraj specifically mentioned the ShareASale and Google Affiliate networks.  Jeff asked about everyone's frenemy Amazon; the answers were uniformly respectful: "they're a tough competitor, but they build general confidence and familiarity with the ecommerce channel, and that's good for everyone."  Niraj noted the 800 lb. gorilla nature of their category dominance: "They're at $20m and NewEgg is the next biggest pure play at $2B.  They're a fact of life. We just have to be better at what we focus on."

Someone in the audience raised email.  All of the panelists use it, with lists ranging from millions to hundreds of millions of recipients in size.  They noted that this traditional pillar of online marketing has now gotten very sophisticated.  In their world, they look well beyond top line metrics like open- and clickthrough rates to root-cause analysis of segment-based performance.  Re-targeting came up, and Niraj noted that for them, email and re-targeting weren't substitutes (as some have seen them) but in fact played complementary roles in their mix.  (Jeff explained re-targeting for the audience: using an ad network to cookie visitors to your site, and then serving them "please come back!" ads on other sites in the network they go to after they've abandoned a shopping cart or otherwise left your site.  A twist: serving ads inviting them to *your* site after they've abandoned one of your competitors' sites.  Hey, all's fair in love, war, and ecommerce...).  A common theme:  unlike most of the rest of the world, email teams at these leading firms are tightly integrated with other channels' operators to better integrate the overall experience, even to the point of shared metrics.

What about social?  Scott: "Building community is key for us.  We run contests -- "What are you hoping will be under your tree this Christmas?" -- to stimulate input from our customers.  And, while we have social media coordinators, many people here participate in channels like Twitter in support of our efforts."  Niraj: "Our PR team came up with a 'Living Room Rescue' contest which we did in partnership with [a popular] HGTV host [whose name escaped me -- C.B.].  We got six thousand entries; we used a panel of professional decorators to narrow the list to a hundred, and then used social voting to choose a winner.  We publicized the contest, and it took on a life of its own, as local papers tried to drum up support for their local [slobs -- my word, not Niraj's].  While we couldn't / didn't measure conversion directly from this campaign, our indirect assessment was that it had a great ROI."  Jeff observed that social's potential seems greater when the object of the buzz is newsworthy.

It was a short leap from this to a question about attribution analysis, the simultaneous-dream-and-nightmare-du-jour for web analytics geeks out there.  Brian was surprisingly dismissive.  In his experience (if I understood correctly), he's seeing only up to 20%, and usually only 5-10% of order-placing customers touch two or more properties they source clicks from, across the broad landscape they cover, across a time frame ranging from a day to a month long.  "In the end, only a couple of dollars would shift from one channel to another if we did attribution analysis, so in general it's not worth it."  We chatted briefly after the panel about this; there are large ticket, high-margin exceptions to this rule (cars).  I need to learn about this one some more, it surprised me.

Mobile!  Is it finally here?  Scott reports that 6-9 months ago *customers* finally began asking for it (as opposed to having it pushed by vendors), so now they have a Shoebuy.com iPhone app.  Jeff noted that customers are rolling their own mobile strategies -- some folks are now going into (say) Best Buy, having a look at products in the flesh, then checking Amazon for the items and buying them through their iPhone if the price is right.  So, your store is now Amazon's showroom.  If you can't find something, or didn't even know you wanted it, but happen to stray near a store carrying it, location-based services will push offers at you -- and the offers may come from competitors.  (Gratuitous told-you-so here.)  Niraj:  "Say you're in Home Depot.  You want a mailbox.  Their selection is 'limited' [his description was more colorful]. We have 300 to choose from.  Wouldn't you want to know that?" Jeff:  Soon we'll also see the death of the checkout line: you'll take a picture of the barcode on the object of your desire, your smartphone will tell the store's POS system about it, and the POS system will send back a digital receipt you can show someone (or in the future, something) on your way out of the store. 

With all these channels in use, I asked how often they make decisions to reallocate investments across (as opposed to within) them -- say from search to email, as opposed to from keyword to keyword.  Brian: "Every day, each morning.  Some things -- like affiliate relationships -- may take 3-4 days to unwind.  But the optimization is basically non-stop."  Later we talked about the parallels with Wall Street trading floors.  For him, the analogy is apt.  Effectively he's a market-maker, only the securities are clicks, not stocks.  It's now reflected in their recruiting: many recent hires are former Wall Street quants.

A final note: The cultures in these shops are intensely customer-focused, flat, and data-driven.  Scott reads *every one* of the hundreds of thousands (yes you read right) of customer survey responses Shoebuy gets each year.  He also described the enthusiasm with which their customer service team embraced having all company communications to customers end with an invitation to email senior management with any concerns.  Niraj described CSN's floor plan:  500 people, no offices.  Everyone in the company takes a regular turn in customer service.  Everyone has access to the firm's data warehouse.  Brian told us about a digital display they have up in their offices showing hour-by-hour, source-by-source performance.  They also recently ran a "Query Day" in which everyone in the company -- including sales, finance, HR -- got training in how to use their databases to answer business questions.  Tom described that they “watch the cash register every minute, hour, day during the Christmas shopping season.”

This was a terrific session, and I've only captured half of it here.  Further comments / corrections / observations very welcome.

Quiz Answers:

1. MIT Prof. David K. Gifford, Open Market, Cambridge

2. Tom Gerace, BeFree, Cambridge

3. Constant Contact, Waltham

Marketing Zeitgeist: Winter 2010 #amab

Call me Ishmael.  Wednesday night I was on the tip of Boston's Fish Pier, attending the AMA Boston chapter's first panel of the year at the Exchange Conference Center. The title of the event was "Marketing 2010: What CMOs Are Saying".   Panelists included Harpoon Brewery's EVP of Marketing Charles Storey, Dancing Deer Bakery's VP of Direct-to-Consumer Marketing Scott Miller, and Philips Healthcare VP of Global Communications Frank McGillin.  Collectively they represented a useful cross-section of the B2C-B2B spectrum.

Myles Bristowe, the chapter president and an old acquaintance from ArsDigita days, moderated.  Myles' first question was "How has the economy affected your marketing plans for the coming year?"  The consensus answer I heard, channeling Stephen Stills, was to "Love The One You're With."  Charlie talked about increasing purchasing frequency among folks who know Harpoon and are brew-istas.  Scott described plans to de-seasonalize their business by positioning DD products as gifts for occasions beyond end-of-year holidays, and to invest in database technology to do a better job of personalization ("It's worse to do personalization poorly than not at all.")  And Frank talked about how Philip's event-focused strategy would focus less on tallying leads and evaluating events as lead sources per se, and more on the quality of engagement of interactions (online and off), trusting that this will prove a better indication of the efficiency and effectiveness of their investment in pricey events.

In answer to where they are increasing and decreasing their spend, the panelists presented an interesting duality, combining a "going to the mattresses" reliance on channels they know and love (Harpoon and Philips both rely heavily on events) and a forward-looking focus on integrating the cross-channel experience.  Charlie talked about Harpoon's intent to "cut in new channels and go back to the core [events]", describing their marketing strategy as "experiential" (focused on music festivals, road races, bike races, and the like) with support for "enthusiast activities with a social component" where they could use social media to reinforce the investment in the event itself.  Further, Charlie talked about the importance of documenting these experiences -- storytelling -- to reinforce and extend the impact of the events themselves on brand affinity.  Frank talked about how Philips is working to ensure that they are trying to "get better synergy across channels, by understanding customer segments and their purchasing experiences."  Scott described how DD's D2C average order value and conversion rates are much higher in areas where thay have a presence in grocery stores, and how they are re-focusing on "harvesting cross-channel affinity" by targeting their outbound D2C investments into geographies where they have a wholesale presence / store distribution. 

More generally, Scott talked about how the ebbs and flows of supply and demand are also affecting where they put their marginal dollars.  He described how a couple of years ago, surging postage and printing costs had pushed them away from physical catalogs and toward email but also SEM in particular.  However, more recently, popular keywords have been bid up to the point where that channel has become less attractive on the margin.  Meanwhile, affiliates have matured to the point where they can be relied on more, and, related, Scott's seeing major ROI in their SEO investments -- every dollar invested there has
produced $95 in revenue.  Throughout, direct marketing generally and email specifically "still work".  As for social media, his experience so far has been that it's useful for supporting the brand, but it's not yet accountable enough to be looked to as a monetization mainstay.

Speaking of social media, Charlie and Frank echoed Scott's sentiment.  Charlie noted that Harpoon still relies primarily on a high-five figure house list for its email newsletter as the get-the-word-out cake, and its so-far-more-organic social media efforts as frosting.  Frank talked about how for Philips, their main investment so far in social media has been more focused on listening in established communities such as Sermo and Facebook's "Innovations In Health" group, rather than "trying to build the world's biggest online community of MRI enthusiasts."  In particular, he noted there's a genuineness of the feedback you get in these settings that the artificiality of focus groups and surveys tends to suppress.  And Scott talked about how DD is trying to "recycle" the listening it does through its call center's conversations with customers, where "everyone's got a cookie story -- 'I just want you to know that Grandma had one of your brownies just before she passed!'" to do online justice to this organic brand advocacy they're hearing everyday.

Another question concerned how measurable they find / are trying to make their marketing, and what that's meant to their business.  Scott described DD as very analytically driven, telling a story about how insights have transformed their business.  he described how they had observed that 92% of their orders were "ship-to-someone-other-than-buyer".  This helped them conclude that they weren't really a bakery, as the founders perceived, but a gift retailer.  So, they stopped taking pictures of the cakes, and started taking pictures of the packages for their catalogs! (Very memorable "data is the new creative" example, IMHO.)

The panelists were asked about the degree to which they are pursuing finer-grained measurement, and how much they are using testing.  Interestingly, they suggested that there were both cost and utility limits to what they could do.  Charlie noted that being two layers away from the customer made measurement beyond profit per case-equivalent a very expensive proposition for them. As for testing, Scott noted that with most of their sales concentrated in a very tight seasonal window, testing carried high risks that didn't rule it out, but made them more conservative about what to try.  Nonetheless, he noted that given the ease of fielding some tests they are now able to adjust what they do within this tight holiday window if they start very early -- right after Thanksgiving this year, for example.

I asked what campaigns by others they found memorable and gave them ideas for their own marketing.  All three panelists mentioned good ones. I liked Frank's best: he described how, before and during a major snowstorm, Volvo Boston had sent email weather advisories and reminders about topping up on windshield fluid.  Great example of indirect brand building through a useful service.

Afterward I chatted briefly with Paul Regensburg, President of Rain Castle Communications, which recently helped Unica re-launch its brand.  Paul noted a slightly less breathless tenor about "new channels" among the panelists than you'd expect if all you read were the trades.  We agreed that it's always different to hear directly from practitioners, especially when you ask them about everything they're grappling with rather than any particular channel effort or campaign.  The calibration was really useful.

(Finally, congratulations to Myles and his volunteer colleagues for the great work they've done building the Boston chapter to be the fourth largest of 78 in the country.  Last night's event drew well over 100 people, not bad for a frosty January weeknight.  Myles noted that 30% of ticket sales for the event
had come from their viral "Tweets For Seats" Program.)

Personalization Is A Process #MITXMT

Last week I went to a MITX panel in Cambridge titled, "Get Relevant:  The Next Generation of Website Personalization".  I asked a question: "In between broadcast-to-the-masses and one-to-one, where in your practical experience is the crossover point (in number of customer segments you define and design for) where returns from finer-grained personalization are exceeded by the complexity of supporting an expanding number of them?" 

I got three good answers:

• Brett Zucker (CTO at Bridgeline Software) and Joe Henriques (Regional Director, Sitecore) manned up ;-) and each gave me a number for where they see many organizations today -- Brett said 6-10, and Joe put it at 10-20.  Gross average, but crudely useful nonetheless!
• Andrew Hally (VP Product Marketing and Strategy at Unica) offered that it really depends on the industry, and on the mass-customizability of the product and other elements of the marketing mix. In the credit card biz, for example, you see firms executing against thousands of segments continuously redefined through real-time testing, because it's really easy to change terms and assess response.
• Scott Brinker (Co-founder/CTO at ion Interactive) noted that there are several answers to the question, because the process changes with each order of magnitude of the number of segments you set up to support. Scott described how in his experience, the hardest jump to make is from a handful of segments, supported by a highly manual process for creating offers, to the next order of magnitude, which at minimum requires modularization of marketing mix elements so they can be re-combined easily.  Scott further noted that traditional, primary-research-based segmentation approaches are being replaced by emergent (my word, blame me) segmentations based on testing. 

(Gents, apologies if I misquoted you -- please let me know.)

There's another question embedded in all this, which is Personalization (segmentation) with respect to what?  In other words, you can usefully define different segments for different elements of the marketing mix.  Upscale leisure traveler and a business traveler may get the same luxury hotel room.  But, they may behave differently when it comes to price.  Price-sensitive travelers may have different preferences for using marketing channels to find the best price.  So, in theory, you could have a single segment for product (luxury buyer, for example), two for pricing ("service-focused vs. price-focused"), and yet another two for channel preferences (e.g., "online-dominant" vs. "offline-dominant").  This can make segmentation much more operationally relevant, but it then also puts a premium on coordinating the outputs of these segmentation efforts (for example, if someone's really price-sensitive, you may want to steer them toward lower-cost digital channels for conversion).

Finally, another take-away from all this is to match the technology to the degree and kind (e.g., implicit vs. explicit) of personalization you intend to design a process for.  There's no point in buying a "Hemi-size" personalization engine if you've got a "Yugo-size" gas tank for marketing mix execution.  On the other hand, when the technology for testing an order-of-magnitude jump in segments becomes affordable, maybe it's time to optimize for that capability and flex / redesign the execution capability?

#Adobe + #Omniture: Further Thoughts ( #Analytics )

I've been following the Web Analytics Forum on Yahoo! -- David Simmons' ideas here are especially thoughtful -- and I listened to the Q3 Adobe con call.  Plus last night at Web Analytics Wednesday in Cambridge I had a chance to talk about it with VisualIQ CTO Anto Chittilappilly and Visible Measures' Tara Chang.  Here are some further ideas based on what I've read and heard so far:

• Rich media -- video, interactive ads, etc. -- are a growing piece of the Internet experience. (Google's rumored acquisition of Brightcove reflects this.)  (The flip side: Semphonic CEO Gary Angel writes that "It's taking a long time, but HTML is dying.")
  
• Since they're growing, tracking user interactions with them effectively is increasingly important, not just on the Internet but across platforms, and as the CIMM challenge to Nielsen suggests, not yet well addressed.
  
• User tracking in rich media platforms like Flash is more granular and more persistent than cookie-based tracking (David Simmons explains how and recommends Eric Peterson's Web Site Measurement Hacks for more).
  
• But, support for event-based tracking of users' interactions in rich internet media in existing web analytics platforms is in its infancy (though vendors say otherwise).
  
• So, publishers want tighter, simpler integration of event-based tracking.
  
• In the con call, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen mentions the framework "Create - Deploy - Optimize" as a way to understand their overall product roadmap vision.
  
• Adobe has the "Create" (e.g., Photoshop, this part of their business is ~60% of their revenues) and "Deploy" (e.g., Flash Server / Flash Player) pieces covered.  But "Optimize" was still uncovered, up until this announcement.

That's the product strategy logic.  The financial logic:

• Adobe is too dependent on the "Create" leg of their stool, and hasn't been able to monetize the "Deploy" piece as much as they might have hoped -- removing  license fees from the Open Screen Project is one recent example of this limitation.  So they're betting that "Optimize" has legs, and that buying Omniture in this economic climate at ~5x revenues is good timing.
  
• Adobe's traditional software-licensing business model has gotten crushed year to year.  Omniture's revenues are >90% recurring subscriptions based on a SAAS model.  Adobe revenues (~$3B) are 10x Omniture's but the enhanced value proposition of the A-O integration and cross-selling through Adobe's sales force will accelerate O's growth.  Over the next 2-3 years, this will help to reduce the volatility of A's revenues / revenue growth.

What's ahead?  One direction, as I've previously discussed, is that the workflows associated with "Create-Deploy-Optimize" are increasingly complex, and that platforms that support these workflows in a simple, more integrated way will become important to have.  Managing these processes through hairballs built with Excel spreadsheets scattered across file servers just won't cut it.

Postscript: Eric Peterson's take.  And more from him.  The gist -- not so high on Omniture's relative value to customers and the experience of working with them, and not sure why Adobe did this.  Anil Batra has some interesting ideas for product directions that emerge from the combination.

Action #Analytics Symposium

I'll be in St. Paul, Minnesota on September 21-23, presenting at the "Action Analytics: Setting A National Agenda" Symposium hosted by Minnesota State Colleges and Universities (MNSCU) and by Capella University.  (Notes on the conference to follow.)

MITX "What's Next": Mid-Year Digital Marketing Zeitgest Check (#MITXDT)

This morning I went to MITX's "The Current Digital Market and the Outlook for What's Next" event at Microsoft in Cambridge. The event was well-attended.  Before the  panel discussion, I enjoyed talking with Allen & Gerritsen CEO Andrew Graff, who helped us at ArsDigita, and iProspect CEO (and ex-Bain colleague) Rob Murray.  Andrew reported that business was surprisingly strong, and Rob validated trends toward multi-channel attribution analysis and optimization.  I also had the chance to meet Forrester's Shar van Boskirk briefly; the 5-year interactive marketing forecast of spend across display, search, email, mobile, and social she / they released yesterday, projecting digital to grow to 20% of an otherwise flat market, with social growing by a factor of five, sparked a spirited conversation on Josh Bernoff's Ad Age article about it yesterday.

Shar moderated a panel that included Dace Venture's Jon Chait, Fidelity Labs' (and Razorfish alum) Hadley Stern, and Razorfish Client Partner Kristin Marlow.  Jon's got a $75M debut fund focused on consumer marketing solutions; Hadley's job is to develop things for Fidelity customers that will be ready for prime-time in 12-18 months, and Kristin runs the Razorfish relationship with T. Rowe Price.

Shar's summary / synthesis of the panelists' themes:

• the marketing organization's function has been transformed into one of "conversation stewardship"; marketers need to take their efforts to plant and nurture conversations to where audiences are (e.g., syndicate, Hadley's main point), and be prepared to have it be a real 2-way communication (Jon's primary point). (FWIW, maybe "2-way" should be "n-way").
• There's a tight focus on performance right now; investments in data management / integration are taking precedence over investments in new media

Panelist comments I noted:

• Kristin: Interactive marketing budgets are on the sideline, waiting for performance to come back; what is getting spent is very close to conversion, and is very closely watched and analyzed
• Kristin: Quantcast is hot, people like the idea of being able to buy cookies  
• Kristin: Attribution analysis for display v search spending optimization is a growth area 
• Kristin: There's also lots of attention to the "on-domain experience" 
• Kristin: Lots of focus on social, because people think it will be largely free, but it's not
• Hadley: "97% of Fidelity's business is done online" [stunning stat, I'd be very interested to better understand how that's bounded / qualified] 
• Hadley: Given that, his big theme is syndication -- "Fidelity Everywhere" -- building applications for the desktop, iGoogle, iPhones, etc. that allow Fidelity customers to do what they need in the places they are most comfortable, which doesn't always mean coming to the website 
• Hadley: Fluid times -- "Feels like every six months we're trying to make big decisions without much information."
• Jon: Trend is toward 2-way marketing , most cost effective ways to maximize engagement with the right people. Seeing 5-14% CTR on display ads in these media
• Jon: The trend is real -- his portfolio companies serving these needs have had their strongets revenue growth ever since Q4 of last year 
• Jon and Kristin: establishing credible social presence takes commitment -- can't dabble.  
• Jon -- entry price for credible social media effort = $250k-350k/year, sustained effort will be seven figures / year
• Kristin: There's a tradeoff between engagement and scale [Note: my presentation at IBM Research on Monday was partly about how you reconcile the two]
• Shar: there isn't and won't be any fully integrated platform for marketing analytics and execution -- the key is to work with vendors who play nice with each other, through adherence to "open data"  

Questions I wished I'd asked:

• How much of decision-making by clients right now is based on modelling versus testing?
• Given the decline in unit prices for media, as well as lower creative costs, the cost of analytics and tracking for any given campaign are getting bigger -- to what degree are marketers factoring these into campaign ROI? [I'm not seeing that yet, but I suspect it will begin to become an issue in the next 12-24 months.  If in the past the medium was the message, the measure may well be the message in the future -- meaning what each target consumer experiences will be personalized based on complex algorithms drawing conclusions about him or her.]  

What did I miss? 

From The "Stop Whining About Obscurity And Start Rethinking Content For Usability" Dept.: What's your iCalendar Strategy?

At  a number of events I've been to recently, one common refrain has been "Gee, how is it that no one knows about all the cool stuff that's going on in sector X around here?  We've been working hard to get the word out, but we're still flying under the radar."

Around the same time, I was fiddling with my Google Calendars, trying to integrate them and add additional calendars to them (like weather, holidays, etc.).  I was really surprised to see the scarcity of things already registered with Google that I could add.  There's an option for adding a URL for different organizations' iCalendar feeds, but no way readily apparent to me to search / discover such feeds, either on Google Calendar itself or via a logical search.  

I went to the web sites of some organizations with events series that I like to get to, to see if they offered iCalendar feeds that would place those events on my calendar, so I could have them there as reminders if by chance I could get to them.  So far, no joy.  Reassuringly, I'm not alone with this idea or my curiosity at the lack of feeds, or their discoverability, as this post by Jon Udell suggests.

If you are a publisher with a series of events you'd like people to come to, how can you publish an iCalendar feed?  Here are a number of options for tools to publish calendars on your site that also support publishing an associated iCalendar feed.

I also checked out services like Eventbrite  and Eventful, thinking that these intermediaries logically would publish iCalendar feeds for organizations that publicize and manage individual events through them.  Again, no luck -- maybe I'm missing something?

This idea is not new.

The broader point:  Democratization of publishing tools means content exposed as content will find it harder and harder to get its day in the warm sunlight of user attention.  Smart publishers will think about how they can expose their content in formats and applications that are more tightly tied to how users employ that information.  Many things can be turned into event series -- if you are a recipe site, how about a "meal-of-the-week" series?  If you are the US Government -- or Forbes.com -- where's my iCalendar feed for economics statistics announcements?  Other examples: interest rates integrated with interest rate calculators, apartment rental listings integrated with mapping applications that support getting directions...  what can you think of?

Future Forward "What's Next In Tech": "DARC" Days Ahead

Thursday evening I attended Future Forwards' "What's Next In Tech: Exploring The Growth Opportunities of 2009 and Beyond" at the BU School Of Management.  The second of the evening's two panels (moderated with usual aplomb by Scott Kirsner) included Hubspot CEO Brian Halligan.  Brian described the criteria Hubspot uses as part of its hiring process using the acronym "DARC":

• Digital natives -- active presences in a number of places on the Web
• Analytic -- not just comfortable with, but passionate about data and the tools to play with them 
• Reach -- their digital presences have a large number of friends and followers that potentially help Hubspot's viral marketing efforts 
• Content creators -- their digital contributions provide signs of intelligent life 

Very useful and memorable.  Also, echoed the "Show, don't tell" philosophy we had at ArsDigita a decade ago.

Brian noted the emergence of Boston as a center of digital marketing thought leadership, citing (among others) local heroes David Meerman Scott, Chris Brogan, and Paul Gillin, and mentioning firms like Communispace and Crimson Hexagon (where my friend Ms. Perry Hewitt was the first CMO before leaving a few weeks ago to lead online communications for Harvard University).

So what did the panelists think would be the opportunities to track going forward (generally, and in Massachusetts in particular)?  My notes (please correct any inaccuracies and ommissions):

• Tim Healy, (CEO Enernoc and our former landlord in Contact Networks' early days -- thanks Tim!) -- Water
• Brian -- (seconding Michael Greeley) -- Connected Healthcare
• Ellen Rubin -- Business Intelligence (naturally, I agree) 
• Helen Greiner -- Cloud Computing 
• Mike Dornbrook  -- Smart Grids (After my recent MITX judging experience I think there's lots of possibilities here too!)
• Neal Sequeira (GC VC who backed video at network Scanscout, another piece of the ArsDigita diaspora) -- The "real-time web" (here's what I think that could mean)
• Michael Greeley -- robotics specifically, "connected healthcare" via the intersection of robotics and healthcare digitization/ informatics more generally 
• Bijan Sabet -- Education (specifically mentioned using online games to teach, citing 8D World as an example)

Pet peeve of the evening: student entrepreneurs who complain that VCs don't do enough to reach out to student entrepreneurs.  Kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy if they keep at it, no?  "Capture-it-in-a-bottle" moment of the evening: Scott Kirsner disarming said student as "cranky".

Innovate Mass Technology: June 10 Meeting Summary

Today I went to the Massachusetts IT Collaborative Workshop meeting (http://innovate.masstech.org/about/) at Microsoft Research in Cambridge.  The Governor came to announce a new venture funding prize competition, as part of a ~150(?) person brainstorming session to figure out how to drive IT sector job growth here.  There were plenty of very accomplished people there, and it was helpful to hear what they had to say.  The initiative certainly seems to have a blue-chip organizing committee behind it, and today's event did it justice.  

Some thoughts on the day:

It helps to have goals, if only to prioritize different ideas according to the contribution they could make toward meeting them.  The UMass Donahue Institute presented some interesting research (anybody got the link?) on IT sector capital investment on a per IT job basis, and some job growth stats for the sector here in the Commonwealth.  This got me thinking.  Let's say a reasonable objective would be to create and retain 25k IT sector jobs each paying $100k -- I picked this number to reflect skill, cost of living, and inflation -- over the next five years.  What top line would justify that?  What characteristics would the jobs have to have to make sense in Massachusetts, rather than some other place?

For each person you pay $100k, there's overhead: benefits, taxes, rent, tools of the trade.  Call it another $100k per job.   Plus you need other people to make and sell what the IT folks engineer.  Then in some cases the stuff is real physical stuff and has material costs.  Whatever, all in let's say that the required top line, for each $100k IT job, is $800k.  25k new IT jobs thus means we need $20 billion in new annual revenues to justify them.  Or, to coin a new unit of currency, $20B = a Google (though not as profitable -- GOOG generated $20B in revenue in 2008 with only 10k total employees worldwide, of whom maybe half (??) are engineers).

Hmm.  A little daunting, but maybe not.  Question: what sectors a) are huge b) need huge change and c) are led by Massachusetts practice and innovation?  Answer: health care and education.  Together, these push $3 trillion in spending in the US.  A 2% efficiency gain (the same with less, or more with the same) would represent a 3X ROI on the $20B folks would pay to achieve that.

There's precedent for the state mobilizing at this pace and scale.  In 2004 I was honored to be asked by BENS to work with MEMA on an initiative to increase emergency (read anti-terror) preparedness in conjunction with the 2004 Democratic National Convention.  In six weeks that summer, with a low-six-figure budget, we developed the equivalent of "Craigslist-for-emergencies" and registered $300M in emergency-related assets from 30 major local corporations which could have been made available if needed.  (See clearinghouse ideas below.)

OK, now let's think about the pipeline.  We need to attract, engage, and convert that revenue, and the jobs that go with it, to Massachusetts.  Some we grow from scratch, some we have to import.  Maybe the work from here is to do the math to figure out how much activity we need in the attract and engage buckets to convert the target revenue and jobs, and then prioritize and manage the initiatives according to how (cost-effectively) they contribute toward the goals in each bucket.

Other thoughts (some previously tweeted:) 

• You get what you measure.  We have debt clocks and population clocks. Maybe the Boston skyline needs a job creation clock?
• Tough times drive folks toward isolation, when what they need is more circulation for more company formation and job creation, so maybe encourage circulation-friendly initiatives? Like online clearinghouses for cheap office space to get them out of their basements? (For example, Craigslist doesn't present options in a very consumable way.  A better service would allow filtering by total budget, or location, or number of people to be accomodated, to help clear the market more readily.) Or, help finding shared financial and HR services for VC-backed startups struggling to use capital efficiently with the B-round door slammed shut?
• Our competition is described by vastly larger scales -- China, India, even Silicon Valley (SJ to SF can be 2-3 hours in tough traffic).  Can we afford to define ourselves so narrowly? Heretical thought: NE+NY as a marketing partnership?  It's only 4 hours and 15 bucks by Bolt Bus (with free wifi!) between the two.  Now that's capital-efficient!

Support A Worthy Cause: Nashoba Learning Group

Dear Friends,

On June 13, I'm riding in Nashoba Learning Group's annual 50 mile Bike-a-thon fundraiser, and I'd really appreciate your support.  As some of you know, the school does extraordinary work with autistic and similarly developmentally-disabled children (here's a good Boston Globe article that ran last year), and it's become a model for other schools around the country in the process.

Here's a link to the donation page, and below is my account of the 2007 ride (reprinted at friends' requests):

http://www.nashobalearninggroup.org/donations.htm

Many Thanks!

Cesar

"Friends,

Thank you all for being so generous on such short notice!   

Fresh off a flight from London that arrived in Boston at midnight on Friday, I wheeled myself onto the starting line Saturday morning a few minutes after eight .  Herewith, a few journal entries from the ride:

Mile 2:  The peloton drops me like a stone.  Dopeurs! Never mind; this breakaway is but  le petit setback.  Where are my domestiques to bring me back to the pack?

Mile 3:  Reality intrudes.  No domestiques.  Facing 47 miles' worth of solo quality time, I plot my comeback... 

Mile 10: 1st major climb, L'Alpe de Bolton (MA), a steep, nasty little "beyond classification" grade.  I curse at the crowds pressing in.  'Allez! Allez!' they call, like wolves.  A farmer in a Superman cape runs alongside.

Mile 10.25: Mirages disappear in the 95-degree heat.  (First time I've seen the Superman dude, though.  Moral of this story: lay off the British Airways dessert wines the night before a big ride.) 

Mile 10.5: Descending L'Alpe de Bolton, feeling airborne at 35 MPH

Mile 10.50125: Realizing after hitting bump that I am, in fact, airborne.   AAAAARRH!!!

Mile 14: I smell sweet victory in the morning air!

Mile 15:  Realize the smell is actually the Bolton dump

Mile 27: Col d'Harvard (MA).  Mis-shift on steep climb, drop chain off granny ring.  Barely click out of pedal to avoid keeling over, disappointing two buzzards circling overhead. 

Mile 33:  Whip out Blackberry, Googling 'Michael Rasmussen soigneur' to see if can score some surplus EPO

Mile 40:  I see dead people

Mile 50:  I am, ahem... outsprinted at the finish.  Ride organizers generously grant me 'same time' when they realize no one noticed exactly when I got back."


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