Avoiding Irrelevance

Jeremiah’s Web Strategy blog has a great post about evolving your irrelevant corporate website.

Here’s a taste of his view of the future:

Websites are created with customers
This is disruptive, but I predict that the most relevant future websites will have customers building websites alongside employees. The most effective websites will contain a balanced point of view of both the product team and customers –even if they have qualms with the product.

Unfiltered customer testimonials will appear
You’ll no longer only be the only one publishing to your website, customers, prospects, and other members of the community will have direct access to publish on your website. Sure, there will be controls to make sure the content is somewhat factual or reviewed, but it will be obvious to many that the only voice won’t be the marketing one.

Content will have both negative and positive views about your products
This one is hard to swallow, but how do you build the most trust? By being open, authentic, and transparent to the marketplace. We know from research that the highest degree of trust comes from those ‘like me’, a savvy marketer will allow content to appear from peers, customers, and the market. These will not always be a product rave, in fact it may be downright criticism, the goal? To take that feedback, and demonstrate in public how you will improve your offerings in plain view. Case study: Dell has done this with IdeaStorm.

Check out the rest here. It’s certainly thought-provoking. Some organizations have high levels of trust. I think what Jeremiah is advocating will be keys to building and maintaining that good will with the public in the long term.

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This makes me really proud of my hometown…

Austin, Minnesota, my hometown, the place where I’m raising my kids, and the home of non-electronic SPAM, is in the news again:

Man in deep doo-doo over ticket protest

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

AUSTIN, Minn.— An man who allegedly included dog feces along with his payment for a parking ticket has been charged with disorderly conduct. The 22-year-old man was charged with the misdemeanor May 11 in a criminal complaint filed in Mower County District Court.

The man’s vehicle was ticketed on April 18 while it was parked in front of his residence. He put an envelope containing his payment and dog feces in a drop box at the law enforcement center, the complaint stated.

On April 25, an office employee for the Austin Police Department smelled a rank odor as she gathered envelopes from the box. Opening the envelopes, the woman noticed one leaking a brown fluid, which got onto her hands and her desk, according to the complaint.

The next morning the woman awoke with a headache and vomited repeatedly. She was hospitalized for about two days with an undetermined illness.

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These columns must be mixed up

That’s what I thought at first when I logged on to my Wells Fargo on-line brokerage account today and saw $27.39 as the increase for the day for my aQuantive (AQNT) stock.

“That must be the stock price, not the increase,” I said to myself. “It’s been trading in the 30s. A $27 increase can’t be right.”

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Then I read the daily news and found out Microsoft had agreed to purchase aQuantive for $66.50 a share, an 85 percent premium over the previous day’s close. It’s all over the blogs, too: here, and here, and here, and here.
Good for my IRA.

It just goes to show what a BIG deal on-line advertising will be. With Google having announced a deal for DoubleClick, Microsoft needed to buy a seat at the advertising table.

I first bought AQNT stock (but unfortunately only 100 shares) because of trends I had been following in media and advertising. Spending on TV ads is huge, but audiences are getting smaller and people are skipping the commercials. But so far there hasn’t been anywhere near enough on-line ad inventory for current TV advertisers to buy. So I figured companies like aQuantive would have a great long-term opportunity for growth as they figured out how to create advertising opportunities.
In this investment, I was partially taking advice from two money people I respect, and partially going against both. Phil Town in his Rule #1 Investing suggests purchasing single stocks in industries you follow and understand. That I did. This is an area I work in and blog about.
Town says, however, you should look for companies with long track records of earnings, but which are currently trading at a significant discount to projected future earnings. That wasn’t true for AQNT, but the long-term market upside looked too good to wait until this stock got cheap by his standards.
My real financial hero, Dave Ramsey, the get-out-of-debt guru, says you shouldn’t buy single stocks, but instead should invest in mutual funds with a long track record. He rightly points out the examples of Enron and others, in which employees who had all their retirement eggs in the company stock found themselves financially ruined.

So because I like the Town tactic and the Ramsey rule, I just try to, in essence, create my own mutual fund by limiting each individual stock to no more than 10 percent of my IRA. That meant I had to sell Apple because it had gone up enough that it was too big of a part of my portfolio.

Yes, I’ve had my share of losers, too. Nortel hasn’t been great (and that was one that did have accounting problems that whacked the stock.) And then there was the STUPID Tax I paid by falling for a “hot tip” on Pangea Petroleum (PAPO). But because they were small percentages of my account, they were just aggravating, not devastating.

aQuantive isn’t a Peter Lynch 10-bagger for me (although if you had bought it five years ago, it would have been), but having it go up 130 percent in six months, and 78 percent in a day, makes up for some mistakes.

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NY Times to Depend on Video Syndication

Even the New York Times realizes that its video success depends on syndicating its video to blogs and other web sites, not in just driving traffic to the nytimes.com site.

That’s the report from Lost Remote. Here are some of Steve Safran’s highlights from Martin Nisenholtz’s presentation:

“We started to create original video for the web – and grew a desk from a handful to 25 people completely integrated into the newsroom.”
Our teams abroad have video cameras. We’re starting to build the full infrastructure.

“Video costs have dropped dramatically. The video we now produce – the majority requires a specialist in the field. This notion that the print reporters would be able to produce videos still hasn’t taken shape yet, but the trend is taking shape.”

“What does it take to get a print reporter to do this? After about a half a day of training, the print reporters do get the basic skills they need.”
“To reach a broader audience, the Times must distribute its video outside of NYTimes.com. We believe we need to go outside the walls to make this work.”

“By this strategy we get to put our video in front of a much bigger audience than we would by (keeping it at) the NYTimes.com.”

“It’s possible that something like AppleTV is going to be the living room’s iPod. That’s going to fundamentally change the way programming takes place and, we’re very early in this, but we’re determined to take a role in this.”

Goal in the next 18 months: “We want to have four to five times more streams generated outside NYTimes.com than inside it.”

“We do believe that in video, brands matter. Content choices are expanding at a dizzying rate. Brands serve as a beacon out there. We think that is one of our differentiators out there. And we think quality matters, too. Good is still good and bad is still bad. I still put my money on the guys in the Times newsroom than on the amateurs. That’s not to say there won’t be good amateur content.”

“The advantages that the new folks on the block have is that they have nothing to protect. Even though the New York Times is 156 years old, we’re still new in video. Failure (in video) is not a step backward for us.”

“Avoid square pegs. Web video is not TV… The whole format is radically changing.”

“The blogosphere is very important for moving video around. These are the new rules of the medium. We’re starting to think of ourselves not only as creators but as programmers as well.”

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