In the morning I sat in a session that discussed web start up. The main focus of this session was geared towards new startup companies. There were some good ideas presented that we could look at when creating new consumer solutions. According to Rob Hayes when designing new ideas we must ask a few questions:
· why this and why now?
· What is the Problem being solved and value to the customer?
Example – Mint money. Designed to manage money easily . Replaced Quicken in many levels.
· Market size – who is targeted demographic? How many potential users? What is it going to take to get to the total projected revenue? Think through numbers and think through real potential.
· Value to customer – Determine this and market to target audience.
· Required skill set – Important for the site design to match skill set of demographic.
In the morning I also attended a session on Free traffic with social media. How can we as a media company use blogs, social news, social networking and online video to leverage traffic? This is low cost high return, high impact. Stephan Spencer also talked about creating easy opportunities to share information. All info should include an email to a friend link. He also shared http://www.netconcepts.com. This looked like a good site to visit regarding SEO.
Afternoon session was on Experience driven product strategies by Todd Wilkens. Lots of great info – below are a few key thoughts.
1. The Experience is the product! - We need to understand the users experience and define the logic and data from here. Outside in approach vs data to user.
2. Experience strategy
Don’t use feature matrix to build strategy – competitors have x so let’s build this as well.
A better approach is to look at consumers needs and what is being missed… have strategy built in stages so you have a clear idea of how your product will evolve. Important not to overwhelm with functionality out of the gates.
Example -
Customers needs when it comes to photos.
Capture Upload Storage Viewing edit sharing printing
CVS, Walgreens does best with printing
Kodak did good job of upload and storage – sharing weak
FLIKR – saw an opportunity with sharing. Focused on where others were missing. As we create new experiences, we need to really define what are the customer’s needs? Why do they come to us? What do they want to see? How is our offering different than any other? Build an “elevator pitch” will help answer these questions – fill in the blanks: Product is for ______, who are dissatisfied with (or interested in) ____________. Our product/ service is ___________ that provides____________ unlike _______(the alternatives/competitors)
Another approach – Create a list under each question below.
Who is service for? What is the Service? Why is this compelling? How distinct?
All for today, looking forward to tomorrow.
Borelli out!
Hey Ted. Great post. Great to see someone on the business side really digging this stuff. Can’t wait to see how you infect to folks back at the shop!
Ted, what’s SEO mean?
SEO = Search Engine Optimization. Basically, cleaning up your code, making your site usable and making sure the key phrases/words from your on-page content are also in each page’s unique meta data.
Did Stephan have any other information on SEO and Web 2.0 other than what’s out at netconcepts.com?
Sarah, I have not had a chance to look at the site in its entirety. But some of the key pts he made were to get the info out into the social world. Make it easy for consumers to send to friends. The more your info is seen the better they will come back helping in overall traffic. Talked abut avoiding PDF’s adn if using rich media to code to where it is searchable. Not sure if this helps – I will go through my notes to see if I can find anything else.