CenterNetworks — Business on the New Internet

Just discovered this, and it looks like a good resource:

CenterNetworks was relaunched in September 2006 to focus on the “new” Internet. This includes social networking, Web 2.0, and social lending. One of my main goals with CenterNetworks is to help you create better web apps. Not so much on the coding side but on the business side. To help you, we provide content in the following areas:

* Site Reviews
* News
* Insights
* Interviews
* Conference Coverage

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Categorized as Internet

12 Tenets of Social Media Marketing

The 12 Tenets of Social Media Marketing

I. The public is the Lord thy God
II. Thou shalt covet all media
III. Ignore not peer-to-peer media
IV. Thou shalt think globally and speak in tongues
V. Thy communications must pass the “who cares?” test
VI. Thou shalt learn to create artful blog and forum comments
VII. Thou shalt not talk shit
VIII. Thou shalt not make someone else speak for thee
IX. Thou shalt not refuse to comment when thy company is under fire
X. Concern thyself with thy overall marketing strategy
XI. Give they brand to the consumer
XII. Remember: thou must keep holy the Internet.

Amen.

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Categorized as Internet

A New Internet Strategy Course

Though there is much punditry on the topic, I’ve found a paucity of books, classes, and other educational materials about Internet strategy. Guessing Internet practitioners would appreciate a formal review, I’ve created a course called Introduction to Internet Business Strategy and will be teaching it first at the Information Architecture Summit in Las Vegas this March.

If you can’t make it to Vegas, I’ll be teaching it again in New York soon thereafter. Stay tuned.

Americans Online

The NY Times covers the new census figures…

Among adults, 97 million Internet users sought news online last year, 92 million bought a product, 91 million made a travel reservation, 16 million used a social or professional networking site and 13 million created a blog.

Do Customer Communities Pay Off?

In HBR this month is a rare, methodical (and free) look at the financial effect of online communities via a study of eBay Germany…

Over the course of a year, we compared the behavior of community enthusiasts and lurkers with that of the control group. The differences were astonishing. Lurkers and community enthusiasts bid twice as often as members of the control group, won up to 25% more auctions, paid final prices that were as much as 24% higher, and spent up to 54% more money (in total). Enthusiasts listed up to four times as many items on eBay and earned up to six times as much in monthly sales revenues as the control users. The findings on first-time sellers were even more impressive: Compared with the controls, almost ten times as many lurkers (56.1%) and enthusiasts (54.1%) started selling on eBay after they joined and participated in customer communities.

The challenge for companies now is remembering that creating community means getting like-minded groups of people together to do things they like doing and not just installing some community software.

Chaulk One Up for Blogs: The Satorialist

The Satorialist has suddenly made a big splash in both the blogging and fashion worlds with a very simple idea: take photos of wonderfully-dressed everyday people on the street and post them on a blog. The author’s eye and insightful commentary create little moments of education and beauty. We knew about the threats to classifieds and news and encyclopedias, and this peck at the high-media establishment further demonstrates that everything — even the insular fashion publishing world — is subject to the democratization of publishing.

Next time you’re at the bookstore have a look around and wonder what wouldn’t benefit from a simpler or more social approach or a whole new perspective.

This photo is titled, What Every American Boy Dreams Parisian Girls Look Like. Sigh.

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Categorized as Blogs

Cost-to-serve

Cost-to-serve is defined as the total supply chain cost from origin to destination, it incorporates such factors as inventory stocking, packaging and re-packaging, shipping, and returns processing.

So explains Tim Laseter, Elliot Rabinovich, and Angela Huang in S+B. I’d say products that have poor cost-to-serve profiles, like shoes, just haven’t redesigned their businesses to take advantage of online opportunities. For example, if shoe return rates are poor for fit reasons, more consideration needs to be put into consistent fit. This was never necessary before because we always bought shoes in a place we could try them on. Consumers may show loyalty to a particular brand, style, and even model given the possible price and convenience advantages of ordering online. Shoe manufacturers may find advantages in not redesigning every model every season, making it easier for consumers to re-order a shoe that fits, and profiting both in lower development costs and higher loyalty rates.

An example of redesigning the business to take advantage of e-commerce is Design Within Reach, which has showrooms to market items that are hard to evaluate online, and an online store and paper catalog for everything else.

Amazon disintermediates the credit card companies

Why bother with micropayments when you can reach right into the bank account?

For anyone familiar with European banking, this is an obvious solution. My European friends pay all their bills directly using a standard electronic system and none of them have checkbooks. Checkbooks are an American anachronism.

iTunes is so, so unfair

The music industry’s lack of innovation ability to even look at business differently is rather sad. Even after Apple showed how digital downloads could be made profitable, they’re pressuring Jobs to change his pricing model, complaining about his ingenuity

A sore point for some music executives is the fact that Apple generates much more money selling iPod players than it does as a digital music retailer, leading to complaints that Mr. Jobs is profiting more from tracks downloaded to fill the 21 million iPods sold so far than are the labels that produced the recordings.

Andrew Lack, the chief executive of Sony BMG, discussed the state of the overall digital market at a media and technology conference three months ago and said that Mr. Jobs “has got two revenue streams: one from our music and one from the sale of his iPods.”

“I’ve got one revenue stream,” Mr. Lack said, joking that it would require a medical professional to locate. “It’s not pretty.”

No, it’s not. But why blame that on Jobs?

Linking to the New York Times website

I just discovered two techniques for increasing your online enjoyment of the lovely New York Times:

  1. From blogs, links can lead behind the pay wall by creating a weblog-safe link (thanks Jason)
  2. If you live here and have a library card, you can access the newspaper’s archives back to 2000 — as well as the WSJ, Washington Post, company data, and a whole lot more through the public library’s Novel system
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Categorized as Blogs

New: comments on this blog

Those of you reading this via RSS — 2 out of 3 of you — can now come to the site and post your comments. I became convinced that the emerging practice of applying design thinking to business should be a conversation to hasten progress, so I’ve opened up my blog to discussion. Hope to hear what you have to say.

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Categorized as Blogs

metacool is itself cool

Diego Rodriguez — instructor at Stanford’s d.school — has a blog called metacool that’s the product of an engineering + MBA educated brain, definitely worth a look.

For example, he discusses Nike’s Considered line of shoes:

Considered shoes generate 63% less waste in manufacturing than a typical Nike design.  The use of solvents has been cut by 80%.  And a stunning 37% less energy is required to create a pair of shoes. Is Considered a perfect example of green design?  No, but when was the last time anyone did anything to perfection?  I’m just happy to see a big, public company like Nike — with everything to lose, and not so much to gain — take a leadership role in trying to forge a new market space for environmentally friendly, socially relevant products.  This is a wonderful first step.

I think green products will soon hit a tipping point, making Nike’s gamble pay off big. More on this in a future post.

CPH127: Design and Innovation are Boarding

CPH127 is a promising new blog from like-minds in Copenhagen:

This is a brand spanking new blog about the major influence of design as a motor for innovation, and like wise the other way around. We are neither 100% design-focused nor are we 100% business-focused. Our team consists designers, MBAs, dot-com entreprenours and all the other folks you would never expect to be on this kind of blog. Welcome aboard – we are about to take off!

Thanks to Gavin for the heads up.