Conde Nast will let Reddit spin off as a separate organization with hopes that the greater autonomy will increase Reddit’s growth. Conde will retain ownership as Reddit seeks to first increase its staff, starting with a CEO that will let Reddit reach its “full, unbridled potential,” according to a post announcing the change on Reddit’s company blog. READ MORE
Last week’s blackout of Amazon’s Web Services caused expensive and exasperating traffic halts to many prominent sites such as Reddit, Foursquare, and Hootsuite. However, according to Mashable, Amazon has finally issued a formal apology and lengthy explanation of how the outage occurred, why the system failed, and what Amazon plans to do to prevent similar issues in the future. READ MORE
In the wake of Amazon Web Service’s EBS (elastic block storage) subsystem outage, which took down or severely hampered sites like Reddit and Foursquare, there’s been plenty of noise about the perils of the “cloud.” ReadWriteWeb’s Klint Finley places the blame squarely with Amazon, citing not just the way the company handles data but also the company’s evasiveness in answering customer questions about the outage—what could be a costly “failure to communicate.” READ MORE
Many critics are still castigating Amazon Web Services, after an outage last week hobbled sites ranging from Reddit to Hootsuite to Foursquare. A guest post on Brad Feld’s blog, Feld Thoughts, calls for cooler heads to prevail. (Of course, the writer has an agenda.) READ MORE
Over the last few years, Web 2.0 has evolved to become not only a design paradigm, but also a development methodology that has become synonymous with innovation. Web 2.0 companies are able to innovate rapidly for four simple reasons: Low cost of innovation. You don’t need a bucketful of cash to prototype a Web 2.0 product or launch a Web 2.0 company. Costs of computing and storage have fallen dramatically, and services like cloud computing virtually eliminate the need for heavy IT infrastructure, reducing fixed costs. Case in point: Y-Combinator, a seed fund that invests an average of just $15,000 per venture, has helped many young companies get their start. Y-Combinator success stories include Reddit (acquired by Conde Nast) and Zenter (acquired by Google). Rapid bite-sized improvements instead of massive launches. The software that powers the Web services can be updated constantly, because it’s delivered over the Web. As a result, Web 2.0 companies often upgrade their services every day or every week, launching new features and fixing bugs. Ease of “measuring” user interactions with the service. Web services have the advantage that user interaction with the site or the service can be measured in a very precise manner. It’s easy to record the time spent by an average user on the site, the number of page views they saw, the trail of clicks and pages that helped them complete their task, and a lot of other such data. Because everything can be measured, Web companies have developed a philosophy of testing and measuring a lot more and guessing a lot less. Before any feature is launched to the entire audience of a site, it’s often tested on a small portion of the user base. An open innovation model. Web 2.0 companies have realized that some of their most innovative ideas might not come from within the company. Using Web-service application programming interfaces (APIs), they have exposed some of their most precious data to outside developers who can build innovative applications. Real-time search, one of the most used applications on Twitter, was developed by a company called Summize, using Twitter’s API. Twitter later acquired Summize. Taken together, all these methods are geared towards a new model of innovation — one that emphasizes rapid experimentation and serendipitous discovery. Since every idea is cheap and quick to try out with real users, and the results are easily measurable, Web 2.0 companies get to road test several ideas without spending excessive amounts of time trying to prioritize between them. Similarly, by allowing outside developers to use the company’s data to create applications without any restrictions, Web 2.0 companies are in effect launching hundreds of experiments simultaneously. This throws the traditional model of product development and innovation on its head. In the old days, companies performed exhaustive (and costly!) analysis to determine which one or two ideas would be most likely to succeed, and then invested accordingly. The Web 2.0 model makes it possible to experiment with a lot of ideas, without investing a lot of upfront cash or forcing assumptions about which idea will deliver the biggest upside. This new model is great for a world in which consumer preferences are difficult to predict and change rapidly. While your business might not have the same natural advantages as a Web 2.0 company, with a little bit of redesign of your processes, you could use elements of the same philosophy to fast-track your innovation. Here are some tips to get you started: Lower your cost of new product development. Be on the lookout for opportunities to reduce your costs of new product development. Using technology for knowledge management and outsourcing to low cost countries are among some of the ideas that innovative companies use. For example, in the electronics industry, Original Design Manufacturers (ODM) companies based in low cost countries like China have emerged as choice partners for prototyping and launching new designs. Create experiments that lead to continuous bite-sized improvements.If any aspect of your offering is a service, you can keep innovating by adding small features or by improving the workflow. In order to do that, you need to build a test-bed for trying out lots of experimental ideas. A few years ago, Stefan Thomke, a professor at Harvard Business School, published an insightful study detailing how Bank of America turned its branches into “Service Development Laboratories.” For instance, Thomke talks about an experiment designed to solve the problem that users perceived their wait times to be longer than the actual time. In order to remove the perception, the experiment involved testing user perception when televisions were installed over teller booths and comparing that with a standard branch without televisions. By measuring the improvement in customer satisfaction ratings with the television, the team was able to develop a case for wider rollout to some of the bigger branches of BofA. This is a great example of an experimental setup that leads to constant improvement in the quality of service. Measure everything and create feedback loops. You should aim to find opportunities for measuring user interaction with your product or service directly at the point of interaction, without relying on “marketing surveys.” Harrah’s is a great example of a company that invested in business intelligence solutions around its loyalty program, and made all of its marketing efforts highly data driven. Whenever a customer conducts a transaction using their Harrah’s card, the information is transmitted to a database, and used in a variety of ways to target the customer. The success of marketing campaigns is also measured using this data, and the campaigns are optimized accordingly. Soon after the program was launched a few years ago, its success made Harrah’s the most profitable company in its sector. Open up the innovation process to others and plug in with the ecosystem. In his book Wikinomics, Don Tapscott talks about how Goldcorp Inc., a struggling Toronto-based gold mine, opened up its sensitive geological data to the public to help the company get accurate estimates of the location of gold in its mines in Red Lake, Ontario. Within weeks, solutions poured in from all kinds of unexpected quarters, and identified more than 110 targets, half of them not previously identified by the company, with 80 percent of the new targets yielding substantial amounts of gold. In another example, Proctor & Gamble has developed a program called “Connect and Develop” with a goal of having 50 percent of its new products come from outside the company’s labs. The program also opens up access to P&G’s innovation assets. On the other hand, if you can’t find good ways of exposing your own data, you could instead think of using the data and APIs exposed by others — for example, Pure Digital, the manufacturers of the Flip Video Cameras, used YouTube’s APIs to make it easy to upload videos directly into YouTube, and in the process out-innovated the competition. It’s clear through all these examples that the new model of innovation is for everyone, and not just Web 2.0 companies. Find applications for these ideas in your business, and use them to change the world for the better. Vijay Chittoor is the director of product panagement at Kosmix, an exploration engine that offers a 360 degree view of any topic on the Web. A former McKinsey consultant, Vijay is a graduate of Harvard Business School and the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. He shares his thoughts on technology at his blog..
GotCast is an online clearinghouse where casting directors post jobs and aspiring performers submit audition videos. Some of those videos are amazing, inspiring, or funny. Founder and CEO Wil Schroter realized the videos themselves were valuable content that could help promote GotCast, so the company makes it easy for visitors to watch the videos and vote for favorites. GotCast posts links to some of its most popular videos on Digg, and some garner significant numbers of votes and viewings. That brings new visitors to the GotCast site. Admittedly, GotCast has something of an unfair advantage, with talented performers submitting their very best videos every day. But if you use content to try to add value or appeal to your website, you owe it to yourself to have that content do double duty by building visibility for your company on social media sites such as Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon. “If you can get on the front page of Digg, you’ll reach millions of eyeballs,” says Jon Wuebben, author of Content Rich: Writing Your Way to Wealth on the Web released this month. And even reaching front-page status in one of the sub-categories on the site can have a dramatic effect. How do you get the votes? Simply posting quality content is not always enough. Here are some inside tips for getting the most social media play: 1. Make it personal. For written content, a lot depends on tone and the language used, Wuebben says. “You want to write in first person, and use ‘you’ a lot. Don’t write in third person, or anything that sounds like brochure copy. Write as if you were writing to a friend.” “Your corporate training video probably won’t get a lot of love,” Schroter adds. “But if you, personally, have a reaction to something, if it makes you laugh or upsets you or touches you, then others may react the same way.” 2. Follow direct-mail rules. The same rules that help direct-mail copywriters get recipients to read “junk mail” will help you write social media-friendly content. These include stating something controversial, or offering valuable information such as a list of tips. And do put careful thought into the headline or title of your content. “Some of the best social media stories come from a great, usually provocative, headline,” Wuebben says. 3. Check out the sites before you create content. “You might want to go on Digg and see what’s on the homepage,” Wuebben says. “You can look in the section where your content would fit and see what’s getting ‘dugg’ the most.” That should help you figure out what kind of content would be likeliest to succeed on the site, and you can follow similar strategies for other social media sites as well. 4. Make it easy to share — and share it yourself. “We provide links for sharing content, or emailing it to a friend, on all our pages,” Schroter says. Sometimes users take advantage of these to share GotCast content on Digg or elsewhere, but the company also posts content to the sites itself — the only way to get consistent social media presence, he says. “Usually, it doesn’t happen unless we do it.” 5. Take a long view. “This is a tough thing that doesn’t happen overnight,” Wuebben cautions. It’s important to be patient, and to continue posting material to the social media sites that can slowly build recognition over time. By the same token, a prominent placement, could lead to a dramatic traffic increase on your site. If this happens, don’t assume it will last forever. “People get that massive spike, and they think it will keep on coming,” Schroter says. “Then, six months later, traffic has returned to its earlier levels.” And that’s okay. The temporary increase means a lot of people who may have never heard of your company now know who you are, and how to find you. And after all, that’s what promotion is all about.
