sylleptic - mark hopwood’s blog

Yesterday, I read at Gizmodo that Reevoo (a leading provider of online review services to retailers) is warning shoppers to be careful when relying on reviews they read on the Internet. This might seem like an odd thing for a provider of reviews to be doing, but Reevoo’s business model involves pooling reviews across all its customers, and building its own brand as a trusted supplier of independent information, perhaps a bit like Which? Magazine. So Reevoo’s message can be translated as “our reviews are independent and reliable, beware other peoples’”.

I wrote last week about the benefits of consumer reviews on e-commerce websites: they help with search engine optimisation, and there is evidence they improve average basket value, conversion rates and return rates for many retailers. There is a real concern about the extent to which some retailers might edit unfavourable reviews, while others at the low end might just make up good ones. If 6 out of 10 consumers are strongly influenced by consumer reviews, there’s obviously an incentive for some to improve, or even manufacture, better feedback than they would otherwise receive.

This issue is on a continuum of questions regarding online trust. At one end we see trusted, peer reviewed academic writing, at the other unauthenticated random messages on Twitter, Facebook and Bebo, which might be inaccurate, slanderous or even criminal in some cases - the name of someone who might have been involved in a murder briefly appeared in comments on a Youtube video last week, according to this article.

Clearly you shouldn’t believe everything you read, and this is why trust models like ebay’s have become so successful. Tim Berners-Lee addressed the question at his lecture at the BCS in March. There might be better technical solutions on trust soon, but for now it’s not surprising that people are questioning consumer reviews. If Wikipedia can be amended by the CIA, to suit their world view, we should be careful before trusting anything we read.

One of the powers of a brand is to create that kind of trust for the information it provides. Would John Lewis fix its reviews? The reason most people would say not is that their brand is so strong. And that’s based on decades of hard work.

The Information Commissioner has ruled that bluetooth marketing isn’t subject to the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003 and that marketers no longer need to get an opt-in before they send messages over bluetooth.

His ruling is here and the IPA guidance on the implications are here.

Essentially this ruling removes the legal protection people have from unsolicited bluetooth marketing messages, but that doesn’t mean that good sense shouldn’t be applied. Unwelcome messages have a negative effect on the recipient from a marketing perspective, so responsible advertisers are unlikely to descend into bluetooth spamming as a result of this ruling.

The IPA also pointed out that messages need to be suitable for all ages, especially since a greater proportion of under 18s probably leave their bluetooth on than is the case in the rest of the population.

This article at the Economist makes some very strong points about Facebook as a business, and is well worth reading. Given that the whole value of the company is in its right to market to its users, the value of that marketing really has to be thought through. Lots of people are predicting Facebook will be the next behemoth Internet business, comparing it with Google, but is this a valid argument?

One of the first creative directors I worked with used to talk about “mission marketing”, creating advertising that online consumers were responsive to because it helped them with whatever task they were carrying out. If they’re searching on Google, adwords are a perfect example of this, and that’s why they’re so successful. But you can do it in other ways too: mortgage calculators on property sites, entertainment for our downtime, even cleverly placed 468×60 banners can help users complete their missions.

But what’s our mission when we’re on Facebook? We’re catching up with friends, gossip, making plans for the weekend. Sure, some advertising might help us with that, but an awful lot of brands have nothing to do with this particular mission, and could easily be seen as a nuisance or distraction.

It’s certainly possible to develop clever campaigns that help people research their holidays, or swap tips on the best DVD player, or whatever, and to incorporate those in Facebook, but how scaleable is that model compared to sponsored search listings? How many Facebook apps will one person install and use? It seems pretty clear (and this is one of the Economist’s points) that the comparison with Google is specious.

Which takes me back to the valuation question: is Facebook really worth $15bn? When people value companies, they do it on the basis of long term expected return on investments. If I invest $100 in one company, instead of another, or a savings account, I expect my money back eventually, and I expect an income that is greater than I’d get elsewhere, especially if there’s some risk attached. A company’s value (number of shares in issue times price per share) is often worked out as a ratio to annual earnings or profit. British Airways, with earnings of $500m, is worth about $5bn, so the price/earnings ratio is about 10 (11.18 when I looked, but I’m simplifying!)

What do those numbers look like for Facebook? $100m in earnings this year, and a $15bn valuation based on the Microsoft deal, means it would take them 150 years to earn back their market cap. Obviously they’re expected to grow, but how much growth is possible? And will they be around for long enough to repay all this enthusiasm?

I was at e-commerce expo in London on Tuesday, speaking to technology vendors, listening to presentations, all the usual exhibition things. The e-commerce space is very complex: if you examine a typical modern online store, it has many components, probably including the following:

• a core e-commerce platform (perhaps ATG, IBM, MS Commerce Server, Demandware) which can have many features including promotions, the basket and checkout functionality
• a merchandising tool, which the retailer uses to organise how products are presented to consumers, and increasingly merging with search (all those named above have one, but Mercado and Endeca are well-liked today)
• analytics and reporting tools like Coremetrics and Omniture (and again lots of others bundle this in)
• product imaging solutions like Scene 7
• product review features,  perhaps from Bazaarvoice, Reevoo or Feefo

… and these are just some of the options. Throw in order management, fraud detection and payment handling… the vendor landscape is very complex, and there is a healthy economy in figuring out the best combination of products for each retailer, implementing it, and integrating it with their back-end systems.

A presenter from one company was talking about behavioural targeting on retail websites, which his product did, and which involves detailed, specific configuration of web pages, content on those pages and even the different routes shoppers take, depending on what we know about them, and what they do. (This is a terrible definition of BT, but it’s the one he used). He said that using his company’s product meant shoppers got the right offer every time, leading to massively improved conversion, sales and profits.

Another presenter talked about how his company’s consumer review features were the most important contribution to his clients’ success: consumers loved to read what others had said, and higher sales, lower returns, better search engine optimisation all followed.

It’s clear that the claims of the vendors are largely contradictory. Buying all their products can’t be the answer. They can’t all be right! So where is a retailer to start? I think the answer is in thinking about the consumer: what customer journeys are best for the company’s product or service, for their consumers and ultimately for their retail performance? And then to design the experience around those insights, choosing the right combination of vendors to support the consumers’ journeys.

Another critical factor to consider is integration: buying a stack of products from different people is only going to make putting all the pieces together harder. There might be specific examples where buying products from multiple vendors adds value, but this needs to be balanced with the ease of implementing a suite that has been built to work together.

Finally, as one speaker was very keen to point out, renting a hosted solution, where you pay a monthly, quarterly or annual rent for a service rather than operating it yourself, makes many companies a lot more agile than they would be otherwise. In my management consulting days I would always have to remind clients to consider the “buy, build or outsource” question, and that question is even more important today than it was then, because what we can build for ourselves has become so much more complex.

News International is (according to this article) about to launch a vertical search engine focussed on the UK property market. To some, this might seem like a fairly uninteresting development in online property advertising. There are lots of property websites in the UK, Rightmove being the most prominent. Zoomf (who I’m involved with as a non-exec director), Propertyfinder and a host of other companies are also in this very competitive niche, so you might ask who needs another property website?

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Charles Tyrwhitt have just launched their new online store, which Agency.com helped to develop the user experience for. It was a collaboration with Javelin Group, and a host of e-commerce technologies are used, including:

• Mercado, for the structured product search and merchandising
• Scene 7 for the product image presentation
• Feefo for the user reviews of products

As an occasional wearer of suits and such like myself, I’m glad this site’s gone live, as it’s a great improvement on its predecessor and is applying a lot of current e-commerce best practice.

I’ve known the people at Emailvision for 6 years, and have worked with them on several occasions, as a client and as a consultant. The company has grown amazingly, especially over the last couple of years. This morning I was at the Institute of Directors for their breakfast seminar about version 6 of the Campaign Commander email marketing platform.

As they explained it, version 6 is about 3 things: easy integration with other web-based applications, better reporting and control over user rights and workflow.

Integration is all about APIs (the interfaces developers use to integrate applications with each other) and web services , a specific kind of API used for web applications. As they explained it, you no longer need to use the Emailvision front-end at all if you don’t want to: you can control and access anything Emailvision can do just by using their APIs. It’s unlikely that anyone is going to write their own user interface to Emailvision’s email platform: there’s a good one already. It does mean that most integrations you might like to do will be possible.

Suppose, for example, you’ve got an e-commerce website that’s been doing its own email marketing, but you’ve grown out of the built-in capabilities. Now you can choose between enhancing your own email platform or building an interface and using Emailvision’s. Given the amount of R&D they do each year, the idea of moving up to their platform could be a lot more attractive than attempting to enhance your solution. If you’re using Salesforce.com or Highrise for your customer relationship management, or Coremetrics for your analytics, you could easily benefit from this integration.

There’s something about this that reminds me of yesterday’s piece about Dopplr: building something very functional and making it easy to plug into (and well-documented) makes it much more likely that people will pick up your application and start doing interesting things with it.

Chris Combemale, Emailvision’s COO, and I were talking about APIs for the Emailvision platform in 2002, so it’s great to see them doing such a comprehensive job now, and placing it at the centre of their product strategy. And very web 2.0!

The reporting enhancements looked very nice, and I would expect so too! This is a very competitive area and keeping the reporting ahead of its rivals is a necessity.

Finally, on workflow and user rights, they’ve implemented controls and structures that remind me very much of those you see today in commercial content management systems. User access can be defined at the role level, and then users can be assigned to different lists (effectively databases) with very specific control over access rights. Different workflows for campaign development and execution can be set up, and these can again vary from list to list. It’s very powerful, allowing customers to set things up so that the CEO can run a dashboard report but can’t inadvertently push the campaign live. Agencies can be allowed to upload creative (and perhaps to test it) but not to create campaigns, if that’s how you want it.

My only reservation on this point is to ask whether they might open up the workflow and user architecture, so that big enterprises can use their existing LDAP or Active Directory for user access, for example. Might a corporate website built on Sharepoint 2007 link to Emailvision for its email campaign management, and use Windows Workflow Foundation to integrate web and email development workflows?

Finally, it’s interesting to see how many pre-configured packages of services Emailvision are offering. Having acquired Barnes & Richardson, the Brussels-based viral experts, last year, they’ve designed a full-service viral solution that looks very competitive. They also have post-sale engagement and up-sell solutions that would benefit a lot of retailers.

This is a great presentation I picked up yesterday, from the team at Dopplr. It’s somewhat technical, and useful for developers for that reason, but it’s making some important points about business trends as well.

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The first big point is that you don’t have to build a huge online service to do something truly useful. Dopplr actually does a very simple thing, but it does it in an open way that makes it easy to integrate with other things. The presentation gives lots of examples of this: blog badges, Facebook integration and even a tool that can tell you how much CO2 you’re producing with your business travel, all powered by trip data at Dopplr, but integrated with other things, to make 1+1=3.

The second big point is about identity management. OpenID is emerging as a standard for identification online: Dopplr, 37 Signals (with their Basecamp application) and many, many others are turning to OpenID to manage authentication and identification. This will make it much easier for applications to stitch together bits of information from different sources. But there are also standard APIs (Google has one, Facebook has one, Flickr has one) that make it easy for users of the Internet to authorise applications to access the data from each others’ systems on behalf of the user. OpenID will be a big part of lots of services looking forward.

After a great deal of effort from a cast of hundreds (well, almost) we’ve launched British Airways’ preview site for Heathrow Terminal 5, which opens next year. It’s a feast of interactive content, showing all aspects of what’s going to be an amazing place to travel through. Some of the team have had visits already, and it sounds incredibly futuristic. They say on the site that bags will often be waiting on the carousel for arriving passengers, and it’ll be the way they’ve designed and used technology to improve service that will determine how successful it turns out to be.

Well done to the team that built the site: I know it’s been hard work, though maybe not as hard as erecting the largest free-standing building in the UK…

Yesterday I read about Jiglu, a plug-in for blogs that reads content and creates tagging data for it, automatically. Tagging is an important, necessary, and occassionally tedious activity that people with blogs carry out, and it’s hard to say whether you’ve done it intelligently or not. Tags are used by people reading sites (for example you might look at all the content I wrote about “web 2.0″) but they’re used a lot by software as well: sites like technorati, Google’s blog search and a host of others use tags as a way to navigate and understand what content is about, and it’s a popular way into websites as a result. So it drives a lot of traffic, which makes it important, and none of us know if we’re doing it well or not.

I therefore installed Jiglu yesterday, and so far I’m pretty impressed. It’s extracted useful tags (more than I would, which I guess is good) about people, things, places, and created a little panel that you can see on the right hand side. But it’s also created active links in my text, so you can go straight from a mention of the word IASH (I do hope it’s highlighted that for me) to all my entries about them.

It looks quite useful, in a geeky kind of way. I’ll keep an eye on how it goes, but if it improves my tagging and traffic numbers, it can’t be bad.