The Media Revolution lead by the Prosumer!

I stumbled across the following video on the Logic and Emotion blog. It lays out an interesting view of what the future of the internet and user generated content might look like. I encourage you to view it:

Buzzillions the ultimate in site taxonomy & user generated content!

Yesterday I met with Jeff and Arun from Powereviews about their consumer product portal Buzzillions. This website is a great example of the use of taxonomy and user generated content to create a website with a wealth of content and an intuitive user experience.

They've used their rich database of tags and their search/taxonomy engine to provide a fresh way to drilldown and find the right customer reviews with their "Consumers Speak" navigation, see below:



Fresh approaches to navigation like this are exactly whats needed with modern websites with content that is so deep and often hard to find (requiring to many clicks to drill down). I encourage you take a look at Buzzillions it's a well designed site, and just might help with your decision next time you want to buy any type of product.

Product Information Management ... beyond traditional CMS/DMS

I saw a lot of cool products at the Internet Retailer Conference (IRCE 2007) in San Jose. However the one technology that resonated with me the most was Production Information Management (PIM). In this modern day and age when building a website generally it’s generally always on a Content Management Systems (CMS) platform which enables you to truly split content from the design of the site.

The one limitation of traditional CMS is that they are generally focused on doing page level copy very well, but don't offer enough flexibility and scalability when it comes to warehousing large amounts of product specification and data. Enter PIM.

PIM enables you to create your central data store or content warehouse where web copy, product information and specifications, files and assets are all housed in one place and are truly versioned. Depending on the package the technology lets you create structured or un-structured relationships with the content that is housed in the system via taxonomy. Adding targeted or personalized content to users becomes a much easier prospect with a PIM engine behind the scenes.

This of a system where every content item or asset is housed in a data warehouse that is truly version and can be shared with any number of platforms (web, print etc) via XML, Web Services or through an API and you have one very useful tool.

The two vendors I met at IRCE 2007 where Stibo and Catapult. The following diagram is an excerpt from Stibo's sales presentation of its STEP product. It really helps to show how a PIM software solution can be implemented and used to its full effect:

You can centralize it all in one place and provide a system to divide labour to keep things up to date and fresh in one place as well as enforce workflow. It also provides a framework to allow true de-centralized content, so you can offer direct feeds to suppliers, partners, dealers or other 3rd partys.

By truly embracing a PIM system you can throw away your old offline spreadsheet or Access / Filemaker database. And Forget dated versions of Quark, Word or other electronic documents that store product data. Breathe a sigh of relief! :)

Internet Retailer 2007... Community is King!

Last week I visited in the Internet Retailer 2007 conference in San Jose, California with a co-worker Chris Larson an Interactive Strategist at my employer Hanson Dodge Creative. It was an amazing trip to the Silicon Valley, my first time and I've returned with plenty of new information and ideas on how the web is breakdown down the barriers of traditional bricks and mortar establishments.

We started a blog while we were out there for 5 days to record some of our learning and our antics.

My three major takeaways from this conference were:

1. Community driven websites, sites that give users a sense of ownership and contribution are the way of the future. Community is King!
2. Buy versus Build. ASP or Hosted web software solutions with solid API's and support for Web Services and syndication are replacing the need to build it from scratch. They are cheaper, turnkey and will offer a greater ROI.
3. Big company’s do their research and development by merger and acquisition.

I have much more to share, but wanted to get these high level idea's down and expand on them at a later date.

De-centralized content

With the ever growing population of Web 2.0 community enabled sites on the internet it dawned on me that the same technology employed by sites like YouTube, FlickR, MySpace and others use to get visitors to their sites can be easily harnessed by other Business to Consumer and Business to Business .com's. Working in the agency world most clients generally believe a sound SEO and SEM tactics are the best way to get people to their sites. However what if you created your new website with the same embed tools (blog this, link this etc) that the experts use to enable you content to be aggregated?

As with any technology there are some concerns when you open up you websites content to be de-centralized, and that is loss of control. The other is making sure your site can handle the increased traffic if an article, picture of video goes viral. I recently read an article about the pitfalls of Microsoft enabling all their website content to be syndicated via RSS. The increased traffic almost brought their website to its knees, resulting in a less aggressive RSS strategy.

However the pay offs including improving awareness, increased visitors and your sites ranking are worth the risk. These days it seems if your embarking on a website redesign or build you should seriously consider a strategy to de-centralize some of your content. Whether it be press releases, imagery, documents or rich media such as video and audio. Creating buzz around your content is what it’s all about!