Category Archives: Peer Reviews
Online recommendations taking off
Greg Sterling writes about online reviews today… lots of good stuff.
Adding to the mounting evidence that online reviews are now critical for both consumers and businesses, comScore and the Kelsey Group released online survey data (n=2,090) last week showing that 24% of consumer-respondents used online reviews in the context of looking for a local service business (during the preceding three-months)…
PQ Media issued a new report that estimated “word-of-mouth marketing” has become a $981 billion business. In addition, the report says that among consumers surveyed, 80% rely on friends and family for recommendations. This phenomenon is now moving quickly online… [lots more]
Taken together, these data all show how significant online reviews are becoming – as an extension of traditional “word of mouth” – for both consumers and local businesses. As the stakes get higher, which all these data suggest they will, the risk is that there’s more gaming and manipulation of reviews. Note that 30% (of the 24%) in the comScore data wrote reviews because they were asked to do so. (And see my recap of the SMX panel on user review content.)
Reviews and recommendations are a large part of the Front Porch Forum postings. Most arrive upon request from a neighbor.
Lessons from the Dot.com Graveyard
Andy Sack, former CEO of Judy’s Book, shared some lessons learned this week on his blog…
The first mistake: we weren’t aggressive enough in customer acquisition…
The second mistake: we expanded out of Seattle in August 2005 and went national… Ultimately, this decision prevented us from focusing on the customer acquisition problem I mentioned above as well as other improvements that would have made our product more sticky and compelling…
Interesting insights for Front Porch Forum to consider as we look to expand beyond our initial community.
It’s a bit apples-to-oranges, but I wonder how Craiglist in San Francisco compared to Judy’s Book in Seattle before each decide to expand beyond their original city? My sense is that Craigslist benefited from a much more solid homebase than Judy’s Book… but I don’t have any numbers to back that up.
FatDoor has money and leadership… now what?
TechCruch reports today that FatDoor.com just landed $5.5M of funding and a new CEO from Yahoo…
Fatdoor aims to connect you with your neighbors by providing a localized social network for your physical community. Although the site will be in private beta until the spring of 2008, a handful of details have been publicly available since at least June. The website will integrate with Microsoft Virtual Earth to display local business and residential listings on an interactive map. Once users claim their listings, they can add profiles and put down their interests. Users can then plan events and form local interest groups with the site.Fatdoor will also pull in information from other web services such as business reviews from Yelp, events listings, and driving directions. Users will be able to add their own business reviews but they won’t be displayed outside of the network on Yelp’s website. Fatdoor’s homepage will display something akin to the Facebook news feed with information about upcoming events and recently created groups.
So my FatDoor scorecard reads… great space with huge potential, new CEO with impressive credentials, money to burn… this could prove interesting. Or not… time will tell.
Most Silicon Valley successes are made by roping in some small percentage of the population over a huge geographical expanse… e.g., 5% of the United States on board some website would be 15 million people… yipee.
But to succeed at the local or neighborhood level, you need a relatively large percent of the population in a small area (e.g., our Front Porch Forum has 25% of our pilot city registered, but Burlington, VT only contains a fraction of 1% of the U.S. population). This is a very different game and one that most mainstream dot.coms and start-ups aren’t pursuing well or at all… thus the opportunity.
Whrrl and the new idiot box
From TechCrunch today…
Sometimes products are easy to sum up in single sentences, sometimes they are most definitely not. Whrrl, a new site by Pelago, is one of those that eludes definition. Hence, Pelago’s need to describe it unhelpfully as “a seamlessly integrated Web and mobile experience that is social, useful, and fun”.
Let’s start with the fundamentals and go from there. Whrrl is at heart a social network, as are many websites we see these days. But it’s a social network with a purpose (or, several related purposes, as we shall see). Members primarily use Whrrl to share their opinions and knowledge about local outfits, such as restaurants, bars, retail stores, and hotels. In the spirit of Yelp, users can find basic information about establishments and then, more importantly, share reviews of them (with brief descriptions and a star rating system). You can also write simple notes that correspond with particular locations, notes you can choose to share with all Whrrl members or just your friends…
Pelago raised $7.4 million last November from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Trilogy Equity Partners. They are currently running a promotion campaign with American Eagle to get the word out to Whrrl’s target demographic, 18 to late 20 year olds. Robert Scoble recently recorded an interview with Pelago CEO Jeff Holden.
I have no idea if this will be successful… perhaps it will turn into a real champ. What catches my attention is how much venture capital is flowing into dot.com start-ups with silly one-word names that are aimed at gear-heads living in major urban areas who have too much time on their hands. That’s not a knock against Whrrl, just an observation about the online universe.
Perhaps the division I’m groping around is between those who use the internet primarily for entertainment and those who use it as a tool to get things done more efficiently, cheaper, better, etc. Seems like internet-as-entertainment has won the day. Maybe we should start calling PCs mobile devices “the new idiot box.”
Judy’s Book RIP
I just learned from TechCrunch that Judy’s Book is dead…
We just got word from Judy’s Book founder and CEO Andy Sacks that the Seattle startup will be shutting down operations, and most of the staff of twelve was let go today. The company had raised a total of $10.5 million over two rounds of financing. Judy’s Book started off as a community driven review site for local businesses, but changed it’s focus in 2006 when the original model looked to be failing. The company de-focused on local reviews, and went more towards the shopping angle and local deals.
Other players in the local review space have fallen in the last year, too. Intuit shut down Zipingo last summer, and Insider Pages sold for little more than the capital it originally raised to CitySearch. Yelp is still standing and reportedly doing well, although fierce competition from Yahoo and Google as well as younger startups is looming.
Front Porch Forum does a booming business in our pilot community with local reviews… but with a very different take.
NY Times covers LifeAt and others
Bob Tedeschi wrote in the New York Times today about LifeAt, meettheneighbors.org and i-neighbors.org… three services taking aim at online social networking for neighbors. About LifeAt (see my recent post)…
Matthew Goldstein, LifeAt’s chief operating officer, said the company is only now completing its advertising strategy. For now, the company, based in Brooklyn, is surviving on the roughly $6,000 it receives from each building that signs up for the service. It does not charge the buildings yearly fees.
More than 335 buildings have joined since LifeAt began in March. About 600 more buildings are scheduled to introduce LifeAt Web sites by year’s end. The company does not currently share ad revenues with the buildings, but Mr. Goldstein said that could change.
Among buildings with LifeAt Web sites, Mr. Goldstein said, residents of 64 percent of the units have created personal pages. Property managers, who give residents login and password information, also use the sites to post news about maintenance work and vacancies.
And about meettheneighbors.org…
Since late 2004, MeetTheNeighbors.org, a for-profit company based in Manhattan, has operated a social networking service for apartment dwellers.
That site, which is free, has about 15,000 users, and last year began serving residents of Boston, London and Dublin. Jared Nissim, the company’s founder, runs the site as a sidelight.
Mr. Nissim said some buildings have considerably more active Web sites than others, thanks mostly to the efforts of volunteers in the building who are responsible for managing the content of the site. “It may be one of the flaws of our system that it relies on one primary contact to get the ball rolling,” he said.
The meettheneighbors site reports 2,204 buildings set up with 11,621 members… about five people per building.
And i-neighbors.org…
I-Neighbors continues to grow, with 45,000 people now using the free service.
I seem to recall that this service hosts about 5,000 neighborhood groups across North America. That’s a lot of people… although averaging 9 people per group.
About 25% of Front Porch Forum‘s pilot city has subscribed via word of mouth. Our average neighborhood forum has about 50 households.
Marchex Marching through Local Online
An interesting article in the Business 2.0 finale this month about Marchex.
Marchex CEO Russell Horowitz is launching websites for thousands of cities, big and small. The play? To beat Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo to the punch in connecting businesses to nearby customers.
With smart people, powerful tools, and hundreds of millions of dollars behind it, I’m sure that this effort will produce something of value… in fact it already has. But I wonder about “soul”…
Marchex is having a hard time selling its vision. Since so many of its sites sat idle for so long, packed with nothing but ads, Marchex looked like a giant domain play except with much higher overhead. But the company has been developing new technologies. And in June, Marchex lit up 100,000 of its sites – with another 150,000 or so to go – changing them into destinations with a smattering of content and reviews. The goal is to create sites that, as Horowitz puts it, “have a soul.”
In May 2006, for example, Marchex bought a review site called OpenList, a local guide that pulls together reviews for restaurants, hotels, and local attractions. The company then developed software that crawls the Web, sorts out duplicate content, and then generates a review. Look up San Francisco’s Hotel Triton on BayAreaHotels.com, for instance, and the software-generated write-up reads like a Zagat guide: “What travelers said they loved: ‘The location,’ ‘the staff,’ and ‘the room.’ Guests can enjoy yoga and other local activities.” Users add their own reviews too.
Hmm…
Ask your Community vs. Find it Yourself
Greg Sterling writes today about social networks as a way to cut through the tangle of information on the web…
Community is something of an antidote to these phenomena. Community has definite limitations and flaws but it also offers a way to navigate the sea of too many choices online.
We’ve been talking about this with Front Porch Forum for some time. Seems like there are two kinds of people in the world… those who think there are two kinds of people and those who don’t. 😉 Whoops…
Another two kinds… people who live and breathe online and those who use it as a tool when needed. Advanced users jump all over the growing mass of online services to find whatever, whenever. The rest of us would just as soon ask some real and familiar/trusted people… “does anybody know where I can get X?”
Reminds me of the old male-female stereotype about asking for driving directions.
LifeAt – Social Networking in Residential Buildings
TechCrunch reported today…
New York-based LifeAt
wants to create a social network around your residential building. Do you need one? Nope. But maybe you’ll use it anyway. And perhaps you’ll even get to know some of your neighbors. The building managers control the network and post information about the building itself. Residents sign up to get news about the building, interact with other users, etc.
LifeAt is in the ballpark. Front Porch Forum knows all about the demand for neighborhood-level online service. Time will tell if they’ve got it right.
Smalltown buys Local2Me
Smalltown announced today that it just bought Local2Me. Here are some of the reports about it…
As I’ve written in the past, I admire Smalltown’s narrow and deep focus on their initial five California towns. Local2Me is in the same geographic area as Smalltown. From Local2Me founder Michael Olivier…
The Local2Me service launched in 2000, and over the last seven years community members have posted over 31,000 neighborhood messages in 90 towns about wide-ranging topics, from great pediatric dentists to Halloween costumes for sale, trustworthy appliance repair, neighborhood crime issues, anti-raccoon measures, and more!
Each of these services has some similarities to Front Porch Forum. Although it’s probably more apples to oranges than anything, FPF had about 15,000 messages in its first year operating in one small metro area (including 19 towns).
About Blog
Ghost of Midnight is an online journal about fostering community within neighborhoods, with a special focus on Front Porch Forum (FPF). My wife, Valerie, and I founded FPF in 2006... read more
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