TheWayoftheWeb

I’m always really interested to hear people in non-marketing and non-editorial jobs talk about how they make a living and the way they deal with the challenges they face in their industries. It’s a great way to get some inspiration and find ways to think about things a bit differently.

One topic that’s stuck in my mind for researching is the idea of belief - the idea that brands should have a clear belief (not a proposition or a strategy - that’s for the executives) that is integral to the project/product, the team, and the people who interact with it. And whether you need to start with a belief, if it’s possible to introduce one, and how you can find people who already share yours.

Obviously religion is a belief-based system, but I saw a great example today of something I can more readily understand - football!

A non-league team who train and play around their 9-5 jobs, Histon FC, played Leeds United today, a team that has won the English league, played in European competitions, and that is currently chasing promotion back into the top English league.

And they beat them, 1-0, to know them out of the FA Cup competition.

Watching them, it was clear that the Histon team were full of belief and weren’t scared of a team three leagues above them. And although their belief wasn’t the only factor - Leeds should have scored twice, and the weather and pitch conditions also helped the non-league side - it was the biggest one in their success as they were able to keep going.

It’s also what seems to separate world champions in any sporting discipline - in motorsport, for example, the likes of Valentino Rossi and Mick Doohan, Michael Schumacher and Ayrton Senna (F1), Sebastien Loeb and Tommi Makinen (World Rally). They all differ in their personalities, with Rossi standing out as the best example of a world champion (eight times) who appears relaxed and mischevious, but carries a huge amount of confidence and self-belief.

Valentino Rossi - Picture by Matt Ritchie on Flickr (CC Licence)

Now this isn’t news. Plenty of psychologists have looked at sporting success or celebrity and spotted the planet-sized self belief that powers these people.

In marketing and social media, the concept isn’t new: Mark Earls coined the term “Purpose Idea”

‘Put really simply, the Purpose-Idea is the “What For?” of a business, or any kind of community. What exists to change (or protect) in the world, why employees get out of bed in the morning, what difference the business seeks to make on behalf of customers and employees and everyone else? BTW this is not “mission, vision, values” territory - it’s about real drives, passions and beliefs. The stuff that men in suits tend to get embarrassed about because it’s personal. But it’s the stuff that makes the difference between success and failure, because this kind of stuff brings folk together in all aspects of human life.’

And Hugh McLeod created a social object around a Purpose Idea for Microsoft.

What I’m interested in is finding as many great examples of this working within marketing and business, and externally. Sport, Religion, Manufacture, Publishing, - anywhere it can be found. Because that’s how you can show the transformation it can make to those who haven’t tried it. And the more belief that is in the brands I work with, the easier it makes marketing them!

I’ve been thinking about a comment by Ari Herzog on my post ‘Is Digg’s Day Done‘. As part of my discussion, I used the comparison with the ease of use and personal recommendation element of Stumbleupon. Ari raised the valid concern that Stumbleupon is intended for recommending index pages, and Digg is intended for deep diving into articles.

(Clarification from SU in the last 3 paragraphs clarifies index and deep level pages are both fine. The following still sets out good reasons for why the confusion has arisen)

But certainly a lot of users are using Stumbleupon for sharing and recommending individual articles and images. The question is whether this is a bad thing, or whether it benefits Stumbleupon?

A cause for confusion:

Stumbleupon itself has to share some of the blame for this in the terms used for explaining the site. While the submission tool has a ’submit site’ option, elsewhere ’site’ and ‘page’ are used interchangeably. For instance, the SU About page.

‘StumbleUpon helps you discover and share great websites. As you click Stumble!, we deliver high-quality pages matched to your personal preferences. These pages have been explicitly recommended by your friends or one of 5,946,251 other websurfers with interests similar to you. Rating these sites you like () automatically shares them with like-minded people – and helps you discover great sites your friends recommend.’

Bearing in mind a website can have thousands of pages, you can understand why there’s a little confusion. Again:

‘A simple 2-level rating system gives users the opportunity to pass on or give their opinion on any webpage with a single click.’

And certainly the Getting Started page clearly seems to say either choosing websites, or webpages is fine:

‘When you Stumble! a page or site, first thumb it, then click on to see reviews & comments made by other Stumblers, and to add one of your own‘

I’ve contacted Stumbleupon for clarification and an official answer, seeing as I can’t find one in About, FAQs, or the Discussion Forum!

Why Stumbling pages makes sense to individual users:

Stumbling individual pages makes more sense in a lot of circumstances than recommending an entire website on the basis of a single encounter with an article or image. If I’ve read some text or seen an image I can make a quality assessment on that piece of work immediately via the toolbar.

But to give an accurate assessment of a website could mean visiting 10, 20, or 50,000 pages or items to be able to get an idea over consistent quality - and that’s not taking into account how random a large site can be when it accepts a wide variety of authors or content submissions. Could you rate the entire Youtube site on the basis on one video? And how much would depend on whether your first encounter was with a rickroll or an mwesch anthropological study?

Why it makes more sense to publishers:

As user recommendation and rating systems become more mainstream and more numerous, publishers either need to offer the world’s longest drop down list - or pick the sites they’d most like to appear on. A site like Yahoo Buzz makes complete sense, as it’s a big gamble with big rewards of hundreds of thousands of visitors to a single article. Stumbleupon makes sense because it tends to drive a significant amount of traffic over longer periods, and with lower bounce rates, than many other sites (such as Digg), but the results are still somewhat transient. The only way to increase the amount of regular readers from such a site is to frequently have good quality content placed in front of them - which only happens when numerous pages are being submitted and highly rated.

And without the ability to raise the profile of a site with numerous pages submitted in this way, Stumblers (and users of other ranking systems) would be far more limited in sources, and only the established large scale sites would get publicity and traffic boosts of enough to make a difference.

My opinion is that Stumbleupon accepts and promotes both page and website submissions, and that’s the correct usage of the site.

Official clarification in a quick time:

And in an incredibly quick time, a message to Mr-SU got a prompt and comprehensive response:

‘Submitting an index page or a specific page that’s levels deep in a site are both appropriate uses of StumbleUpon. We want our members to submit the best-quality pages they discover so they can be shared with others.‘

So there’s some clarity. You can submit an index page, or a deep page to Stumbleupon. Therefore Stumbleupon conclusively is the best social website recommendation service as far as I can see!

In an update to my last post on Digg, the good news is my colleagues and I are now unbanned from Digg, following several emails.  It’s good that the ban was lifted, as not only would it have left some of my colleagues unmotivated about social media, but I’m also quite determined to see if there’s a way to be successful at driving traffic on Digg without gaming the system - and to do that requires legitmate access rather than cheating and going through proxies, or using autoscripts etc. There’s quite an interesting profile of the top Digg user, MrBabyMan on ReadWriteWeb, and whilst our own Digg saga was developing, there was a rash of stories regarding whether or not he uses a script to autosubmit content.

But whatever happens, during my last post, I referneced quite a few sites which provide a major developing threat to Digg, as it continues to inhabit a world between the massive traffic of Yahoo Buzz, and the smaller focus of sites like Sphinn on the same technology premise.

RSS sharing: Personally, I use two web based RSS readers - Google Reader is my main reader, but I keep an account at Feedeachother because I got to know the sole person behind it, Udi Falkson, it’s got a lot of features which are as good as Google Reader, and it’s good to have a place for feeds which I read for pleasure and aren’t work related, stopping my main reader becoming incredibly overwhelmed. What both sites offer - and what almost every RSS reader contains now - is the ability to easily share stories with friends and fans via the sites themselves or emails etc. As user networks grow, this provides one major method for content of interest to appear in front of me.

Social news aggregators: In Web 1.0, this meant Digg. Now, however, it tends to mean sites like Twine and Socialmedian. These services combine uploading discovered content with methods to follow ‘friends’ who submit quality news, and to comment around it, re-share it, and discover more via recommendations. Numbers at the moment are small as Twine is still in private beta, and Socialmedian has recently emerged, but they’re growing:

Social networks/microblogging/lifestreaming: Lumping together everything from Facebook to Twitter to Friendfeed basically revoles around one thing. Recommendations from friends. I build networks on these sites from people I know or discover who share interests with me, and therefore, their recommendations carry a certain weight with them. Can I say the same about 800 random Digg users or Amazon reviewers? I know which of my friends can recommend video cameras, mobile phones, or good hiphop. And I’ve already built up this information in getting to know them and adding them. Do I want to have to start researching each Digg user, particularly when the top Diggers tend to submit and rate so much it’s seemingly random - one of the flaws of the Shout system and blind digging the content your friends send for reciprocal links.

Niche ranking sites: It doesn’t take much to create a ranking system - probably less work than getting an article on the front page of Digg! Hence sites like Sphinn, which concentrate on Marketing news and discussion. And bearing in mind that the ‘Digg Effect‘ is infamous for traffic which may have a high Bounce Rate, and low loyalty, the smaller niche sites have a benefit for attracting and interacting with likeminded individuals. Plus you need far less popularity to get to the front!

The majors: I’ve already mentioned Yahoo Buzz and the huge amounts of traffic it can bring. As major newspaper and media sites evolve towards becoming more digital, they’ll increasingly be seeking ways to aggregate and curate online content. They’ve got sizeable audiences, and a wider perceived range of interests than the ‘Digg Crowd’. If you’re not looking for technology specifically, would you browse Digg, or an aggregator run by the New York Times or the Guardian?

Something completely different - human search: I’ll be honest and admit I didn’t see a use for the likes of Mahalo when I first encountered it. Why search within a far smaller sea than Google can trawl, and rely on weak-minded humans rather than our robot overlords? But I always like to use something for a while before making a judgement, and I’m glad I did, because the Mahalo homepage and the plugin for Firefox have become really useful for seeing popular stories and sources of information (the plugin also improves Google search with a handy summary information box!). Now I get an overview of recent stories, which have had an element of human filtering. And it’s showing pretty good growth:

All of this information is coming to me without needing to visit the Digg homepage on a regular basis, or research the small group of Digg users who can effectively make or break a story. I could subscribe to sections by RSS, but given the churn of stories, and the fact I’m not interested in every car or internet news story, it becomes problematic. Instead, I can rely on friends and family who know me to be able to show me things they think are a) Cool, and b) Things I’d really like by their own self-selecting mechanism and no real effort on my part.

I’m intrigued to see how other people feel, especially after some of the great comments to my last post on Digg. At the moment, I can’t see an easy solution for Kevin Rose and the team, but I’ll try and outline some possibilities in my next post.

The most important element of a successful website isn’t the technology, the content, or the marketing. It’s having a clear and defined proposition which is understood by the entire team - and most importantly, by the users of the website.

I’d always been implicitly aware that the likes of Google, Ebay et al had a clear purpose upon which they’d built success, and yet I’m as guilty as anyone of putting the cart before the horse, and trying to fill something with content, and market it, without  ensuring that there was a clear proposition in place. That’s even true of this blog, which has evolved over time, but really began as a general internet/tech blog. Even now, posts like this are somewhat at odds with my main focus on community and social media marketing!

Anyhow, since moving from editorial to marketing, I’ve had the chance to see how much a clear proposition helps the titles I work with - much of it driven by great work by one of my colleagues, Charlie Watson. Suddenly there’s a clear purpose and drive which can be lacking, particularly on sites which have been going for some time without direction.

But it’s also important to remember that direction and proposition may need to change over time, and be adapted in response to your audience. And that was underlined by a great meeting with the Ditto team yesterday. I can’t say what’s changed quite yet, but I can say that I’m constantly impressed with the way they respond to their audience, whilst maintaining a clear focus and proposition.

I guess it great propositions boil down to:

• Define a clear and simple aim for your site which differentiates itself from competitors, and aims to answer the needs of your audience.
• Monitor how effective the proposition is, and be open to changing it. Noone has ever got it exactly right first time - but the biggest websites listened and evolved more quickly than their competitors.
• Don’t be tempted to keep adding ‘and also this’ to the proposition. It needs to be so clear and simple you can convey it with one look at your homepage, or in a few words in ad advert or message board. Or even in a logo. You can’t do that if the proposition is 3 paragraphs long with an appendix! Google’s proposition is summed up by a logo and search box.

Oh, and if that does help you build the next big thing, my commission is around 10%!