15 posts tagged “web business”

I had a chat with a friend last night about what “Web 2.0″ is.  He, a young marketing exec, thought that it was basically a programming term and that since he wasn’t hearing it that much anymore, it’s kinda a dead trend.  Oh no, I told him.  It’s much more than a marketing term for programming.

Basically I separated Web 2.0 into 3 areas: Design, Programming and Community.  I said that any one of the elements, done correctly, could qualify something as up for a Web 2.0 label, but a combination of the three ensured it.

• Design
• I am writing a creative brief today and started digging around to see if I could find some references for aesthetics I am partial to.  In doing so, I uncovered this nice writeup that summarizes some of the typical design elements found in a “web 2.0″ site.
• http://f6design.com/journal/2006/10/21/the-visual-design-of-web-20
•  Programming
• I told my friend, if you hear the words Ruby, Python, Drupal or AJAX used, you are dealing with a Web 2.0 site.  Of course, many other programming languages are used to achieve the kind of drag and drop feel of a Web 2.0 site, but these are the big ones lately.  These are also nice languages to see on a developer’s CV if you are hiring them for a job, as, even if they are not experts in any of the languages, they are forward thinking.
• Community
• How happy am I that the accidental career path that I wandered onto has become such a superstar in the industry. :) 
• Users are #1 in the Web 2.0 era.  You have to figure out a way to not only provide ways for your company to hear and communicate with your audience/users, but to actually listen and value their input.  Voting, focus groups, user enhances product design - the list is becoming infinite in the ways a company can immerse itself it it’s audience and become better for it. 

Let me know if I missed any major facet of Web 2.0.  I think most characteristics will fall in these buckets though.

Now that Web 2.0 has become normal, the fun begins.  Virtual worlds, user-centric design and strategies, MTV and video game raised kids becoming executives and generally blurred lines between companies and users are just the beginnings of a new era of business.  Web 2.0 isn’t dead, it was just the beginning. And I am excited for things to come.

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Tags: web2.0, design, mtv, video games, virtual worlds

I know it’s been a while since I posted.  My new job has me busy working now.  Not that strategizing isn’t working, but the next phases are more resource intensive and allow less time for blogging.

That said, I am researching production blogs now, especially aniamtion/cartoon ones.  If you know of any more, let me know.  Also, any production blogs in video games, virtual worlds and toys would be great, too.

Frederator Studios - http://newtoons.frederator.com/
•    Industry Veteran Fred Seibert (Hanna Barbera) started his own company a couple years ago with a main teme of get the word out for free no matter how.  They have tons of tangent video casts, etc and multiple posters.  Their posting frequency is a bit high for me, but a great animators blog.
Yo Gabba Gabba - http://brobee.blogspot.com/
•    One of my favorite preschool properties that I have been tracking since 2005.  The production blog is a mix of animation, behind the scenes with eccentric staff and fan submissions.  They also use an open blogging tool (Blogger)
Wow Wow Wubbzy - http://wubby.typepad.com/wubby/
•    Another property that implemented a production blog early in their development and allowed us to track progress until they went on air and then after.  They also use an open tool (Typepad).
The Muppet Newsflash - http://muppetnewsflash.blogspot.com/
•    Older property that is using new techniques to keep fans up to date on property news.  As their franchise is much older and more established, their updates are more on the caliber of new DVDs and Macy’s Thanksgiving float announcements, but the tone is the same as the others – light, excited and fan-centric.  They also use an open tool for posting.
South Park - http://www.southparkstudios.com/rss/
•    An old intern of mine is now one of the PA updaters on this blog.  Not one of my favorites due to tone, content and length of posts, but worth looking at for reference on scope of production blogs in this industry.

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Tags: cartoon, animation, frederator, muppets, yo gabba gabba, wow wow wubbzy, south park, plog, blog

10. Virtual worlds set up by toy manufacturers.
Another point from Lord Puttnam’s keynote, casting doubt on whether it’s such a good idea for toy firms to be launching their own virtual worlds - Mattel (with Barbie) and Lego being two examples. The idea of child entertainment funded by toymakers isn’t new (He-Man and Transformers, anyone?), but Lego’s Mark William Hansen had an elegant and considered response, pointing out that a virtual world launched purely to sell products is bad - but that kids will see that most quickly, and desert it.

Virtual Worlds Forum Blog » Blog Archive » Top 10 takeaways from the first day of VWFE 2007

I completely agree with this.  The first question that that needs to be asked when the topic of a virtual world (or any community initiative) comes up is “Why do we need/want it?”  It is the job of the web strategist to find the root of the request and to deal with the answer frankly. 

If the goal of adding community is to increase sales of offline product alone, community is probably not the correct strategy.  Starting a community is difficult work, maintaining one is even harder.  And there are risks involved that have to be dealt with in much more faster and comprehensive ways than just releasing a press release.

If the goal is, rather, to engage your audience in a very personal way with your brand and/or product, then you are starting on the right foot.  Sure, selling products is a fine goal, it’s the easiest way to sustain the community and makes complete sense, especially if the community is involved in some way.  But it shouldn’t be the primary goal - if it is, there are easier ways to achieve it.

Creating a community or virtual world is not a small decision, nor is it a finite decision either.  It’s funny to me how the enormity of a concept diminishes when the words become more common.  “Community” and “World” are BIG concepts - they are (or should be) big strategies for a company to adopt as well.

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Tags: marketing, virtual worlds, toys, vwfe2007

Any robust community is all about sharing; it’s what powers the group. Without an open exchange of ideas, content, and kind words, you don’t have community you merely have a group. Sharing is the social glue that creates long lasting relationships.

In a quest to reduce risk, holding their cards close to the vest, business has forgotten how to share. Your customers & community members what you to pass along information, give them insight into the company/brand they love, and create a relationship that’s based on a collaboration. Trust is built through this collaboration, and trust is a core tenet of customer interaction.

To kick off the Community Contest 2007, you have to learn to give something away before you see the reward. You have to trust that your sharing will return something positive…

Community Guy - Jake McKee » Community Contest 2007: Learning to Share

I love games and contests and Jake McKee from CommunityGuy.com is
kicking off a series of contests about community - for prizes even! 

The first one is so simple to win you would be a fool not to go and check it out.  I am sure they will get more challenging, so now is your chance to win… and share.

Good Luck!

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Tags: community, contests, trust, sharing

Those of us who understand the positive aspects of online play need to help shape the climate online in the next couple years. Gone are the days of bragging about how your child knows so much more about technology/computers/internet than you do. More and more of our lives are being spent online. Let’s treat that sea change with a bit more respect than simple awe/wonder.

If we don’t want EVERY brand space online to be blatant consumerism with no message or goal, we have to be proactive about preventing that from happening. We must work toward not just calling out the bad sites, but creating and commending the good sites. And not just ones that give lip-service to more holistic goals - ones that actually step up and do it.

I ducked out of the Kids and Teens talk at the Virtual Worlds conference last week in order to see a young girl doll brand case study. Oy vey, was that a hard one to sit through. The developer giving the talk continually talked sarcastically about the girly brand that he developed, which showed me that he didn’t respect the audience and community the site was trying to develop. How can you create a great community if you don’t care about them?

Through his talk, he talked a couple times about the core values of “Empowerment” etc that the site’s founders wanted to convey in the virtual world. But almost in the same breath, he would reiterate multiple times that the only purpose for the site was to “sell more dolls.” Makes you wonder if the brand managers of those dolls know and care how their brand is being conveyed to conference audiences and their online community.

If “to sell more dolls” is truly the reason that the parent company wanted to launch this world, fine. They certainly are not alone. But that doesn’t mean all the other sites that will be developed in this category have to be like that.

Sesame Street’s Panwapa world is a cool approach to get into a space that is bound to be crowded in the next 2 years - preschool to early readers, 4-7 year olds. Kudos to them for being there before anyone else with a solid idea for a world (and not just the mindless wandering and silly games that make up almost every world in this space).

Whether we like it or not, a child is assimilated into the tech space earlier and earlier as the years go by. To pretend that this isn’t happening or block the kids from sites on a micro level is not the way to improve the situation. It’s the ostrich effect and doesn’t improve anything for anyone, especially the kids.

People who grew up with technology are now having kids. These younger generation parents have less or no aversion to introducing their kids to the online/tech coolness that they have grown up with. As producers of content (be it for a marketing purpose or pure creative), we have to develop for the parents AND the kids. These younger parents will still want the educational aspects that the past decade of attentive parents wanted, but the younger parents understand all of this on another level. Many of them understand that you can have fun, build relationships, and develop as a human online. They also understand the importance of design, navigation and user interface in your online experience. AND they will, directly or indirectly, teach these concepts to their kids.

Hopefully the content will start to catch up with paradigm shift that is happening world-wide as I type. Is your content up to the task?

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Tags: panwapa, sesame street, proactive, virtualworlds,

Visionary Panel - Where the Platforms Are Going Next
The media has been largely dominated by one virtual worlds platform but innovation is coming fast and furious on multiple fronts from multiple vendors. This one-of-a-kind session brings together the visionaries of the major platform companies for an interactive discussion on the future of the virtual worlds platform.  Join us for a session you won’t want to miss.
- Christopher Klaus, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Kaneva
- Raph Koster, President, Areae, Inc.
- Michael Wilson, CEO, Makena Technologies
- Hui Xu, Founder & CEO, HiPiHi Co., Ltd
- Stephen Lawler, General Manager of Virtual Earth, Microsoft
- Corey Bridges, Co-founder, Executive Producer, & Marketing Director, The Multiverse Network
- Mark Wallace, blogger , 3pointD.com (moderator)

What does the future look like?
- A Common App is needed - so that all the worlds are not so compartmentalized and there is greater portabilty
- More incorporation of Social Networking features and games
- Usability hurdles need to be dealt with - the average person still finds most VWs to be too difficult and there is little being done for the mobile platform
- Controlled Identity management to all you to manage all of your identities in all of your worlds, with your own criteria for privacy and transparency

3D/Social Search Fans
    - “3D is a red herring” Raph Koster
        - we should be talking about 3D not as the next big thing, but as an aspect
        - More important question is regarding what we are using these space for and ding inside of them
        - 3D doesn’t work for everything - shopping market

Hui Xu, HiPiHi CEO, brought up how non-multiculti the crowd was
- he felt that culture blending and learning form other cultures was the biggest potential for these worlds
- No standard language exists to discuss these spaces yet, we don’t have a multi-lingual tool to bridge the gaps and we don’t have the world view mind set to talk theoretically yet.

The web migrated monetization models
= Subscription > Commerce/Ads
- vws have to do the same
- Migration needs to be Ads > Goods > Services
    - new toys are helping this transition
   
QQ (?) service - IM, Virtual E-commerce

Mobile Phone banking is very big overseas now

Local search is an opportunity to monetize
- ads need to excel in AI to raise relavancy

Mirror worlds will be the link to the Mass market
- Education contexts
- MS Live maps - Accurate to 4 inches
- Real versus Imaginary
- Melt content - reenact a bank robbery from earlier

“We are in the bookstore business - not the fiction or non-fiction business” - need to stop seeing everything as mutually exclusive

“Blogging in 3D is dumb” - Raph Koster

Representationally Agnostic
- data will show up how the user want it

3D is hard form many populations to grasp
- kids, older, etc
- it is not the holy grail

We need to jump over the now and next and think about later

Wii-mote and Hardware is helping innovation
- 3D mouse

Multiverse is sketchup compatible

Language - vulcanization of cultures
- there are translators for vws

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Tags: areae, hipihi, multiverse, kaneva, future, kids, tweens

I’m jumping the gun– but I’m giving ya’ll a weekend heads up. Ms. Joi Podgorny and I will be starting a podcast regarding kid communities, kid media, online media, and entertainment. Why? Because I strong arm her into thoughtful chats nearly every day (or vice versa)– and (if you’ve followed this blog at all you’d know–>) I love to ramble, and she does too. So, between me & joi, you’re gonna get a HUGE dose of everything-ness (and yes, that’s my new technical term).If you are interested in participating in our adventure, let us know.

We’ve already started a “wish list” of contibutors (and if you and I have previously spoken, or you’ve ever come into contact with this blog –> you’re probably already on that wish list).

Podcast. Modcast. Tween Cast. Kid cast. Us-cast? « Izzy Neis

Brilliant Suess-esque title of this post from Izzy and of course wanted to alert everyone that this is what we are thinking. I am a podcasting junkie and thought it was high time I added my (and Izzy’s) voice to the dull murmur of voices online. Plus, I have yet to find a good podcast about the kids online business. If you know of one, please let me know.

So, starting this week, Izzy and I are going to record one of our weekly chats about kids online and share it via rss with all of you. Like Izzy said, the format we want to try is the two of us, a guest and a online-kid-centric topic, so if you are interested in also being recorded talking about kids online, let one or both of us know.

Wish us luck and stay tuned!

technorati tags:IzzyNeis, podcast

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I was thinking about something a bit this week and thought that I would share it on my blog.  Apologies in advance if the ideas are still in the less than solid state.  Basically I have been thinking about the future - that the web, emerging technologies, cell phones, social networks are not really trends, as some people think of them as.  They ARE trends, in that when a new example of one comes around, it’s all anyone talks about for a while (can you say iPhone? Facebook? Club Penguin? Webkinz?).  But the fact that the larger population is even paying attention to these sorts of things, let alone the amount of attention those people are paying, in greater numbers is the phenomenal thing.

It’s this move, from trend to habit, that I have been thinking about lately.  No longer is it only the early adopters using new technology, websites and gadgets.  Now, in ever-increasing numbers, the rest of the population is starting to early adopt as well.  Trends are assimilating themselves into peoples daily lives.  I received multiple emails and messages today from friends that claimed the only way they remembered my birthday was via Facebook or MySpace alerts.

It’s because of this assimilation that we, as producers, need to move ahead in our thinking.  We have to have innovation of product and service on our minds at all times.  Me-too products and services are too old the second they come out.  We have to think about cool ways to take this new tech culture our societies are adopting and make new ways of learning, entertaining and existing. 

One example is mobile.  Mobile has come to mean cell phones.  But the new iPod Touch released yesterday has a wifi browser on it.  Still a small screen, but browser capabilities.  Many people are adopting this portable, surf anywhere mentality - but the devices and sites aren’t keeping up.  We need to think about how that switch will affect our content offerings and how we design.  Normal cell interfaces that access online are still around and will be for a while.  We have to design for that as well. 

But we also have to think about how the future users will use it.  Are the users using their phone browser for different activities than their normal browsers?  If they are watching video, is it certain kinds of videos?  Are there demographic differences in the kind of content consumed?  What are new ways that we can use this more portable means of accessing the Internet that will work for any phone interface that the user uses?  International cell users can give great insight here, as can pre-existing, albeit small US cell content networks. 

How can we move past simply identifying the next trends and start predicting habits?  How will we help future users to push the boundaries of how they are communicating?  What are you doing to this end?

technorati tags:clubpenguin, webkinz, iphone, future, mobile, cell

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Lord knows I will be able to this month and next. And I am not complaining, far from it. I have always wanted to travel, both professionally and personally. Whoa, am I getting my wish now.

So, I wanted to put my travel schedule up so that if any of you were in any of the towns when I am there we can grab a coffee or beer (or any other beverage you like). I love company and if it keeps me from watching the local news in my hotel room - even better!

London - 9/16-9/24
- Various meetings

NYC - 9/26-9/30
- Tween Mashup, co-paneling with Erin Reilly

SF/Bay Area - 10/3-10/11
- Online Community Summit in Sonoma
- Virtual Worlds 2007 in San Jose

Shanghai - 10/31-11/5 (? actual dates)
- various meetings

If you are in any of those places (or within rental car driving distance) let me know! (joipodgorny at gmail.com)

And because I am a google apps fangirl lately, I made a google calendar with my “Joi is not in Chicago” schedule. I know, I know - but it’s handy for friends and family!

technorati tags:travel, shanghai, nyc, london, sanfrancisco, conference, mashup, ypulse, tween

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I was talking to a colleague the other day about a work situation that is less than admirable.  Tension, uncertainty, and now, backstabbing.  Not the kind of place where any sort of real work would be expected to get done.  But what do you do when your team, or even worse, your company, has gotten to that point?

The obvious first thing to say is don’t let it get to that point form the first place.  When I’ve taught classes, both formally and informally, on project management, I am always sure to not glaze over the section on people skills and team dynamics.  This is sometimes the hardest area for a great leader to grasp - that s/he wouldn’t get there without the people that helped them along the way.  Project managers who are big task masters sometimes forget simple niceties like “please,” “thanks,” and “hello.”  But by in large, one of the most damaging actions a leader can do to their team, is not give them credit where it is due.

Most of the time, this simply an acknowledgment of a good job or task completed.  “Thanks for finishing that project” or “I really appreciate your weekly reports.”  Neither is required, but over time they make the difference between a happy employee who feels appreciated and one who doesn’t.  Practice makes perfect, here.  A person can tell when you are being canned or insincere in your delivery - so don’t say it unless you mean it.

The worst, though, is when a leader doesn’t acknowledge that their employee came up with an idea, or worse, steals it from them completely.  It sounds like an obvious no-no, but it happens all the time.

I developed an entertainment property concept once.  It was a preschool property, then called Superinas, about a troupe of super-hero ballerinas.  I even sewed tutus for the company pitch so myself and another gal that I brought in to help me flesh out the idea could twirl around and show how fun a series it would be.  I had no intention of writing, drawing, directing or producing the series, so giving the idea to the company was a no-brainer.  All I wanted was a simple nod from time to time, acknowledging that I come up with it initially.  And thankfully, everyone did that and all was good, all the way up until the last day I was at the company.

Acknowledgment goes so far.  Don’t overlook it.  If you do, you may just find you have less employees to be acknowledging overall - which is not a good thing.

technorati tags:project-management, superinas

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