Yahoo goes mobile with search

By Charlene Li

Yahoo! already offers extensions of its popular Web-based services like Yahoo! Mail and Messenger. The company announced today that they will provide local, image, and Web search on mobile devices.

Of the three, local search is the most compelling. Users can look up a business (for example, a pizza shop), call the phone number from the search results, and best of all, get a map and driving directions.

But why would someone bother with this when they can simply call 411 to get the same information? It turns out that on the Web, about a quarter of all yellow pages searches are category specific – meaning that there’s no specific business name. So if you’re driving to a meeting and want to eat a slice, 411 calls can’t help you, but potentially Yahoo! Local Search via mobile can (presumably, you’d pull over first).

Driving directions are a godsend – especially if you have your locations stored on Yahoo! Maps. But here’s the catch – it’s highly unlikely that you’d be actually at one of those locations – because you’re doing this all on your phone. If were actually at home, work, or your parents’ house, you would probably access the information via the Web. This means that any driving direction information would require slow, painful typing of the current location. Eventually, I expect Yahoo! to craft a partnership with wireless providers where location information is automatically fed into the search queries.

Overall, I believe that the true value of Yahoo! Local and also, of Yahoo! Web Search on mobile devices is tie-in back to Yahoo! The instances when you would actually need this type of information will be far and few between, but when you need it, lo and behold, Yahoo!’s there to provide it for you.

I can’t say though that I see the same value for Image Search on mobile devices. The example Yahoo! gave during their briefing with Forrester (Yahoo! briefed my colleague, Charles Golvin, who covers consumer wireless products and services -- this example was relayed to me via Charlie) was of someone sitting at a restaurant admiring the art on the walls, and doing an image search to see the artist’s other works. Hmmm…I can think of better ways to spend a nice dinner with someone than waiting for images to render on a small phone screen. There are few instances that I can think of where I couldn’t simply wait to get back to my computer to conduct an image search. But if you think otherwise, by all means, let me know!

Correct Forrester RSS feeds

By Charlene Li

It turns out that I jumped the gun a bit -- Forrester launched it's official RSS feed page with three choices: WholeView2 (which gives you excerpts of all of the research produced) and two sub-feeds, one for IT-oriented research and the other for business strategy research.

The previous feed that I had given in another post is actually an RSS 0.91 version -- the new feed is in RSS 2.0.

So, here's the link to the RSS 2.0 feed for all of our research.

Pheedo's blogging best practices

By Charlene Li

Bill Flitter, VP of Marketing at Pheedo, sent me this email about corporate blogging best practices (I've edited it down a little for space reasons). Thanks so much, Bill! And I really agree with the point that blogging is just another part of the communications and marketing mix.

Again, if you have any suggestions, comment below or send me an email.

Pheedo has both an internal and external blog. We set the internal blog up to better communicate with teams working on specific projects. It took us several weeks to work out the details on best practices. We found people were posting too much information and using it as more of a data dump then a communications tool. The take-away was to establish best practices up front and decide how the blog should be used. Email, desktop folders and blogs have a purpose. It is important to understand how to use all effectively.

Now to our external blog at Pheedo.info. ...Much the same way you saw your blog traffic grow as a result of a few good posts, so did we. I was very diligent for the first 30 days to post original content every day that was very specific to the theme of the blog which is the marketing implications of blogging and RSS.

Once I established a rich blog, I reached out to the community and participated in the conversations on other related blogs. This generated a sizable amount of traffic to our blog.

I set up a few key word searches using PubSub so I could monitor the conversations happening on RSS Advertising. I was sure to participate in every relevant conversation on the subject. Next, I concentrated my efforts on the a-list bloggers. Getting mentioned by them was crucial.

After much effort, our work paid off. A post I wrote about RSS advertising was mentioned by an a-list blogger. Because RSS advertising is a still somewhat controversial, it spurred a lot of debate on the a-list blog, my blog and as well as countless others. This helped our traffic grow exponentially. Even those people who were opposed to us helped. It propelled us into the number one spot on Google for the search phrase “RSS Advertising.” This was also one of our goals. Furthermore, this lead to numerous reporters and researchers calling us because we’ve established ourselves as the experts in RSS Advertising.

To recap:
1. Focus on your core interest area to establish yourself as an expert.
2. Create at least 15-20 meaningful posts BEFORE you open your blog to the public. When people visit for the first time, you’ll have more then one post to share with them. If your blog is rich with information, most likely people will continue to read it.
3. Figure out who the a-list bloggers are in your niche and participate on their blog using comments and trackbacks. Links to your blog, outside your blog and within in your blog are all important to search engines.
4. Continue to write on target content

The biggest challenge most companies have is keeping the blog current. What I always suggest is you must look at it as a prospecting/networking tool that needs to be included in your marketing mix. It is just one more tool in your marketing toolbox.

Scoble on blog metrics

By Charlene Li

Robert Scoble was kind enough to respond to my query on blog metrics examples -- here's the excerpt from his post:

Here's some ways I'm measuring it:

1) How many inbound links there are. That shows how many people find you interesting enough to link to. Use Technorati.

2) How much raw traffic each site is sending. For instance, when Joel Spolsky linked to me he sent me about 12,000 visitors off of one link. Slashdot usually sends 15,000 to 100,000, depending on the sensationalism of the headline. Mainstream press? When Dave Winer was linked to by an article on MSN's home page he got 200,000 visitors from one link.

3) Anecdotal influence measures. For that you have to go to conferences and talk to people. Collect business cards. Etc.

I'm interested in how other people are measuring their ROI. You do all notice that I'm still doing this as a hobby on my own time, right? It's the fun things that change the world.

Which raises a darn good question -- if a company is going to sanction (or at least ignore the productivity impact) of someone blogging, there has to be a clear, measurable benefit to the company. An official blog hopefully brings the company better returns in the form of increased sales and lower customer service costs. And in the case of tolerating employee blogs, appropriate metrics may be employee satisfaction and retention.

Forrester's RSS feed

By Charlene Li

Bob Wyman wrote in a comment to a post, "...one thing I would really like to see from Forrester is an RSS or Atom feed that provides details on the new research reports that you folk are constantly publishing."

To which I posted a comment -- which wasn't the smartest thing to do! (Remember, I said that I'm still trying to figure this whole blogging thing out!) So here's what I wrote so that you can all see it.

We actually do have an RSS feed -- it's at http://www.forrester.com/rss here, although we're not yet actually publicizing it yet on our site. But it's in the works!!! It's by far the best way to scan our research -- and since I've started using it, it has helped me tremendously (I can now honestly say that I read all of our research -- or at least, the summary!).

Update 11/08/04: The feed I originally posted in this post is a link to our RSS .91 feed -- the feed linked to above is a RSS 2.0 feed. And we are now publicizing it along with other feeds on a Forrester RSS Feeds page.

Fear of corporate blogging

By Charlene Li

I'm currently researching how companies should go about blogging (it's a piece that I'll be producing as part of Forrester's Client Choice program -- clients get to choose from a number of different and topics and lo and behold -- blogging was #1). And Robert Scoble comes out with a very thoughtful post piece discussing the fear that holds companies back from setting up blogs.

In the course of my work, I frequently talk with companies struggling with what to do about blogs -- all the pros of connecting with your customers offset by tons of scary legal scenarios.

As I mentioned earlier, this is Forrester's first blog and I've seen something very interesting happening which I thought I'd share with you. I started this blog on September 24th with no publicity or links. On October 13th, I started putting the URL in my signature and told maybe about 10 people outside of Forrester about the blog. After Steve Rubel, Search Engine Watch, Search Engine Lowdown, and even our competition added links, I saw traffic jump 100 fold in one day.

I’ve been watching the blogging phenomenon for a while, but to experience it personally – and to see the impact it can quickly have – is still astounding. So, yes, there are a lot of barriers companies need to overcome, but I also see some pretty big benefits.

BTW, if your company has a public blog, a blogging policy for employees, internal blog – I think you get the idea – let me know as I’m looking for case study candidates and examples to use in the research. I’m particularly interested in how companies are measuring the impact of blogs. It’s great that “conversations” are taking place – but what’s the measurable benefit to offset the perceived high risk?

First Forrester blog

By Charlene Li

Steve Rubel posted a very nice comment on his blog, observing that this is Forrester's first blog. Very observant! It seemed natural that since I cover the space, that I have a blog. What better way to research a topic than to actually practice it!

One of the goals of this blog is also to figure out what role blogs will have within Forrester. So if you have suggestions about what you'd like to see this blog cover -- and also, what you expect to see in a Forrester blog, by all means, please let me know.

JotSpot and the making of my own wiki

By Charlene Li

I had a chance to speak with Joe Kraus, co-founder and CEO of JotSpot, about the company. They provide WYSIWYG wikis (what's a wiki?), similar in function to what Socialtext provides. JotSpot does position its service (which is still in beta) with a new bent -- because it's easy for them to tie together "loosely coupled objects", applications can be easily developed.

The example Joe walked through for me is recruiting -- a company can set up pages for individuals being interviewed by the company. They can then add news feeds about the candidate's current employer (and even better, any mentions of the candidate him/herself). But wait, there's more! I could then design an application where I can give the person a rank and set up a script where the candidate is emailed to other managers for review only if they meet certain rank criteria. The scripting language itself was pretty complex, but anyone who can write HTML can get a handle on it pretty quickly (I'm just on the edge of being competent enough with HTML to cause a lot of damage -- I personally wouldn't be able to do the JotSpot scripting in its current state.)

But then I started thinking that I could really use a wiki associated with this blog. For example, I could create a page that listed all of the marketing departments setting up blogs or delivering newsletters via RSS instead of email. Rather than act as gatekeeper for that type of information, it would be updated by the people most interested in the content. Joe said that JotSpot is currently conceived as a paid, hosted service, but that he was getting a few inquiries about doing exactly this. While it's unlikely to be a mainstay of JotSpot's business, I think that there could be an interesting business model for this, similar to what Six Apart has done for blogs (disclosure: this blog is hosted by Typepad, a Six Apart business).

There are two free wiki farm sites that I'll be trying out: SeedWiki and XWiki.com. Stay tuned....

Social networking and local search

By Charlene Li

There's been a lot of activity lately in this space -- I wrote about Evite's entry into social networking yesterday and there have been recent launches by Lycos Circles, Yelp!, Insider Pages, and Judy's Book.

Here's the logic. If I'm looking for something, say, a good tailor, I'm likely to ask my friends for a recommendation. All of these sites can potentially collect all of those reviews, and then rank the businesses based on the number of positive reviews they received.

Two big problems: 1) Getting your friends into the network and 2) Getting them to make reviews. Neither will happen quickly or easily.

Which is why I think services like Evite and to some extent, Lycos Circles will have the leg up over the more specific local referral social networking sites like Yelp!, Insider Pages, and Judy's Book. Evite already has a natural way (via invitation lists) to map social networks, while Lycos Circles draws in your tight social network via regular interactions.

The big, lurking shadow you see running around behind all of this is Yahoo! Local, and to some extent, Citysearch. Yahoo! in particular could easily map their general reviews in their database to your social network -- and I'm talking about the "network" that resides in your Yahoo! Calendar contact database. It will be hard for small start-ups to get much traction when size of network is the key to success.

Evite debuts local social networking

By Charlene Li

Evite revamped its site today to include social networking. The big news is it’s leveraging data from its RSVP service to automatically create the social network, rather than have users manually identify and invite people to join it. They do this by taking information about 1) who you’ve invited to an event; 2) who has invited you; and 3) people who have been at the same event as you to create the connection. I wrote about this in a social networking report – that relationship mapping for social networks will take place in the background by tapping into existing behaviors.

But what good is social network if you can’t do anything about it? Evite asks its users to create profiles and provide recommendations of their favorite bars and restaurants. When a user goes into “Places To Go” and does a search, venues with a recommendation from people in their network will appear. This review means a lot more to me, than say a review in Yahoo! Local that comes from someone I don’t know.

In effect, Evite is expanding out of the RSVP business and hoping to tap into local advertising dollars. It will also be showing paid listing ads from sister company Citysearch, as well as incorporating venue editorial reviews.