In a recent NY Times “Wheels” email, I clicked on a curious link entitled 2008 Collectible Car of the Year Contest (I must have missed it during the last six months of emails). I was brought to a user generated photo gallery where readers had submitted photos and descriptions of their cars for the community to vote upon. The winner, in case you were wondering, was The Marquis de Soto.

The fact that users are submitting this kind of info to the web is not new. Rate My Space, which was constructed by SIIA Member Neighborhood America does this for living spaces, and I’m certain that Car & Driver, Road & Track, as well as Hemmings Motor News are doing this for cars. What impressed me was that the venerable NY Times was trying to build such a niche audience.

I dont’ know how successful this venture has been, but I’m sure that many readers of the NYT have the disposable income to buy collectible cars. By creating a way to draw users together, bestow awards, and curate content, the NYT is employing some of the tactics they’ll need to survive in an online world.

 = Panels?

In looking at some of the people I follow on Twitter, I’m impressed and intrigued by the number of followers they have accumulated.  Then it dawned on me that perhaps there’s a way to make some money by selling access to your twitterati.  Suppose you wanted to gain some insight into what David Meerman Scott’s followers had on a PR or Marketing idea you had.  For a price and maybe a $ on the hash tag you would be permissioned to survey his list.  Same could go for someone who wants to know what David Pogue’s followers have to say about a new gadget or device.

Is anyone doing this now?  Do you think it is similar to the panel business that market research firms have built?

If you’ve ever taken a marketing or economics course you’ve been introduced to the notion of substitutes and complements — these are products or services that could either replace your offering or could make it better. I had a real life example of that concept this morning at Union Station in Washington DC. I had to catch a train to New York and had limited time before the train and headed toward the Starbucks and saw a line that had at least 20 people in it. Doing the quick calculus I figured I’d miss my train so I opted for a substitute — Primo Cappucino that had virtually no line.

Big surprise that the espresso was lousy, the scone was stale, and the yogurt tasted like strawberry frosting.

In the information industry we’ve talked about the phenomenon of “just good enough” replacing premium services. As in the breakfast example above, you get what you pay for and next time I’ll get up earlier for the premium service. I also think that most of the professionals served by our industry that are making market moving, life saving and critical strategic decisions will continue to rely on the premium services that we have to offer.

“Content Nation” is a wide-ranging look at what makes social media tick, offering case studies and practical tips as to how we can conduct our business, our politics and our personal lives using social media and a look at how a future shaped by social media will be very different in many ways than the civilizations of the past several thousand years.

A few months ago I noticed a new newspaper available at Starbucks. It is quite small, free and is distributed right where one waits for coffee (at least in Madison, CT). The idea for this came from the Mystarbucksidea.com website. The paper takes advertising, covers one topic and helps disseminate useful information all while you wait for your double tall nonfat dry cappuccino. I remember reading years ago that the articles in People Magazine were short enough to be read during a visit to the restroom — perhaps the Good sheet fills up the time while waiting for your coffee. More details here: http://www.good.is/

I read with interest about the new service that came out of Google’s philanthropic arm. By culling data from the last 5 year’s of searches and running it against reports for the Centers for Disease Control Reports, Google found that they were two weeks to ten days ahead of the CDC in learning about the outbreaks. I hope they call it “Floogle”.

What a great use of “data exhuast”. I think it also shows how important it is for publishers to see and understand how their customers construct queries on their databases. It can be such a great data set to mine for new products or to improve existing ones. 20 years ago while working in Washington DC, I used to file Freedom of Information Act requests at the Securities & Exchange Commission for all the other FOIA requests that had been filed. We found some great product ideas and market insight in those letters. The Internet makes the process a whole lot easier!

I attended the InfoCommerce Conference in Philadelphia this week and caught Ann Michael’s interesting session on launching products. She was joined by Michael Balsam , VP Products & Services, Onvia and Adam Bernacki, VP Sales & Marketing Leadership Directories.

Ann started out by remarking how change has affected product launches. Back in the day of books you had to be perfect because if a mistake was made it would live forever. This is not true in the Internet world – you can no longer afford to be perfect as you’ll never get the product out the door. The panel addressed this phenomenon by reviewing its impact at several places along the development process.

Michael talked about how Onvia publishes 60+ million pages per year with all sorts of detail about government contracts. This information can help clients like Dell know a year ahead of time when and where a new school would be built. Dell can use information to help them size future markets

Onvia’s development process includes Strategic Planning, Market Needs & Satisfaction, and User Experience. Onvia tries to drive toward the most profitable opportunities. They then try and understand the current and potential competitive landscape. They profile and segment markets based on unmet needs and finally benchmark and measure key performance indicators over time. They strive toward designing offers that are intuitive and workflow compatible. This informs their go to market planning.

Mike also extolled the benefits of agile product development versus waterfall and making sure to work from the “market back”. Agile really fits the notion of not letting “perfect be the enemy of the good”.

Adam Bernacki provided some background on Leadership Directories, known to many as the “publishers of the Yellow Books”. The Leadership Directories product is a “handcrafted” database with 70 editors/reporters covering 500,000 people. There are 5000 changes made every day.
As with Onvia, their process is also strategy driven. Here are a few of the measures they use:

1) Does the product support our strategic direction?
2) Does the product make money?
-Can you define success in absolute dollars and absolute time frame.
3)Is the product experimental enough?
-What does it teach us about our world, our market and our customers?

He shared their requirements for a measuring stick:
· Measure of commercial success should be both time-bound and absolutely clear in terms of sales achievements floors and ceiling targets
· New product has to produce 1-2% of our annualized sales in the 1st 12 months

Adam then walked us through a sales pipeline example with real numbers to show how truly ambitious this program really is. Net, net – 3200 sales hours or two people working full time for a year to achieve the goal!

These processes have led them to some great successes and some learning experiences.

The session finished with a lot of great questions as the publishers in the audience tried to gain insights on when to kill a product and how product use data is repurposed to create enhancements.