Friday, March 18, 2011

COD: Mixtent aims at cracking the professional reputation nut

Thanks to ad:tech for publishing this first

I first learned about Mixtent in mid February, and was fascinated by both the notion of collective reputation measurement and the role it could play in making better hiring decisions. Let’s face it, making the decision to hire people is always a bit of a crap shoot. You can check references but rare is the person that cannot find three schmucks to vouch for them. Further, the fluid nature of job roles in the modern organization means that the same job title can require one set of skills in one company, and quite a different set in another.

We all know that hiring and retaining great staff are huge challenges on both the agency and brand sides. I am going to use the role of Media Supervisor as an example of why deep reputation information can be essential to making better choices. One assignment might require intimate knowledge of the bleeding edge, another an extraordinary mentoring ability, and the third the ability to build a stronger relationship with a client. We none of us are strong at everything.

What Mixtent does is uses your personal Linked In network, and a binary either or rating system to provide a picture of an individual based upon the opinions of people that they are connected to.

You join Mixtent by connecting it to your LinkedIn profile. From there, the platform defines a range of skills connected to your experience, and has the community rate you versus other connections on those skills.

In turn, you get to rate people you know on their experience sets. As I mentioned earlier, the ratings system is binary. Would you rather work with person A or person B on a project requiring the given skill set?

The platform gathers all of the ratings of all of the people and gives you a percentile rank versus others with the same skill sets. Your percentile rank is only calculated AFTER you have received 20 ratings, which is designed to limit the impact of being flamed by an individual you are connected to. And to give the data genuine validity.

How will this be useful in hiring and management decisions? Well, for a start, it gives you a more quantitatively valid view of an individual’s strengths. It’ll help you decide whether candidate A or candidate B might be more appropriate for that Media Supe assignment that requires strong managerial skills. Because you won’t be relying on a few interviews and self-selected references.

BTW, your ratings of individuals are kept private – that’s another inherent strength of the system requiring more than 20 votes before it calculates your percentile rank. That way you can be honest without fear of repercussions.

This is a new service, and for now only your connections can see your rankings. Additionally, if you see your ratings and dislike the answers, you can opt right out. Tech Crunch said that this is important to building a successful professional reputation platform. In their words:

Your peers can vote on you anonymously, so you don’t have the LinkedIn issue where people glad-hand recommendations for one another, but there is no way to enter text so the site doesn’t evolve in the defamation morass of Honestly either. Also, unlike Honestly (born as Unvarnished), you have to opt-in to Mixtent, and if you don’t like the results, you can opt out. I think that’s essential to any reputation system. If you build a good enough product, people will use it without being bullied or forced into it.

I can only guess where Mixtent is going. But I think the model is well designed, and the information very valuable. It’ll become even more valuable as the ranking algorithms get more and more accurate. Keep an eye out for this team – I think they are on to something very valuable.

COD: Tecca and the New Way to Sell

Thanks to ad:tech for publishing this first.

Big box retail has brought consumer benefits, but there have also been costs. No, I am not going to get all Mary Harris “Mother” Jones on you, though if you asked me to lunch I certainly could. Rather, I am going to come at this from a different perspective: How difficult it can be to make a good decision on purchases, particularly electronic purchases when you're standing in a warehouse-sized store and the electronics clerk is outside having a smoke.

Because let’s face it, if you go to a big electronics retailer, the “help” you get is pretty spotty. All the happy well informed employee TV ads don’t make up for the time when you have $2000 in your pocket for some washer dryer set, and the employee (when you find one) only knows which is the LG and which the Vizio. I can read logos, what I want is some insight on the strengths and weaknesses of each.

Tecca is a relatively new website designed to create a community expressly for sharing opinions about electronics. Best Buy funded it through its Fuse Capital venture. The site has massive amounts of information on electronics, from product specifications, to news, to reviews from multiple sources, to UGC reviews. Here's the intro flick:



Tecca also incorporates extensive pricing information from Best Buy (natch) and a multitude of other retailers. Listings arrange prices in ascending order, so the cheapest retailer wins top billing. Now, Best Buy is the national electronics big box left standing so naturally they win their share of these arrangements. But the site does not always list Best Buy first.

You use Tecca through iPhone, Android, or iPad apps, or online. But obviously, this is primarily a mobile play because that’s where most people are deciding what to choose.

I did see Kmart on a pricing listing once, but even by typing in eight models that I pulled off either Target and/or Wal-Mart sites, I never got either company in the price comparison results. I don’t know whether those two retailers aren’t participating by their choice or by Tecca’s. Or if indeed this was a fluke of the database. But given that Target and Wal-Mart have more limited selections, they wouldn’t end up in most searches anyway.

Why should you care about this if you aren’t in the electronics biz? I think the emergence of Tecca reflects a new reality in the way business needs to act in order to make a sale. In a world where consumers don’t or cannot trust retailers to provide unbiased perspective on products, they need resources that they can consult that are credible. I don’t doubt that having reviews available on product pages is beneficial, but if you’re the suspicious sort, as am I, there is often the sense that a richer story is available in an editorially driven community.

So for the rest of this, I am going to assume that Tecca and Best Buy understand that an effort to systematically exclude a competitor would quickly be discerned, and that the traffic would disappear. I was impressed by both the breadth and depth of info available on the site, and the free flowing community discussions. There are other shopping and electronics recommendation communities out there, including many NOT funded by retailers, but Tecca really does offer a strong content platform.

When I buy electronics, I usually print out Consumer Reports reviews. And then I take them into a store and find that all the model numbers have changed. So having a community that includes items currently available has benefits.

Assuming Tecca IS offering a level playing field for other terrestrial retailers, having this sort of resource offsite offers a powerful way to help consumers make decisions. When you are Best Buy, your biggest competitor may be indecision.

I am not for a moment suggesting that there aren’t other places or other, possibly better content destinations out there. But having access to Tecca in iPhone and Android apps makes it beyond easy to use. Assuming they aren’t Best Warping the data, it’ll be very interesting to see how it does.

COD: Lanyrd is the super nifty social conference directory

Thanks to ad:tech for publishing this first!

Do you go to a lot of conferences? Or do you only go to one, and spend a lot of time selecting the perfect event for your networking and personal development? Or do you fall somewhere in between? Or do you generally not get to go to conferences for reasons of cost or schedule, but wish you could get some insight into a killer session.

That paragraph is my long winded way of saying that whatever your interest in conferences, you should surf on over to Lanyrd, a site that provides great information and connection opportunities for hundreds of conferences around the world, with more added every day.

The site connects to your Twitter, and gives you a view of the particulars of the event, related links, a dashboard of speakers, related books, attendees, a conference calendar, and loads more. Users can link assets to the event like press coverage, videos, Slide Share decks, etc.

The community is based upon the idea that users, and of course event marketers, will contribute content, as with a Wiki. You list yourself and your relationship with an event (organizer, speaker, attendee) or you can simply track an event before you commit to attendance, and be updated with new information as it becomes available.

Users can also tag events with a view to helping people find relevant by topic, geography, or whatever makes sense.

In addition to in person events, the site offers the opportunity to list and learn about virtual conferences, which are becoming more and more common.

The value to event marketers is obvious, but it also helps facilitate the networking which is a vital draw to in person events. At an event as large as an ad:tech, for example, you might never know or see colleagues whoa re attending, and your experience might be enriched by spending time with them. Similarly, it enables you to make new connections with attendees that share interests, etc.

Explore the site by topic, by event name, or drill down into a particular attendee’s profile.

They’ve also taken out a lot of the friction that you may have experienced before Lanyrd was created. For example, you can export your conference schedule into Outlook and iCal, among others. You can even get little event badges for your personal site so you can let others know where you are going to be. An even deeper level of facilitating connections between people.

I think this is big stuff for the conference ecosystem. As a means of finding just the right event, following the discussion, and connecting with others, it is unique. All these are really important services in a very crowded industry category. And given that highly competitive business, it’s pretty easy to see how this tool will become a moneymaker by providing services to events, among others.

I’m not the only one who thinks so. They are getting money and advice from Y Combinator.

COD: Wishpond – Putting virtual in service of local bricks and mortar

The percentage of retail driven through ecommerce continues to grow, but it's still in single digits. That being said, there is no doubt that consumers are using the web to do research on products, especially for more considered purchases.



Wishpondis out to drive more sales to brick and mortar, using geolocation to help small and large retailers make consumers aware of what they have in stock and ready to take home today.

Imagine you are looking for a fairly high end Nikon. You've done your research online, but now you are ready to buy. You COULD make a purchase through Amazon or Fry's online, or you could fire up Wishpond and see if it is available anywhere nearby. Wishpond lets you search local retailers' inventory to see who might have the item and for how much. Let's say three retailers report having the item. You can then consider the trade offs of price, reputation, and distance to see if one of these retailers might be a better place to buy than an online store.

There are benefits for all of the players in the retailing ecosystem:

•For consumers, Wishpond gives an easy way to compare prices and the opportunity to get the good today. They can also "make a wish" meaning that they can offer to buy something at a certain price and see if any local retailer bites.
•For retailers, it provides the opportunity to spend ad dollars on people actually looking to buy, and a chance to level the playing field by communicating local availability of an item.
•For brands, the opportunity to communicate participating retailers gives another means of supporting your brick and mortar distribution system, and a way of growing sales. They could also advertise on the platform to impact buying decisions
•For publishers, the platform provides the opportunity to grow relevance to readers by making things like product recommendations more actionable. Not only can you recommend an item, you can now show consumers exactly where they might want to buy it. As such, it might also be a good advertiser lead gen tool.

This is an ads-supported platform. Retailers can join for free, or they can join and take advantage of the opportunity to do hyper local and highly targeted advertising to very likely buyers. They can even package up sales leads of people looking for an item.

We all know that the big retail winners over the past couple decades have been big box stores. But this platform levels the field, enabling even small retailers to capitalize on the technology and sales opportunities it surfaces. Though of course big box stores are also welcome to participate. And no doubt are and will.

One of the things that makes this a compelling platform is that Wishpond can plug into existing inventory management programs so the retailer doesn't need to manually input items and manage inventory levels. Instead, it's inventory speaks for itself.

There are other resources in this space, not least Milo and Google Blue Dot. But one of the ways that Wishpond stands out is that a business or pub can participate easily using an embeddable widget. These widgets can search inventory, show local locations, and even be embedded into distributed presences in social media. They also have an open API, which is helping them differentiate by shaping themselves as a platform rather than a retail search destination.

BTW, their blog is also an excellent resource if you just want to learn more about local and shopping and retailing in today's environment.

COD: GlobalMojo is the browser that lets consumers and businesses give back

Thanks to ad:tech for publishing this first.

As someone who came of age during the “greed is good” Eighties, I find it heartening that companies and consumers now have far greater interest in doing good. Global Mojo is a philanthropic browser that gives consumers the opportunity to do good as they go about their daily business online.

The browser, which is built on the open source Mozilla platform, donates 50% of gross revenues to schools and non-profits selected by the community as worthy causes.

Here’s the Explaniflick…



The offering essentially works like an affiliate, generating revenue when the consumer searches, browses, or makes purchases online using GlobalMojo. Because it is based upon Mozilla, it offers all of the customization options available through Firefox. But with this caring benefit overlay it may well become the choice of people who want to make a difference in more things that they do in the course of their daily lives.

There are essentially four channels of shared revenue:
• GlobalMojo Travel gives users the opportunity to compare results across a range of sites that pay the service a bounty for bookings. Travel site partners include Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity, and more.
• GlobalMojo Shopping enables users to compare prices and products across more than 900 retailers that compensate the browser for purchases.
• Advertising and Search offer additional revenue channels.

The user selects the nonprofits s/he chooses to support, and can allocate the revenue they generate by assigning percentages to different organizations.

How much revenue are we talking about per user? Well, GlobalMojo estimates that each user will generate between $10-$30 for the charities of their choice. Not a fortune, but when combined with the donations for the behaviors of potentially millions of others, it’s easy to see that GlobalMojo can make a real difference in the world.

Of course, the beauty of the model for marketers and advertisers is that they can help do good by partnering with the company. Not only does it offer a new customer/revenue channel for online retailers – it also enables the company to do something good – and be seen doing something good by people who care deeply about such things. If you are a marketer looking for any of these benefits, visit this page to obtain more information.