Curiously enough, what got Segway into this problem was that the company was itself a kind of Segway. It was too easy for them; they were too successful raising money. If they’d had to grow the company gradually, by iterating through several versions they sold to real users, they’d have learned pretty quickly that people looked stupid riding them. Instead they had enough to work in secret. They had focus groups aplenty, I’m sure, but they didn’t have the people yelling insults out of cars. So they never realized they were zooming confidently down a blind alley.

– Paul Graham, YCombinator

My take:

- I agree, raising “too much” capital for an idea is poison. Having to do a lot with a little instills discipline, and forces one to be uber-resourceful, razor focused, and quite frankly a little paranoid :) I’m extremely lucky to have mentors like David who have drilled this mantra into my head. We achieved a lot with little at both Lookery and Compete.com, and now Shareaholic.

- Iterative design is the way to go. All of us that create applications for which we can push updates and upgrades at-will at not much cost are blessed. Criminal not to take advantage of this gift.

- Focus groups? Community Managers (= everyone in the company) should be curating the feedback loop from in the field – talking to real users, asking them how we can improve our products, create the most value for them, and knock down the most roadblocks in the process — in short, make their lives easier.

Users first, always.

This morning I rediscovered this (previously unpublished) transcript from February 2008 in my archives.

I was Product Manager of Compete.com at the time, and it goes into how we managed and thought about our user community at Compete, a critical component that helped us surpass 1 million monthly unique visitors to Compete.com very quickly. I’ve carried much of this thinking over to Shareaholic, a tool that has been used by over 1 million people. At Shareaholic we obsess over our users, always putting our users first.

Hope you find this to be a useful read. Enjoy!

1. Who do you work for, what do they do, and what is your official job title?

Compete, Inc is a competitive web analytics company. We have a diverse sample of over two million U.S. internet users that have given us permission to aggregate and analyze all the web pages they visit and ask them questions via surveys. We believe that web analytics means analyzing what consumers do across the entire web, not just what they do within a particular site, and that marketers can use this rich information across the entire company, not just for online media planning or site design decisions.

We’ve been doing custom web analytics work for big brands such as Verizon, Chrysler and Wells Fargo for over 7 years now. Just over 13 months ago we launched compete.com. Compete.com is targeted towards the millions of people dependent upon their website/online presence to drive their business. Up until the launch of compete.com there really was no affordable, reliable and consistent source of competitive web analytics for the average marketer.

As for my own role with Compete, I’ve been with the company for just over 3 years, and my official job title is – Product Manager, Compete.com

2. Now that you have experience actually doing it, what does community management mean at Compete?

We won’t be satisfied until compete.com is the go-to industry source for the most precise competitive web analytics data available. For this to happen, we need to build a large community users that regularly use, trust and recommend Compete data – our advocates.

Generally, communities do not build themselves. They need some nurturing. I like Chris Brogan’s description of the role:

“The people gathered before you aren’t an orchestra and you are not a conductor. At best, you are a jam manager. You are the person helping bring about the experience, but with your hands as far off the overall end results as possible.”

At Compete, community management/evangelism translates to encouraging and supporting early users, enabling two-way transparent conversations about Compete, looking for and enabling people who might be interested in what we do, listening and responding to feedback (the good and the bad), setting up and managing user expectations, integrating user feedback into product roadmap decisions, being the customer’s voice within Compete, and generally being available, easy to reach, and responsive.

3. If a community manager does their job well, what happens as a result?

We hope good things :) In all seriousness, in my experience users tend to feel a greater sense of ownership of the product. This leads to our users being happier, they engage more with the product, tend to talk more favorably about their experiences, and give us more (constructive) feedback in return. They become our advocates.

4. What is much more of a challenge than you originally anticipated?

As Product Manager of Compete.com, community development is not my only focus. I wish there were more hours in the day! (well, doesn’t everyone?) Balancing the two roles simultaneously is a little bit of a challenge as community management can be a full time job in-itself.

At Compete, we made sure product and community go hand in hand. Our users heavily influence product direction. I love being close to our users, and I am also lucky to have great colleagues who also love interacting and cultivating our community, and they do a fantastic job at it.

5. What technologies do you use to interact with your community?

The Compete Blog (wordpress) is used extensively to educate our users on how to most effectively look at and analyze Compete data. We use Technorati to monitor incoming blog links, and our local analytics package (IndexTools – now Yahoo Analytics) to monitor non-blog mentions like Digg, Reddit, Slashdot, etc. Shareaholic to spread and seed content on social media sites. We also use twitter, email, im, newsletters, mybloglog, facebook and field regular feedback surveys. Twitter’s “track” feature in particular has proven to be very effective. Google Alerts are also great to monitor conversations about Compete.

6. What specific metrics (if any) do you focus on for success?

We focus on unique visitors to compete.com, repeat visits, registrations, feed subscribers, incoming links, and the quality and frequency of blog and press mentions. We track these metrics on a daily basis, and make them available to the entire company weekly. We also field a user feedback survey at least once each quarter, in which we ask our users to rate our performance, and whether they would recommend us to a friend or colleague (Net Promoter Score) — we track this closely.

7. What is the most important skill to have as a community manager?

Listening skills, humility, being attentive, inquisitive and responsive. Community management is a constant process of listening, sharing, and enabling.

8. What are the best/worst parts about being a community manager?

The best part of the role is connecting directly with people who use Compete.com, and those who are just waiting to be converted! As Product Manager, learning how the products are actually being used is invaluable. The job can also be very different every day, which is exhilarating.

9. Let’s imagine that there was a company directive to “increase engagement” with your customers. How would you, in a community management role, go about doing that?

The end strategy would depend upon how “engagement” is being defined and end business goals. At a high level – at Compete.com we have the luxury of over 700,000 monthly unique visitors, and over 70,000 registered users that are quite active on the site. I would likely first reach out to them, followed by people who are already talking about us (positive or negative). I would ask them how we can improve our products, create the most value for them, and knock down the most roadblocks.

As we engage the community more in such conversations, and as we start incorporating their feedback, overall user engagement should hopefully increase.

TJ is now one of FlipKey’s co-founders. FlipKey was conceived with the basic idea of applying web 2.0 principles to under served markets — in their case vacation rentals.

TripAdvisor invested in FlipKey last year, and it’s great to see how well they’re doing. TripAdvisor now includes FlipKey reviews on its own network of sites, which attract over 30 million visitors a month worldwide.

The big challenge with UGC is reaching critical mass quickly. FlipKey took an alternative approach compared to its parent TripAdvisor. Rather than offering an open review system where consumers were required to find the site and home/accomodation they stayed in to leave a review, FlipKey went directly to the source (the rental management companies) and created a Reputation Manager that invites confirmed past guests via an email to leave a review. This also ensured higher quality of reviews, as the reviewer is guaranteed to have actually stayed at the vacation rental. Smart.

Last night we also brainstormed some _big_ ideas for Shareaholic, which took me right back to when compete.com was hatched — lots more on that soon :)

The chart below overlays the same Facebook vs. Digg’s traffic data to their respective launch month’s:

• In their first 4 years of existence, Digg and Facebook have very similar curves
• Digg traffic has been greater than Facebook’s 33 out of 51 months (65%)

Facebook’s recent growth and expansion strategies are paying off in a big big way. It is going to take a special effort from Digg to continue keep pace with and beating Facebook, a leap of imagination if you will. Facebook doubled traffic in its 5th year of existence, going from 28,487,293 to 73,787,766 unique visitors. Can Digg do the same in its fifth year?

Will Kevin Rose+team at Digg be able to innovate at the pace that is required? Innovation certainly beats size when in the battle to grow attention. Digg has a lot going for them, but only time will tell how ultimately successful and innovative they will be. I’ll certainly be watching intently :)

Compete just revised UP Yahoo’s market share number significantly – by 5.3 percentage points.

To put this number in perspective — combined market share of AOL and ASK.com = 4.1%

On Monday we released our May Search Share numbers. As a result of some conversations we were having with Danny Sullivan in parallel we sent over our “rules” we use to mine the search data. Danny threw these up on his post reviewing our data and one savvy reader very quickly identified an issue with our rules. So, long story short, we have fixed our Yahoo! rules (and also reevaluated all the other engine rules in the process). Here’s the updated data based on adjusted rules.

According to the revised market share numbers, a MSFT/Yahoo Search combination would yield:

Yahoo+MSN/Live = 28.5% combined market share (revised)
Yahoo+MSN/Live = 23.9% (old)

However, as Jeremy points out in his post, trend wise not much has changed. Yahoo Search market share is still trending downwards.

I’m sure folks at Microsoft (and Wall Street) have been watching these numbers closely (along with those from comScore, Hitwise, etc). This revision certainly makes Yahoo worth more, but is it enough for Microsoft to change its mind? Only time will tell.

CORRECTED STATS:

OLD STATS:

According to Compete, Google now (since March ‘08) has more “reach” than any other web property in the United States. While Yahoo is ahead on every other metric that Compete reports on, Google is catching up slowly, but steadily.

note: stats do not include Google/Yahoo owned properties that may be hosted on their own domains ex. YouTube, Flickr, etc.

Less than a year later, in September 2007 for the first time more people visited Compete.com than Alexa (a Amazon owned online audience measurement company). It’s been a closely fought (& monitored) battle for supremacy since then.

In April 2008, 18 months after launch, Compete.com broke through, and is now clearly ahead of Alexa. It used to be a close battle. No longer. Compete.com continues to make me proud :)

Watch out for more great stuff to come from the Compete team in the near future. I hear they have a pretty big release cookin’

At Compete, I had the privilege to work with the most incredible, talented, and fun group of people I have ever met — together we worked hard, played hard, believed in and executed on our vision for compete.com, achieved what some thought impossible, delighted clients, pulled all-nighters, and during all that developed special friendships. I learned A LOT, and had a lot of fun. Most of all, I am very proud of the teams accomplishment and what we were able to achieve in a very short duration of time. You can expect a lot of great stuff from Compete in the very near future.

As you can tell, it was a very hard decision for me personally to leave my fellow Competers, but they are all excited for me and understand that my next opportunity is a big one. Thank you Team Compete for an incredible experience — I love you guys.

what’s next?

I will soon be joining David Cancel (founder and former CTO of Compete), Scott Rafer, and the rest of the crew at Lookery, leading Product Development & Strategy.

About Lookery (blog):

Lookery provides demographic marketing services in and around social networks. Lookery is in the process of assembling anonymous profiles on 100+ million people. Using this data and Lookery’s 1.5 billion+ page-per-month Facebook ad network, we will raise the price paid for billions of remnant Internet ad impressions each day. Part of that course is becoming the anonymous user data king and expose that via APIs, widgets for site owners, etc. Lookery collects profiles from and with the permission of social networks, dating sites, ISPs, and e-commerce sites.

A whole new adventure is just about to start, and I am very excited by all the possibilities that lie ahead! …and in case you’re wondering… for now, I am going to be based out of Cambridge, MA.

Every single year that I have prepared my own tax return (yes, I still do my own taxes), I’ve prepared them the weekend before they have been due. Examining traffic to IRS.gov for the past few years, it looks like my tax filing behavior may not be the norm!! –

My observations:

• Traffic to IRS.gov peaks in February each year (and not in April :)
• After several, mostly flat years, more people are visiting IRS.gov this year. However, my guess is that some of this increase was likely driven by people curious about the Economic Stimulus Payments. Compared to February ‘07, traffic is up 27% this year. According to Compete data, the 24.4 million unique visitors in Feb ‘08 was also the biggest month ever for IRS.gov (data goes back to 2001).

Details here.

• 15.4 million Facebook users interacted with fb Application pages (@ apps.facebook.com) in January:

  

• On average ~51% of Facebook’s user base engages with Application pages:

  

• In January, fb Application pages directly contributed 1.5 billion pages (8.4% of total) to Facebook.com’s total page view count. Given the trend, I expect Application pages to gradually form a larger chunk of Facebook.com’s overall page views over time.

  Note: Stats in this post are limited to activity on apps.facebook.com. Most Facebook Applications load pages in iframes from 3rd party (non-facebook) servers. According to sources, users can generate well over >10 page views on 3rd party servers for each one that they see on apps.facebook.com. In January, Compete estimates ~1.5 billion page loads of apps.facebook.com, which translates to roughly 11-12 billion page views across Facebook app iframes.

  

• 6-month gains in time spent, sessions, and page views generated on apps.facebook.com:

  

Bottom-line:
This data reinforces the fact that Facebook’s Application strategy and ongoing refinements appear to be working. Now the big question — as Facebook’s unique visitor growth plateaus, what will be their next traffic growth engine? They are still 36 million short of MySpace.com’s 67 million U.S. unique visitors.

Does privacy matter to most Facebook users? Take a look at the chart below, and judge for yourself (weekly unique visitors to facebook’s privacy settings pages):

Even after all the recent mainstream media coverage and debate surrounding Facebook’s controversial beacon program, online privacy in general, and Facebook making available universal beacon opt-out — traffic to Facebook’s privacy settings pages has essentially been flat. NOT A GOOD SIGN!

It’s likely that the average Facebook user DOES care about their privacy, and know they should do something about it, but are mostly unaware or don’t know what they can or should do. Should Facebook be doing more around online privacy education? There is a lot of unintended sharing going on, and I think it is in Facebook’s long term best interest to do so.

March 7-11, 2008
SXSW Interactive
Austin, Texas

The SXSW Interactive Festival features five days of exciting panel content and amazing parties. Attracting digital creatives as well as visionary technology entrepreneurs, the event celebrates the best minds and the brightest personalities of emerging technology. Whether you are a hard-core geek, a dedicated content creator, a new media entrepreneur, or just someone who likes being around an extremely creative community, SXSW Interactive is for you!

it’s going to be my first time attending. it sounds like A LOT of fun, can’t wait!

please ping/tweet/email/message/im me if you’re going, would love to connect and catch up :)

A number of Compete.com updates were released today!

1. Cleaner Results with Report Overviews

Now when you run a Search Analytics report, you will see a new “Report Overview” table above each report. Big plans for this section. Look out for more here in the near future.

2. More Search Analytics data on Site Analytics

The layout of the new Search Analytics module on Site Analytics is much cleaner, and also includes a new metric — the total number of keywords that are driving traffic to the domain.

In the screenshot below, you see immediately that the gurus at Amazon are doing a much better job of milking the long tail than Walmart. Over a 10x difference – 286,306 keywords drive traffic to Amazon.com vs. just 27,206 keywords to Walmart.com!

How are you doing vs. your competitors?

click here for a more complete list of updates

Facebook’s about-face on privacy a bit late
By Therese Poletti, MarketWatch

“Facebook should have said something earlier, that’s a mistake that they made,” said Jay Meattle, a product marketing manager at Compete.com in Boston, which tracks Web site traffic.

The whole Beacon fiasco does not seem to have had any impact on membership, and it is not clear that it will. Even though some members threatened in their posts on the MoveOn.org group that they would quit Facebook, visits to the site are still surging. According to Compete.com, the number of unique visitors to Facebook in November jumped 20.1%, outpacing growth at the larger MySpace, owned by News Corp, which is buying Dow Jones, the parent of MarketWatch.

“Even with the privacy hoopla and the PR fiasco, Facebook is still growing and it’s growing quickly,” said Meattle of Compete.com.

Technorati Link
My blog posts on Compete.com

All 3 (very aggressive) personal year goals I set back in January for compete.com met, with time to spare :)

* Get the blog to a rank better than Hitwise (smoked Hitwise)
* Cross 500,000 monthly uniques (should do 700,000+ in december)
* 50,000 registered users (crossed 60,000)

Compete.com has been around for just 13 months. Anything is possible ;)

The big question — Are Facebook users even aware of their worsening privacy situation? Take a look at the chart below. Looks like regular Facebook users are mostly unaware of their worsening situation, or more likely don’t know what to do about it – not good.

According to one Facebook poll, 67% of all respondents had not even heard of the Facebook Beacon.

It’s generally a good idea to put users first, then investors. I hope the good people at Facebook HQ wake up quickly.

(Published on the Compete Blog on 5-Dec-2007)

We are spending more and more time consuming information online. Logically online advertising spend should follow a similar trajectory with marketers allocating their ad budgets in proportion to where people are spending their time.

Needless to say, this is a time of considerable opportunity for online media properties and online marketers!

Published on the Compete.com Blog on 29 Nov 2007

I believe I pulled the correct sub-domains, let me know if I didn’t.

Note: Data is U.S. only.

Is Digg close to a $300 million sale?

Good thing Digg didn’t sell itself a year ago. Digg has performed spectacularly in the past 12 months. All key user and engagement metrics are up dramatically for the site:

Now I know Facebook and Digg are fundamentally different services, it’s an interesting head to head comparison nevertheless:

• Even though Digg’s and Facebook’s unique visitor numbers aren’t that far apart, the engagement metrics reveal fundamental valuation driving differences between the two sites.
• Facebook users are much more engaged with the site. They come back to the site more often, spend more time, and view more pages. Most important – most Facebook users have user accounts, have to be signed in to use any Facebook feature, and voluntarily share lots of juicy facts about themselves with Facebook. This has to be the main driver behind Facebook’s lofty $620/unique visitor valuation.
• Interesting that both have multi-year multi-million dollar ad deals with Microsoft.

Will Digg get acquired soon? We’ll find out soon enough. Maybe Microsoft should use some of its $18.8 billion war chest (again) to buy a small piece of Digg in its bid to catch up with Google/Yahoo/Fox in the social networking game. After all, Microsoft already has a $100 million ad deal with Digg.