I’m flying most of today back from the ICMA conference on digital classifieds, which was held in Amsterdam. I spoke at the event and tried to make the point that traditional publishers of classifieds needed to step back and reorient themselves to broader trends on the Internet. My slides were titled, “Rethinking the Product to Compete More Effectively Online.”
Rob Paterson, of Friday-Ad Ltd, UK, and the Chair of the organization, gave a great opening talk about how he found his dog (with the aid of his six daughters), which anecdotally and perfectly captured the changing and fragmented state of the media and the way that people go about researching and buying things these days.
Amid the standard data overview, I spoke about social media, syndication, mobile, widgets, video and hybrid products. But when I was initially asked to speak I really struggled with how to move beyond saying “the sky is falling” and be constructive. Given the time I had, my ambition was really to try and get publishers to think more expansively and creatively about their products and point them in some directions rather than offer “best practices.”
This was a list of quick takeaways I delivered at the top of my presentation:
- Be willing to rethink your product
- See it in the broader context of user trends and indirect competitors
- User experience is critical; you will be compared to others you may not consider competitors
- Syndication and distribution are critical
- Consider “next generation” capabilities (e.g., video, mobile)
- Take risks, which may include the business model
In addition to trying to illustrate those points, I also added SEO/SEM and the recommendation that they add community thoughtfully. Nothing revolutionary here . . . just the notion that the Internet and traditional media are related but also quite distinct products.
November 2, 2007 at 2:23 pm |
hey Greg, do you have perspective on whether there are such strong category killers/leaders internationally in the Classifieds space such as there are here in the US with Craigslist, etc. I see a lot of delineation here btw e-classifieds/pers (mostly C2C, little B2C) and local search (all B2B). Have you noticed if the lines are more or less blurry in non-US?
November 3, 2007 at 1:28 pm |
Hi Greg. Thank you for your very interesting views on the classifieds business of tomorow. I was happy to join the conference i Amsterdam, and listen to your points – and yes I fund your jokes quite amusing – sorry you didn´t hear me giggle. Especially I found your issues about syndication and distribution (toolbars, RSS readers, widgets etc) very interesting. Those are quite new disciplines for lots af websites today. You should coin a new term, to supplement SEO and SEM – something like SDO as in “syndication & distribution optimisation”. That could constitute a whole new business for a new branch of consultants, helping companies grasp these issues, and helping them execute their SDO strategies.
November 6, 2007 at 12:54 pm |
Hi Greg, your keynote presentation was a true blast into the future for the classified publishers still hanging in the web 1.0 world. Social network benefits, rich media consumption and mobile evolution was a ongoing topic.
I had the opportunity to spend many days at the congress and you certainly woke up the complete audience. It was also amazing to see Mobiya up there on the presentation canvas and it has motivated us to push even harder in achieving our vision to create conversational marketplaces over mobile.
November 7, 2007 at 11:23 pm |
[...] sort of dovetails with the theme of my talk at the ICMA conference in Amsterdam last week: the product that you think you’re selling online [...]