Dave Concannon

After a bit of internal monologue, I decided to skip the last Tuesday push (for DineToRead.ie). I didn’t find it particularly ground-breaking or innovative and what value could I really add to a description besides the fact that it’s an “online book club”? I felt my last push for MyMunster.com missed the mark mainly due to the fact that it’s a forum for Munster rugby fans, and I don’t particularly believe that a forum (however nicely implemented) is the sort of ground-breaking innovation that’s going to drag Ireland by the scruff of it’s neck out of the economic dark ages.

Random sycophantic linking adds some nice google juice for the recipient, but I don’t think it makes for interesting reading on this blog, so I’m going to take a more critical view of future pushes from more of a business perspective and gracefully opt out of any future pushes that I believe are just an off-line business with a nice website. This week’s Tuesday Push is for www.loopthing.com which purports to be

“a new online business network which provides businesses with an opportunity to control all of their online business information through a dedicated profile page”.

Unique Selling Proposition

Immediately I’m wondering where the unique value proposition is. In the general area of “business portal” websites I can think of the following list before even hitting up google:

• Linkedin
• Younoodle
• IGOpeople
• Facebook pages
• Ning
• goldenpages.ie

What qualities differentiates loopthing from these other sites? What differentiates loopthing from the presumably hundreds of other business portal sites that I would find with a google search? To be honest, I can’t determine that from the site.

Specific Cricicisms

From a business model perspective, the revenue stream for loopthing seems to be direct advertising and affiliate sales (via the “discounts” concept on the front page). This may work if the site gains a following but I would have the following specific criticisms of the site itself which may hinder them in getting that following:

1. No SEO – I’m not an SEO expert by any means, but the site has no meta information for keywords and description, and the content doesn’t seem to target any specific keywords that I can see.
2. No analytics measurement – I’ll freely admit that they may be using their web logs to determine user intentions, as I’ve only done a very brief search in their code for google analytics, but it doesn’t seem to be present.  How do you know if you’re gaining traction if you’re not measuring every tiniest detail of your users’ interaction with you? How do you know what is working and what is not working?
3. Content – All web2.0 huggy-feelyness aside, user-generated content only happens after the site reaches a critical mass. In the meantime loopthing need to enter every business they can think of to build up the site. The claim on the front page that “everyone is on loopthing” is very wishful thinking at the moment. Get a harem of student interns on board to enter business profiles until their fingers bleed. This is something that should have been done pre-launch – content is still king.

My final criticism is that of consistency. Here’s a quote from Loopthing’s latest blog post on improving your social presence:

Engage with social media – Social media has turned the way people search the web on its head. A few years ago all people did was search for words in search engines and read articles…there’s no reason not to make a move into social media circles.

So what’s my problem with this? Nothing in itself, but loopthing have a twitter account with a grand total of two followers, and no updates. There’s a facebook fan page that can’t be found from the main search page. Consistency is key – you need to practice what you preach.

Suggested improvements

In terms of improvement, I would suggest the following to try to engage loopthing users more:

1. Business suggestions – On the user’s dashboard suggest businesses that they may be interested in. The current user area is pretty empty and the only “call to action” is to edit the user profile. If the goal is to get people to engage with businesses, suggest some businesses they may be interested in or give them more specific actions that they can accomplish when they get in.
2. User suggestions – Suggest people that they may know ala facebook etc.
3. More social media links - Allow the user to enter social media profiles – twitter, facebook, linkedin etc.
4. Rethink the “features” list on the main page – At the moment the main page lists features, not benefits. For example, it lists “Boosting profits” and “Exploring a new route to market” as a benefit of loopthing, but offers no specific ways that these can be accomplished.
5. More content - Content, content, content. CONTENT.
6. More customisation – Allow companies to style their own pages.

Summary

In summation – The technology looks like it works, and the site has a clean and professional design, but that’s only a small part of the puzzle these days. I think that loopthing need a concentrated focus on what user value they’re trying to deliver, a  differentiated product offering from the dozens of similar sites, and a rethink on their marketing and SEO strategy.

This may be a case of the ubiquitous tech maxim “Ready, fire, aim”, but I think for a saturated market like business portals you really need to market the hell out of it before launching and use social media more effectively.

Over at Carsonified last week there was a bit of an uproar about a competition to design a holding slide for one of their forthcoming events. Almost immediately after the competition was announced, there was a comment made which suggested that the competition was an example of “Spec work”, and pretty soon afterwards the comments on the post descended into chaos and name-calling.  Speculative work is a phrase that is synonymous with exploitation and opportunism in the average designer’s mind, where solid design effort is traded for a lottery ticket. The announcement that something is “spec work” is the designer’s call to arms.

There are several crowdsourced design sites such as 99designs and crowdspring, where a design specification is provided for designers to submit designs for. From the specification owner’s point of view, this must seem like a gold mine – a real-life version of the experiment where a million monkeys on a million typewriters try to produce Shakespeare. The designer’s perspective on things might not be as rosy – instead of winning a tender to develop a good design at a happy price for a specific client they’re now competing against any designer at any skill level with spare time on their hands.

But is that really accurate? From the client’s perspective it might seem like a free buffet lunch, but there can be legal downsides to the process such as receiving plagiarised designs or designs that use copyrighted images, to just generally being inundated with poor results. Perhaps lowering the barrier to entry to such an extent allows students or people who can’t get a paying gig to compete, but in a normal situation would you ever be likely to pick their designs? Design is normally a two-way conversation where you gradually hone your idea to match the client’s vision until the result is perfect. Crowdsourced design skips this step in favour of the “harder, faster, more” approach. The benefits are based on the “diamond in the rough” gamble that perhaps your competition will somehow attract that elusive “Good Will Hunting” character out of hibernation to produce genius. I believe that the bell curve statistic in combination with the fact that the odds are overwhelmingly against any individual designer winning (thus preventing their entry) proves this to be a fallacy. Renderedred has a tale of one designer’s experiment in the area.

Crowdsourcing has also been applied to the market of “ideas” whereby contestants submit creative ideas to solve problems. Where design has a limited barrier to entry in that you at least have to have access to graphics software, idea-sourcing has no barrier – and therein lies the problem. Having to wade through the effluent of a hundred monkeys to find your next “great idea” is time that could be spent actually brainstorming a creative solution. Where twitter provides a level of credibility in that at least your respondents have some sort of connection to you (or at the very least you can determine to a certain extent whether they are mentally unhinged by skimming through their previous messages), idea-sourcing opens the floodgates to anyone regardless of qualification, experience, or competency. Lowering the barrier to entry is the main benefit and the main drawback, trading an initial vetting process based on credibility for a post-mortem where you can’t tell the qualified from the insane.

I think there will be a continuation of crowdsourcing, mainly along the “me too” category of design competitions as it seems to have struck a chord with a segment of design customers who have had bad experiences in the past. Overwhelmingly, designers are opposed to speculative work (see no-spec.com), but I’m wondering how many may be driven to entering these sorts of competitions in the current economic climate. One hypothesis is that twitter’s revenue stream could come from harnessing the power of their network to incorporate crowdsourced design, idea sourcing or similar competitions.

In a break from the usual seriousness, I noticed that someone was hot-linking to an image on my site. (For any non-techies, hot-linking is when you use the link to an image on someone else’s site instead of hosting the image yourself, thus eating their bandwidth and not your own). But, in the words of M. L. Plano:

Never attribute to malice what can be explained by ignorance.

So, long dull story short – A religious blog links to an image on my site, and I can’t resist changing the image to something more amusing: