Dave Concannon

The Tuesday Push is a crowd-sourced approach to PR with a little word-of-mouth marketing thrown in. It gives Irish businesses a push on the web and occasionally a little advice.

Today’s Tuesday Push is for the business directory Mytown.ie. Mytown provides a comprehensive list of Irish towns, and lists the various amenities, clubs, and businesses that exist within the town. In terms of reach, their SEO attempts seems to have worked quite well – google searches for various business types in a specific area direct me back to mytown. Do we need yet another business listing site? Does it provide any extra benefit over google home, loopthing, facebook fan pages, or however many other sites and directories there are out there?

The site revenue is ad-supported as well as charging businesses for premium listings. They seem to be getting some leverage with traffic according to alexa, and probably as a longer term prospect it could work.

My main suggestions for improvement with Mytown:

1. There is no obvious way to free-text search for certain types of businesses. Maybe if you log in – but really why should I need to log in to view a business listing? I understand that most users will be coming direct to the site from an internet search, but not providing the ability to search the site globally is poor design.
2. The need to select a town before looking at clubs. This makes no sense – I would love to get a metric on the number of users who have abandoned the site after trying to use these functions. The “Please select a town or login first!” box is something that would make me leave the site and never come back.
3. The claim on the front page – “mytown.ie is the most popular local community website in Ireland“. I can’t see how this is possible with the likes of boards.ie gobbling up Ireland’s local community Internet traffic. Well, if the legend is more interesting, print the legend.

Mytown also has forums which are unsurprisingly empty. I think this is a feature which doesn’t really add much to the site and could be removed without anyone spilling any tears. As far as I can tell, the use case for this site is in users coming to find the number of the local plumber, they probably don’t want to hang around and chat and the development time could be used to improve other features.

Other features that Mytown.ie provides:

• Community Events
• Classified Ads
• Image Galleries

Does this Tuesday Push come across as cynical? Maybe I’m a little jaded with the idea that there are a lot of smart developers in Ireland, all working on what is essentially a very basic idea – replicating the phone book on the internet. I might even give it a shot myself.

The weekly retweet

A recap on any interesting links I posted or retweeted this week

• Important post by @andrewsavikas: Content is a Service Business http://bit.ly/10eG7T (via @timoreilly and @fredherrera)
• New Space Avalanche Comic – “Michael Jackson” – http://short.ie/mjtrib (Via @spaceavalanche)
• Twitter integration is coming to Loopthing in the next few days: http://bit.ly/9yLVv (Via @Donagh_)

Two weeks ago I wrote a Tuesday push about loopthing.com. Despite having a nicely designed site,  Loopthing isn’t something that resonates with me in terms of a business model. Until the service matures I believe that they’re sitting in the category of web business which I describe as “Me too! (dot zero)”. The Me2.0 businesses are missing one or more of these essential ingredients:

• At least ten percent innovation on their competitors to make them stand out (Satisfying the criteria of “value to customer” versus “uniqueness”).
• A niche that’s small enough that they can dominate without significant competition before branching out into new markets or niches.
• A superstar web or entrepreneur personality who can drive traffic immediately just by having their name attached to the project (E.g. Jason Calacanis, Guy Kawasaki, Gary Vaynerchuk, Kevin Rose, et al) – It’s possible to succeed as a “Me too!” if you have a “celebrity” name attached.

Revahealth

This week’s Tuesday Push is for yet another business listings portal, in the guise of Revahealth.com. So what’s different here? For a start, Revahealth have been around for a few years, giving them time to solidify their business model and  giving them a head-start on any recent competitors. Secondly, and most importantly by far, they’ve picked a small but extremely profitable niche that isn’t going to go away any time soon – Healthcare.

Business Model

The business model is straightforward. Business for healthcare services like Dentistry, Cosmetic surgery, and Laser eye surgery  practices are competitive. Your average small-to-medium sized clinic isn’t likely to have a web page, and even if they did it’s probably unlikely that they have much time to update it regularly. Revahealth fill this gap by funnelling clients to grateful clinics who reward them with a referral fee. In addition, Revahealth offer the “freemium” model where clinics can list their business for free, but there’s a much nicer upgraded profile available for a fee. The model is proven – Internet marketing “superstars” such as Jeremy Schoemaker have commented on it before. The difference between Revahealth and the countless other “business portal / connect users to business” sites is in the niche.

The healthcare niche is by no means small, but certainly not as big as “a list of all businesses”. This means that it’s possible for one player in the field to make a name as the go-to place for healthcare information and dominate, with the added benefit that there’s revenue immediately. Once they are a recognised brand in the  healthcare sector, there’s nothing stopping them from moving into another area using the same basic technology and business model.

Management Team

In Micheal Cusumano’s eight-point lens for business evaluation, the management team is the primary criteria. Revahealth benefits from Caelan King’s experience in marketing and as a product manager, and the experience of Ray Nolan as a board member, who has built Web Reservations International into the (very profitable) market leader in hostel bookings. Tapping into Ray’s experience of the problems faced in building a niche service like hostel bookings is a very useful skill to have on board when moving into another area.

Social Marketing

Calelan puts a lot of effort into the Revahealth blog (well worth a read), is active on twitter, and regularly presents at conferences such as Bizcamp. While this isn’t marketing to the specific audience of their product, it ensures brand awareness of revahealth within the technical and entrepreneurial community, and at the very least indicates that there’s no plan to let their technology stagnate.

Summary

From a business perspective, Revahealth ticks a lot of boxes – a solid management team with a compelling offering in an attractive market. The site itself has lots of content, the design is clean, spacious and easy to use, and the layout seems entirely geared towards the company’s organic SEO efforts. I can see Revahealth doing very well – Healthcare services are an necessity, and they have a great targetted service which I think will continue to grow profitably.

Here’s a presentation that Caelan King gave on monetising web applications at Barcamp Belfast, which goes into more details about Revahealth’s revenue model. (Via Ken McGuire’s excellent Tuesday Push for RevaHealth).

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.