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.

Unrelated picture by 89AKurt @ flickr

This week’s Tuesday Wednesday push is whoseview.com, a community review site for Dublin businesses.  The Tuesday Push seems to have met some sort of untimely end – it may just be to do with general lethargy from the recent bank holiday weekend, or it may be that this week’s Tuesday Push is for yet another community business directory and reviewers are jaded. I’m wondering what happened – the concept started off with around fifteen or so bloggers pushing the idea and offering criticism and advice, and after a few weeks it dwindled to one or two. I deliberately avoided writing a post yesterday to see who’s still pushing, and the only review I could find for yesterday’s Tuesday Push is by Paul Watson. Get off your asses!

Whoseview is a nicely designed site who are picking a relatively tight niche by focusing on Dublin businesses, before planning expansion into other major Irish cities and beyond. A little more focused than the approaches by mytown.ie and loopthing.com who are trying to list all Irish businesses and all businesses everywhere respectively, but not as focused as Revahealth who have found a very focused, profitable channel. Trying to list everything in the country or world is no more a “series of narrow channels” then trying to swim across every ocean in the world is “going for a little paddle before dinner”.  I can get behind whoseview’s approach of focusing on one city and branching from there, and I’m a big fan of the look and feel of the site. It’s polished and professional, and blows the doors off most of the competitors in terms of usability. As Paul points out, the sign-up is a little convoluted though.

Now for the dispicable(sp) bit where the author gives out unwanted advice. Do we really need another Irish review site? Yes, it’s niche. Yes, it’s very polished. No, it’s not original – but then again, what really original concepts does the Internet really provide?  As long as you’re offering something even 10% new you can succeed, and if you focus on a small enough business area you will find it easier to make money than trying to cater to everyone and everything. That said, they’re competing in a crowded space where a lot of sites are offering similar and overlapping service offerings. I believe the key will be solid concent, SEO, and marketing.

If I offer a minor criticism (total nitpicking for the sake of it) it’s that the site loads somewhat slowly on my crappy national-telephone-company-provided connection. I’d recommend moving their static content to another server (from the cookie settings it looks like a the current one is a java container), and using apache/ngix/whatever flavor of server to set far-future expires headers to allow for browser caching and serve the images without cookies. Possibly also combine their CSS into one file, make Yahoo’s YUI Compressor part of their build process, and use Yslow / Google pagespeed to tweak accordingly.

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 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.

Photo via parkerman@flickr

This week’s Tuesday Push is for FineTuna.com, a collaborative image editing tool. The idea behind this site is simple – You upload an image, add comments or suggestions to the image, and then send it on to people for review.   I work from home full-time and seeing as the rest of my colleagues are happily sitting in the Californian sun,  something like fine tuna is perfect for discussing new features, collaborating on new design, and critiquing areas that need tweaking in our applications.  In terms of identifying a pain point for your user and solving it, Fine tuna does a good job.

In terms of a business model I see fine tuna as more of an advertising piece for SpoiltChildDesign’s main product, an email marketing tool called toddle. Fine Tuna works well as an advertisement, but with some minor tweaks it could become a very useful stand-alone product:

1. Better Privacy – When you send an image for review, the recipient gets a shortcode. It’s very easy to play with the shortcode URL and see some other random discussion that isn’t yours. This alone means I could never use it for anything more than messing around.  I’d suggest having to enter a one-word password which is shared with reviewers before you can see the design. This would keep it just secure enough to deter people from nosing around.
2. User Accounts - There’s no way for me to easily go back and see old designs that I’ve worked on without digging through my email. Having a very simple user account which lists your designs and who you shared it with would be useful. I understand that in it’s current incarnation it’s a sort of throw-away design session, but even the illusion of security would make it that little bit more usable.

Overall, it’s a very nice little app. The UI is clean and usable, and it’s well suited for simple collaborations, or getting approval and commentary on designs.

Image via mikejackson@flickr

Between 1845 and 1852, Ireland lost about twenty five percent of its population through starvation, disease, and mass emigration as the potato blight destroyed Ireland’s staple food. While there were larger forces at play,  one contributing factor to the mass starvation of the population was the lack of diversity both in Ireland’s potato crop, and the diet of the population in general.  Even if there were different types of potato in the diet of the average citizen, the effects of the famine could have been reduced as differing potato crops wouldn’t have been as badly affected by one type of blight.

Property Boom and Bust

Can the lessons of the great famine be applied to our current economic situation? Most certainly. Ireland is in deep economic decline caused by singularly betting our fortunes on property.  As the property bubble inflated the government stoked the fire yet further by offering tax incentives to investors purchasing housing and commercial property, banks pushed large loans to people without the means to pay for them long-term, and home owners cashed in their equity in order to invest in second homes or to allow them to live far beyond their means. People on very average salaries released mortgage equity so that they could drive brand-new sports cars, take several expensive holidays a year, or buy apartments in Eastern Europe.

Laying the blame

While it’s clear that the government was not only asleep at the wheel but actively unscrewing the lug nuts on the wheels to the economy, the blame also has to fall squarely in the lap of the populace.  Overwhelmingly, Irish people have a high external locus of control (“it’s not my fault – it’s fate / the government / they’re all out to get me”) which I’ve heard attributed to Catholicism in that it preaches that “the flock follows the Shepard”. Many Irish people are happy to follow the flow without trying to determine whether they’ve just pushed themselves into the veritable creek without a paddle.

It’s also a common phenomenon for Irish people to complain loudly from the safe confines of the pub long after it’s too late to change anything, as is our penchant for begrudgery towards anyone who succeeds. I’m all for constructive criticism, but where other countries praise their success stories loudly the Irish belittle them, cast doubts on the origin of their good fortune, and sneer at their efforts.

Learning from the past

For Ireland to drag itself out of the current economic mire, we need to correct these attitudes. The economy can be stimulated by innovative businesses succeeding and creating jobs. Government can be changed by motivated people who aren’t willing to accept the endemic cronyism, incompetence, and dynasty politics. Ideas to promote business like the Tuesday push, and incubator programs are essential. Ireland is a tiny country hiding at the edge of Europe, but by learning from the lessons of the past and embracing divergent thinking we can have a global presence. We need original businesses that fix a problem for paying customers not “me too” opportunism or “We’ll figure out the revenue model later” delusion. Most of all we just need to support people getting started find their path to success.

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.

Photo via asmundur@flickr

Decisions for Heroes provides an interface for rescue teams to manage their teams, and measure all the details of a rescue operation – from the time it took to get to the victim, the injuries encountered, to the wind speed at the time of rescue.  This allows for detailed logging, measurement, and metrics which can be analysed to determine the effectiveness of their teams in precarious situations and lets them determine if they need more members with particular skills or training in a specific area. As it logs all the data it builds up a detailed picture of how the team operates, and can print immediate incident reports, making it very easy for teams to keep a paper trail.

I had heard of Decisions for Heroes before FOWA Dublin and thought it was quite a nice idea – but when Robin Blandford blew away the competition at the small business pitch session, then I really took notice. Robin’s years of experience as volunteer cliff rescuer has obviously opened his eyes to the potential for a team management application.

So, in terms of a business model – how does this stack up? Decisions for Heroes has a nice niche market for whom the product is definitely a “must have”. My only question (knowing little about rescue services) would be how large the potential English-speaking market is? I would think that there is certainly enough money to be made before the need to localise the application into another language presented itself, and in the meantime the product can quite easily be adjusted to suit similar niches or customised for very specific types of rescue or medical teams. The software-as-a-service model promises to deliver a recurring revenue stream which should have little churn providing there are no serious competitors in the market. This is as far away from “me-too! (dot-zero)” as you can get.

In terms of  marketing D4H hits the nail on the head with great used of AIDA and clearly answers the customer’s potential questions of:

• What is the product and what can it do for me? – Nicely explained with a video, a tour, and clear feature set descriptions. Additionally all application features are positioned as benefits to the customer, not just a list of things that the technology does.
• Why should I care? (‘Why are you credible?’) – The main page has several credibility indicators, namely the logos of several internationally recognised rescue services who have used the service and given testimonials.
• What do I do next? – The “Get Started” and “Take a Tour” buttons are repeated throughout the page, with notes directing attention to them. All in all a very compelling page designed to convert the user.

As might be expected from a company making software to analyse data, the analytics behind the scenes on the main page are impressive. Bytesurgery are not only measuring how often people visit the page, but how often they’re playing the intro video, when exactly they’re pausing or stopping the video, and if they’re watching it through to the end. I’m sure there are a dozen other events that they’re tracking so that they can tweak their main page to optimise conversion.

My only criticism that I can think of (and it’s a stretch) would be the quality and position of the video on the front page, at full-screen it’s very grainy and hard to see the product features and I’d also expect it to centre on the screen. Minor criticisms aside, I think this product has a huge amount of potential.

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.

    The Tuesday Push  is a little social experiment to help promote Irish businesses on the web.  Every Tuesday a group of dedicated helper monkeys listening for the signal to act receive their instructions from the Tuesday Push website and scatter to the comfort of their blog software’s admin panel like some sort of benevolent terrorist cell. 

   This week’s push is for mymunster.com, a social networking site for Munster rugby fans. To brutally frank, rugby is not something I’m interested in.  Actually, if I was given the choice between watching rubgy or being hit in the face repeatedly with a shit-covered shovel, I’d probably have to think about it for a while.  

    With my masochistic preferences aside, the site is a nice niche within a huge, passionately dedicated market. The design of the site is intuitive, clean,  and well branded and they have a good community following already.   If you’re a Munster rugby fan check it out!

The best ideas are the simplest. Tuesday Push is a way for Irish companies to leverage community and get a little extra recognition. Every Tuesday a company is nominated and a small but dedicated army of altruists get to work testing the company’s product and giving it a bit of a plug via blogs, twitter, and other social media.   

The reasoning is pretty simple – You write about the company and people who have never seen it previously get it put in front of their eyes. If they like it, they tell their friends or colleagues and it spirals towards a tipping point where the product can become mainstream.

The idea successfully implements several of Robert Cialdini’s concepts from “Influence: The science of persuasion” in that people are more easily persuaded by people they like – A recommendation from a blog they subscribe to is far more effective then a random link from a stranger.  Additionally, social proof indicates that it’s more likely for people to try a product if they believe others are using it – The catch-22 of a lot of startups; You can’t get customers until you have customers.

The Tuesday Push was started by Damien Mulley of Mulley Communications last year. Here’s his take on the how the concept has worked so far:

Since July of last year 10 products and services have been pushed with about a dozen regulars helping out each fortnight to write about each service.

• Putplace.com (01/07/2008)
• 1time (15/07/2008)
• Pix.ie (30/07/2008)
• Toddle (12/08/2008)
• Crewger (26/08/2008)
• eWrite Lite (09/09/2008)
• Downloadmusic.ie (23/09/2008)
• Loudervoice (7/10/2008)
• IGOpeople.com (27/01/2009)
• Twitter Mosaic (10/02/2009)

You can request a Tuesday Push for your business here.