Also check out a review from Ad Age… here.

With Google making some rumbling about real time search this is going to get really interesting.  Much like SEO is used to drive traffic to web 1.0 websites, social bookmarking and social discovery was used to drive traffic to websites in Web 2.0.  Web 3.0 may be where we see another source of traffic generation through different real time feeds and streams.  An indication of this is Mark Cuban’s recent blog post about how he is getting more and more traffic from twitter and facebook than Google.  In his case it is definitely Streams (Facebook + Twitter) > SEO (Google).

Very intent to see where this leads us.

1. Creation (Ex. Open Source Software, Wikipedia)
2. Prediction (Ex. Pickspal.com, Stockpickr, American Idol)
3. Organization (Ex. Google’s PageRank, Digg.com, DMOZ)

The concept of crowdsourcing is really interesting in that it is really self-organization where seemingly chaotic conditions goes through a phase transition to bring about some sort of order. You can find self-organization everywhere from diverse subjects such as nature (Ex. Ants), business (Ex. market bubbles), physics (Ex. equilibrium thermodynamics), chemistry (Ex. chemical reactions), Entertainment (Ex. American Idol, Billboard Music Charts), and of course the Web.

Value is created when one can harness the power to create structure from unstructured chaos. In Physics, this phenomena can be described in mathematics.  This is very much the problem that our team at Search Physics have been trying to tackle when it comes to organizing the information on the Web. Stay tuned for more.

1. Dell Ideastorm – No doubt part of the effort to revive the fortunes of Dell now that Michael Dell is back at the helm. Makes Dell more open and responsive to consumers. Much better than a canned survey from a market research firm since the suggestions are unedited and can be voted upon. I absolutely love the fact that it requires registration so Dell can continue a dialog with these consumers who obviously care.
2. Yahoo! Suggestions – The Yahoo! Suggestions board is being used to gather feedback for quite a few number Yahoo! properties (15 at launch) from Autos to Real Estate. A pretty good first start. The only wish I have is Yahoo! should really promote this a lot more. A lot of the suggestion boards don’t have a lot of traffic nor enough feedback to form a critical mass.
I know that there are a lot of folks in the blogosphere who decry these efforts as blatant rip-offs of Digg, but I think all of these folks miss the point. As a marketer, the hardest thing to do is to create a vibrant and constructive dialog with the consumer. These “Digg-like” Web 2.0 features merely make customer feedback much more accessible, cost effective, and with the added benefit of sifting out issues that are more important than other due to open voting. Remember, Digg didn’t invent voting nor did it invent ranking. Digg’s great breakthrough was they packaged it in such a way which was brilliantly easy. Besides, Drupal had this feature in their content management system since 2000.It would be great if brand marketers and product managers across different industries embrace harnessing the consumer voice to improve products and customer experience. Imagine if car enthusiasts had this capability to suggest new features and product wishes for their favorite vehicles (Detroit anyone?). Or how about struggling airlines use this capability to markedly improve flight service and give us options for better food on flights. It would be very easy for old line companies to begin offering these capabilities by leveraging open source solutions like Pligg (an open source version of Digg).

Remember, companies exists to fulfill and capitalize on a market demand or consumer desire, what better way than to get this feedback directly from your customer’s mouth?

Update: Peter Cashmore and TechCrunch has a pretty interesting post about this as well.

]]> http://stanleywong.org/2007/02/25/harnessing-consumer-voice-to-improve-products-customer-experience/feed/ 1 http://stanleywong.org/2007/01/12/my-yahoo-buzz-index-patent-has-been-granted/ http://stanleywong.org/2007/01/12/my-yahoo-buzz-index-patent-has-been-granted/#comments Fri, 12 Jan 2007 19:51:44 +0000 SWong http://stanleywong.org/?p=12 Last month, I found out the patent for the Yahoo! Buzz Index (US Patent 7,146,416) was granted. I had a great time working with Janice Yoo, Elliot Yasnovsky, and KT Lim on building this project. From Search Engine Land:

Yahoo’s Buzz

This patent had me wondering how Yahoo presently measures trends in topics searched for on their search engine and portal, selected in their directory, and from people’s usage of the many services they offer; and how the company might be analyzing and using that information.

Web site activity monitoring system with tracking by categories and terms
Invented by Janet Yoo, Kian-Tat Lim, Stanley Ben Wong, and Elliott Yasnokvsky
Assigned to Yahoo
US Patent 7,146,416
Granted December 5, 2006
Filed September 1, 2000

Abstract

A traffic monitor provides statistics of traffic using an activity input for receiving data related to activity on a server system. Events being monitored are binned by topic or term, where the terms are associated with categories. The categories can be a hierarchy of categories and subcategories, with terms being in one or more categories. The categorized events include page views and search requests and the results might be normalized over a field of events and a result output for outputting results of the normalizer as the statistical analyses of traffic.

The Yahoo! Buzz Index goes way beyond what you see on the public version of the site. Back when I was at Yahoo! we conceived of this product as a marketing dashboard that would give you all types of insight on arguably one of the largest online panels in the world.
The client version of the Buzz Index empowers marketers to slice and dice data to find out aggregate information (without personally identifiable information) about who was engaging with a brand, concept, or search term. These insights leverages Yahoo!’s unparalleled number of consumer profiles (over 250 Million when I last looked). Google’s Zeigeist and Google Trends are similar but lacks the insights contained by the behavioral patterns enhanced with the sheer number of profiles. For example, a brand manager can find out whether or not Pepsi’s brand profile on the web engaged with younger female audiences than Coca-Cola’s and how they compare.
It was a lot of fun dreaming up that product when I was at Yahoo! It was fun to work at Yahoo! during those times when we were routinely innovating with new concepts and technology. In fact, the Yahoo! Buzz Index predated Google’s Zeigeist and Google Trends by over 4 years. Glad to finally see the patent has been granted.
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