Josh Klein explains why reputation systems like Klout will never work in Can Reputation Come Down to a Number?:

There’s a more nuanced problem interwoven into the problem of arriving at a unified reputation system. The people who are attempting it, such as Klout and Kred, might hope to measure reputation but their algorithms, at best, track influence. The two are not equal. Influence is the ability to get others to take action, such as donating funds. But how that influence can be wielded is critical; Obama had great luck in soliciting donations using his influence, but so did Butch Cassidy. Influence is different in different contexts, and measuring only “influence” means you are judging someone’s capabilities without any of the necessary context.

Personally, I think the only online reputation system that does work is Klouchebag.

In The Banner Blindness Cure: How Fewer Ads Can Equal More Revenue Dave Zinman points out something all readers know already, and publishers will hopefully take note of:

It’s no wonder, looking at these stats, that banner blindness is such a glaring issue. Talk about losing sight of the forest for the trees: We’re so busy looking after our bottom line, we’re not paying attention to the user experience. We hit our visitors over the heads with ads like sledgehammers, then wonder why our ads aren’t “performing.” It’s absurd. Clearly, we’re doing it wrong. […]

Wouldn’t a publisher be far better off serving fewer ads, and taking top dollar for one or two premium placements? With highly relevant ads that aren’t forced to compete against several other ads on the page, odds of interaction and possible conversion are tremendously improved. And when ads perform better, publishers, advertisers and consumers win.

Somewhat related, here’s what’s happening over on the far end of the creepiness scale:

The odds are that access to you — or at least the online you — is being bought and sold in less than the blink of an eye. On the Web, powerful algorithms are sizing you up, based on myriad data points: what you Google, the sites you visit, the ads you click. Then, in real time, the chance to show you an ad is auctioned to the highest bidder.

Not that you’d know it. These days in the hyperkinetic world of digital advertising, all of this happens automatically, and imperceptibly, to most consumers.

If I may use a John Gruberism: Gross.

Marcelo Somers wrote a good article arguing that to compete with the likes of Amazon, e-commerce companies need to focus on telling stories through the products they sell. From Disrupting Amazon: Rethinking eCommerce:

An eCommerce site should be about more than just selling stuff. It should embody a set of values that are distilled in how the product looks, how it feels, and what it contains. It should have an opinion - the story is how we go about telling it through our interface, how we merchandise, the photography, and the products on the site.

He also provides some examples of companies that do this well.

Related post from the Elezea archive: The welcome shift to context-based e-commerce.

Craig Mod wrote a very interesting essay about community and content for Contents Magazine. In Our New Shrines he talks about building a community first, before deciding what you’re going to do with them. It’s a contentious topic, but it’s worth entertaining Craig’s argument:

There is a reality those of us long steeped in the web are reticent to admit: for many, Facebook is the internet. More than Tumblr. More than wordpress.com. More than Twitter. For a certain person, a very commonly found person, Facebook is a Yahoo! portal, personalized Google news, Gmail, Flickr, iPhoto, and Xbox. If you look closely, companies don’t post URLs to their home pages, they post URLs to their Facebook pages.

We facilitate lots of usability tests here at Flow. I’ve asked the question “So, what do you do when go online?” enough times to know exactly what the answer will be. It is always, without fail, a variation of “Well, I Facebook, of course… A little bit of email… Some Google… Umm, well, mostly Facebook.”

This might change, but I completely agree that for most people, Facebook is the Internet at the moment. I personally don’t like Craig’s proposal of building a community around something vapid before you decide what product/service you want to provide to them. I think it’s a dangerous game. But denying the short-term effectiveness of such a strategy would be naive. For better or worse, this is the attention economy we live in. For now.

Cap Watkins says goodbye to getting stuff for free — and celebrates a better way — in Death of the Free Web:

As a result, the web is becoming more localized, more niche. And what startups are beginning to realize is that they don’t need to be the next Facebook or Twitter or Google to achieve success and to grow a large, sustainable business. What they need to do is create products that connect with these small, but passionate groups of like-minded people. Instead of passionate users making up the minority of a product’s customers, the new goal is to make them the majority from the start. Because those passionate customers, it turns out, create even more passionate customers.

Cap gives some good examples as well. His post argues for a similar approach to what I discussed in Imagining a future without traditional marketing.

(link via @bokardo)

Farhad Manjoo discusses what he believes is “a terrible problem for the Web marketing business” in The uncanny valley of Internet advertising:

Today’s Web ads don’t know enough about you to avoid pitching you stuff that you’d never, ever buy. They do know just enough about you, though, to clue you in on the fact that they’re watching everything you do.

Farhas also shares some very interesting examples of the issue. Great article.

(link via @karenmcgrane)

I turned off satellite TV at our home about 5 months ago. This wasn’t some moral stand against the horrors of technology. It was simply a matter of return on investment. Satellite TV is ludicrously expensive in South Africa, and my wife and I are so happy with our Apple TV setup that I couldn’t justify the cost any more. I wondered if we would have some withdrawal symptoms, but I can honestly say I’ll never go back to satellite. I do miss the odd live sporting event, but that’s not compelling enough to fork out a gazillion dollars every month just to see some guy yelling about cake.

The side benefit of this decision is that we haven’t seen a TV commercial in 5 months. Combine that with my practice of doing most of my online reading in Instapaper, and things start to get interesting. The sheer volume of advertising I used to be bombarded with forced me to tune it all out. But now that it’s a bit scarcer I notice every ad I come across. And I don’t like what I see. It’s especially jarring on Facebook, where “Promoted pages” are starting to annoy the crap out of me. I used to scroll through them without a second thought, but now I grit my teeth as they fly by.

This got me thinking about the current state of traditional marketing, and what a future without it might look like.

RIP traditional marketing

I believe that marketing as we currently know and practice it is well on its way to extinction. That’s certainly not what ad agencies want you to believe, but the evidence is all around us. Marketing is losing its ability to convince people to buy things they don’t need. Jason Calacanis sums it up perfectly in The Age of Excellence: “If your product sucks, it’s over. Transparency is a bitch.”

We discuss products and services everywhere we go, and our friends and followers are listening. “Word of mouth” marketing isn’t new, but the tools to spread our views about a company or experience are now within everyone’s reach. And boy, are we reaching. Even a cursory look at Facebook’s usage metrics shows the staggering amount of time people spend there.

What frustrates companies, of course, is that they can’t control the conversation any more. They’re powerless against an angry mob of consumers who spew vitriol about their products all over the Internet. This is ultimately a good thing, because it will slowly scare companies into taking some of their marketing budgets and spending it on making better products instead. Because that’s where profit and sustainability will come from.

This doesn’t mean I don’t want to know about new things. I still want to find out about cool products or services that I might be interested in. But I don’t want to see it on TV or in a sponsored link on my Facebook page. I want to hear about it from people I trust. That can be through a tweet or blog post about a good experience, or even a paid ad related to a topic I care about (like the advertisements on the 5by5 network).

I’m not averse to marketing messages. I’m averse to being manipulated into buying something that won’t live up to its promises. When’s the last time you read the back of your shampoo bottle? Do you believe that the right shampoo will give you “gorgeous, luxuriously soft” hair, or maybe “the hair nature didn’t”? No? Then why are we ok with these ridiculous marketing messages? Why don’t we call companies on it when they do things like promise “everything you could ever want”?

The future of marketing is product

There is no traditional marketing in the future I’d like to see. There’s no professional advertising TV spots, no billboards, no videos created to be “viral content”. Instead, companies take the money they save from paying ad agencies, and spend it on building great products.

In this future, the people who work on products aren’t faceless entities. They are individuals who hang out online, who write on their blogs about their journeys, and who are active in the industries they operate in. Since they’re focused on providing value to others, they have a large enough following so that when their product launches, they can promote it to their networks without being overbearing. And if the product is good enough, that message gets amplified through the various networks to acquire customers. If it’s not good enough, they get the negative feedback and try again.

The outcome of this vision is that the products we use are made by people we know, and promoted by those who want to spread the word about something they like. I don’t think we’re even that far from being able to create this future. I’m happily unaware of TV advertising these days, and most of the things I buy are based on recommendations on Twitter or in offline conversations.

Granted, we need more success stories to convince companies to buy fewer ads and hire more product-focused people. And we need all those product people to start contributing to their communities and talk about what they’re working on. But the puzzle pieces are all there. We just haven’t finished putting them together.

Jason Calacanis believes The Age of Excellence is here, and I agree:

You see, in the old days, it was about distribution, location, marketing spend, celebrity endorsement, traffic buying or the black art of search engine optimization.

Today it’s about getting a positive net-promoter score and making your five-star histogram look like a gun: a lot of five-star reviews coupled with some four-star reviews make the barrel. A dramatic drop-off to three stars, followed by slightly fewer two- and one-star reviews, makes the handle of your gun.

No amount of marketing or gamesmanship is going to flip the upside-down gun over. If your product sucks, it’s over. Transparency is a bitch.

(link via @jonaspersson)

They’re not always great at citing sources, and it’s not exactly the height of intellectual journalism, but I’ll admit: BuzzFeed’s publishing strategy is commendable:

We don’t show crappy display ads and we make all our revenue from social advertising that users love and share.  We never launched one of those “frictionless sharing” apps on Facebook that automatically shares the stories you click because those apps are super annoying. We don’t post deceptive, manipulative headlines that trick people into reading a story.  We don’t focus on SEO or gaming search engines or filling our pages with millions of keywords and tags that only a robot will read. We avoid anything that is bad for our readers and can only be justified by short term business interests.

Instead, we focus on publishing content our readers love so much they think it is worth sharing. It sounds simple but it’s hard to do and it is the metric that aligns our company with our readers. In the long term it’s good for readers and good for business.

That’s from an email that BuzzFeed’s CEO sent to employees, and it’s worth reading in its entirety because it’s such a good description of the principles that good online publishing is built on.

Michael Lopp discusses Apple’s famous secrecy in the context of the “One More Thing” keynote moments during the Steve Jobs era. As usual, he nails it:

The best stories, the ones we love, have a surprise ending. Since Steve returned to Apple, an essential part of the keynote was the anticipation of the unexpected, and that means aggressive and invasive secrecy. Not because they don’t want you to know, but because they want to tell you a great story.

His point is that “it’s not secrecy, it’s theatre.” Great article.