iPhone coverage from Yahoo, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and apparently the circus is in town in Manhattan. Rob Scoble is blogging while waiting in line, and TechCrunch is streaming live coverage of people in line in Palo Alto.
Having worked for Sprint for almost 8 years, I’m curious to see if the iPhone lives up to the hype since I’ve seen so many phones march to their death when the expectations were so unreasonable.
Come on people, it’s just a phone, right…?
Ran across a video interview on Robert Scoble’s Pod Tech site today. Michael Wood-Lewis is interviewed about his community enabling web service called Front Porch Forum.
I think it’s great to see that people are genuinely interested in a neighborhood-type service that helps people get to know each other in their actual community. This bodes well for eNeighbors since we are interested in connecting communities just like Front Porch Forum is doing.
Now, if only I can get in touch with Mr. Scoble and tell him that he can set up eNeighbors in his neighborhood…
Dove’s “Evolution” video wins the top prize at Cannes Lions Ad Festival this year. This viral video was created as part of Dove’s “Campaign for Real Beauty” and promotes Dove’s self-esteem charity efforts.
Why is this important?
The social movement on the internet (i.e. web 2.0) has allowed this ad to be viewed and dicussed at unprecedented levels. This ad campaign was fueled by the masses. Five (heck, even three) years ago, this type of awareness and communication simply did not exist.
Pete Blackshaw of Nielsen Buzz Metrics has a great post that details out the specifics of Dove’s marketing success.
This just proves that the social web matters in the “real world” and can be used for more things than the MySpace crowd’s party shout outs and obsessive niche markets like twitter and Google Earth. When companies start talking to us about stuff that matters, we get engaged and become part of the community.
Welcome to the (r)evolution.
Guys like Mike Arrington, Reid Hoffman, and Max Levchin are all hanging out at Supernova 2007 this week in San Francisco.
From the site:
At Supernova, we attempt to answer “what’s next” after everything is connected. Supernova is the only event that assembles the most compelling people and companies from the converging worlds of computing, telecom, and digital media to put decentralization issues into meaningful social and business contexts.
In addition, Google, Yahoo!, AOL, Comcast, Verizon, Cisco, Sun, and IBM are all represented as well.
Some interesting topics of discussion include virtual worlds, user-generated content, online identity, social commerce and media, net neutrality, advertising, and copyright.
The Future of Online Advertising (FOOA) conference wrapped a couple weeks back, and I’ve been reading a lot of summaries and commentary about the different sessions and the overall direction of online advertising.
Not surprisingly, the topic of video was very hot. YouTube and Google made sure of that. And of course, the traditional TV networks are in full support of a medium that they are at least somewhat familiar with, but the trend that I thought was more relevant to us here at eNeighbors was the demand that online direct marketing be even more measured and tracked than it already is, and secondly, that the media and channels provide accountability.
With so many different online channels (e.g., blogs, videos, social networks, etc.) to use for your ad campaign, picking the right ones are going to be determined by how measureable and accountable a particular channel is willing to be.
Additionally, the content aggregators that are stripping content from their source only complicates the measurability situation. So, I think the question for how to determine effectiveness will ultimately end up with figuring out where and how people want to receive their content. And if (and that’s a big “if”) when they do receive that content in their personalized fashion, they are willing to put up with advertising.
The key is relevance. If I’m looking for a new grass treatment company for my lawn, then I’ll welcome all the ads I can get for lawn companies. But the icing on the cake will be whether I can quantify those ads in regards to value.
So, what we need is useful aggregator of content that is personal and relevant. And when I need it, provides me with a useful way to find and assess a service provider for whatever my need might be.
Good luck.
We are showing excellent positive growth patterns, and we continue to get positive feedback from our customers on how much they love using the tool, and how it makes communicating with their neighbors so easy.
Traffic data:
69,847 page views – 27% increase (over last 30 days)
7,482 visits – 36% increase (over last 30 days)
5 minutes avg visit duration – 5% increase (over last 30 days)
17 neighborhoods online
1,708 registered users at 1608 unique addresses
With 6,659 potential addresses in the neighborhoods that have signed up so far, we are at 24% adoption rate for our entire resident base.
The newsletter adoption rate is holding true as well with only 12 residents (out of 1708) opting out of receiving the email newsletter.
Total user-generated content since launch (about 3 months):
News posts: 198
Events: 124
Groups: 41
Classifieds: 259
Keep in mind that some of these neighborhoods have only been using their site for less than a month so far.
Overall, we are in really good shape. If we hit our goal of 50+ neighborhoods by the end of the year, we could easily be at 700,000 page views per month from 15,000 registered users in early 2008.
The “news” feature is next up in my profile of eNeighbors’ services. Everyone likes to be informed, and we use CNN, Yahoo and MSN to keep up on all the world, national and even city-level news, but what about the news that’s happening in your own back yard, literally.
The News feature is the most versatile of the communication tools. You can use it to alert the community to upcoming events, post details about neighborhood activity, remind residents of safety protocols, or simply use it to start an online conversation.
1. Anyone can post a News item.
2. Anyone can leave a comment on the posted News item (this helps to generate an online discussion by allowing real-time feedback).
3. The top 3 most recent News items appear on the Home page.
4. When you post a News item, it is viewable by anyone in your neighborhood that has registered on the website.
5. Finally, each News item is automatically put into the eNewsletter and sent to every neighbor that has chosen to receive the newsletter either daily, weekly, or monthly.
Contact us today to get more info on signing up your neighborhood for eNeighbors
We’ve recently put together a small sales team and subsequently developed some training materials to get the guys up to speed on all the features of eNeighbors. So, I thought I’d follow suit here on the blog and post a series of entries tied to the different features that eNeighbors offers a neighborhood.
First, there are 5 core communication features that we offer:
1. News
2. Events / Calendar
3. Groups
4. Classifieds
5. Bulletins
In addition, there are other more standard web features:
1. Online Resident Directory
2. Contact Form
3. Architectural Request Form
4. Resources (this is for all your HOA documents)
The first feature, I’ll cover is Classifieds since it has been our most popular so far. As of this morning, there have been 253 classifieds posted on eNeighbors from about 15 different neighborhoods in the past 10 weeks.
1. Classifieds are free
2. It’s so easy to post a classified, you can do it in about 2 minutes. All you have to do is click “Post a Classified”, type up your ad, preview it, and then click “publish.” Your ad is instantly added to the site for everyone to view.
3. The top 3 most recent classifieds appear on the Home page.
4. When you post a classified, it is viewable by anyone in your neighborhood that has registered on the website.
5. There are 4 different categories you can post to:
– For Sale
– Wanted
– Neighborhood Services?
(things like babysitting, pet sitting, yard work, etc.)
– Professional Services
(things like, Mary Kay, tax services, house painting, etc.)
6. Finally, each classified post is automatically put into the eNewsletter and sent to every neighbor that has chosen to receive the newsletter either daily, weekly, or monthly.
Contact us today to get more info on signing up your neighborhood for eNeighbors
Out of respect for Kelsey, I’m going to refrain from posting my typical stuff about technology and the web.
Our hearts go out to Kelsey’s family in their time of loss. I have two younger sisters as well as a daughter of my own, and this is my worst nightmare. It’s unimagineable for something like this to happen in our beautiful city of Overland Park.
There will be a candlelight vigil tonight. Here’s the details:
Candlelight Vigil for Kelsey
Shawnee Mission West High School
Marching Band Practice Field
June 7, 8:30 p.m.Due to construction, park in the Antioch parking lot and enter the field from the north side. Please carpool. Candles will be provided.
Additionally, the family has set up a Kelsey Smith Fund. The details are on the new site that was moved to Blogger:
The other day, Techcrunch ran a guest post from David Sacks (founder and CEO of Geni and previously the COO of PayPal). I’m going to attempt to summarize his point in one sentence:
Locating content on internet portals has evolved from browsing to searching to sharing.
And today, Facebook has this latest stage of “sharing” figured out way ahead of Yahoo and Google who are still in the search phase of allowing users to locate info on the web.
Ultimately, the sharing phenomenon is more about “pushing” content rather than “pulling” it since the content is recommended by your trusted sources (i.e. your friends list).
So, given that this is the eNeighbors blog, I’m obviously going to tie this into our long term vision and content model…
eNeighbors is building a hyper-local network of neighborhoods, and our registered user base is tied to a physical location (as opposed to the 18 different profiles you have on MySpace under various aliases and which MySpace can offer no data at all about where you really are on the planet).
Once this network is in place and has enough adoption, it inherently creates the ultimate local platform for local business advertising and referrals since the users all live in the same area.
The sharing concept of trusted content becomes extremely important when you are looking for someone to fix your roof or the best real estate agent in your area.
So, instead of going to Ask.com or Yahoo Local to find service providers in your area where you have to search at the city level or metro level, eNeighbors will be able to provide neighborhood-level information on service providers, and on top of that you’ll be able to get trusted referrals from your neighbors that have actually used the service.
I’m telling you, the top down approach to these search portals has to go, people. Demand better (and more relevant) information.
eNeighbors Blog 