Classroom enlightenment

We've now finished with all final presentations, and, as one might expect from classroom presentations, it was all very educational. A stand-out for me: Selling the disease.

I found Halvard's talk about drug companies putting up sites to help people self-diagnose various diseases so they might head off to their doctor with a firm idea of what is wrong with them and what medications they might need completely fascinating from several different angles. Combined with the talk on healthcare Websites, I can see why my doctor always rolls her eyes when I say something like, "Well, I was looking on the Internet, and..."

It seems that Internet can be a weapon for good or evil in the fight for good health. On the one hand, people may be able to learn how to better care for themselves and cut down on unnecessary doctor's visits, ostensibly (but probably not actually) reducing healthcare costs. On the other hand self-diagnosis, often perhaps over-diagnosing, can lead to even more healthcare furor, raising costs to meet demand.

Either way, ultimately what may be at risk is credibility. Can you trust healthcare advice from the Internet (or any advice, really, but that's a whole other topic), and does selling a disease diminish that trust, or is it a line on further information?

Costco enlightenment

I found our visit to Costco last Friday both pleasant and enlightening. Mike is an excellent speaker and clearly knowledgeable about his topics, which helped me gain a good grasp (at least at a high level) on Costco's marketing methodology. A few things that stood out for me:

Upsell. Or don't. As a few others have also mentioned, I'm curious as to why they do not duplicate the store merchandise online. Or, because they don't, why they don't make a greater effort to cross-sell, or upsell) between the stores and online. It sounds like they are making tentative steps in this direction and working to raise awareness of Costco.com in general, but why not really go for it (and why have they not done it before if this upsell/cross-sell is their strategy)?

One potential reason is that Costco is loathe to disturb the good thing they've already got going. The merchandising in the warehouse stores works the way it is, so why disrupt the balance? Or why break something in an attempt to fix something else? Still, if Costco is serious about Costco.com, they will need to start making some potentially disruptive efforts in their stores to boost traffic.

Where's my package? While I was not exactly surprised to find out that the majority of their customer service calls revolve around package tracking, I was surprised that the solution was to improve shipment times (which as far as I can tell are quite streamlined already). Perhaps they have already tried, but another angle would be to look at the site. I believe Mike said customers can track packages on the site, but is there a way to make this more visible in the site design? Or, the larger point is to investigate whether there is something more to be done on the customer education side rather than on the delivery side.

Surprise! I had never considered before why Costco always had such wild things in their big warehouse store. One day you might find fine art, the next you might find grandfather clocks. On the day we visited, Costco.com posted an $18,499.99 "Scallywag Sloop Pirate Themed Club House" under "This Week's Buyers' Picks" (which begs the question on how they generate these "picks." Probably not unit sales). One of the things I enjoy about visiting Costco is to see what surprising merchandise they have in stock. Having never thought much about it, I didn't really realize it was a clever marketing scheme, and that I had fallen into the trap: Let's go to Costco and see what weird things they have this week.

Online Security follow-up

As a follow-up to my presentation on Monday, here are a few resources you might find useful:

• Anti-Phishing Working Group: http://www.antiphishing.org/
  "Committed to wiping out Internet scams and fraud"
• StopBadware.org: http://www.stopbadware.org/
  "Regaining Control of Our Computers
• News: Google puts up "Beware of malware" signs
• TRUSTe: http://www.truste.org
  "Make Privacy Your Choice"
• P3P Research: An Analysis of P3P-Enabled Web Sites among Top-20 Search Results

Additional mitigations and protections that I didn't mention in class are:

• Automatic warnings. These are the type of security warnings you see in your Web browser as well as the Google signs mentioned in the above article.
• Cookie software. There are some software programs you can get that will make cookies more secure. One removes cookies from the typical location on your hard drive and stores them on removable media that you can separate from the computer. Another moves cookies to an alternate location on your hard drive and encrypts them to prevent hacking.
• Alternative e-mail. Nym servers (short for anonymous servers) obscure the origins of e-mail messages you send using a mapping scheme and various remailers (servers that remove header information, containing the origins of the e-mail, before forwarding along). Or, many people create "throw-away" e-mail accounts with Yahoo, Hotmail, or other free e-mail software and do not tie any personally-identifiable information to that account. They then use that account to access risky Web sites.
• Vigilance/Acceptance. Two sides of the same, coin, you, as a Web user, can be super-vigilant about where and when you enter your information. You may miss out on some Web conveniences and opportunities, but you can be more sure your information is safe online. Alternatively, you can accept that some amount of your private information will be made public and this is the cost of using the Internet.

To this last point, bearcat's has a blog post talking about the fact that PII is already out there and may be more so in the future. If people begin to receive value for their PII, the "acceptance" path above may gain momentum.

No fear

I think I'm a bit late jumping into the "fear tactics" discussion following Monday night's debates, but I've been pondering how the discussion ended up so weighted in fear. Specifically I'm thinking about fear of technological advancement (as opposed to fear of falling children or lack of medical help).

I don't recall that our debate points as envisioned included fear of technology (I was in the Statement #1, Against group), but we wanted to touch on the impersonally or possible "coldness" of transacting with technology as opposed to humans, where technology may not be able to quickly adapt to the more subtle cues that human shoppers give off. And, we wanted to emphasize the impact of technology-gone-wrong on human beings: frustration, lack of immediate or satisfying recourse. But, interestingly, we ended up spontaneously characterizing these interactions as scary, or threatening. Why is that? Well, I'm not exactly sure, but I think I can see where the leap came from. I think that examples of technology-gone-wrong, along with a lack of understanding of how technology works and what to do when it breaks, can escalate to fear (or at least this is a societal assumption). At their core, movies like Minority Report or I, Robot are about what happens when technology behaves unexpectedly and people no longer have control over it. You can find more than a few Twilight Zone episodes from the '60's on this theme as well.

But, as someone (or several people) in class mentioned, the biggest technical adaptations we make as a society are more-or-less painless because they are gradual. For most of his life, my grandfather never would have considered banking with an automated teller, but their numbers have grown and grown and their benefits are so obvious that it has become far more difficult to transact in the non-automated way. I think this is a great example of how the adaptation of good technology takes place. Perhaps another good example is the telephone: From huge machines anchored to your wall, to smaller machines anchored to various walls, to handsets disconnected from walls, to entire phones not even remotely near a wall.

As a separate point, I really enjoyed the debate format of the discussion. I don't know much about debating and I think I learned a great deal about format and tactics from the awesome groups that presented. (Since I couldn't put it on my form, I thought the best debate was made by the Statement #1, For team. They did a great job with the format, and in particular I thought their point-by-point rebuttal was effective.) I'm not sure I see the value of a pre-written rebuttal deck and thought the best rebuttals were tied to the original points made by the opposition. Anyway, it was a good learning experience.

SimBay

As anyone who has played SimCity knows, once a community grows beyond a certain point, you can expect an increased burden of managing a large society, such as a need for expanded infrastructure, taxes, entertainment, and public services, such as a police force. Online communities, such as Craig's List and eBay, seem to suffer the same challenges. What began as two men's utopian dreams grew to global proportions and introduced one of the greatest challenges facing large communities: crime.

If I'm recalling correctly, the video we watched in class last Monday mentioned a 100-person strong policing division within eBay US. They scan site content constantly looking for suspicious items, site infractions, and other types of fraud. Craig's List has the same problem, although they have a smaller enforcement team. Both companies employ fraud software to uncover illegal practices.

But, both companies rely on their communities the biggest crime deterrent. eBay's rating system allows buyers and sellers to rate each other--positive, neutral, or negative--on each transaction. This acts as a warning system to buyers and sellers. Wikipedia's article on eBay lists the following weaknesses of the feedback system:

• Small and large transactions carry the same weight in the feedback summary.
• A user may be reluctant to leave honest feedback out of fear of negative retaliatory feedback (including "negative" in retaliation for "neutral").
• The receiver of a negative feedback is allotted only 80 characters to type a response in their defense, making a thorough rebuttal extremely difficult to write.
• eBay's policies make it nearly impossible to remove unfair or retaliatory feedback.

Still, the feedback tool remains eBay's most powerful weapon against fraud.

In Craig's List case, crime has the potential to move out of the strictly online arena and into the personal. Reading through Craig's List you'll see posters warning of other posters, and the e-mail messages that Craig's List sends to potential buyers contains an automatically-appended message warning against putting money up front for transactions.

Each company cites fraud as one of their biggest challenges, and legal proceedings involving the companies are often around fraudulent transactions enabled by the companies. These companies walk a line between simply providing a convenient transaction location online and mediating the activity that takes place there (maybe like Napster--see Wikipedia for a summary of their legal issues).

As with other types of online crime, no matter how good the tools, there will be those who seek to circumvent them. For the Web, perhaps a self-policing society is going to be as good as it gets.

I'm Feeling Lucky

While we were discussing the Google Home page redesigns in class on Wednesday, it occurred to me that perhaps the strength of Google's brand wasn't necessarily only their clean home page but also their simplistic style. I think people have called their company "cute" (like the changing logo at holiday time), but I think they also rely on the simple default-styled links, the default-styled buttons, and the folksy "I'm Feeling Lucky" button text (see more on this below). I think they really rely on their image as another startup doing good work with solid technology and few resources when, in fact, they are big and growing Fortune 500 company.

Someone mentioned in class that MSN Search is trying the clean look too and doesn't seem to be working as well. But, maybe it is also because MSN Search doesn't capture that look of "I'm way to busy designing great technology to help you get done what you need to worry about fancy site design." First, the fact that the property is owned by Microsoft is a dead giveaway that it's not some small startup, and second, the customized link fonts and colors and gradient background and button potentially work against the simplicity by implying that behind the simple exterior lurks a massive, well-trained graphic design team waiting to market to you.

Since this seems to be my week to bring Craig's List up in every blog posting, I'll mention them here too of an extreme success that relies on its simplistic design and styling to convey its brand. Add some images and some fancy flash, and they've lost a lot of what makes Craig's List Craig's List and I would imagine a lot of their traffic as well.

I'm Feeling Lucky: I noticed that the teams who opted to remove the I'm Feeling Lucky button did so based on it's dubious usefulness and likely low use by actual site visitors. I think this is completely true, and more data would surely support this perspective as do the tenets of good product design. So, it makes sense to remove it to make way for the more profitable properties and to maintain the clean site look. But, I think the I'm Feeling Lucky button is actually a part of the Google brand, maybe almost as much as their cute logos. It puts a personable face on the company, makes it seem as though they have a sense of humor, and adds some levity to Web searching. They make take it down in the future, but I'd be sort of surprised if they did.

The perfect match?

In the eBay video we watched in class on Monday, there was brief mention that eBay now owned a 25% stake in Craig's List. After some reading I realize that this is now old news, but interesting none the less. From an interview with Craig's List founder Craig Newmark, I understand that the purchase was unintended (by everyone except Newmark's "friend," who sold his 25% stake in the company, and by eBay, of course). The agreement reached by the two companies was that eBay would retain their stake but remain uninvolved in daily operations, and Craig's List's core mission to "Provide a trustworthy, efficient, relatively relatively non-commercial place for folks to find all the basics in their local area" would remain intact (see Craig's List Fact Sheet).

Newmark hoped that the two companies could benefit from each other's experience. Newmark cites Craig's List's strengths as page load speed (which he credits to using an open-source environment) and efficiency (he said his company serves as many pages as Amazon with only 14 employees). From eBay, Newmark was hoping to gain experience with working on an international scale with a number of different regulatory environments and to pursue scammers more effectively. (Craig's List now, in fact, has over 500 sites in 50 different countries.)

The key that seemed to resonate with both companies was their community focus and their incredible site traffic (Alexa.com ranks Craigslist.org at 29, eBay at 10; Craig's List data puts them at 5 and 7, respectively). To my mind, they are also complimentary. Person-to-person transactions (or small-business-to-person transactions) are clearly a success on the Web, and while eBay claims the higher end of the market with small businesses and national and international transactions, Craig's List brings it all home as a way to trade (among other things) within a local community. Seems like a very powerful combination should either company wish to take more advantage of their now-formal relationship.

What people are really looking for

In class on Wednesday we evaluated the online strength of a company using various measures: page hits, quantity of search results, online chatter, etc. To me, one of the most interesting measures was search text analysis (http://inventory.overture.com). This tool returns a list of commonly used search terms and their freqency related to a term you enter into the tool. For example, if you enter "Starbucks," you get a list of the search terms people used that contained the word "Starbucks."

The tool bills itself as a way to identify which search terms to purchase, but it also sheds some light on the people behind the page visit numbers. Yes, it is important to know that people are (or are not!) visiting your site, but what does that tell you about them? You can use this keyword tool to gain insight into what those people are hoping to find when they visit your site. This is especially true for companies that do not do the same type of business offline as they do online. For example, in Starbucks stores, people can buy coffee drinks. This is not something people can do online. So, how does Starbucks know how to tailor their Web site?

Well, Starbucks probably uses plenty of expensive research to answer this question. But, a quick look at the top five common search terms that include "Starbucks" reveals that people are looking for information on coffee, nutrition, store locations, and franchise information, all of which are readily available on the Starbucks Web page. By this measure, at least, Starbucks appears to be on target.

The underlying assumption

One thing that struck me as we were discussing the origins, nature, and behavior of the Web in class Monday is that if success is measured by the number of visitors, the underlying assumption is that all content that is published to the Web is intended for any visitor, regardless of their intentions or desirability. But is this necessarily always true? There are certainly mechanisms used to deter just anyone from accessing a Web site--subscription, fees, technological blocks, access-point placement--but is there a class of Web site where deterance isn't feasible, but you also don’t want everyone to visit, and is success then not measured by number of visits?

An example that comes to mind is a professional blog that a co-worker created last year. Along with other people in our group, he began blogging about an upcoming software product release. In his blog, he discussed one of the controversial features he and his team had worked on and what he thought the benefits and limitations were. In turn he was able to gather comments, often heated, from public site visitors about what they thought this feature should do and how they planned to use (or not use) it. All very good and useful. But this blog also attracted blog-commenters who simply hate the company and posted comments that were derogatory or inflammatory, all off-topic. The content of these posts wasn’t so much the issue--people should feel free to hate the company and publish it if they wish--but it undermined the value of this particular blog exchange and made it more time-consuming to extract the good, helpful information.

So, is the success of this blog really measured by the number of visitors? I think that is the usual measure of success for a blog (number of readers). But, does that measure truly capture the success of the blog. In one sense, it does. A visitor is a visitor, and if you are blogging about something that elicits any kind of response you are at least making an impact of some sort. But, what if you have fewer visitors but a better exchange of information and ideas with a lower amount of effort?

Archiving the Web

I was once told (though this has the aura of an urban legend and might not be true) that in earlier years when Microsoft published a new suite of software, some people would scour the printed manuals looking for errors--omitted copyright acknowledgments, improper use of trademarked names, etc.--and would use these errors to bring lawsuits against the company. The manuals were costly to recall and reprint, and Microsoft's exposure remained for at least some duration.

Now much of this content is publicly available on the Web. The benefits for the company include, among other things, the reduced production costs of creating printed manuals and the ability to collect information about the kind of information people are seeking and adjust as demand dictates. And, if an error is discovered, the content can be immediately replaced. While public exposure to incorrect content is wider (more people can potentially see it), the duration of exposure is much shorter and the content is far less costly to replace.

But, if the content is archived, the company's exposure remains and the chance to replace the content in any manner, costly or not, is removed. I’m not a lawyer so this example may be bogus, but in this case the practice of archiving the Web negates, to some extent, the benefits of the Web's changeable nature.

If the alternative is not archiving, however, we are losing a valuable piece of our history. Then the Web's changeable nature means that one of the most extensive records (though not perhaps the most accurate) of our current worldwide society, culture, and existence is completely fleeting.

Likely the alternative is something else. But in any event, the outcome of the suit against archive.org may begin to lay the foundation for regulation in the future, along with other efforts to regulate this relatively new information medium.

Welcome to new blog

When there are real posts, this blog will report on things learned in an MBA E-Commerce class over the next four weeks.