Supernatural Agency: Online business tales

Supernatural Agency is a virtual company. Both of us have full time jobs at Software as a Service (SaaS) companies. Mike works at a hosted email company called BlueTie and I have recently joined Techrigy as Director of Marketing. We run Supernatural in our ’spare’ time, (not a lot of that) which fits our business plan of no customers, no employees, 8-10 hours a week of work.

Techrigy is a social media search and discovery company. Our SM2 service allows brand marketers and PR pros to track conversations and sentiment across blogs, wikis, online video, microblogs like Twitter and other social media in real time. As a domain owner, entering this vast universe of user-generated content (UGC), brings up something very interesting. This social media eco-system has millions of participants, members and users and very little of it rests on unique domains. In fact it is an entirely different iteration of the web. Nothing is static, communities form and dissolve constantly, opinions and ideas spread way too fast for conventional search to index and track, and these trends and memes can make or break a candidate, a product or a reputation overnight.

Unlike sites on domains, social media resides in a sphere of reputation that is fickle at best. Concepts like the social graph which (as I interpret it) attempt to map where you and your ideas reside in a three axis grid, are not fixed- they change as relationships change. Other concepts like semantic search attempt to understand the context of a query so they can improve the relevancy of results, the never-ending Holy Grail of search.

As you might understand the challenge of marketing this new universe of ideas is both irresistible and daunting. It took me months to be able to write the sentences above and feel that they made sense to me. Now I have to explain them to others and help them see why they should care about what people are doing and saying in that universe. Pretty cool or should I say Dyson?

I’ve been a number of conversations lately about data-mining and semantic search (or ‘discovery’ as one company’s CEO told me she preferred- not sure I know the difference…). In one of those exchanges I brought up the idea of tracking ‘habitual information’, a phrase I’ll take credit for originating (my five minutes of fame?). The idea struck me- there are many kinds of information I track on a habitual level: certain stock prices, weather, environmental economics, usability, etc. I am sure that there are many others who share a similar pattern of habitual information.

As a marketer I see behavioral targeting potential in this information. In a previous post I wrote about iGoogle as a potential source of behavioral data for Google. This idea of habitual information takes that model further. If you know my information habits, as opposed to simply tracking what I do while surfing, then you could target me more precisely when I do surf. So if go daily to Techcrunch, NYTimes Business section, Science Daily and have a Google Alert set for Apple Inc.,  I’m guessing there’s quite a few people like me out there. The ads served up on these sites collectively could target my interests.

I haven’t quite got my arms around how this might work but I’m guessing the data-miners at Google and the ad networks have got something like this on their radar- I’ll be watching for it.

Google recently announced some changes to its iGoogle page(s) that will incorporate various social networking functionality. While I haven’t seen it, I expect they’ll include some kind of ‘friending’ capability, some sharing fort files and favorites, message boards, etc. This is a big deal for one because people like me make daily use of iGoogle as the default browser page. Mine serves as a dashboard with stock quotes, gmail, weather, Google news and blog alerts, RSS and more, all organized with tabs. Adding in social networking functions, especially the ability to tap into my existing accounts like LinkedIn is a big deal. Here’s why, IMHO:

One of the big trends in search is the use of actual humans to parse results for accuracy, a la Mahalo. The problem is that this cannot scale  the level required for a universal search engine like the Goog. There are simply not enough people to do it and it’s not fast enough. However there is a way to do human-monitored search and I think Google knows what it is.

First I’m going to back up a bit. There is a Captcha system out there that takes advantage of all these humans typing in text they see as an image that goes beyond a security measure. As they type they are verifying words that have been captured by scanning systems used to scan books. This serves as a human editing system for an automated process. Quite clever really, as it does not require paid employees nor does it add to anyone’s workload- they’re going to type these words anyway.

Fast forward to the social network concept. LinkedIn was built by people entering their own information and updating it, making connections with people they know, forming groups, etc. It has a Q&A function where users can ask questions and get answers from other users who are, ostensibly, experts. It also has a job posting system tied in with a recommendation system. All of these elements together add up to a database of detailed information on people created and maintained by people (millions of people) who are unpaid. They’ve created a human-powered search engine that can and does scale. FaceBook, MySpace, Orkut, Hi5- they are all search engines with the dataset kept up by users.

With Google getting into this space more universally (they were already there with Orkut, which they acquired a few years ago, but is principally popular in South America) they are adding a human screening capability to their data on humans. With iGoogle they have my daily habits at their fingertips. Adding in a social network or two means they’ll also have that data in a social context- who I’m connected to and how. With a few more acquisitions like Tripit, which helps users track their travel itineraries (very cool, BTW), they could also track where I’m traveling, etc., etc.

I suspect there will be businesses that specialize in configuring Google assets to create specialized datastreams and searches. I’d thought of doing one that simply configured Google’s Apps for business use, something like the way RedHat works with Linux- Find out what the business needs, configure browser and application preferences, logins, etc., and distribute those preferences to employees with set-up instructions. I’m not doing it but it will happen.

Google is staying on strategy: to organize the world’s information. Instead of bemoaning their ubiquity, try looking for opportunities in their eco-system. They’re all over the place.

Viral marketing is truly guerrilla marketing as this guest post from Techcrunch shows. If you post videos on YouTube it is a must read.

2008 is going to be the year that revenue from online video explodes. I have a friend whose 18 year-old daughter’s music videos have been viewed millions of times. She made them at college and they are just her playing guitar, ukelele and singing original music.

Does she make money at this? She is selling 15-20 CDs daily at ten bucks each (they cost around $.50 each to have made). Because those buying are big fans they often put extra money in the envelope as a gift. She has serious interest from several major record labels and is opening for Ben Folds on tour. Because of the rapid change in the music business she may not need a record label.

That’s viral power…