The Four Pillars of a Distributed Web Strategy

My interest in distributed web businesses – web businesses that don’t reside on a single domain, but instead span across various web sites – stems from necessity.

While the long tail of the Web is getting longer, so is the percentage of overall pageviews absorbed by the head of that tail. If your site isn’t one of those elite sites at the head of the curve, you’re most likely losing ground every day.

In this environment, you either find ways to put your content / functionality / service in front of people where they are, or you wither away into irrelevance.

At a macro level, there are four broad strategies that can be undertaken to get distributed.

Widgets

Widgets have been covered in excruciating detail on this blog. The short version: have a stable of Flash widgets available to your users that your makes your site’s best content and functionality available “to go,” at the whim of anybody who hits your site, and at the whim of anybody who comes across one of your widgets in the wild.

Here’s my list of best widget resources.

Toolbars / Extensions / Downloads

Not to sound idiotic (which this does), but another place that Internet users spend a lot of time is in their browser or on their desktop.

If you can convince your users to add a plug-in / toolbar / extension to their browser, your service is going to be front and center in these folks’ browsing experience. From a distributed perspective, it doesn’t get much better than this.

The challenge, of course, is that a download is a big obstacle to adoption. Not that this is an impossible task – StumbleUpon is a great example of a company that rode a browser extension to mass adoption, and eventually, an acquisition.

I’d also include downloadable clients in this bucket. Stuff like Last.FM’s audioscrobbler and Meetro’s IM client are both good examples of download powered distribution.

APIs

APIs, or Application Programming Interfaces, allow outside developers build on top of your application, and typically involve creating modular blocks of your site’s functionality or content that can be called into use by other sites.

APIs are not as accessible as widgets, as only developers can make use of them. However, APIs can enable broad, site wide adoption of a web service. For example, when my employer decided to use the Yahoo! Maps API to add maps to our local business reviews channel, in one fell swoop we added about 1M Yahoo! maps to our site.

Facebook Apps

With more than 30M active profiles, and a unique opportunity to distribute your web application via the social fabric of existing networks of friends, Facebook has become a distribution channel all its own.

I was initially skeptical about some aspects of the Facebook platform – but no longer. I see a Facebook distribution strategy as an absolute must have for just about any consumer facing web app.

The best post that I’ve seen on Facebook App tips can be found on Inside Facebook.

Conclusion

While coverage of each of these four distribution buckets may not be appropriate for every consumer facing company, it’s interesting to take a look at some of the leaders in distributed business strategy and see what they’re doing in each area.

So is anybody knocking the ball out of the park on all of these distribution elements?

StumbleUpon has millions of downloads of their toolbar, but “only” 7,000 FB app users.

Adaptive Blue (review) has an impressive toolbar and stable of widgets, but no Facebook app or API that I could find.

Yelp has a newly released API, a stable of widgets, and a Facebook app (3,000 users).

The companies that seem to really have distributed business strategy down are some of the original MySpace era widget kings. Slide has massive traction on Facebook, massive widget traction on MySpace and elsewhere, and a toolbar.

Likewise, RockYou has massive Facebook traction, huge widget distribution, and a Facebook API.

Photobucket has incredible widget traction, a custom browser, and Facebook App (16K users).

Those looking to better understand best practices in terms of distributed business strategy would be well served to keep an eye on the things that these photo widget players are up to – though I wouldn’t necessarily copy these sorts of crass cloaking and spam tactics.

While I don’t believe that it’s nearly time to abandon home base entirely, I do think the importance of building and executing a distributed web strategy is growing. It will be fun to see which companies solve this, and if any of the monster destination properties show an interest in distribution (vs. aggregation).

Reposted from its original on Sexy Widget.

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Why YOU Should SEO

Why YOU Should SEO

I speak to prospective clients every week about Search Engine Optimization and many aren’t familiar with the concept. Those that are usually tell me how gung-ho they are about it, but when the time comes to talk about implementation it’s the last thing they want to spend their money on. It always comes down to cost and instant gratification.

SEO takes time to implement and weeks or months before a client usually sees results. On the other hand, a client can spend the same amount of money on paid search and see results immediately. The question then becomes do you want to lease search engine traffic or buy it? When you pay for SEO, you are making a long term investment in keeping your business visible in organic search rankings on Google and Yahoo. Essentially you’ve earned the ranking you’ve worked hard to obtain. When you do straight paid search, you may be at the top of the heap, but that only lasts as long as you choose to pay for keywords. Both techniques are important, but SEO should be the foundation of any sound Internet marketing strategy. Besides building brand awareness and reinforcing the perception that you’re an expert in your field, there is an inherent amount of trust gained when a perspective visitor to your website finds you on the first page of Google vs. being the first banner ad on the page.

So now that I’ve sold you on SEO, you naturally want to know what sort of techniques work to get your site the attention it deserves.

• Make sure your site can be easily “crawled” by Google and Yahoo spiders. Often, we design a website to look appealing to human eyes, but the tools that search engines use to actually learn what your site is about can’t read the content because all your text is buried in graphics.

• Know which keyword terms you should be targeting. Do research on your competition and see what is working for them. Type several search queries into Google and see how your site ranks. If you’re on the first results page, then you’re doing something right. If not, then you have some work to do.

• Update your content regularly. Search engines want their results to be fresh. Just because you published your website to the world doesn’t mean you don’t have to update it for a year. Ideally you should be adding new content every week.

• Become an expert in your field. Google and Yahoo want to highlight the experts in a given industry. By writing articles and blog entries on topics relevant to your business, you establish yourself as a thought leader. That leads to better page ranking.

• Don’t try and “game” the system. Tricks and other “black hat” techniques may work for while, but search engines will catch you if you try and cheat the system. That means no link farms, no keyword stuffing, and no hidden text on your site. The only thing harder to overcome than a low Google ranking is a low Google ranking on a site that’s been penalized for cheating the system.

Hopefully the items above give you a starting point in regard to mounting a successful SEO campaign. If you decide to outsource your SEO (many companies do), make sure you do your research and find a company that won’t do more harm to your business than good. Beware of firms that promise the #1 spot on Google, or guarantee a time frame in which you’ll see results. SEO, when done properly, takes weeks and often months. There are no shortcuts. Set aside a budget, and give your SEO firm six months. You’ll be amazed at the return on your investment.

Scott Parent is the Vice President of Search and Social Media Optimization at MediaTrust. His division specializes in Search Engine Optimization and Marketing, and Social Media Production and Optimization.

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Social Networking is a FEATURE

RelevantlySpeaking A MediaTrust Industry Blog
Sun, September 30, 2007 Trip Foster

Social Networking is a FEATURE

Based on recent experiences with Facebook and several blog entries from insightful and skeptical prominent bloggers, it has become apparent that social networking has become a very “commoditized” component of the online experience. Social networking has become a feature, not a destination. In effect, as the web has become more writeable and user-generated, social networking functions will be standard on EVERY website, thus setting us on the course similar to that of the late 90’s: users migrated away from the main “portals” to smaller, more focused niche sites for richer and deeper content and community.

This fact may explain why Facebook has “opened” up so much (with the goal of becoming a social networking fixture on other sites). A smart move in my mind, as stand alone “meta social networking” has seemingly begun to “jump the shark”. It also may explain Googles recent legitimate salvo in this battle.

In my opinion, David Bohnett, the founder of GeoCities, said it best in the recent article in the Journal :

“It’s the same as it is today — people want to feel like they’re connected, give them a set of tools and they’ll do it.”

Anywhere you go on the web, you should see social networking capabilities. People want to create community anywhere they spend time. They use this community function as a place to make a spectacle of their lives, interests, and expertise…to provide legitimacy to their desire to belong to the community.

Rather than making predictions now about the demise of facebook and myspace, I’d rather discuss the future…

The real long-term question in this game is: Will any company get it right for the end user? There is no reason (other than a walled garden’s need for revenue and unique users!) that an end user should maintain several different online profiles and manage the content in each across the many communities in which they they socialize. I like the idea of the single login for all Google apps. It makes my life easier, and it makes the ads Google serves up more relevant and ultimately more profitable.

Nirvana for end users would be to have a traveling profile that they can access across several niche sites. Why shouldn’t my movie preferences be used in helping me determine what books I’d like and vice versa?

Sadly, I don’t think this nirvana is a reality in today’s landscape, as the large social networks like myspace and facebook rely on logins to target and these businesses will certainly not welcome the idea of an open ID for social networking features that span all sites. It is my hope that when most tier 1, 2, and 3 sites have social networking features, the ability to open these profiles to other networks will exist. If looked at intelligently, its a win-win. The end user gets a profile that travels, lessening his or her burden, and those sites that accept this traveling profile benefit by more relevant recommendations for ads and content (higher eCPM). The good news is, I don’t think that technology is too far away…it looks to be right around the corner. For some interesting reading about these kinds of solutions, read Alex Iskold’s Piece on the Attention economy and read about Attention Profiling Mark-up Language (APML).

So what do you think? Will it ever happen?