Ugly Step Children

It was only a matter of time till MySpace had kids. In the last week we see the launch of CarSpace from Edmunds. I personally think this is a wonderful strategy and I think cars are an area in which a lot of people will want to talk with like minded people and the advertising opportunities are numerous.

After my visit to CarSpace, I noted both contextual ad serving and a Revenue Science cookie. Congratulations Edmunds on a job well done. You know the space is going to be valuable to advertisers and you built the CarSpace site to leverage every opportunity and provide a more ROI focused product set.

CarSpace is a great move and in reality it should not have cost Edmunds that much to set it up either – it is well thought out and in my opinion much better set up than MySpace and because it is focused on a particular segment, I would say the advertising space is even more valuable than the playground that is MySpace.

Also in the last month we have seen the launch of Edgeio – this is a truly innovative classified site. The only first release draw back of Edgeio is that it was not built from the bottom up for advertisers – classified advertisers or corporate advertisers – this is easily remedied and the usage of RSS from blogs to main database and then back out is really a good idea – I wonder if Edgeio will be able to attract users easily or if it will have the budget to attract them or if it was simply built to be acquired by one of the leaders as a simply better way to do classifieds – either way the inventory from blogs, edge of network idea is really good as well

I have over and over again pitched good ideas to existing businesses who look at me totally dumbfounded and then never seem to even respond. You would think they would at least try to steal and deploy the ideas themselves. This year (2006) I am simply building and launching my ideas in the most cost effective manner I can and then sending the link to the same people – it does not make sense to me but it seems they like to acquire and spend millions versus listening and spending $250K – but works for me either way

The question is when will we see a classified site that does both? –Act as a haven for classified advertisers and for corporate advertisers – so far the closest example is still Amazon and this is exactly why the big book distributors never seem to catch up – Amazon recently released author blogs – and more and more this kind of staying on the edge activity are going to keep them ahead of would be competitors – they should let individuals sell podcasts on Amazon – so let popular individuals read their blogs in podcast form and sell them – I would also be heading in this direction if I was E-Bay

Web2.0 is a two edge sword – it really takes no work at all to set up a blog but to get anyone to read it or interact with it is not easy – not only do you have to have an angle but you must also be able catalyze either word of mouth or place links about your blog in other places where people who are interested will be. The other thing you must do especially if you are corporate entity with a blog is be willing to deal with the people who want to interact which I think is real gap in most corporate blog launchers thinking. They don’t want to deal with the negative either which is really an opportunity to create positive buzz by dealing with it for a change. Wallmart leaks tidbits to bloggers so that they will release information – this is an excellent strategy because they can disseminate information without having to be responsible for it – they even have plausible deniability – Coca cola hired bloggers for a Winter Olympics site because I am sure they deduced that no one wanted to blog about Coca cola. They hired people to blog about the experience of being at the Winter Olympics and they probably used the additional real estate to advertise – I cant say for sure as I was not even interested enough to check – so there you go