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Technorati–Shopping Is NOT Strategy

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Joining the Mainstream Are We?

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I’m starting to feel like I’m on Weekend Update on Saturday Night Live. As Sting would say Be still my beating heart. Another day, another 50 cents, and Peter Hirschberg is announcing another Technorati new deal. This time Technorati teams with Associated Press to connect you and me and 40 million bloggers to over 450 AP member websites. The new service began this morning. How will this help my life, my business, my brand? I just don’t see it.

Excuse me. Excuse me, please. Is this door number 3? Darn, I lose again. Yoohoo! I’m the little guy who uses your service.

How the AP Deal Works

Mr. Hirshberg explains it this way.

When readers visit an AP member website that uses AP Hosted Custom News, they will see a module featuring the “Top Five Most Blogged About” AP articles right next to the article text, dynamically powered by Technorati. Additionally, when readers click on an AP article, Technorati will deliver “Who’s Blogging About” that article. Now, if you have commentary about an AP story, you can get mentioned in that module simply by linking to that AP news URL, akin to what you can do with Washington Post articles, Newsweek articles, Der Spiegel articles, and a host of other media partners that currently work with Technorati.

Translation: AP sites get traffic. Five bloggers get citations. The AP thing is great for the Technorati name. Every time I’ve tried to link with one of the current such partners the link connect has taken so long there has been no advantage to making the effort. The article is usually a day or two old by the time the link is posted there.

Strategy and Customer Needs

For as smart and as analytical as I know David Sifry to be, I’m disappointed by what has been announced over the past three days. I know quite bit about strategy and how to organically grow a company of that size through buying, partnering, and building — and have done just that over a very short time.

SHOPPING IS NOT STRATEGY. Strategy involves planting seeds and knowing what they will become and having some idea how they will work together. It’s about preparing your customers for their introduction before they happen, not after. So that it’s almost an automatic, “Oh yeah, that makes total sense to me.” reaction on the part of the core user base –building confidence, not fear that the core users will be left behind with less service.

Strategy is not just getting bigger or merely taking opportunities. It’s knowing every opportunity taken is one that you’re leaving behind. It’s about meeting the needs of core customers and making new ones who use your products.

Did folks ask for this? Did someone actually determine there was a need? This is one citizen journalist who’s been waiting for the ability to connect to the AP as much as Frazier’s dad has been waiting for Frazier to buy him a new chair. I bet more bloggers on the index are like me than are not. I’d be interested in the research behind the last three deals. What opportunities were passed by while this one and the two yesterday were being pursued and rolled out?

Making new products for new customers is the highest risk in two ways. It takes new marketing and new product both. I also takes time away from your core business. It’s the last choice of companies looking for stable organic growth. Even when choosing partnerships, it’s good strategy to stay either within your core customer group or one step alongside the products you already provide so that you can adequately support the new customers new products might bring.

Companies only fail for two reasons — they grow too slow, or they grow to fast.

Chartreuse Talk to Them

Chartreuse tell them please.

. . . getting traction is all about execution kids.
. . . you gotta bring your A game to play.
Now remember, your goal is not to please everybody. . . .
Your number one goal is to only please your core users.

You treat those core users to your site, those who make comments, those who send suggestions, those who drop you an email to say you suck, like they are freaking gods.
They can make you.
Or break you.
Which makes them pretty omnipotent.

MEANWHILE, My Blog is still stuck, bet yours is too.

It is — one move, three points in 4 weeks — still not indexing correctly.
Where is Technorati looking? It’s not looking at the folks who make the content it indexes. We’re the core customers at least I thought we were. What is an index without posts anyway?

Mr. Hirshberg, did customers really ask for these features? Did anyone even talk to a customer? Perhaps you could let us in on the big picture. That would be really cool. Thanks in advance. If you have the time, please, tell me why my blog has been broken for 7 months and so many others are broken too, yet new features are the always the topic of the technorati weblog?

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Related
Technorati — Hollywood and International
Technorati Blog Cards
It’s Not Your Blog, It’s Technorati
Put Your 2Cents In–What’s Technorati Worth–Without Janice?

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Comments

  3. Ooh! You go, girl! I agree — yes, Technorati has to help itself grow, and partnerships can be a good thing, but they’re forgetting the core.

    Reply

  5. You think it goes that way, Joe?
    I think it could go the other. Techorati gets it’s name on 450 websits –that’a lot of mainstream advertising for an unknown search engine that might want to be a household word.

    Reply

  8. You’re right of course… You are the nice one.

    I just hope they don’t forget about us and fix some of the problems they (we) have been having.

    J.

    Reply

  9. This looks exactly like what they did with The Washington Post. The stories have a little box listing links to blog articles that have linked to that news story.

    For a member of the “long tail” this gives the small blogger a chance to get a few click throughs from those links.

    However, the links are powered by JavaScript and won’t boost the blogs page rank. And the link from the blog will likely be pure HTML, driving the AP’s page rank through the roof. The provider also gets clicks from mulitple blogs.

    Don’t believe me? The PR for WashingtonPost.com is a NINE. The AP stands to win big from this one, and so does Technorati. They will have an ad on every news story anyone has blogged about. That’s potentially millions of ads.

    The problem Technorati has is getting its servers working. I can’t believe how slow the service is. It also seems inaccurate. It listed one of my blogs as “Untitled” for no reason. It has happened before, then corrected itself for no reason. That’s minor compared to the number of times a search I’m doing times out. I think those issues are a bigger problem for Technorati than the AP deal.

    Reply

  11. Thank you Financial Reflections.
    You’re seeing exactly what I’m seeing.

    Technorati has new customers. We are just content providers. We get very little from this service. They get mainstream recognition.

    BTW, I emailed this post to Peter Hirshberg when I posted it.

    You’ll notice he didn’t run back to respond.

    Reply

  13. Liz, why can’t you just be nice to Technorati?

    All you need to do is stop expecting the authority on what’s going on in the world of weblogs to be the authority on what’s going on in the world of weblogs.

    Then all of your problems with Technorati would be solved right then and there. As an added bonus it’ll give you time to pick fights with all those crazy blog writing people so they stop posting stuff about Net Neutrality and leave the corporations to deceide what on the Internet is best for us.

    Reply

  14. Oh. I see now. I was really confused. Thank you, Anthony. I feel so much better. I think I can take a nap now. Whew! Why didn’t you tell me all of this sooner?

    Reply

  15. Sorry it was part of a wager David Sifry and I had going.

    He bet me $50 that he’d make Technorati so shiny looking that you’d forget what it was meant to do and therefore would stop posting nasty truths before I’d crack by telling you that it just can’t be fixed and will never work.

    David, I owe you a crisp fifty.

    Reply

  19. Liz,

    I’m not sure I understand your point. We’ve been doing this kind of syndication with other media companies for over a year – with the Washington Post, Newsweek, salon.com, Der Spiegel, and others. And the idea is that when you write about an AP story and link to the article, you get some recognition (and traffic). It is also about helping regular AP readers understand that there’s a story around the story – the story on blogs. And maybe they’ll want to be a subscriber to your blo, too.

    Dave

    Reply

  20. Oh, and as for your bugs, I’m sorry that you’re still having problems getting indexed, Janice and I and our engineering team are working on taking care of you and any other folks who have indexing problems.

    Dave

    Reply

  21. It could be that the sheer scale of it. Has just knocked me over completely. I didn’t actually stand back and see the big picture. I didn’t understand where your business was going.

    I’m not sold that the AP will mean as much to me as it will to you . . . It could, but I’m one in 40 million and you’re every one. It will be fun to see what this all means in the months to come.

    I do, however, mean it when I say that I think it’s brilliant both for Technorati and AP.

    I was wrong when I implied there was no strategy. I just couldn’t see it. Wrong, wrong, wrong again.

    That’s something that I like about watching you, Dave. You’re so smart. Smart is good. I learn from you. Thank you for that. Thank you also for being a patient teacher.

    Reply

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