Moog's Viewpoints

Recent presentation from Charlene Li

Social Media Marketing Summit Keynote, Oct. 1 2008

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Viewpoints Update - October 2008

(This was originally sent out as an e-mail and I later realized it should also be a blog post)

Two years ago the team here at Viewpoints set out to build a new platform for consumer reviews. We wanted to bring reviewers to life and give them an opportunity to write great reviews.   At the end of the day our goal is to help consumers make smarter decisions in their everyday lives.  

I am pleased to report that we have made fantastic progress toward our goals in this respect.  In just one short year since our official launch, we have attracted more than 900,000 monthly users and have registered more than 125,000 members to join our growing community of reviewers.

Just this week we launched a major upgrade to our profile pages that give our members more ways to feature their great reviews and interact with fellow community members. Over the last year we have incorporated a long list of features such as message boards, blogs, photo galleries, private messaging, stats and advanced member profiling.  Take a look at my profile page to see many of these features in action or read our recent blog post that provides a more detailed overview of the many great features in this release.

I am also pleased to report that it is not only our users but also advertisers who have seen the value in the Viewpoints solution.  Leading advertisers such as Proctor & Gamble, Kenmore, Tivo, Panasonic, HP and partners such as Google and eBay  have seen the benefit of running campaigns targeted at active "in-market buyers" and social influencers. Additionally we have also created co-brand versions of our site for several large clients who are interested in building an online community for their customers.

So that is the quick update, but we promise to be back more often than every two years to fill you in on all the exciting news here at Viewpoints!

Be sure to check out Viewpoints for all your holiday gift giving needs.

Warm Regards,

Matt Moog

Founder & CEO

312-447-6111

matt@viewpoints.com

http://www.viewpoints.com/aboutme/Matt

Big news! New profile page on Viewpoints.com

When we launched Viewpoints.com last September we set out to create the most social platform for consumer reviews on the web. Our basic premise was that a social reviews platform would help create more context around the reviewer and in turn help our users, the people reading the reviews, make smarter decisions about everything from choosing the right digital camera to picking a hotel that met their specific needs.

I am happy to announce that we have taken that focus to another level. Last night we launched our completely remodeled profile page to give members new and exciting ways to engage with others and feature their reviews. Since this is my personal blog I will give you the run down using my own profile page as an example.

1. First, you can check out my public profile page here: http://www.viewpoints.com/aboutme/Matt. You will immediately notice the addition of my own mini blog, a place for "my motto" and the ability to leave me a private comment. All of those features are new.
2. Second, if you explore the "I Am" tag cloud in the left hand column you will see how you can filter and browse my reviews by the tags I have used to describe myself with those reviews. So for example, click on the "5 star diner" to see my 27 reviews of restaurants that include that tag.
3. Below my blog posts on my profile page you will also see my "Fun Facts & Interests" and then a list of my most recent reviews and message board conversations.
4. Next to my reviews and just below my "I Am" tag cloud you will also see some of the friends and fans I have recently made on Viewpoints and links to my photo collage and a beta project that helps you explore the connections among my friends.
5. You can find one of my favorite features by clicking on the "Reviews" link just to the right of my profile picture at the top of the page. Now we give our members and readers a whole new way to explore any reviewer's reviews. You can filter these reviews by my I Am tags or by category, by rating or by date. So for example, if you want to see the 11 hotel reviews or the 15 movie reviews or you can filter my reviews by "I Am" tag to see my 6 sushi lover reviews or my 5 wine lover reviews
6. The Friends & Fans section of the profile page gives you boatload of new ways to see the friends you have and make some more. If you are logged in you will also see what friends you have in common with anyone else on the site. I found it really helpful to view people who were my fans that I knew and needed to make them friends.
7. The Photos page proves the old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words. We have expanded the number of photos that you can upload as part of your profile to 27 photos and we have built a "Review Photo Album" to show off all the photos you have uploaded as part of your reviews. Check out the picture of me and the family in front of the Supreme Court sporting my Viewpoints T-Shirt!
8. As if all this wasn't enough, we also have some great new features that you have to be a member for. Be sure to register and log in and look at the "Edit Profile", "About Me" and "Settings" links just to the right of your picture. A personal favorite of mine is our new "Member Interests Survey" that helps connect you with other members who share your interests.
9. Also, don't miss the "view more stats" link just under your Stats Snapshot on your profile page. I have had more than 36,000 views of my reviews since we started tracking back in April. That is a pretty cool stat to track but the coolest thing of all is to see how you can write a review that starts getting readers almost immediately. My recent review of Hub 51, a new restaurant just down the street from us has already received 331 views in just a few weeks. It is also nice to know that more than 10,000 people have read my review of the Westin Heavenly Mattress!!

And after all that, here are two hidden gems that we clearly need to highlight more.

• After you have made some friends be sure to check out "latest friends' activity" which you will find a link to in the left column of your friends & fans page. It is pretty cool to be able to see what all of your friends are up to including the ability to filter by reviews, discussion posts, friends, photos, comments and blog entries.
• After you have completed your Member Interest Survey be sure to follow this link: http://www.viewpoints.com/quick_review to then write 10 quick reviews on product, services or businesses that you have personal experience with. We created this format to make it easy and fun for you to jump right in! We use your interests to suggest things to review.

Phew!!! How our development team managed to pack all of that into this project I will never know but my hat goes off to them. Congratulations to our incredible technology team.

Are you are starter or a joiner?

As someone obsessed with social media I got to thinking about crowd dynamics at the Cubs game a few days ago.  Next time you are at a big sporting event, watch how crowd action is first started and then how it spreads.  This might seem strange but I think those of us who think long and hard about how to create vibrant online communities have something to learn from how the wave gets started .

Warning! Your are being tracked. Proceed with caution...

There is an article in The Washington Post today about a "surprising" disclosure that some advertising networks are NOT explicitly informing consumers when they track their behavior.  Shocker!  Every major ad network and ad serving company has been tracking consumer behavior without informing consumers for the past ten years.  And ever since Doubleclick's attempted to purchase Abacus and connect catalog purchase data to web surfing behavior most ad networks have provided a way to opt out of being tracked, which of course almost no one does.

This leads me to ask a few questions to bring some more context to the debate:

1. Do the press and policy makers understand the difference between collecting anonymous surfing behavior and collecting surfing behavior that can be tied back to an individual household?
2. Why are credit card companies and catalog companies allowed to collect and sell detailed personal purchase and financial information while lawmakers are up in arms about tracking that is both anonymous and not tied to financial or transactional data?
3. Is "explicit consent" better than "explicitly informing"?  Is explicit consent practical?
4. Do consumers really even care?  In my experience most consumers are willing to give up huge amounts of personal information in exchange for things such as coupons, sweepstakes, free membership etc.  One way to test this is to ask the top 50 sites how often a new member looks at their privacy policy when registering.
5. The U.S. government provides census data that map back to a zip+4  which usually is specific to a few hundred households.  Is data no longer considered personal or need privacy protection when it is about you AND your neighbors? 

What do you think?

Five lessons learned as an early stage entrepreneur

In my 16 year career (uggg, I must be getting old!), I spent 4 years at Microsoft in business development and then joined a start up (CoolSavings) as the VP of Sales and worked there for ten years, the last five as the CEO.  I ran CoolSavings as a public company with 150+ employees and while revenue exploded from $21 million to $80 million.  Then we took it private and I left to pursue my dream of starting from scratch, as the say -  tablua rasa or with a blank slate.  Now almost exactly two years later from absolutely nothing two years ago, Viewpoints Network has 12 full time employees, 750,000+ monthly users and as they say, the world is our oyster.   Allll right, I hear you, get to the point.  What are five lessons learned about starting an early stage start up?   

Blogging is tougher than it looks

So for the last two years I have run a social media company, which hopefully you know is Viewpoints Network.  You would think that blogging should come second nature to me.  But it doesn't and I need to fix that.  Starting today I am resolving to post something at least four times a week. I know of no other way to get my juices flowing. I will confess though, it seem odd to start blogging without an audience or a real clear sense of who your audience is.  I admire people like Fred Wilson, Mark Andreseen and Jason Calcanis who seem to be able to churn out some very thoughtful posts one after the other. 

Here are some of the topics I hope to cover on this blog:

1. Interactive advertising and marketing

2. Social Media

3. Entrepreneurship

4. Politics (occasionally)

Two excellent presentations about Social Influencers

| View | Upload your own

| View | Upload your own

Cookie Cutter Thinking

A very smart friend of mine made an interesting observation to me earlier this week.  He said that many people who lack experience dealing with a certain type of circumstance will apply a cookie cutter approach when thinking about the solution.  The point he was making was that complex problems are usually not the same and have many different variables.  If you apply a cookie cutter approach to the problem you are likely not thinking deeply enough about all of the variables that could effect the outcome.

You have heard people say, "I have seen this movie before".  Well, when it comes to strategic business decisions there is a strong chance that this movie might appear to be similar, but is really different.  Maintaining the self awareness and humility to know that you have may been taught something, told something or even experienced something your self, you should always ask your self the question, "what is different this time than last?"

My friend called this advanced pattern matching.  You are not just looking for 70% of the variables to be similar because, more often than not, a few, or even one, of the variables will have an out sized impact on the outcome.

A very cool version of Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy" on the Theramin

A friend forwarded me this video this morning.  My father had a very early association with the Theramin and this really made me think of him.