How to Damage an Online Comminuty

So I was thinking the other day about how eBay has recently alienated it’s entire community. A few years ago, eBay was truely on the forefront of understanding what the next great thing on the Internet was going to be. That is, community.

Of late though, eBay has made some poor decsions that have significantly impacted their own community in profoundly negative ways. A few months ago, eBay first changed their rating and review system in a way that angered many loyal community members. Next, eBay started veering away from what used to be it’s real business advantage, creating a consumer-to-consumer community where we can interact with each other selling and buying our own inventories. eBay now seems to be favoring large retailers and their “power sellers” more so than the loyal community that put them on the map.

Instead of working to better understand the needs of the community that they created from the ground up, eBay is turning itself into a basic online retailer. “Buy It Now” was a good idea that they’ve let loose to kill their community.

Where eBay and many other companies have gone wrong is in understanding this new truth:

People that purchase your products and services are no longer customers, they’re community members!

Today, anyone can say anything about your company in seconds. And, when this is damaging, it’s like a snowball rolling down a hill, growing bigger and bigger, turning into an avalanche unless you hustle to stop it. Right now I see eBay and a lot of other companies sitting at the bottom of a mountain as they throw rocks, waiting for an avalanche.

Companies cannot treat thier community as faceless customers without an identity. Today, everyone has a voice and an identity online. And, we all want to be heard and respected. To fail to understand this is to doom yourself online.

As for eBay, it’s not too late to turn things around and to mend what they’ve done to their relationship with their community. They will have to make big decisions though. Only time will tell if they can repair the damage and save the community that they themselves forged.

More on Pages Not Being Worth Anything

Followup to “Pages Aren’t Worth Anything” from Jason Egan on Vimeo.

This is my first attempt at a video post here, so this might be a little rough. They should get better though!

Summary:

• Pages aren’t worth anything, but what you’re selling is.
• Testing and optimization should replace analytics in determining how effective a page is at conversion.
• You should me optimizing and measuring the worth of your marketing accumen as opposed to some HTML. Look at a page or site this way. It is a marketing and sales tool. How good is it at marketing and selling? How good are you and making the site better at marketing and selling.

Your Pages Aren’t Worth Anything

I’m sure that some of you will disagree with the title of this post as soon as you see it, but hear me out (read me out?). Wether you are in publishing/content or straight up e-commerce, your pages are not making money inherently. Many executives and busines owners always have one of the two following question:

1. “How much revenue has this page made?”
2. “How well is this page converting?”

To preface the rest of this post and explain the title of this post, I am going to say that pages do not make money, and they do not convert. Crazy, I know. But, what does make you money and convert are the changes that you make to your pages.

Answering, “How much revenue has this page made?“

I do not want to turn this into a debate about revenue attribution at the page view level, so I will leave that issue for another time. So let’s just assume that you have some kind of repor that has page names and dollar amounts next to those pages. The answer to the above question is:

“Does it matter what that revenue number is if you aren’t changing anything?”

So you can trend a page’s revenue over time. So what? Let’s say that you sell hair dryers (why was that the first thing that popped into my mind?). Your sales of hair dryers are what make you money, not the view of some page on your site. Afterall, you are selling hair dryers, not page views.

I also want to take this opportunity to address the publisher/content sites out there. News flash, you are selling something! Your selling ad views, and video ad plays, not page views or time spent (or “engagement” of all silly things).

You should not be asking how much a page makes for you. You need to be coming up with ideas that you think can make a page better, and testing those ideas to see if you can create lift! A page that just sits there and is never, or blindely changed isn’t doing you any good. Does it really matter how much you think a page makes over time if you’re not trying to make it better to begin with?

You changes, improvements and efforts make money and create lift. A page sitting there isn’t doing you any good.

Answering, “How well is this page converting?“

Again, I would say that a page just sitting there is never converting any different that it ever has, so tracking the conversion rate of a page is pointless. You should be tracking how good YOU are at making changes that improve conversion.

Lift is as Important as Revenue and Conversion

Just like I feel that “engagement” is an excuse on the part of publisher/content sites, I feel that tracking how much a page makes or how well it converts is an excuse for not testing your pages and working on creating lift. If you really care how much a page is making or how well it’s converting, then you should have a hypothesis as to how you can make it better, and you should test that hypothesis to create lift.