kidmercury

When I sent the rough draft of ActoBlog.com over to a colleague of mine, his immediate reaction was one of dissatisfaction with the design, citing it as "unprofessional."

This got me thinking: what does professional really mean, especially on the Internet?

I prefer to think about it in terms of the target customer: will professional bloggers, the target users for ActoBlogs, find the site to be "unprofessional"? Professional bloggers can span a wide range of individuals, from Steve Pavlina to Michael Arrington, and loads more people with smaller audiences.

In this context, I did not find the ActoBlog design to be unprofessional. Perhaps my colleague was just being tactful, and what he really means is that it "looks like crap." Although my instinct is satisfied with it, I am obviously biased, as I made it. I'll come up with a few more skins to see if something better comes up. If you have an opinion on the matter (positive or negative), feel free to let me know.

Also related to the issue of professionalism is the conversational nature of business. For instance, one idea that has been tried before is that of conversational advertising -- i.e. giving businesses the opportunity to discuss their products with communities. This was tried at ThreadWatch, an Internet marketing community, although did not thrive; my understanding is that one of the obstacles was that businesses were afraid of being "eaten alive" by a rowdy crowd. In my mind, that's a stupid fear, and if you are delivering a product/service that you really believe in, your faith should give you the courage you need to speak openly and proudly about your products/services (it's called Superhero Marketing, didn't you hear?). I also wonder if the advertising would have been a lot more successful on a community web site that was run in a less rowdy fashion, with a more "la la la we are all friends" type of spirit. In the Internet marketing community, the Cre8asite community forums would be a prime example of this.

I think we will see the rise of conversational advertising, and that it is a natural fit in blogs and social networks -- particularly small ones, where the community is less prone to rowdiness, and where meaningful interactions are more possible. I think the ones who will be able to really take advantage of it are small businesses -- businesses still small enough to be able to invest heavily in customer service and "the sales touch" -- which I think is a market that is underserved by incumbent ad networks, thus making it a potential opportunity for an innovator pursuing a low-end disruptive strategy. With this in mind I'm setting the foundation for ActoAds: the ad network that comes pre-built into ActoBlogs, giving ActoBloggers the ability to sell conversational ads. I think this is a good first step for fleshing out the ActoNetwork business model, as it is complementary to the incumbent ad networks, leverages the value of RSS (as companies can simply import their blogs and RSS feeds into their forum on the ActoBlog they have purchased space on), competes on dimensions along the lines of PR announcements and conversational advertising rather than CPM or CPC pricing (dimensions that are core competences of the incumbents), and caters to customer segments currently underserved by incumbent ad networks (namely bloggers and small businesses).

That is what I hope for. Of course, if you disagree, you should let me know before I go down the wrong path.