People Want Message Boards

In February, Kerry Bodine of Forrester published a research report entitled, “What Consumers Want On Media Web Sites.” In her research, Bodine and her team interviewed 5,000 online consumers about what they’d like to see on websites. Interestingly, one out of five reported that they’d like “discussion boards and forums on media sites.” That number jumps to one out of four in the Gen X (28-41 year old) category.

You’ll recall that back in July 2007, Alex blogged about how message boards are “The Original Micro-Communities.” We see this and Bodine’s findings reflected on many of our clients’ sites today. A great example is the Stone Temple Pilots’ KickApps site. The site recently went live and as picking up a lot of steam. With almost a thousand members already, the site’s message board is hopping with activity.

Another thing that the developers of the STP site did was to use their KickApps widget as a deployment component. We talk about widgets in terms of both a vehicle for hyper-syndication and also as a means of deploying media and content and creating a gateway from the ‘editorial’ portion of the site onto the community section. In this case, STP embedded a forum widget on the homepage of the STP site. The widget lists most recent discussions and updates the content of the widget via a KickApps powered feed. By doing this, they’ve not only integrated the site’s community content but also now have fresh and dynamic content that keeps fans of the STP coming back for more. This results in greater engagement on the website itself.

Another great example of this is on Planet Orange, the Phoenix Suns’ fan community.

A Word About Innovation

I attended Brett Petersel’s NY Web 2.0 Meetup last night in NYC where one of the presenters spent a few minutes lambasting the notion of innovation. He claimed that it’s a BS marketing concept and that the company he works for doesn’t innovate, they simply build products that people want (I’m paraphrasing based on what I heard). I suppose it’s a controversial statement to make. Yes, doing anything for the sake of doing it is silly. I think I understand why he said it. I think.

Coincidentally, I had been thinking about innovation a lot recently. In fact, over the last few days I’ve been listening to a series of podcasts by Peter Day during my daily subway commute. Mr Day does several shows on BBC Radio where he interviews business leaders around the world from various industries. In his three most recent episodes of ‘Peter Day’s Global Business,’ he talks to people from Xerox PARC, GE and Philips, three brands that have been responsible for many of the world’s most innovative technologies and products. [The podcasts are available for free on iTunes as well, really worth the listen.]

Unlike last night’s presenter, I’m proud to say that innovation plays a HUGE role at KickApps. Innovation drives and fuels our business. Innovation surfaces in our technology: the way we designed v3.0 of the KickApps Platform, our self service platform that delivers the broadest range of social media applications, a tightly integrated media and member management and reporting system, powerful tools like the feeds and widget builder, our APIs, our view on utilitarian widgets…I could go on. Innovation also rears its beautiful face in our business model: free under the KickApps Ad Inventory Network and usage based fee under the Ad Inventory Buyout.

We also see it each day from clients and KickApp’rs around the world. Case in point, Stan Shaul, our VP of Software Engineering, put together the following tutorial for creating a Tag Cloud Widget using KickApps. As Stan-the-Man puts it on KickDeveloper:

In KickApps 3.0 we introduced a tag cloud feed containing the 50 most frequently used tags in your community. With a little server-side coding, you can parse this feed and generate your own tag cloud widget. Don’t want to mess with code? No sweat. We’ve created a handy-dandy Tag Cloud Widget Tool that will do it all for you. Just input a few parameters and out pops an HTML tag cloud widget. You can customize the look of this widget by entering the URL of a custom stylesheet into this form as well. Then just paste the widget code into any webpage to add a tag cloud widget to it.

I think it’s imperative for any company or person in our industry to ask themselves how they’re delivering more than just ‘what people want.’ Innovation afterall is in part about creating things that people don’t know they want yet. [I didn't know I wanted an iPhone until Apple made it!]

How are you innovating?