Brain Trust Question

Question on the Lockergnome Brain Trust mailing list:

Why should companies pay attention to Web 2.0 and the"conversation"?

This is a great question. I have spent a great deal of my own time thinking about this and whether or not our own Web 2.0 efforts have been worthwhile. The problem is that it is hard to measure. If you JUST looked at the traffic to our blog as a measure of our success, you would probably conclude that it is not worthwhile.

In 2005, WeatherBug was getting hit pretty hard with this mis-perception (and it is a mis-perception) that we were Spyware. Why? Personally, I think it came down to the fact that we were not a part of the conversation. We didn't join the conversation and it became very one sided, with us being on the receiving end of negativity. What is worse, is that the conversation turned to real harm when the Anti-Spyware vendors who were listening to the one sided conversation decided that the "people" can't be wrong and added us into their detections.

Since attending Gnomedex in 2005 and working with Steve Rubel, we have tried a lot of things. Here are the things we have done that I think were most successful.

1) WeatherBug Labs:
    - Several things we have done here to show that WeatherBug is not JUST a desktop application. WeatherBug is about our unique data set.
    - We have had some cool mashups and uses of WeatherBug data from our API show up around the internet.
    - The customer feedback loop is something that got started with WeatherBug labs. For all WeatherBug labs projects, any user feedback goes directly back to the developer(s) that worked on the project. This gives them a much better understanding of what our customers like and dislike and gives them extra incentive to address the issues quickly and to join in the conversation with our customers.

2) The Customer Feedback Loop:
    - This is one of the most important things we learned. Every product needs to have that feedback mechanism and it does not just go to technical support guys. The developers, the marketing folks and especially the CTO get to see almost all feedback (I am good at managing email).
    - Customer service in general is very important. Even though we have millions of customers, trying to maintain that personal touch is important. I like Joel on Software's recent take on this.

3) WeatherBug Backyard Blog and Web 2.0 Features:
    -  The backyard blog is a relatively small number of folks around the country that are just fanatical about the weather and reporting on the weather. We get around 200 weather reports submitted per week, about 100,000 page views from 40,000 or so unique visitors. The key here is that  I have gotten to personally know  some of our backyard bloggers and others in the company are communicating with them every day. Each of these people has become an advocate of what we are doing and what we are about at WeatherBug.
    - We have also developed a couple of cool Web 2.0 features ourselves. The coolest one so far is our youCaster system, which we are using to let any weather fanatic make their own weather broadcast. We are also using it internally to do weather updates more quickly.

4) Speed:
    - The best thing about our WeatherBug Desktop application is that it is very fast to get weather information. When I was at the Web 2.0 Summit Marissa Mayer talked about how Google is spending a lot of time making sure that their sites are fast. In assessing our own web site, we have a long way to go, but there is no doubt in my mind we can get their. We want to provide the fastest weather experience on the internet whether you are on broadband, dial up or using your cell phone, you want fast access to weather information.