There is no better guide to how to avoid the potholes in hyper-local than Judy’s Book Co-Founder Andy Sack, who has been writing a series of “don’t do this at home” posts about Judy’s Book’s failed efforts building an online review site (The site is now refocused on local promotions). In the most recent installment, Sack talks about how Yelp came into the game with a better strategy.
“We were focused on the soccer mom and Yelp focused on the younger twenty-something generation. When it comes to user generated content (and social networks), it turns out that the younger the consumer the better! There’s a reason MySpace is filled with teenagers: younger people feel more comfortable contributing and sharing online then their older counterparts. It’s a generational comfort with technology thing….plus they have more time.”
Sack also notes how Yelp basically out-marketed Judy’s Book. “They managed from early on to make their customers feel loved. They were the first site (amongst Judy’s Book, Yelp and Insider Pages) to focus on getting consumer photos up on their site. This was a very powerful marketing tool. They were aggressive at experimenting with parties and alcohol and building an offline community with their community. They made joining yelp a bit of a fraternity/sorority….in a good way. Their marketing efforts for a small company were better than ours. “
While Sack says that Yelp has clearly won at the user generated content game, he wonders whether the winnings amount to more than a hill o’ beans. “We’ve ceded the directory business to other companies, including Yelp. We didn’t do this because Yelp won (though, they were getting more consumer traction) — but rather because we grew highly skeptical of the community directory business direction as the basis for a successful profitable business.
“Judy’s Book’s new direction includes a real revenue model — and a different set of challenges,” concludes Sack. “I feel confident that we learned lots of lessons about user generated content, local search, and businesses in general that will help us succeed going forward.”
(Thanks to the good eye of Niki Scevak’s Bronte Media for turning me on to the link.)
The candor that Andy Sack brings to his blog is astonishing and admirable. But the problem with candor is that it’s a bottomless well. As Andy Says, Yelp out-maneuvered Judy’s Book by focusing on younger (25-34-year-old) demographics and cultivating them with age-savvy tone and substance. But Judy’s Book owned the older (35-49) demo, and those soccer moms, and much more, represented 23 percent of of the total U.S. population compared to Yelp’s 14 percent slice. Not only was the Judy’s Book demo slice thicker, it was more rooted — more into what I call nesting than networking. Advertisers love young networkers, but they also love nesters, who earn more money (if measured by median household), are more likely to own their home, be married, have children and be generally more settled, and thus likely to spend money on all the things that nesters do. Initially Judy’s Book seemed to understand that it owned, or could own, this huge demographic slice. But it made no serious effort to exploit what it had. What it might have done is build local communities around these nesters. But the site’s bizarrely counter-productive rules prevented that from happening. Members were driven to become “City Editors.” To achieve that title, members had to raise their “Trust-Score” to 8 or higher. To do that, they had to maximize their “Friends,” postings and responses to their postings. So hundreds of members pulled out all stops to become City Editors, and get the gift certificates that went with the title. The easiest way to raise your trust score was to mindlessly seek out Friends from among members, regardless of your likely compatibility with them and to ask questions that you sent to all your Friends. It didn’t matter how dumb a question was, if it got asked of your Friends, and you had 250 of them, you could push up your Trust-Score. Not surprisingly, the quality of postings went down as the desperate competition got more desperate. Members appealed to JB to do something. Initially, JB managers said it was up to the members to hash it out. Many members, frustrated by the decline in content quality, either quit the service or went into hibernation. The result was a huge vacuum of content on JB — when it could have been building nesting communities across America. Finally, JB’s management discovered what many of its members had long since concluded, and went to work creating an entirely new mission — finding Internet deals. But there were already too many deal sites on the Internet. Plus, deal sites need the right kind of scanning software more than they need bargain-eyed Internet browsers. So that’s where JB is today — one more deals site that has alienated its huge resource of nesters, who, contrary to what Andy says, are active Internet kibitzers, and, in the bargain, have fatter wallets than 25-34-year-olds. If only Judy had been around to chart a sensible path.