Digital Marketing and Technological Insight

BrainKeeper, a leading providers of corporate wiki solutions, has announced the release of its latest enterprise wiki software. The release focuses on enhancing the existing wiki product with integrated blogs, enhanced content tagging and other features that are aimed on helping their corporate customers take full advantage of the wonderful world of wiki’s.

"Blogs and Tagging are being used to help deliver information to external communities, but not for internal collaboration," said BrainKeeper President, Chad Ganske. "We wanted to bring the value of those Web 2.0 technologies to the corporation itself. For example, when an employee writes a Blog post in BrainKeeper about a news article, you get the distribution benefits of a Blog, and the unique, focused perspective of the author, contributors, and tags as they relate specifically to your business. Your entire company can participate in organically creating a library of customized research and ideas that can be easily tapped for a wide number of uses."  

BrainKeeper had been a favorite of mine based them focusing on the needs of their corporate clients…capturing important information, reducing email overload, creating a central knowledge base and information delivery. In my opinion, no other enterprise wide solution comes close.

Valleywag always has the most interesting information related to the online world…a few days back they posted the "World Map of Social Networks". I have seen various variations on this theme, but this is the best one by far. Take a quick look at the map and what do you see? First off, no matter how much traffic one Social Networking platform gets, no one rules the world. Yes Facebook gets all the press and boat loads of traffic, but look at sites like Orkut, they rule highly populated countries like India and Brazil. 

Of course we need to look at where the online world is today, but it is equally important to look at where it is going. Online growth is highest in places like  Asia and Africa…China isn’t even represented on this map. What I can not wait to see is what this map looks like in a few years. Will there be more shades of color or will a truly dominant Social Network emerge.

Twitter, my favorite micro-blogging platform, announced that they have closed another round of funding from Union Square Ventures, Charles River Ventures and some angel investors including Marc Andreessen, Dick Costolo, Ron Conway, and Naval Ravikant. The exact amount of funding they raised was not released but the rumor around town puts the investment around $1 - $3 million.

Twitter will take the cash infusion, however much it is, and put it towards hiring more engineers, building a sustainable company and maintaining the current buzz / momentum they have. 

For the past few months I have been telling everyone that the web today is going to break into specialized categories, Social Networking websites who focus on the masses are not the future. A great example of this is Fixya.com. Fixya.com is a website that combines real word need with consumer generated content. They took a popular yet specialized idea based around “Technical Support, User Guides and Repair Service” and built it into one of the best answer based websites I have seen.

When time permits I like to reach out to companies that I feel are unique in some way or another and let my readers in on what is good online. The questions I asked were answered by Fixya’s Vice President of User Acquisition Yaniv Bar Lev and are meant to give a basic sense of where the company came from, what they do and where they are going.

Kieran: In your words, what is Fixya.com?

Fixya.com: Fixya is an online tech support community website where experts and consumers meet to solve their appliances and gadgets technical problems and share ideas on how to operate them. The idea to create this website came from the fact that consumer products manufacturers are not providing adequate support through their web sites. Despite technology advance, tech support is still basically the same as it was years ago (i.e. based on manuals and call centers). With the increase in operation complexity of gadgets the need for tech support and troubleshooting information is growing and this is why Fixya was created. Just in case you were wondering, the name FixYa means “I’m going to fix ya” in slang and it is also the word “fix” plus the syllabi of the company’s founder-Yaniv Ben Saadon.

Kieran: How was the company started? Are you VC Backed?

Fixya.com: The company was created in 2005 by Fixya’s CEO and Co-Founder Yaniv Ben-Saadon formerly the dating unit manager Hotbar. Fixya was originally funded by a few angels, and a second round funding by Pitango and Mayfield VCs in the $4M range.

Kieran: Who is your targeted audience?

Fixya.com: Since we’re all consumers our target audience is everyone. Well, at least everyone who can use internet explorer and speaks English. We have in our community both experts who find joy in helping others and regular consumers who are willing to share their knowledge and/or seek information.

Kieran: What are some key differentiators that will set fixya.com apart from other “Social Networking” sites?

Fixya.com: Fixya was created to provide information about any product, and the product knowledge base now contains over 700,000 products. Our goal is to create a one stop shop website that will provide all Troubleshooting and Support information without the need of leaving the site. We have more than 1,500,000 users per month and we are growing every day. We recently added new premium services such as Guaranteed Solutions which offers users to ensure their problem gets top priority and answered only by top experts and  Live chat support which allow our visitors to receive fast and personal online help.

Kieran: What are the future plans for fixya.com?

Fixya.com: Our future goal is to increase our knowledge base and improve user’s experience. Increasing our knowledgebase is accomplished inherently by attracting more traffic. The more users we have the more solutions we could store and offer through our Q&A knowledgebase. We are now creating a content syndication platform that will allow any website to show our recent problems and solutions through RSS feeds and widgets. New features and development are in progress all the time so keep your eyes open…

I find it funny that all of the publications and people who were talking about “Virtual Worlds” as the next big thing in advertising are now saying the complete opposite. In the past few days I have read numerous posts and articles talking about how companies who set up shop in Second Life are wasting money because of the lack of visitors and / or attention. Why build a Coke Pavilion if no one is going to see it, right? Wrong.

So lets get some things straight…

First off, anyone who thought that building any sort of brand presence in a Virtual World like Second Life was going to lead to immediate business glory had no clue about the space to begin with. Advertising, regardless of the medium is about understanding your targeted audience. Sure online gaming of any sort tends to skew towards a younger (and desirable) demographic, but you need to look deeper. What are these people doing? Why are they doing it? Where are they doing it from? I am strong believer that virtual worlds are the next big thing, maybe not now but in 2 – 5 years. Early ventures like Second Life are only going to grow; new “worlds” will keep coming and corporations (like IBM is doing) will start to build their own virtual environment. Once this happens, early adopters like Coke and IBM will reap the rewards of having put their flag in the ground from the very beginning.  

Great, but what exactly are those rewards? Brand recognition and loyalty that transfers from the virtual word to the real world is one, getting labeled as “cool” or as a trend-setter is another and one that is hard to buy in any world.  Either way you look at it, virtual world marketing is in the early stages of its eventual trip to being part of mass media…so the question becomes when is it time to jump on?