Web 2.0 Expo Take Aways for Product Managers and Product Marketing Managers
April 9, 2009
Listed are some take away messages from last week’s Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco 2009 that I thought would be important for Product Managers and Product Marketing Managers. I went to many of the sessions and also interviewed several of the exhibitors local to Silicon Valley. This post will provide insight into trends, business challenges to address, and areas to innovate.
General Messages
- Be more agile – massive networking drives increase in dynamics and complexity
- Feedback loops rule – learn by engaging in conversations
- Increase transparency
- Participate, listen, and act
- Engage people – be authentic and consistent
- It's about the people – be customer centric not company focused, which will allow your company to be more integrated and better connected across departments, businesses, customers, etc.
- Find ways to offer a great service for free
- Empower your community – remember that people want attention
- Have employees spend time in your community – every week engage in blogs, forums, etc.
- Focus on ROI – to get businesses who are in holding patterns buying again, make sure that they can achieve ROI usng your products
- Build a simple system and let it evolve
- Provide useful technology – Create more value than you capture
- Open up your platforms – provide software interfaces to developers so they can also make money and innovate
- Build feedback mechanisms into the product – quantify the impact of changes made to your product
- Understand users – don’t build for the boss, build for customers by interviewing them before and throughout the development process
- Do not launch and forget – great software requires iteration and a flexible process
- Don’t make users think – users don’t want to get hung up on the product interface
- For data to be useful, it must be digestible - Distill graphics to the basics by providing the minimum amount of information needed for the targeted audience
- Deliver rich engaging social experience – Provide more functionality through rich media interface that is personal, social, immersive (flash, video, etc.), and multi-channel
- The future is mobile – information will be useful and accessible to everybody because the phone is now a cloud connected device with location attributes, camera, and voice capabilities.
- Web is the most viable platform for building individual apps since it makes no sense to build for multiple code bases for the multitude of phones
- It’s about the data, not the apps
You can find presentation files from the Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco 2000 at http://www.web2expo.com/webexsf2009/public/schedule/proceedings.
To greater success.
Posted by Grace Hu-Morley. Posted In : Marketing (general)
