Iarfhlaith Kelly - Code agus Craic

The Tuesday Push is a bi-weekly cooperative effort by bloggers to help get the word out about the chosen web service in a co-ordinated way. This time around it’s MyTown.ie.

“MyTown provides local information about each Irish town, such as weather forecast, news, events, attractions, maps, and business listings (including accommodation and entertainment).”

I usually take a slightly different approach to the Tuesday Push and try to highlight things about the web app or service that works, and things that don’t. This week is no different. Hopefully the guys behind MyTown will find this helpful and constructive feedback. That’s certainly my intention.

The Strategy - The Good Parts

First off, the strategy. Lets look at what’s good about the approach of MyTown.

It’s operating in a narrow channel.

Having a niche is a great. It means you can focus on delivering exactly what that small set of people want, usually resulting in a very focused and specific tool. But sometimes the niche is a little small, reducing the overall potential of the business. To counter this, MyTown are providing hundreds of narrow channels, each one focused on a small community. This has the potential of encouraging people who live locally to gain a voice online.

They’re asking for money.

Straight off these guys are setup to take payments online. Too many web services launch with a ‘wait and see’ approach. Hoping that they’ll be able to figure out a business model at some stage down the line. This is unsustainable without funding. So a better way is to start charging users from the get go. MyTown have taken this approach. Fair play.

It’s a manageable amount of content.

Whether it’s user generated, imported, scraped, or hand written there’s a manageable amount of content on the site. Each town has a reasonable amount of sections and sub sections to fill data into them. But with little micro communities constantly submitting content, this should ensure that the content grows steadily with the user base.

It’s a franchisable scalable business.

If it works in Ireland it can work anywhere. A lot of entrepreneurs use their home town as a testing bed for something with a potentially wider appeal. If MyTown becomes a successful viable business, then there’s no reasopn why it wouldn’t work in the UK or anywhere else.

It’s up and running.

It’s easy to criticise from the sidelines. To point out other people’s mistakes and feel smug when it doesn’t go right. But you’ll never get anywhere with that attitude. It’s dispicable. These guys from MyTown have put their heart on their sleeve and launched something. Now that they’re out there they can tweak, improve, test, tweak, and improve again. All under the eyes (and with the input) of their users. This is the only way to get things done. By actually doing it.

The Strategy - The Not So Good Parts

Despite all this positivity, there’s still a lot of work to be done. Here’s a few of my thoughts on their strategy and how it might be improved.

Who is this website for?

I can’t figure out if this website is for locals living in these towns or for tourists visiting it. I think this is a crucial decision as I don’t think you can provide a great service for both of these people in the one place. They’ve got totally different needs. For example, if I’m a local I don’t need a Google Map showing me where in Ireland I live. And if I’m a tourist, I don’t need to know what cars are for sale in the area.

Having a defined target market is absolutely critical, and I’m not sure who that is here.

There’s huge competition in this space.

This is a pretty cluttered market at the moment. Listings websites are a dime a dozen. There’s YourLocal.ie, Entertainment.ie, RateMyArea.com, IGOpeople.com, Boards.ie, MyHome.ie for property and AutoTrader.ie for cars. All of these sites command huge audiences and focus on one specific niche. MyTown is trying to cover all of this under one roof. Very risky.

Lots of features but not enough data.

MyTown offers a large variety of sections and listings for each town, yet a lot of them have very little content. For instance, the gallery sections in may of the towns I looked at were completely empty. And the same with the events calendar, not a lot going on.

I would almost cut some of these features and focus on nailing just a couple of them first. Doing it better than anyone else. Once you get a small part of it right, grow it out and slowly reintroduce some of these additional features. It’s all about having a critical mass of users, built up slowly over time.

What’s compelling me to stay?

MyTown seem to be doing a lot of things reasonably well, but nothing stands out that would keep me here and get me coming back. There’s no compelling data, local community or a killer feature enticing me to revisit the site.

There’s no clear call to action on the homepage either. I don’t know what to do next.

To encourage people to visit, and then to keep coming back I think there needs to be at least one very compelling reason. Whether that’s the sum of all the information about my town or something else entirely, it needs to be dressed up and presented in a way that gives a sense of community. Because the best thing MyTown has got going for them is the narrow channel of each town.

I’d focus on that, and add on the rest later.

The Tuesday Push is a bi-weekly cooperative effort by bloggers to help get the word out about the chosen web service in a co-ordinated way. This week it’s RevaHealth in the hot seat.

RevaHealth is a portal website for people who want to ‘find and compare health and cosmetic clinics anywhere’.

First Impressions

RevaHealth is a portal site, but it has a razor sharp focus on healthcare. and in particularly dental and cosmetic clinics. This is a good thing. Like I’ve said before, having a niche a focusing on it is crucially important on the web.

Overall the site has a deliberate purpose, helping you to find the right clinic. The homepage has a clear call to action and prompts users to search for the type of clinic they’re looking for in a specific geographical area.

The results are clear, informative and provide user contributed ratings on most of them.

The Test Run

I wanted to see how useful RevaHealth would be in helping me pick a suitable dentist in my area, so I took it for a test run. To start, I didn’t go to RevaHealth, I went to Google, and typed ‘Dublin Dentist‘ into the search box.

Hey presto! RevaHealth came up on the number one spot for those keywords and deep linked to their internal search results page for ‘Dublin Dentist’. - Someone’s been working hard on their SEO!

Once I arrived at the RevaHealth search results I picked the clinic with the best star rating (Smiles Dental Spa). From there I could see a lot more detailed information about the clinic. Things like:

• a Google Map showing their location;
• a detailed review of the clinic;
• a gallery of photographs of the clinic;
• a full price list of the services offered;
• and their opening hours.

I wanted to compare this against the information on the Smiles Dental Spa website and amazingly they gave almost none of the same information over there. Not even their opening hours.

Summary

I think the guys behind RevaHealth are onto a good thing here. They’re providing easily accessible information, that’s community driven, in a niche area, that’s difficult to find anywhere else.

They’ve got a clear business model and are already earning revenues from advertising and corporate accounts.

Well done to Caelen and his team. I wish you guys the very best of luck with the business.

I’m joining the mass exodus of bloggers from Dublin today and heading off to the Annual Blog Awards. It’s being hosted in the stylish Cork International Airport Hotel and as always is organised by the irrepressible Damien Mulley.

I’m really looking forward to tonight, mostly because I’ll get to meet so many people that I admire and respect within my own industry. It’s a chance to connect with like minded people over a pint, have a great laugh and give the blogging world a big high five in the process.

Make The Most of Everything

To all of tonight’s winners in each of their respective categories, I second Robin’s call to do something while your in the spotlight. Like he so rightly says “the blog awards are not an award to say you’re great. The blog awards are a platform to do something.” Since winning the category for Irish Technology Blogger last year, Robin has left his job and started his own business. Part of the motivation to do this, he says was down to the spotlight he found himself in after winning the award last year.

Make Your Predictions

There’s a little predictions competition running over on Le Craic’s site if you fancy a go at guessing the winners. The closest prediction wins an original (and pretty cool) oil painting of the Ha’penny Bridge. Give it a go before the awards tonight to be in with a chance.

See You There

This is my first time going to the Blog Awards (although it doesn’t feel like it), and if it’s even half as good as the Web Awards were then it’s going to be a very memorable night!

Hopefully see you down there. If you want to get in touch, my mobile is 085-7343118.

Good luck to everyone on the shortlists, it’s going to be a great night.

Twitter Perch is a new app that lets you automatically follow other Twitter folk that post about things you’re interested in. It’s a small app that was very simple to build and uses a combination of the Twitter API and the Twitter Search API to do it’s magic.

How To Use It

It’s really easy to use. Just enter your chosen keyword into the form on the homepage along with your Twitter username and password and Twitter Perch will then add new followers to your account every day, automatically growing your list.

The Rules

To put off spammers, we’re restricting the maximum number of new followers to 20 per day for each keyword. We’ll be carefully managing its use and will kick off anyone who abuses the service.

The Good News

We’ve also open sourced the code behind Twitter Perch so that others can run the service privately if they have security concerns or want to extend its features. The source code is hosted in a Google Code repository available here: http://code.google.com/p/twitterperch/

Best Intentions

I’ve launched this tool in the hope that it will be useful for businesses who want to track their brands and engage with people on Twitter. I think if it’s used properly then it will be a very useful extension of the Twitter Search features already available. However, if it’s used incorrectly it could reduce the value that Twitter provides to its users and potentially dilute the strong community bond that currently exists there.

So with that in mind, I urge people who want to try the service (online or on their own server) that they use it responsibly and in moderation.

I’m a little late on this because of a few deadlines yesterday but the Tuesday Push is back and this week we’re pushing IGOpeople, ‘a network for the real world’.

There are advantages though in writing at the tail end of a push because a lot of good reviews have already been done. So instead of writing another [a post explaining what IGOpeople is], I’m going to show how the IGOpeople team are leading by example and engaging in their community and learning from the feedback they receive.

Instant Engagement

The first post I ever put up on IGOpeople generated 3 Thumbs Up, 7 comments, and has been viewed 86 times. It was a thread called “IGO back to Twitter” and was a tongue in cheek way of firing some tough feedback back across to the IGO team.

I challenged them on the point that despite how great their site is (and it’s very good) I doubted that it would attract great numbers of users because the early adopter community was already on Twitter and seemed very happy there.

The response was overwhelmingly positive. Both their CEO and Lead Developer replied to the post and actively engaged with me on the feedback I gave them.

The responses they gave me may not have convinced me to switch over, but I was definitely impressed by how they reacted the to challenge and the positive way in which they received it.

Quick Fixes

Within 24 hours of my original post, the IGO team had added a new feature to each post to allow users to publish part of their post on Twitter. Now I’ll agree that that doesn’t solve the issue entirely but it’s a start, and it shows that the people behind IGO are willing to listen to their community and give them what they want.

As I understand it now, they’re working on new ways to bring the Twitter community and the IGOpeople network closer together. I’m not sure how they plan to do this, but one useful way would be to let users import their followers to save them having to start a new community from scratch.

But there are other ways too, and because of the active way in which the IGO team have responded to feedback, I have no doubt any more that if there’s something that can be done to make IGOpeople a success, then Campbell, Darragh and the rest of the team there will do everything they can to make it happen.

Remember, It’s Irish

On a final note, I’d just like to mention that IGOpeople is an Irish startup.

We talk a lot about the lack of startup community in this country, always moaning that Silicon Valley is where we should all be. Personally I couldn’t disagree with this more (but that’s for another post). The more we encourage each other and actively use and promote other Irish startups, then the more likely we are to emerge successful.

That’s the reason I take part in Damien’s Tuesday Push, because a rising tide lifts all ships. If we are to become truly competitive and successful on a global scale, we need to come together, speak as one and bring attention to ourselves by shouting out loudly that Ireland is the best place on earth to run a startup. If we don’t believe it, then there’s no way anyone else will.

My hat’s off to the guys at IGOpeople, because they’re actually doing it. They’ve built something and they’re bringing it to the rest of the world. We need a hundred more of these. Roll on next weeks Tuesday Push.