I’ve been hearing a lot about WAYN (acronym for “Where Are You Now”) over the last few months.  WAYN is a social networking site focused on travelers, where community members can exchange travel tips and meet others who will be in the same place at the same time. With some calling it the “MySpace of Travel,” I figured it was time to do some research and take WAYN for a test drive

WAYN’S HISTORY:

Headquartered in London with back office operations in Poland, WAYN was founded in 2002 by three friends, Pete Ward, Jerome Touze and Mike Lines.  Initial funding came from Friends Reunited founder, Steve Pankhurst.  At the end of November 2006, WAYN secured a $11M (£5.7M) from a combination of high-profile investors including Brent Hoberman (co-founder of UK-based budget travel company, Lastminute.com), Esprit Capital Partners (British VC fund), Adrian Critchlow and Andy Phillips (Co-founders of Active Hotels), David Soski and Hugo Burge (Cheapflights) and Constant Tedder (co-founder and MD of Jagex).  This month, Hoberman will join WAYN as non-executive Chairman.

WAYN has experienced exceptional growth – from 45,000 users in 2005 to over 7 million today. The site boasts users from all over the world, but it is especially popular among the “gap year” contingent in Commonwealth countries like the UK, Australia, South Africa, etc., where many students travel the world for a year before going to University.  Unsurprisingly (given the estimated number of US passport holders), WAYN doesn’t yet have as much traction in the US. The following graphs from Alexa are useful indicators of the progress WAYN has made over the last three years:

WAYN Daily Traffic Rank (3 year trend through 4 Jan 2007):

Wayn-daily-traffic-alexa

WAYN Daily Page Views (3 year trend through 4 Jan 2007)

Wayn-daily-pageviews

WAYN Daily Reach Per Million (3 year trend through 4 Jan 2007):

Wayn-3yr-alexa

A site re-fresh in March of 2006 did well to bolster membership, and according to an article on Yahoo Finance, there are more improvements to come, thanks to the recent $11 M investment of Hoberman and Co:

The Funding will be used to create new revenue streams, expand the team – particularly in Poland where WAYN’s back office operations are managed; enlarge the geographical base of the company and increase the range of online and offline products offered, including a tailored trip planner; expand the ability to share experiences with others using rich media content; and provide exclusive travel and lifestyle benefits to its members. WAYN will also be upgrading its IT infrastructure to help ensure that it is able to support its fast growing active membership base.

WAYN’s competitors include: igougo.com, Gusto.com, Tripmates.com, Tripconnect.com, TripAdvisor.com, and VirtualTourist.com, all of which offer a slightly different flavor of on-line travel networking.

WAYN REVIEW:

Advocates of sites like WAYN believe that being able to broadcast your location to people in your network will revolutionize the way that people meet and interact.  As a management consultant, who used to travel to unfamiliar locations regularly, I like the idea of being able to immediately know if I’ve got friends nearby while I’m traveling and/or meet other travelers who are gong to the same location.  However, I also recognize the potential dangers of broadcasting your location to the public – especially if, say, you’ve got a stalker or your friends have ever called you a weirdo magnet.  Putting privacy issues to the side, I was excited about the idea of WAYN and looked forward to engaging with the community.

I started off by clicking the “Take The Tour” button on WAYN.com, which, as it turns out, like the rest of the site, was a bit slow.  (Good thing that some of the $11 Million investment in WAYN is going towards improving the site’s infrastructure.) Throughout the demo, a side banner flashed repeatedly: “It’s 100% FREE to join WAYN! Register Now”…This, as it turns out, is a bit misleading (more about this shortly).

After trudging my way through the flash demo, I clicked the “Join Now” button.  Registrants are asked to upload information about themselves – including visual descriptors, interests, contact details, mobile number, the details of trips they’ve been on/are going on, and more.  Users also have the option of uploading all of their contacts from several popular web-based email programs.  The enrollment process was straightforward, but it was also a bit clunky and time consuming (extensive drop-down menus that couldn’t be tabbed through, limited options to choose from under “interests”, etc.).

After registration, I was taken to a landing page.  It was here that I learned that while WAYN is free to join, membership is not particularly useful unless you pay for an upgrade.  Strangely, information about the different tiers of membership and associated costs are not advertised on WAYN’s  home page or at any point in the registration process.  In fact, you don’t find out about pricing until you complete free registration and start interacting with the site.  Even then, the only indication that there are different tiers of membership is a banner on the right hand side of the member’s main page:

I was frustrated not to learn about the various tiers of membership, before taking the time to register my personal details.  I think it is important for websites to be up-front about costs.  As it turns out, standard membership is free, but full membership costs $9.99 a month, with discounts if you order three months or one year at a time (3 month commitment= $5.99/month, 1 year commitment= $2.99/month)*.

Wayn-membership-compare

There is also an innocuous third tier of membership called VIP, which isn’t well explained until after you’ve upgraded to Full membership:

Wayn-full-vs-vip

My initial impressions of WAYN.com post-registration were mixed.  On the plus-side, WAYN allows you to:

• See the self-declared location of each of contacts/friends on a world map and learn about their upcoming trips
• Make new contacts/friends who are going to be in the same place as you
• Send an SMS to any of your friends/contacts worldwide
• Chat on-line using the WAYN Instant Messenger
• Upload all of your contacts from Outlook, Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, Gmail to your WAYN account in one click – see who is already a member of the site and see the location of members
• Tell friends/contacts where you’re going and keep on-line Travel Journals to share with those in your network
• See who you know that is on-line and find out who has been looking at your profile
• Upload your photos and store them by location
• Maintain a WAYN-specific mailbox to send email to any of your contacts or groups of contacts.
• Chat with your contacts and other travelers via the WAYN Forum/ chatboards.  Get travel advice and make new friends

There is no doubt that WAYN is feature rich, but the user interface design and web taxonomy leave plenty of room for improvement.  My initial thoughts are as follows:

• Crowded real-estate – overburdened with ads and text.  I don’t believe that users who pay a subscription fee for a social networking service should also have to  see a barrage of unsolicited ads once they’ve logged into the site.
• Confusing interface – The layout on WAYN’s landing page is frustrating.  It is difficult to find what you’re looking for quickly.  The menu banner is down the left hand side of the page (as opposed to the top of the page as with most websites), so you can’t see all of your options without scrolling down the page.
• The website and menu taxonomy are ill conceived:
  • The menu items don’t appear to be listed in any particular order.  They’re not listed alphabetically or in an order that I would classify as useful.  “Search,” for example, which I suspect is one of the most popular menu items, is hidden amongst a stack of less useful menu items and a rotating advertisement.
  • There are too many menu choices and there is duplication across them.  For example, the “Who is online” button links to a page that only shows you members that are on-line in a particular country. Users can’t narrow this down to a state or city.  This is completely useless for users in an enormous country like America.  If you want to know who is on-line in a particular city, you have to pick the “search” button in the menu, which appears three buttons below the “Who’s Online” button. (see pictures below of one WAYN page in three parts – It was too long to screenshot in one go).
    

Wayn-screenshot

Wayn-screenshot-2

• Search is cumbersome –

• When you click the “Search” button, and do a search, it is impossible to narrow down the search results by adding criteria without clicking the “back” button in your browser until you get back to the main search page.
• If you want to find users that are close to you in age, you’re limited to only searching within the following age classifications: 18-20, 21-24, 25-30, 31-40, Over 40.  You are restricted to searching one group at a time. This is inconvenient to anyone who is on the upper or lower end of a particular age range. It seems odd to me that users can’t set their own age search criteria (e.g. 28-36, etc.)
  

Aside from disliking the interface, I struggled to find members with whom I had much, if anything in common.  As with any social networking site, WAYN is only as good as the network of people who use it.  WAYN doesn’t appear to have a critical mass of users in San Francisco, CA, USA.  Despite this, I did get a ton of pings people in far-flung locations with creepy looking pictures emailing to say “Hello.”  This was quite possibly the nail in the coffin for me and the current version of WAYN. There’s nothing quite like getting loads of unsolicited emails from letchy looking men, with whom I share nothing obvious in common and who look old enough to be my father to turn me off of frequenting a website. As I’ve said before in my blog, with the growth of Social Media/Social Networking, privacy is key. As a paying user, I feel that I should be allowed to specify the demographic details of the people who see my profile – not just the people I search for – say “Men and Women between 26 and 38 who plan to be in London between X and Y date.”

A couple of other nitpicky observations about WAYN – The “About us” section doesn’t say anything about WAYN as a company.  There are no executive profiles, discussions of corporate philosophy, or corporate aspirations listed.  In addition, the bottom of the home page, which hypes “WAYN in the News” features seven media logos, but none of them are hyperlinked.

Don’t get me wrong – WAYN is a fantastic social media concept with a lot of potential – both for prospective travelers and for travel businesses.  The ability for travelers to connect with each other and share inside experiences on their travels is phenomenal.  For businesses, sites like WAYN offer an opportunity to make their on-line ad campaigns more targeted and maximize the results of on-line ad spend.  As The Times Online recently reported:

Smart travel companies are using these sites to improve their business. They spot the targeted advertising opportunities offered by a site such as WAYN – where, for example, they can discover that 500 people in the Oxford area are thinking of going on holiday to the West Coast of America.

It is very probably that with $11M in the bank and leadership from Brent Hoberman, WAYN will evolve into the type of site I’d like to use.  For now, WAYN is a good start with a lot of opportunity for improvement.  To summarize, what I’d like to see:

• Less cluttered UI
• Better website taxonomy
• More bang for the buck (e.g. no ads/ pop-ups) OR a free, ad supported service
• Streamlined search facility
• Increased base of US users
• Improved privacy features for paid-for users

Have you tried WAYN? If so, please post a comment.

*Thank you to WAYN, who provided me with full membership (for one month) to evaluate the site.

Today, I got a very nice email from the Marketing Manager at Indeed.com.  She wanted to provide clarification on a few of the comments that appear regarding my December 30th posting about job trends in social media.  However, as a non Voxer, she couldn’t provide comments. She says she tried to enroll for Vox, but she ran into problems registering, so she emailed me instead.

I’d love to see a couple of new features added to Vox – including the ability for non-Voxers to comment on posts without registering for the service.  Just because you want to respond to a blog doesn’t mean you want one yourself.  One of the greatest features of Vox is the ability for users to make their posts public or private. Those of us who choose to make our posts public, want to see members of the public comment!  I’d love to see public commenting incorporated as a feature.

Don’t get me wrong. I love Vox…

• It is free and easy
  
• It is organized well
• It is easy to find people with similar interests
• There is a sense of community
• I got a great address for my blog
• etc.

But, there are a handful of features that I’d like to see added.  In the past few weeks, a few people have emailed me asking why I don’t switch to another free service like WordPress.  Yesterday, I signed up for a WordPress account to try it out. I didn’t like it as much as Vox, but it does have some of the extra features I’d like to have.

For now, I’ll stick with Vox, but if any of you great folks at Six Apart are reading, I’d love to see the following incorporated into Vox:

• The ability for non-Vox users (members of the public) to post feedback on Vox blogs
  
• A counter tool.  Right now, it is impossible to know who is reading your blog without getting comments/email.  And, since members of the public can’t comment, that makes the number of comments limited.
  
• The ability to incorporate HTML code into blogs (for things like buttons, etc.)
  
• The ability to hyperlink photos/logos in blogs
  
• Tracking back on comments – allow bloggers to respond to comments that appear on their blog without having to post a new comment of their own
  

If you’re a Vox blogger who would like to see these features as well, please write a blog entitled: “Six Apart: Why Can’t Non-Voxers Post Comments? (and other feature ideas)”. Please use the tags: blog, Vox, comments, trackbacks, Six Apart, and whatever else you feel is appropriate.   Alternatively, feel free to post a comment on my blog with your ideas.

As always, if you’re a non-Voxer and have feedback, please email me.

When I’m curious about what particular companies are up to/ the strategic direction they’re heading, I often look on their careers web pages and scroll through the open vacancies.  It is hard for companies (especially those in high-tech) to find what they’re looking for in candidates without getting specific about the specific skills they’re after.

I recently found another great resource for getting a wider sense of where the market is going – Indeed.com’s job trends tool.  Indeed crawls the web looking for millions of jobs and provides a one-stop-shop for job searchers.  In 2005, the site posted over 35 million jobs culled from thousands of websites. They’ve recently opened up their archive of jobs allowing people to search this archive and plot job trends over time.

Today, I did a search for the most popular social media keywords. The results (below) are really interesting.  They indicate that companies everywhere are beginning to realize the value of social media and the importance of hiring staff with social media skills:

Web-2.0

Socialmedia

Social-networking

Blog

Podcast

Mashable in conjunction with PhotoBucket is hosting “The Social Networking Awards” and is asking you to vote on your favorite mainstream social networking site. The nominees are:

• MySpace
• Friendster
• Multiply
• hi5
• Piczo
• Tagworld
• Bebo
• Tagged
• Orkut
• Xanga
• Facebook
• Facebox
• LinkedIn
• Vox

To vote, click HERE.

I voted for Vox because I use it so often, but each of the nominees has its strengths.  As I look at the list, I keep thinking that the old phrase “It’s not where you are but who you’re with” is as true in social networking as it is in life.  While I’ve experimented with a lot of the above sites, I’ve wound up using Vox and LinkedIn because these are the two sites that I find the most useful for interacting with people who share similar interests.

On a different note – I’m looking for new material for this blog – including new social media sites/services to review.  If you have ideas (topics of interest, products, services, etc.), I’d love to hear them. Email me.

Coming up in next week’s socialmedia blog a review of Brent Hoberman’s new baby – a social networking site for world travelers.

It’s been a slow news week in the world of social media and social networking – what, with the holidays, people are spending time with real life friends and family, rather than at work or with their on-line network.  But, there is one social media/ social networking story that is still making headlines and drawing crowds of millions with wide eyes and dropped jaws this week – yep – the ‘Washingtonienne’ case.  For those of you social media-ites who have been living under a rock, click here to read the latest on the status of the lawsuit, which is proving just as elicit and sexually-charged as the blog that sparked it.

In my opinion, this case is thoroughly ridiculous and a waste of the court’s time.  Apparently, U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman feels the same way:

“I don’t know why we’re here in federal court to begin with,” Friedman told attorneys for both sides in April. “I don’t know why this guy thought it was smart to file a lawsuit and lay out all of his private, intimate details.”

Despite this frivolity and mis-use of the already over-burdened court system, I’m concerned by the way the outcome of this trial may impact social media and the way that bloggers and other social networkers freely express themselves.  I don’t believe in hanging out dirty laundry to dry in a public forum, but this is America, and if someone wants to do that, it’s their right, so long as what they’re saying is, in fact, true.  However, I also agree withMarc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center:

“Anybody who wants to reveal their own private life has a right to do that. It’s a different question when you reveal someone else’s private life,” he said, adding that simply calling something a diary doesn’t make it one. “It’s not sitting in a nice, leather-bound book under a pillow. It’s online where a million people can find it.

That said, if you want your private life to stay that way, it is advisable to know a little something about the integrity and personal habits of a girlfriend/boyfriend before you share your “private” life with them.  Apparently, Robert Steinbuch didn’t. According to the AP:

“Cutler, a former aide to Sen. Mike DeWine, R-Ohio, says she created the blog in 2004 to keep a few friends up to date on her social life. Like a digital version of the sex-themed banter from a “Sex and the City” episode, Cutler described the thrill and tribulations of juggling sexual relationships with six men.“

What will the outcome of this case mean to social media in the long term?  Only time will tell.  In the meantime, the case highlights the importance of personal accountability.  In summary – It’s not nice to kiss and tell, but if you’re stupid enough to get involved with someone who clearly has a history of kissing and telling, don’t be surprised to read about yourself in their blog.

Todd Schomer from SixApart tipped me off to the fact that BMW is using video upload and social media sharing as a way to involve prospective and current customers with their North America campaign to “Watch Holiday Wishes Come True”.  To see the videos that have been submitted or to post your own video, click here.

For those of you interested in using Social Media as a way to communicate to your customers, partners, etc., I recommend reading the following blog post by Rohit Bhargava, VP of Interactive Marketing for Ogilvy Public Relations.  Back in August, Rohit started an interesting conversation about Social Media Optimization (SMO), summarizing a series of rules for implementing a successful SMO strategy:

1. Increase your linkability
2. Make tagging and bookmarking easy
3. Reward inbound link
4. Help your content travel
5. Encourage the mashup

In time, Rohit linked to a few additional “rules,” for SMO, as offered by other bloggers.  Including:

6. Be a User Resource, even if it doesn’t help you (Jeremiah Owyang)
7. Reward helpful and valuable users (Jeremiah Owyang)
8. Participate (Cameron Olthius)
9. Know how to target your audience: “If you don’t even know your target audience you are in trouble. I would love to have everyone using my product too, but you need to be realistic. There is always going to be a certain audience you can appeal to and others that you can’t. So know your appeal and who it is appealing to.” (Cameron Olthius)
10. Create content (Cameron Olthius)
11. Be real (Cameron Olthius)
12. Don’t forget your roots, be humble (Loren Baker)
13. Don’t be afraid to try new things, stay fresh (Loren Baker)
14. Develop a SMO strategy (Lee Odden)
15. Choose your SMO tactics wisely (Lee Odden)
16. Make SMO part of your process and best practices (Lee Odden)

A couple of weeks after publishing his original post, he wrote:

At this point, I think it’s safe to say the term has grown beyond a point when I feel like I can (or should) be the gatekeeper to decide what the 17th rule should be or how this area evolves.  So, to that end, for those interesting in continuing the discussion and helping SMO to grow – here is my quick list of things you can do to help spread the word about SMO:

• Post your thoughts on your own blog
• Add a comment to the original SMO post on this blog
• Add a comment to a relevant blog post about SMO (whether they mention it or not)
• Tag any blog posts or online content about SMO with the tag “socialmediaoptimization“
• Update the Social Media Optimization page at the New PR Wiki
• Translate the rules into more languages (apart from those already done)
• Tell your colleagues (especially those outside online marketing) about SMO

I agree that SMO is an important topic of conversation, and while I don’t want to “own” the conversation either, I would like to add a new rule to the list – building a bit on rule 9:

17. Make your Social Media Optimization strategy targeted and multi-pronged.  Know your audience and customize marketing messages, making them relevant and compelling to the core groups of people you’re targeting (e.g. YouTube users, bloggers, social networkers, people interested in specific topics, etc).

In my view, one of the most important parts of implementing a successful social media optimization strategy is not just knowing your target audience but making marketing messages to your different target audiences relevant.  I advocate using social media to articulate marketing messages in a slightly different way to different target groups – ensuring that the message a prospective customer received is tailored to their specific needs/interests.  From a customer’s perspective the best “sell” is a “soft sell” – one that makes them excited to buy a particular product/service rather than one that makes them feel “forced” to buy it.  In other words, people want to buy products because they actually want them, not because they’re told they want them.

The companies who participate in Second Life (as discussed in my blog on December 7, 2006) are doing something right.  They’re making their message relevant to a specific group of people with a particular interest.  These advertisers are offering Second Lifers something that is relevant to/ enhances one’s “second life”.  I recommend that companies take a similar approach to other marketing via other social media avenues.  So, for example, if you’re trying to attract YouTube users to purchase your product, talk about why your product is relevant to YouTube… If you make a mobile phone, place a targeted ad on the site that emphasizes about how easy and fun it is to watch YouTube using X, Y, or Z model of phone.  If you’re selling Mentos or Diet Coke, plug the YouTube videos that feature your product.

When you’re building an SMO strategy, take a more targeted approach by:

• Customizing your ads, making them relevant to different target groups
• Writing blogs and posting relevant track backs / comments in high-traffic blogs that point out the positive aspects of your products
• Participating in popular social networking sites and “making friends”, etc.

In other words, don’t just know who your target audience is, but make your messages more relevant to each of the target audiences that you expect will read/watch/hear them.  Because product evangelism through social media can be done inexpensively (or, in some cases, for free), it is possible to execute a multi-pronged approach that is more relevant to target prospective customers than more conventional forms of advertising.  The goal should be to develop a multi-pronged SMO strategy that is more relevant/ compelling/ convincing to groups of target customers with different interest, with the aim of increasing the probability that marketing messages “speak to” different groups in different ways and therefore improve customer acquisition and result in increased sales.

It’s been a busy couple of days, which have left little time for research and blogging, but I will be back full force next week.  In the meantime, here’s some interesting reading. Gartner’s latest study predicts the future of the blogosphere.

The World is abuzz today with all sorts of interesting news relevant to social media/ social networking.  Here are some teasers with links to keep you occupied with plenty of great reading:

MySpace is apparently the biggest site on the internet in terms of the number of page views.  Fox Interactive (largely MySpace) surpassed Yahoo, which saw a 9% reduction in overall traffic in November.  This is not all doom and gloom for Yahoo. Yahoo still has more than double the number of unique visitors to its site than MySpace – clocking in nearly 130 million unique visitors in November.  If you ask me, unique users is a better judge of website size, but I suppose traffic is also important.  Read More.

Speaking of Yahoo. Today, Yahoo and comScore Networks released a research report entitled, “Engaging Advocates through Search and Social Media.” This is a topic that I brought up in my recent blog “Social Networking and The Birth of S-Commerce: A Marketer’s Dream Come True”, in which I compared the power of social networkers to that of the folks that Malcolm Gladwell calls “Mavens” in his book The Tipping Point.  It’s great to see research emerging on the subject.

Skype is planning to start charging for “Skype Out” calls to mobile or landlines effective January in the US and Canada.  If you sign up before January 31, 2007, you’ll get the yearly cost for these calls at half price – a cheap $14.95/year for an unlimited plan (regular price is $29.95).  If you’d rather get a bill after every call, it’s still super cheap – $.021/min!  Read More.

A new social media website called DareJunkies launched it’s beta, which encourages people to submit videos of themselves executing on dares, which appear on the website. Call me juvenile, but it has the potential to be hilarious.  More importantly, it has the potential to be sticky. I’m not sure what their revenue model is, but I can see huge opportunity for ads, product placement in dares, etc.  TechCrunch calls it “A social networking site for jackasses”.  I won’t disagree, though looking at some of the challenges, a lot of it seems a bit more benign than the stunts of Jackass… more like videoing the dare component of a high school truth or dare game.  Take, the following example, which appears in the dating section:

See how many ridiculous pick lines you can try at the drive though window.  Try your best, your most suave moves, until they get increasingly more frustrated with you.  Finally get upset yourself claiming that “this is the Pick-Up window, if they weren’t interested they shouldn’t be working there.  If they can’t take a joke then order the Big Mac Combo…only if you’re not at Dirty Ron’s. Read More.

And, lastly, MobileCrunch is reporting that SharpCast has been added to US carrier Altell‘s deck.  I’ve been excited to hear SharpCast’s announcement for a while now.  While I’ve not seen the service working, I first heard about it last year when it was very much under wraps, as the company has quite a few folks that came from Palm, Inc./ PalmOne.  The service allows you to sync photos across all of your devices (phone, PC, etc.) seamlessly.  While this is not a social media site or technology, per say, I think it has long term potential to revolutionize the way that users of social media sync information with their computers to their phones and ultimately share. Read More.

I was reading my daily dose of social media press releases when I came across a Social Media company based in Los Altos, CA called – Five Across (founded by ex Apple and Adobe developers).  Five Across provides social media and community building software.  Today, Onstream Media announced a series of “teaming and services agreements” with Five Across. “Ho hum” you say?  This is actually pretty interesting.

What the agreement means is that combined service of both companies will allow Five Across’ customers (companies, sports teams, etc.) to add multimedia experiences to their on-line social networking facilities.  Developing their own social networking platform is just one way that organizations etc. are keeping in touch with their customers and fans.  Adding the ability to upload user-generated content to their websites will positively increase the way that Five Across’ clients reach out/ market to their constituents and the way that those constituents interact with each other.

If anyone else out there besides me was wondering, “Could Five Across somehow be related to Six Apart?”  The answer is no.  Six Apart’s name was derived from the number of days between the co-founders’ birthdays.