Fol­low up on my pre­vi­ous post about Dopplr/Tripit (here­after D/T ).

[Small digres­sion: it’s very hard (at least to me) to find the right “voice” for blog­ging. My nat­ural ten­dency is to write in details. Unfor­tu­nately, I don’t the time to afford it in the blog, and it’s prob­a­ble read­ers can’t afford it either. So for the time being, I’ll try to be more con­cise. Let me know what you think :-) ]

So, what are the strate­gic moves these actors can make to both mon­e­tize their users and win ? First, let’s look at the mon­e­ti­za­tion part:

• Sell “clas­sic” ads: no need to expand. Doomed.
• Sell “non-classic” ads (cf the Esther Dyson piece): they would not only com­pete head to head with each other but also with the inno­v­a­tive travel search engines, which would pro­pose such fea­tures as “friend an air­line” them­selves (only it would be “please let us know your 3 pre­ferred air­lines so that they can pro­pose you per­son­al­ized deals when you search for a travel plan”). This would make them com­pete in a broader, much more com­pet­i­tive mar­ket. They’re both unlikely to win.
• Adopt the trans­ac­tion way: pro­pose a search engine aggre­ga­tor right on their site, and charge a %age off each trans­ac­tion. Same thing: com­pe­ti­tion more acute, value for users not clear (if they are slightly less usable or com­pet­i­tive than another site, they will lose). Not only that, but the major­ity of fre­quent fly­ers are cor­po­rate users and cor­po­rate users book through their accred­ited travel agents (no choice).
• Charge a fee for pre­mium accounts: clas­sic model, charge users a small monthly fee for access to exclu­sive fea­tures. With 2 play­ers com­pet­ing for the same mar­ket, they would need a huge dis­tinc­tive value to be able to charge this way. As we see below, they don’t .

As with all other social net­work­ing imple­men­ta­tions, a key part of suc­cess is attract­ing users to get the spi­ral­ing effect rolling. How could D/T try to dis­tin­guish them­selves to attract such users ?

• Add more fea­tures ? It’s unlikely one can come up with a fea­ture so unique it isn’t imitable by the other one.
• Look and feel ? Idem.
• Actu­ally, every­thing else, idem.

Tripit has for it its email extrac­tion fea­ture; Dopplr their look and feel and their com­mit­ment to open­ness (imple­mented deeper than Tripit’s). Nei­ther has a killer com­pet­i­tive advan­tage to attract users, and it’s unlikely it even exists (but the future may prove me wrong). So should they do ?

In my opin­ion, go for the cor­po­rate mar­ket. Yes, I know, but please bear with me. The should offer cor­po­ra­tions a spe­cific set of fea­tures exclu­sive to their company’s employ­ees. The main ones I have in mind would be to get in touch with other, but unknown, employ­ees, while trav­el­ing (or at home when oth­ers are trav­el­ing). Pic­ture this: you’re a young and recent employee of a global orga­ni­za­tion, stuck for the week-end some­where you don’t know any­one. But it’s a big loca­tion of your com­pany, so you know there are oth­ers also there. A tool that lets you sig­nal you’re there and ready to go for lunch/dinner/skiing/whatever with other employ­ees would bring every­one a lot of value.

Think about social net­work­ing in terms of costs/benefits: you use tools that lets you extracts more value out of your con­tacts in less time. Such a tool would let employ­ees extract value out of very loose rela­tion­ships (don’t even know each other, just employ­ees of the same group) and out of their travel time. The cost / ben­e­fits for indi­vid­u­als is great. It is even more sig­nif­i­cant for said com­pa­nies, in terms of knowl­edge shar­ing, net­work­ing, inno­va­tion oppor­tu­ni­ties, etc… (Hey, the only thing in com­mon is their employer, what do you think will occupy 90% of their conversations ?)

Now let’s take our orig­i­nal monetization/attraction ques­tions with this in mind. First, charge employ­ers for access to such fea­tures. It is not triv­ial in terms of data secu­rity, and you can price monthly by active users (ie every­one can use it, but com­pa­nies pay only for the ones who actu­ally use the tool). Done right, this one is an easy sell.

Attrac­tion ? Well, ones you start to have a sig­nif­i­cant sub­set of com­pa­nies onboard, what do you think the employ­ees will use to keep in touch with their friends and fam­i­lies travel plans ? Another tool so that they have the joys to jug­gle among 2 dif­fer­ent apps for doing the same thing ? Right, by going after the cor­po­rate mar­ket, they would in effect get the spi­ral­ing effect in the con­sumer mar­ket (where they can have the trans­ac­tions model if they want to).

Any­way, that’s my take on it and I would be very inter­ested by any com­ments on these dynam­ics; espe­cially if you think I’m wrong, please com­ment away…