Web 2.0 Lunch at CarDomain.com

Lunch 2.0 is a lunch hosted by a web 2.0 company, such as Zillow or CarDomain, for people interested in Web 2.o to gather. It is a great place to network, learn, and eat free food. I highly recommend it.

I’ll highlight some of the interesting points of the talk. CarDomain had great success hiring contact managers to engage users in the forums. Users, they said, take pride in getting contact manager or editors to reply to their messages.

Cardomain also spoke a lot about ego. They said that their website supplied an emotional outlet- it was a place where people went to brag about their cars (this might, however, be a specific trait to car enthusiasts but a similar trend could probably be found in Zillow, and even Facebook).

They also said, after some failures, that they did not try to create new web applications- they left that to open source. Rather, they focused on keeping the community healthy. Their success came from a strong identity- they were not about dev, they were a social network. The one development success story that they did tell was about a marketing guy, Jeff (who I spoke with at lunch), who put together a widget for the blog. And people loved it.

Jeff also told me about how they tracked users. They split the users up into three groups; people who contribute the majority of the content, people who contribute some, and people who just come on the site to check things out. Then they collect data on these different groups, such as how they travel the site, how long, where they exit, what they spend time on, etc. Then they try to fit the demand of their users. Their marketing team focused mostly on the group that contributes content, because content is a major player in pushing their website forward.

They created an ad campaign for one car company where they instituted a contest to find the best color for the new truck series. They called it dynamic advertising and a huge success. They were, however, having trouble convincing the conservative companies in Detroit to come around to such innovative ad campaigns.

I would like to thank all the people at CarDomain for putting on a great lunch and being extremely hospitable. It seemed like all the employees participated by making comments during the talk, talking with random people at lunch, and helping everyone feel comfortable. And the Lunch 2.0 people were great as well, although I didn’t interact with them as much, I do appreciate the lunch that they organized. Thank you.

And my favorite quote from the meeting was, “If you build it, they don’t often come”