Five Quick Suggestions to Improve Technorati

With new CEO Richard Jalichandra in place a week now and an interview under his belt, I thought it would be a good time for me to provide Five Quick Suggestions to Improve Technorati.

Suggestion #1 - Focus on the house

In an interview with Wired, Richard said his goal in the next year is to "build a WUME (wholly unique media experience)". I would suggest Richard take some time personally (not using interns) to review all of the current feedback from bloggers across the spectrum about their thoughts on Technorati. Richard can start with our Technorati coverage over the past year. The current "house" is not in order - counts aren't correct, blogs aren't updated correctly and there are lots of other small issues which seem to frustrate the blogosphere. Fix those first Richard as more positive bloggers talking about Technorati will help your WUME, otherwise it will hurt your chances.

Suggestion #2 - Realize that you track x million blogs

In your first blog post Richard, you mention going to the Top 100 and asking for advice first. What about the other x million blogs you track? The top 100 is not a sales contest with you discussing revenue projections with your best salespeople. Goes back to what I said in Suggestion #1 above - you've got a branding issue - something more than the Top 100 are needed to fix. Especially since the Top 100 might not even be correct given the tracking issues :)

Suggestion #3 - Kill off the WTF immediately

I hope you kill off the WTF feature of Technorati. Since Topics was added, WTF is not needed, it's a joke among bloggers and appears to receive very little traffic and votes per story. Not to mention that a large percentage of the submitted stories are spam and porn.

Suggestion #4 - Upgrade the Customer Service

In my customer service test last year, Technorati scored the lowest with an F overall. Recently when I inquired about a few topics, the autoreply said basically, "we are busy, if we can get to it, we will. If we don't, feel free to nudge us and we might possibly reply". Richard, I would suggest you do some anonymous testing yourself to verify the level of service provided.

Suggestion #5 - Create incoming tracking alerts

One of the small features I'd love to see is a way for an alert (sms/email/twitter) each time someone links to one of my stories. This is different than the alerts that Google provides and could become a good way to drive blogger traffic back to Technorati. Offer up a nice widget and a Facebook application as well and it's a way for visibility for your brand. Allow me to create the same alerts for my brand competitors.

Quick Conclusion

As you can see, all of my suggestions will help lead to greater blogger acceptance levels. Improvement in the blogger acceptance level is critical before rolling out new features. It's time for you to join the conversation and since you are fresh meat, it's a great time. Good luck Richard and I look forward to watching your journey back.