I went to Dallas this week to play a few games. Not Scrabble or Monopoly but serious games that are used as a mechanism to help customers better direct the features and futures of their software products. The setting was the annual user conference of Teres Solutions, a leading provider of credit union back office operations software suites. Facilitating the games was Luke Hohmann, the CEO of Enthiosys, who wrote a book, developed the idea and does dozens of these gaming events around the world every year.

The day of games was at times part encounter group, part revival meeting, part chaos, but totally serious work. The facilitators used a variety of public speaking, psychology, standard marketing techniques and group dynamics – along with the games – to elicit ideas and thoughts from the participants about product features and future product roadmaps and strategies for Teres.

“We tried to do other sessions at earlier conferences that involved our customers telling us what they wanted to see in our products, but they were unstructured and they turned more into bitch sessions,” said Rosa Trachta, a senior product manager at Teres. “We really didn’t end up getting the information that we wanted but saw the games at another conference and wanted to bring them here.”

The games we played involved no fancy technology – for the most part we used things found at office supply store such as index cards and flip charts rather than computer screen projectors. But more important than the materials was the processes used to get people talking to each other and collaborating on ideas.

The first game we played was called “20/20 vision,” based on when you visit your eye doctor and try to find what prescription will improve your eyesight by comparing lenses in pairs. In the game, the group expressed their preferences to a series of product enhancements that were printed on a series of index cards, and had been seeded ahead of time by Teres’ product managers. In the room were customers of Teres who managed departments at various credit unions. For each product enhancement, the customers would justify what they thought, how it could improve their jobs, or be better than what they have at present from Teres.

What impressed me is that unlike many breakout sessions in numerous conferences that I have been to, there was a constant give and take of conversation among the customers and with Hohmann leading the game. It was an honest stream of consciousness, almost too dense and thick for me to capture as a reporter – part of this was because the information was too technical for me and specific to their industry; but also because many people were speaking to each other at once. What I liked about this process was that Hohmann could get all sorts of information about the product and features without having actually touched it. He got down into the weeds about each feature and explored exactly what it meant to the daily user of the software.

I also liked that the customers started talking about their underlying business practices and how they did their jobs, such as working with credit bureaus, originating loans, and so forth. Given the current state of confusion in the financial services industry, it was fascinating to be at ground zero with the people in the room who actually have to approve consumer loans. These were people who were passionate about their application, because their daily jobs depend on it.

As more index cards are posted on the wall, the ranking changes as people argue for higher or lower placement of the specific features. It also becomes more difficult to rank them, and people would get into the finer points of the implications of each feature. We finished this game by evaluating a few of the features in more detail in terms of their financial benefits and costs.

The next game was called “Speed Boat” and involves eliminating obstacles, or anchors that will drag down a product, or slowing down a user’s productivity. A new set of index cards were distributed with a new group of participants to fill out. “We generally don’t do more than one game a day with the same people, because the process is so demanding,” says Hohmann. Then the fun began. Each person came up to the front of the room and pasted their cards on the wall, and others moved them around – the bigger the drag, the lower the card is placed on the wall. Within a few minutes, the wall was covered with items. The wall served as the basis of discussion of why these features were an issue and how they impacted a particular credit union’s business processes. As in the morning session, there was a lot of interaction with the audience, with suggestions flying fast and furious.

The third game was called “Buy a Feature” and this involved handing out Monopoly money that is used to purchase particular product features. (Some of Enthiosys’ other clients have actually minted their own currency. For example, the games at Intuit had pictures of founder Scott Cook on the bills.) Like Vegas, this game is rigged ahead of time because there isn’t enough dough to go around, and people have to pool their funds to get what they want. Again, a lot of give and take here among the participants.

How did the overall process fare? Jack Jordan, VP of product development for Teres, says, “One of the features got more value from the participants than I expected, and one feature that I thought had more priority ended up at the very bottom of the queue. This would have been a lot of development effort; we could very easily have built this feature into our product. Overall, the sessions have been very helpful.” What I saw was a very direct display of different priorities – some customers wanted X or Y features, for example, while others would find X or Y features not useful but want A or B.

I have done a few encounter sessions with computer product managers over my years as a consultant and reporter, and I have to say that the games process is a very efficient mechanism for getting very precise feedback and to help improve products. I was glad to be a witness to this process, and would urge other product teams to employ Enthiosys and its channel to help with their future product strategies. If you want more information, buy Hohmann’s book (which goes into detail on many more games that he’s designed) or attend one of his seminars.

One of the most fun things that I get to do professionally is be a volunteer judge at some of the entrepreneur competitions over at Washington University. Today I was listening to nine different student presentations for the final class projects at the “Hatchery“. The students learn to write business plans, refine their ideas, put together a slide deck and presentation, and figure out funding models and how they are going to create a new business during the course of the semester.

What was impressive were the presentations by the kids themselves. As a professional speaker, I can appreciate all the hard work that goes into polishing up a talk and making your points — and they only have 15 minutes to get across a lot of information for us to judge whether they make the grade. We have an additional 15 minutes to ask questions and all the students did well under our scrutiny.

Here are some of the lessons that I learned from my day at Wash U:

• Know your P&L’s. The weakest parts of the presentations were the financial portion. While the students submitted full accounting statements in their written backups, some of them made absolutely no sense to me. Either they were giving away too much equity for too little value, had odd gross margins of 89%, structured unsecured loans as their initial capitalization, or whatnot, clearly they all could use more work in this area.
• These are the Google generation, and many of them were all over Adwords and other online funding models. But one caution that I would have is that the best plans combined some aspects of online and offline funding and marketing mechanisms.
• Odd uses of IT resources. Some of the teams over-estimated the costs of IT support, some grossly underestimated them. $120,000 to build a Website? Try to do it for $1,000. A part-time CTO with a company that is still developing their iPhone app? I think not.
• Sales was another weak spot. One team that produces a very good student magazine was planning on expanding the magazine to other college campuses. They had never sold advertising until now — because Wash U. supports the publication. While they had some good ideas on how to do this, shoe leather and visiting local watering holes is not a sales strategy.
• Focus on the first hires. The most impressive presentation was by a company-to-be that is going to sell custom women’s sleepwear. What got me, apart from some of the girls modeling the goods, was how the CEO knew what she didn’t know and needed to hire right off the bat. She also had some very clever ideas on using user-generated contests to help refine and perfect her initial prototypes.

I wish all of the students well in their ventures, and I hope to see good things from some of them as the summer goes on and they put their ideas into practice.

Not every Web service has to be completely an online operation. Take as an example Netflix – when they started it wasn’t really possible to stream an entire DVD across the Internets and they developed a system to mail DVDs to their customers. Now, of course, they have some very innovative ways to “watch instantly” your videos, including to Ethernet-connected Blu-Ray and Xbox players.

But the combination of on and offline components isn’t widely exploited by many businesses, either because they are so enamored by Web 2.0 (or whatever we are calling it this week), or because they lack the offline skill sets or institutional memories to be effective in both camps.

Let’s take a look at one service that does a great job in both worlds, called MagCloud.com, which is sponsored by HP. As someone who once ran the editorial operations of several computer magazines that have gone by the wayside (no fault of my own in particular, at least so I like to think), I welcome the effort.

It works this way. Let’s say you want to produce a small number of copies of a custom published magazine – say something more than a sales brochure that has actual editorial content. You want to approach this project with the same kind of quality that a regular printed magazine would entail – full color printing, nice graphics and layout, and mailed to potential readers. This is the idea behind their service. You create your magazine just as you would with the usual Adobe tools, upload the digital files to their service, along with the mailing addresses of your readers. HP takes care of printing, proofing, binding, polybagging and postage.

You can get an idea of what is involved by browsing their Web site and seeing some of the magazines that are offered for sale there. I got a copy of “Georgia Speaker” – a magazine that is published by the Atlanta chapter of the National Speakers Association (an organization that I am a member). It was well put together and arrived in the mail in a few days and cost about $5 all told.

What I like about MagCloud is that it combines the best attributes of print-on-demand with online access for searchability, marketing and awareness. The price is reasonable and you can set up any number of custom-published pieces. Obviously, HP Is doing this to tout its printing business, but why not?

When I first heard of MagCloud, I thought the service would email me the PDF that I would then print myself. And I was pleasantly surprised when the magazine arrived in my snail mail a few days later. Then I realized the genius of this service. How much stuff do you get in the mail that you actually look forward to these days? Other than paychecks from my clients and my Netflix DVDs, not a heckuva lot. This can be high impact just because it is something so retro that it stands out.

Now, I don’t know if MagCloud has a future, but certainly it can bring some bright spots of hope to some of the 11,000 journalists who lost their jobs last year (according to the Columbia Journalism Review). While that is small change compared to the number of idled GM or US Steel workers, it still means that there is a large talent pool to produce custom-published zines. And if any of you do produce your own custom magazines using the service, please let me know and I will post links to them here.

While many of us marvel at those Web sites and “viral videos” that take the Internets by storm and quickly gain viewership, I think the sign of truly successful sites are those that more slowly and incrementally gain their fans. The motto for today’s essay is that slow and steady will win the online video race. And those sites that are quick to gain attention are also quick to lose it: the longer it takes you to build your followers, the better a chance you’ve have at keeping them.

Too often we get consumed by playing the numbers game: is traffic for our Web site up from last month? What were the big ticket articles or pages that brought in the most visitors? Did we get anything posted on Slashdot (which has a huge following, and can often spike traffic if articles get the right position)? These aren’t the right questions to be asking.

Instead, lengthen your time horizon to the next quarter, and look for efforts that will build interest for more than just the quick hit. Is your site truly useful as a resource and will bring back returning visitors several times over the course of the year? Do you regularly post new content? Are your most popular pages easily accessible from your home page or clearly labeled at the top menu bar? Do you tie in your Web site with social network group postings and with regular (weekly or twice monthly) email blasts that have something of value in them? Do you look at your site logs and understand what they are telling you?

I realize that there are a lot of questions here, more than answers. Too often, Web site operators are easily swayed by the latest trend-let or Search Engine Optimization seminar come-on. It doesn’t have to be that way. Here are a couple of examples from my own efforts that you can use to guide your own strategies.

People talk about the power of LinkedIn and other social networks. I have built my own into several hundred people gradually, by adding a few people at a time. Now the whole thing is self-sustaining. And while it seems impressive now when you look at the total members that I can reach, I think it is a much better list because I built them up gradually. I use LinkedIn to find sources for stories that I am working on, or to try to discover new clients from my installed base. After all, these are the people that are most familiar with my work. I also use it as an online resume/reference source, so potential clients can check out what my previous clients have said about me.

The same goes for you, the Web Informant reader. These weekly emails are a great way for me to continue to engage you, because I hopefully send something out of value rather than a marketing blast that is content-free. I hear from many of you that save these missives, or that reply to ones that I wrote months ago, and that is a very potent connection and a great motivation for me to continue to write them.

As many of you know, I began creating my own series of sponsored video screencast product reviews over on WebInformant.tv. So far I have posted 15 videos, and they are slowly gaining viewership on more than a dozen different video sharing and how-to Web sites. While none of them are at the level of the Coke-and-Mentos guys, I am glad to see that day after day and week after week they are getting watched and more importantly, serve as a great resource for enterprise IT managers that are trying to figure out whether they can buy these products.

Another thought: always freely offer something of value on your Web site, even if you are tempted to charge for it. The more people can stop and smell and taste what you have, the more they are going to want to stick around and eventually dive in deeper. Some people suggest that you offer almost everything for free, and then charge them to customize your content. I can’t tell you how many Web sites that I visit that still don’t do this, and insist on registering you or tracking you or verifying you before you can get inside the front door. You can make money by giving things away for free.

And if you feel like sharing your own thoughts with my audience, please post your comments here.

You know that a technology is maturing when articles such as these start appearing. First is the infatuation stage, where the iPhone or Facebook or whatever can do everything for everyone. So I thought I would lead the charge and talk about the various limitations of different social networks that I use. You are of course welcome to send in your other frustrations.

Be a truly useful publishing platform. I want something that is better than an email list server that you as my readers have to remember to update your address and opt out when you are tired of hearing from me (I hope that day never comes, but I promise not to take it personally). I want something that I can target what I write to different affinity groups, without having to set up separate sub-lists. I want something that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg like iContact to track click-throughs on hot links that I so thoughtfully provide in the body of the message. I want something that the bad guys can’t easily compromise and send out spurious messages to my loyal readers. I know, I am asking for a lot.

There are a lot of contenders, including RSS feed-like elements of Plaxo, Facebook, FriendFeed, Twitter, and others, but they don’t deliver the goods, quite literally, aren’t flexible enough to do more than send link notifications (which isn’t as effective as email), and not everyone on my mailing list wants to use or even knows about these various technologies. Plus, none of these technologies really works as well as an email list for immediacy and response rates, which is why, when all is said and done, I am still using Mailman as my main distribution mechanism of my Web Informant newsletter and essays. (And hopefully will do a better job of backups, see last week’s missive for that tale of woe.)

Workable LinkedIn Groups. With triple opt-in, these are cumbersome at best, and annoying at worst. Ideally, LinkedIn could be my publishing platform, if only they could get their groups act together. But again, these rely on email notifications and only recently did LinkedIn add the ability to do threaded discussions.

Search, I still say that getting search right is the hardest thing about the Web 2.0 stuff, and most of the social networks give it short shrift. They all have some kind of search function, but they are designed for searching for names of people and not much else. LinkedIn has the ability to search for job function and location, and that is probably the one search function that I use more often. Try doing this in other services is more an exercise in frustration. To be truly useful, a social network should be able to create saved searches (you have to pay for this on LinkedIn by installing their spam-tool bar) that you can return to, or search for more recent updates to your network other than the default listing that is provided by the operator of the network. As an example, how about telling me who on my contact list has joined the network since my last login like Plaxo does in its weekly email update? To accomplish this query elsewhere takes many steps and is cumbersome.

Synchronize and update my Gmail contacts. With 9000 contacts, I know that the vast majority of them are outdated, but what can anyone do? Wouldn’t it be nice to synchronize all your social network contacts in the one place that you use them, which for me is Gmail? Sorry no can do kemosabe. Yes, Plaxo Pulse can import from Gmail but not the other way around. Cemaphore’s Mail Shadow G can synch Gmail and Outlook contacts, but that doesn’t really help me out. And while this is probably anecdotal, it seems that those people that update their contact info, the first place that they update it is in LinkedIn because this is the first step towards getting one’s job search act together.

Separate my work and personal identities. So much has been written about this warning people about the commingling of your play and work activities, I won’t add to it here. But, if you are concerned, you right now have not many choices: don’t include any personal information in your social network profile, or set up an alias and be selective about whom you invite to connect with you. Neither really works.

Are these all showstoppers keeping me from doing real productive things on social networks? Nope. But it would be nice to do more. And speaking of doing more, my podcasting partner Paul Gillin has electronic pre-release copies of his book “Secrets of Social Media Marketing” available on his Web site here, and you can pre-order the book as well.

http://ssmmBook.com

I am old enough to remember that Web sites started out being one-person operations, using simple, easy-to-learn HTML codes that didn’t take much beyond a text editor and memorizing about a dozen commands from Laura Lemay’s book. There were plenty of Web servers to choose from, and it didn’t take much programming skill to get one installed and up and running.

Now it seems like it takes a village to get your site updated and maintained. There are content management systems, advertising serving systems, Flash and streaming content delivery mechanisms, caching servers, databases, and more. So my question to you today is how many people does it take to update your company’s Web site? If the answer is more than two, maybe you need to rethink whom you have and why you need this entire crowd.

Sure, having a modern Web site is more than just putting up a couple of pages of text, and writing the right codes for paragraphs and bold face. I know that. But Web sites should be agile, should be frequently updated, should be easily updated, and shouldn’t take “approval cycles” or long food chains to get from the person that creates the content to the final stage where the world can view it. You want the content to be as close to the original thinker and creator as you possibly can.

Where have we gone with the Web? What happened to make it so difficult? Was it function creep, or security issues, or the marketing and legal departments getting mixed up with this technology? Was it because no one cares about what Web server you are running anymore (really it is a simple choice between Microsoft and Apache)? Was it because static pages of text with just a few images are so over and we have to embed video and Flashy objects to get anyone’s attention? Or because the browser is now everyone’s mission critical, must-have application and so much of what we do everyday involves going to various Web sites? Or because everyone is now a professional blogger and the average Web site designer has a bucket-full of tools to use? Or because everyone is using RSS feeds to keep track of new content and the actual site that contains this information is no longer really all that important?

It probably is some mixture of all of the above. I don’t mean to suggest that we want to go back to the really olden days, when we had command-line browsers that didn’t do much (remember Lynx?). I just think if you have a corporate Web site, take a moment to look at your chain of command, and see if you can streamline it. Let’s see if you can set a goal to update your site at least once a week, or even once a day. It doesn’t need to take a village, and your customers and your staff might really appreciate it, too.