Dave Naffziger's Blog

Fred Wilson has a great post stressing the importance of Authenticity of consumer web services (although it applies to any business really, it is particularly important to the consumer Internet. Seth Godin also stresses the importance of authenticity in ‘All Marketers are Liars‘

And, it can’t be faked. At Judy’s Book, we initially expected to make our money from local advertising (small businesses). However, the economics aren’t and won’t be right side up on this model for a long time. So, we’ve shifted towards content that is closer to business sustainability: local sales, local and online coupons and great deals.

The trouble is, we tried to tell our users that we were making this shift because they asked for it. To be fair, they had expressed interest in this content, but they weren’t banging down our doors telling us to add it. They were banging down our doors telling us to fix their inbox (long standing bug that is painful for our most frequent users). So, not surprisingly our users howled when we made the shift and tried to tell them its because they asked for it. I’m pretty sure we learned our lesson, and I’d certainly advise other sites (particularly community sites) to be as up front as possible when they make changes – don’t try to ‘spin’ it.