Rudy Thurston, COO, Omnifuse

MM
So as we start this, why don’t you just start off with your name, title and an overview in terms of Omnifuse?

RT
Sure. My name is Rudy Thurston. I’m the COO of Omnifuse. Omnifuse is a social media marketing and technology company that started in earnest in 2003. We’ve been working on our social media platform for a little over 7 years, now. Almost going into 8 years, now.

MM
As a social media developer, this means that you develop a technical platform and license, or provide it to other companies?

RT
Yes. That’s one facet of our business. Our flagship product is FUSION. That’s a traditional social networking application.

We also provide strategy consulting for clients who already have existing social networks, where we help them with memberships. We help them with identifying their target demographics, and inflection points of social media into their social networks, to get more excitement, or to drive more specific types of traffic to their communities.

We specialize in building communities. Whether we’re using the technology that we created to build those communities, or using our community expertise to continue to build those communities.

MM
Perhaps we can go next with a broad overview in terms of key developments and trends in social networking and social media.

RT
Sure.

We’re a very interesting kind of company, from maybe some other social networking companies out there.

Omnifuse came about because my business partners and I had created a community around action sports - icelounge.com. We actually tested our own platform out and created our own community. We went through the whole process of seeding a community from scratch understanding the taxonomy and searchability of community while figuring out what features and functions people needed to have to create a great interactive experience.

We come from the experience of building our own community and the technology around it.

It’s interesting. Our platform is now on its fourth major version. If you think back to the days of e-commerce when people were just bolting stores on to their existing web presence; that was kind of the tactic we took originally with FUSION. It was a bolt-on community to an existing web presence.

As our product matured and we continued down the path of listening to what our customers really want from our technology offering - FUSION has become a very large content management system that includes user generated content as well as other types of managed content.

Content can be anything from a blog or form or posting a comment-a rating or review. A video file. A picture. A page.

These systems are becoming more and more tightly integrated and becoming the primary web presence for these companies. That’s been the trend for FUSION-and seeing how we’ve moved from, “We’ll make it look like yours and bolt it on,” to having all aspects of web presence completely interconnected.

MM
This reminds me of an interview with Eric Schmidt of Google on the Charlie Rose show about 2 years ago, when he said that the eighties were all about hardware. Out of that we got Seagate and Maxtor and EMC and Compaq and HP and IBM. Apple and Dell and all those kinds of things.

By the time we got out of the 80s, the innovation space had been all used up.

Then we got into the 90s and Eric said it was all about software. Then we had Microsoft and IBM and Oracle and Peoplesoft and Siebel and SAP. Guys like that.

By the 2000s, all the innovation space had really been used up for enterprise software. He said the first 6 years of the 2000s were all about Internet and infrastructure. Out of that we got Amazon, Yahoo and eBay and Google and MSN and a couple of others.

But he said that as of 2006, there’s never going to be another eBay and there’s never going to be another Yahoo.

He said, “The future-this next wave of innovation and wealth creation and successful IPO’s is going to be about small groups of people that produce and consume small chunks of information and content.”

RT
Sure.

MM
As they produce and consume, at some point, they hit a critical mass. At that point, you get Skype. You get Facebook. You get MySpace. You get LinkedIn or whatever.

So Eric Schmidt was really making the case that the next big wave is going to involve social media, or media in social networks. I can only assume that you would violently agree with that.

RT
Violently. Yes.

MM
Who are your clients? And how are your clients harnessing that notion of media social networks?

RT
I guess one of the easiest ones to talk about that shows the true power of the networks - the Icelounge test case that I spoke about-which is really the test case for our technology and our understanding of communities.

It was a hugely successful community. We created a community of roughly 50,000 skateboard enthusiasts.

MM
This was for which company?

RT
This was our own test case. This was how we actually started Omnifuse. Omnifuse was started from icelounge.com, which was our skateboarder community.

MM
That still exists? IceLounge.com?

RT
Yes. You can go there. It actually will forward you to IgnitionSk8.com. This community was so successful, it was a highly sought-after demographic, we ended up selling the community to a mobile action sports provider. Ignition was the name of the action sports mobile content provider.

We worked with them to create a seamless integration to their mobile content store.

It’s interesting because communities are really sensitive to authenticity. So if you have something that you want to sell them, you’d better do it in a very, very precise way.

As soon as you have a sense in your community that you are just trying to “sell” to the membership, your community is done. They’re not going to accept it. They lose that sense of authenticity that’s so important when you’re building community.

One of the things that was interesting was, in this demographic particularly-15- to 18-year old male skaters-was very receptive to this kind of mobile content. They could have their favorite skateboard company logo as wallpaper or their favorite shoe company pictures or ring tones for their favorite rock group. Integrating the ability for members to not only consume those pieces of content, but also to rate and review them, and tell other members how much they liked or disliked this piece of content drove their mobile store to the point where we actually had to rebuild it for them, because it wasn’t effective enough at managing all the content they were distributing.

So a skateboard community of 50,000 members, in the years between 2005 and 2006, generated additional revenue by using the community to drive pay-per-use content in their mobile store.

Again, it had to be done pretty subtly. We couldn’t just throw a whole bunch of ring tones and say, “Here, you guys. Buy these, now.” We really did it in an integrated fashion, to show when they were looking at a group and that group was DVS. We were showing them DVS-specific content.

MM
DVS?

RT
Yes. DVS is a shoe company. It’s a hardcore-skater shoe company. We were showing them DVS-related content to the members.