Social Media As Scalable Intimacy

by Nathan W. Burke on January 12, 2009

Mike Troiano has a new blog and idea called “Scalable Intimacy“, which describes the potential of social media to create real, measurable value for brands. From his manifesto:

Marketing = Scale + Mediocrity

Let’s face it folks… marketing has become what HR used to be, before somebody figured out we were spending more money on people than on anything else. It’s the place where arty intellectuals can travel, interact with like-minded pretty faces over cocktails, and hide from the accountability that has transformed every other corner of the 21st century corporation. Most marketing people are mediocre. Most marketing is the sexy part of sales without the pesky accountability, and it is worthless. Harsh, perhaps, but you know it’s true.

and

Social media presents the path of Marketing back to respectability. It is the path back to responsibility for actual Sales; to being the people within a company who truly understand the who, what, where and why of current and prospective customers. It presents an opportunity for direct access to the people outside the company whom we now know control its brand, its fortune, and its fate.

Social Media = Scalable Intimacy

Social media is not about CPM. It is about investing in relationships that create more measureable economic value than they cost. It is about engaging with the individual people who collectively decide whether to buy or not buy your product, like it or dislike it, recommend it or trash it, shape it or ignore it.

The term really appeals to me: Scalable Intimacy. When I hear the term, the word “intimacy” jumps out at me. It really does a great job at describing the feeling associated with the relationships we have with other people through the tools we collectively call social media. Though I’ve never met the majority of the people I talk to using twitter or the comments on my blogs, I feel like I actually know them and have some kind of friendship.

Now, I’m just a person. But if I were a brand manager, I would definitely want to find a way to replicate this “intimacy” between my brand and the people out there. That’s where the “scalable” part comes in. How can a company create scalable intimacy? How can they keep all the warm and familiar goodness of one-to-one communication while talking to a large audience?

I have two examples of the very beginning of scalable intimacy. The first is Dell Computer. What started off as one person monitoring and engaging with customers on twitter has turned into a 28 person team of Dell employees covering every one of Dell’s product lines. Mention something about Dell on twitter, and I’d be willing to bet you’ll get a response.

The second example is Scott Monty at Ford. Scott is the head of social media at Ford, and he’s an animal. He’s all over twitter, he’s got 3 blogs, he’s podcasting, youtubing, you name it, he’s there. Got a question about Ford? He’s got an answer. Have a question you want to ask Ford’s CEO publicly? Done. He’s turned to twitter and asked if anyone had any questions for Alan Mulally. Of course, twitter users had questions about Ford’s strategy, the bailout, etc. And Mulally didn’t shy away from any question.

These are just two examples of companies trying to scale intimacy using social media tools. I’d love to hear other examples. I think the idea of scalable intimacy is still in its infancy, but this is where marketing is headed. I urge you to read the rest of Mike’s Manifesto here.

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Advanced Startup Marketing Tip- Using BlogTalkRadio

by Nathan W. Burke on January 5, 2009

I have a confession to make: I’m a blogtalkradio fanboy. Yep. It’s true. Since I started using it, I haven’t shut up about it. When I did a presentation at podcamp Boston last year, blogtalkradio was one of my tips on building an audience for the content you create.

With that confession out of the way, let me tell you what blogtalk radio is, and why it rules.

What Is BlogTalkRadio?

Well, here’s what they say about themselves:

BlogTalkRadio is the social radio network that allows users to connect quickly and directly with their audience. Using an ordinary telephone and computer hosts can create free, live, call-in talk shows with unlimited participants that are automatically archived and made available as podcasts. No software download is required. Listeners can subscribe to shows via RSS into iTunes and other feed readers. Our network has produced tens of thousands of episodes since it launched in August of 2006.

Here’s how I describe it: You can have your own live podcast where listeners can call in and ask questions. And when you’re done with it, you automatically get an mp3 of the recording, as well as embed code that you can add to your web site. And it’s all free.

It works like this:

  1. You sign up for an account (for free), and they give you a phone number to call. That’s your host number. Whenever you schedule a show, that’s the number you call to start the show.
  2. When you’re ready to start a show, you call the number and log in at the site. You have a dashboard that shows any callers. Over at blogstring, Sarah and I used to do a show on BlogTalkRadio. I’d give her the number and she’d call in. Her number would appear on the dashboard and I’d just click on it to enable her “mic”. When the show started, it sounded like we were in the same room even though we were in different states.
  3. You also get a listener call in number. Throughout the show and on our blog, we’d give out the number and would encourage people to call in. Again, as soon as someone called I could see it on the dashboard.
  4. You get embed code- As soon as you schedule your show, blogtalkradio gives you an embed code to add to your blog/site. That way, your blog readers can listen to you live right on your blog while you broadcast, or they can replay a show after it is over.
  5. You’re listed in the blogtalkradio directory- BlogTalkRadio is not only a production and distribution service, they’re also a podcast discovery destination. While most members are there to have their own show, there are also users just looking to find something to listen to. Blogtalkradio has a categorized directory of shows as well as a “What’s On Now” section where listeners can browse through shows that are happening that moment.

The Benefits

  1. Content for your site– This is a no-brainer. Having more content for your site is always a good thing, and having embedded audio is always a good thing.
  2. Two-way Live Communication– Of course I’m a huge fan of blogging, but it’s really a method of staggered one-way communication. You write a blog post. Someone reads it and leaves a comment. You think about it and comment back. Though it’s definitely a conversation, it’s pretty impersonal and measured. It’s completely different when you’re talking to someone live. There’s something real about that.
  3. Networking- When you’re talking about a subject you’re excited about and get to talk with people that share the same passion, it’s a great networking opportunity. And I’m not talking about a “let’s exchange business cards and pretend we care about each other” kind of networking. I’m talking about a “wow, this person really knows what they’re talking about and I’d love to talk with them more” kind of networking.
  4. Multi-Channel Promotion– Rather than just having a post on your blog, when you use blogtalkradio, you have content on their site, on your blog, on iTunes, etc. Instead of trying to lure people to your site to hear what you have to say, the content is in multiple places. It’s putting content where people are instead of trying to bring people to your content. That’s a hell of a lot easier, isn’t it?
  5. Thought Leadership– I know, I know. “Thought Leadership” is the buzziest of buzz words. But I think it’s obvious to say that if you are consistently and knowledgeably speaking about a topic, there’s a much better chance of being perceived as an expert.

The Risk

Okay, so if you’ve read this far, there’s a pretty good chance that you now understand the upside of using blogtalkradio. So now let me tell you about the risk.

If you use blogtalkradio just to talk about your business, you’ll be ignored. Now, if you’re a company like Microsoft or Sun, you can get away with it. But if you’re a startup without a huge fan base, you’ll probably be seen as a shill. Think about a corollary in real life: think of the last commercial you heard on the radio and imagine that instead of the show you were listening to, the show was instead just an hour long commercial. Would you listen? I’m guessing you would not.

Here’s what I’ve done with some success (at least in my mind): when I worked at matchmine, I had the pleasure of hosting a semi-weekly show called “Talking On The Internet” with Trent Adams. Trent was the founder of matchmine, an officer in the Data Portability Work Group, and pretty much the smartest guy I’ve ever known. He also has a top-notch bullshit detector, so when I convinced him to do a show with me, it was an unspoken law that we wouldn’t just be matchmine cheerleaders. Instead, we talked about broader topics that touched on some of the work we were doing at matchmine, and at the end of the show we plugged the company site and blog. You can hear the shows we did here.

The Effort

The hardest part of having a show on blogtalkradio is the planning. The best way to do it is to have a prep sheet that chunks out the segments you want to cover in 5 minute intervals. It’s amazing how quickly 30 minutes can zoom by…especially if people call in. If anyone wants an example of a prep sheet, shoot me an email and I’ll dig one up for you.

Also, after all prep is done, and before you’re about to go live with the show, it’s time to promote. We’d always do a blog post giving the time, subject, notes, phone number, etc. beforehand, and right before the show was to go live we’d post the URL and phone number on twitter. That seemed to work really well.

Despite the lengthy post here, I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface of blogtalkradio. Please let me know if you have any questions and I’ll be happy to help out.

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The Problems of Competition: The Cost of Switching and Sequential Building Blocks

by Nathan W. Burke on January 2, 2009

And the winner of the most convoluted and awkward blog post title of 2009 thus far goes to……….this post.

This morning I was going through a bunch of unread emails, unsubscribing from lists and deleting junk. I then saw an email from a service called Soocial. The email let me know that the service had completed a full backup of my gmail address book. I vaguely remember doing something like that, and I definitely didn’t remember what Soocial was all about. I went to the site and found that soocial is a universal address book that synchs contacts between macs, blackberries, gmail, phones and outlook. They promise "hassle-free" contact management, and even go so far as to have a cartoonish photo of David Hasslehoff on their site:

Hassle-Free Contacts

I took about five minutes to check out the service, and it looks like it is as promised. But I had an overwhelming "so what?" feeling. Why? Because I already use something else to accomplish the same task.

The Cost Of Switching

Without knowing it, I was doing a cost-benefit analysis and decided that the cost of importing my contacts and the risk associated with giving my login credentials to yet another service was just too much. The switch wasn’t worth it. Which made me ask the next question: what would soocial need to have in order for me to make the change? Then the question moved into more general grounds: what does any competitor need to have to get users to switch from a service they’re currently using?

Think about it for a second. If you use flickr, what would a new competitor need to offer in order to get you to join and bail on flickr? If you use twitter, what would the new microblogging/status tool need to have to get you?

The first answer to this question is: well, it depends. I mean, if we’re talking about a "social" service that derives its value on the community of users, that’s one thing. A new competitor to twitter could have any feature you can think of, but if it didn’t have people using it, it wouldn’t matter. But let’s ignore the social stuff for a minute. Let’s talk specifically about services that are kind of in-itself offerings. Things like contact management tools. Like text editors, blogging software, etc. Applications that matter to you and you alone regardless of what others say.

Let’s pretend you use MS Word. Price aside, what would a new word processing competitor need to have to get you to switch?

Sequential Building Blocks

Here’s an example I had today. Since switching over to using a mac, I’ve been looking for a decent alternative to Windows Live Writer. I absolutely love WLW and I just can’t find something comparable for the mac. I was so used to it that I had all the shortcuts memorized and composing a post was a breeze. I’ve tried everything I can find for the mac, but nothing does it for me.

I’ve been using Qumana for the last two months, and it’s decent. It’s very basic, but it gets the job done. But when I hear of another blog editor for the mac, I’m always willing to check it out. I heard about a similar product called Blogo and had to give it a try. The interface was really slick and simple, but it lacked some of the features I’d grown accustomed to in Qumana. Even though Blogo had features that Qumana lacked, I bailed.

Why? Sequential building blocks.

To me, a new competitor needs to have everything plus. That is, it needs to have all the features of the product I’m currently using along with additional features. Otherwise I’m out. Maybe I’m more impatient than the public at large, I’m not sure. But if someone comes up with an alternative to Excel, it better have everything excel has…..and more. Otherwise what’s the point?

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Awesome Example of a “Vote For Us” Email

by Nathan W. Burke on December 31, 2008

As a startup, it makes sense to do awards submissions. One of the biggest ones out there is “The Crunchies”, a competition put on by TechCrunch to award the best startups and internet/tech innovations of the year. This is the second annual competition, and final voting just started. This afternoon I got the following email from 12seconds.tv:

Dear 12ers,

The Crunchies, Baby.

Because of your participation in 12seconds, we’ve been nominated for a Crunchie. It’s like the Oscars but for startup nerds and it means a lot to us. It’s enough that we were nominated but we’re still going for broke (literally) and we’d like you to vote for us once a day, every day until you can’t vote anymore. If you’d like a daily reminder, please emailftw@12seconds.tv and we’ll remind you every day at noon PST. We’ll even include a daily affirmation like, “you are really good looking” with every email. Thanks for helping us out.

Wow. I love it. The voice is just awesome. It’s conversational, it’s humorous, it’s self-deprecating, it’s honest. I love the idea of creating an email list that will send a message every day at noon to remind people to vote again. I have no idea if it’ll be effective, but it’s great. I also love the ftw@ email address. For the win. Love it.


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Startups- How Often Should You e-mail Your Users?

by Nathan W. Burke on December 29, 2008

If user acquisition is the first problem startups face, the second is getting those users to continue to come back and be active on the site. After all the time, money and effort spent to get new users to register,  online startups have to go one step further to find ways to turn new users into active members. While there are more than a few methods of motivating users to come back, this post focuses on direct contact. Specifically we’ll be talking about email.

Whenever you sign up for a new service online, you’re likely to see a required field asking for your email address. There are few exceptions. Many times you’ll get a verification email with an embedded link that needs to be clicked in order to activate your account. To the startup company, this is great for two reasons: 1) you can filter out spam and fake registrations and 2) you know that the person behind the registration can be contacted at a working email address.

Though bloggers and industry jouranlists have been predicting the death of email for years, direct email communication with a userbase remains the single best way to relay updates, new features, and other motivating factors to get members to return to a site. Think of how often you check your email, then compare that to how often you check out RSS feeds, twitter, facebook, etc. Since people are constantly looking at their inbox, sending an email update is the most efficient way to reach the largest number of people that have indicated interest in what you have to offer.

When someone signs up for your service, how long will they remember you without a reminder? It’s a great question. Think of how many times you’ve signed up for something, tried it out, and forgot about it. If you’re like me, that happens pretty often. Sure, I may see the "Welcome to _____" email later, but if I don’t see that in a few hours after signing up, it drops out of sight in my inbox.

How Often Should You Send Updates?

"So," you’re saying "I get it. It makes sense to send updates via email to users. But how often should you do it?" Well, I’m glad I pretended you asked that question. It’s a really good one with a certain amount of risk involved. I mean, send too often and users will be annoyed and unsubscribe. Send too infrequently, and people will forget about you. It’s a tough one.

I decided to take a look at some of the newsletters I receive to see- on average- how often they send an email. Here’s what I found:

  • 1-800Flowers.com- 7.5 Days
  • Adobe 22.3 Days
  • Amazon- 5 Days
  • Apple- 4 Days
  • BestBuy Reward Zone- 8 Days
  • CafePress- 3 Days
  • Dopplr- 32 Days
  • Evernote- 23.5 Days
  • Going.com- 7 Days
  • IdeaBlob- 30 Days
  • 12seconds.tv- 8 Days
  • Joost- 10 Days
  • Magnify.net- 18 Days
  • MarketingExperiments.com- 3 Days
  • MisterWong- 3 Days
  • TED- 15 Days
  • Utterli- 12 Days
  • Vator.tv- 3 Days
  • Zazzle.com- 5 Days
  • TripAdvisor- 14 Days

Note: These include updates only. I’m not including things like friend requests, support emails, etc.

Looking at this semi-random sample of both startups and established companies, you can see that there’s a decent disparity of frequency. That makes sense. Additionally, you’ll also notice that an average doesn’t really represent the frequency of updates, as things like holidays can change the average (a company can send a note every day near a holiday and very infrequently at other points during the year, thus skewing the average considerably).

But The Right Frequency Is Subjective

So, here’s the problem- everyone has a different interpretation of what is too much and what is too little. To me, getting an email from Amazon.com every five days is excessive, while getting something from Apple every 4 days doesn’t seem like too much. And I’m fully aware that from a logical standpoint, that makes no sense. Both are trying to sell me something each time, so I should look at them the same way, right? Well, I don’t. And that’s what makes it hard.

So with illogical users, each with a different interpretation of the right update frequency, what should you do? One idea is to have the users let you know how often they’d like your updates. Let them decide if they want weekly, monthly, bi-monthly etc. updates. If they choose the monthly option, you can package all of your weekly updates together as one big monthly update.

But, like everything else, there’s risk. Once you ask a user how often they want to receive your updates, they start to think about getting emails from you. When a user is thinking about frequency of emails, they’re much more likely to unsubscribe from your list than if they just blindly register without giving it any thought. The simple act of asking them how often they’d like to hear from you may make them answer "never." But I’d say that’s okay. If they really don’t want to hear from you, that’s their right, and it’s not likely that they’re the kind of user that would allow you to send them newsletters without clicking "unsubscribe."

Sending News vs. Begging For Logins

The other big question is this: why are you sending the email in the first place? Do you have something truly newsworthy, or are you just trying to throw enough content together to send something, hoping users will login? If you’ve really got something that users will be excited about, that’s one thing. Just sending a re-worded buzzword-filled press release just isn’t a good idea. When users see frequent, value-free emails, they’ll just drop you. It will happen.

Summary

So, what’s the magic number for you? Also, as a user, what’s your email threshold from sites/services you care about? To me, this is an entirely subjective question that depends on the service offered, the quality of the updates, etc. I’d love to hear what people think.

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Scrapplet- Whoa….Buggy.

by Nathan W. Burke on December 23, 2008

RadWebTech has just launched ScrAPPlet, a browser based "blank canvas that makes it easy for
anyone to customize a page, connect social profiles, or design a portable
site with drag and drop ease." While other social network aggregators and bridges have used the "enabling users to connect to multiple accounts" angle, scrapplet has gone for customization and data portability as their lead message. And I’m a sucker for the data portability stuff.

I like the idea and the screenshots, so I went to check it out. Boy is it buggy. I can’t honestly give an opinion of the service, as I couldn’t get it to work right. First, I tried to sign up:

And then….

Hmmm. Ouch. Well, hey, it’s a beta, right? I understand they can be buggy, so let’s try to forge ahead.

So, if you go to the home page after signing up, it does show that I’m logged in:

But clicking on "My Home Page" gives me a 404 again. Aight, fine. Let’s go to My Scrapplets. Okay, so this works, and since I have no scrapplets available, it’s time to make one:

Looks like these thing cost points to make, and I’ve got 500 available. Okay. Works for me. But then……

404.

Okay, I’m out.

Since I really can’t do anything, I’ll just share what the press release says. Maybe they’re just getting slammed right now because they just opened their beta.

Scrapplet Extends, Enhances, and Integrates Facebook, MySpace, Wikis, Blogs, and Websites

Personal and customizable online canvas breaks down Social Media walls to help everyone create, consolidate, and share their Web

December 22, 2008, Fort Lauderdale, FL RadWebTech today announced the public beta release of Scrapplet (www.scrapplet.com), browser-based blank canvases that make it easy for anyone to customize a page, connect social
profiles, or design a portable site with drag and drop ease.

Unlike everyday, do-it-yourself Web site builders, Scrapplet is a hub for social profiles, the relationships maintained across each network, as well as a showcase for ideas, thoughts, experiences, and expertise. It started as an application for Facebook and quickly evolved to provide seamless integration with MySpace, Twitter, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr and
more. Now as a standalone Web service, Scrapplet makes it easy to drag and drop content and functionality from each network, tying distributed connections together, while creating a new kind of virtual website.

Update: Though I still can’t do anything to create a scrapplet, I happened upon the "explore" page:

Which leads me to the most popular scapplet page:

Click on the above picture to see the most popular scrapplet page.

Well, since I can’t try it out for myself, I can’t say much about the actual data portability and social features. From what I can see, it’s a drag and drop version of geocities. But again, I can’t really judge something I couldn’t try.

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SignalPatterns Launches Publicly

by Nathan W. Burke on December 17, 2008

Back in October, I wrote about Signal Patterns launching a facebook app to match personality traits to voting behavior. Today, they’ve announced the official launch of their two first web apps: Personality Patterns and Music Patterns. From their press release:

The applications are now available on SignalPatterns.com, a first-of-its-kind website where people use professional psychology tools, developed by leading PhD researchers and scientists, to discover psychological insights, connect to other like-minded individuals, and for content and music discovery.

The Signal Patterns applications offer people unprecedented insight to how psychological traits influence their behavior, emotions, relationships and content choices. This is the first time professional level grade tools have been incorporated into publicly available online social applications. In addition, the Music Patterns application offers personalized music discovery and automatically creates customized playlists based on a person’s "music personality."

So, I took the personality patterns test, which looks a lot like this;

After a long personality test, a registration prompt came up, though I was already logged in. There was no option to log in, so I had to try to register again. When I did that, it said my email address was already on file, and I had to login again. When I logged in, I found I’d completely wasted my time, as my account page said I’d never taken the personality test. Boo.

Perhaps this is another one of the tests. Maybe they thought it would be fun to piss someone off and see if their answers are different after logging them out after taking the whole test. That would actually be pretty funny.

So, since I’ve come this far, I took the test again. All 40 questions.

Here’s what I got:

Hey, maybe it was a test to find out if I’m "flappable."

So, what do you do with it?

Well, you can:

1. See how your friends compare to you by having your facebook, imeem, last.fm, flickr and myspace friends sign up and take the quiz.

2. Find people like you that have already become members on SignalPatterns.

3. Show your patterns- You can get embed code for a badge to put on your blog or social network profile.

I’m not sure I fully "get" Signal Patterns. I know they’re saying that they’re passionate about helping people know more about themselves, but I’m just not sure there’s anything left to do after getting questionnaire results. It’s like taking a strengthsfinder quiz and finding out what kind of work you should do, but instead, you just find out some personality traits.

If someone were to walk up to me and let me know that I’m a calm and creative person, I guess I’d thank them, but I don’t know if there’s any way to apply that information toward anything.

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Telonu- Rave, Rant and Rate Your Company

by Nathan W. Burke on December 16, 2008

Today, telonu launched the public beta of their service, a community site where users can talk about their employer anonymously. The site mixes reviews and ratings of companies with networking features. From their press release:

Telonu Inc. today announced the beta launch of its free user generated content community website, www.telonu.com focused on the workplace. Users gain valuable insight to what insiders are saying about a company. In turn, they can share what’s on their mind regarding the workplace, the people they work with and other important things in their lives, such as schools, brands purchased, and even what’s hot for lunch!

The Upside

When looking for a new job, it’s hard to find out what a prospective employer is actually all about. Every company talks about their “culture”, but how can you get an objective opinion about working at a company until you actually work there? Telonu tries to tackle this problem by having employees anonymously post opinions about their employer.

Taking a look at a review of Citigroup I see this:

Go to an ivy league undergrad — work on the Street — Go back to a top tier Business School — get lured into Citi bank thinking that you will climb up the corporate ladder faster as you have a combination of people savyy and financial engineering smarts picked up at B School — and then get laid off. This is the story of hot shots at Citi and others — not to mention our friends at Bear and Lehman … this is a white color top tier recession — that we have never seen

On the other end of the spectrum there are posts like this one about myspace:

I was at a party recently in the bay Area and there were some facebook employees there. I was just amazed at the fact that they believed that Facebook was larger than MySpace. We are far better than facebook, have a lot more users and also make tons more $ — guys — get over it!

The Downside

While it’s easy to see that there could be value in a site that gives a real, insider’s look at a company, there are some drawbacks:

1. Authentication- Since the foundation of telonu is built on anonymity, there’s nothing to prevent a user from signing on to the service and pretending to be an employee of a company. For instance, if I have a competitor I don’t like, I could post a negative review and say I work at the company.

2. Spam- On the other hand, employees of companies can use telonu to talk about how great they are, using it as a spam vehicle.

3. Motivation- The one question that comes to mind is: why would someone take the time to review a company unless they’re extremely unsatisfied (as can be seen with people posting layoff notices) or are using the service as a marketing channel.

4. Anonymous Slander– Aside from rating companies, users can also rate and comment on individual employees. And since the users are anonymous and are not authenticated, anyone can say they work with anyone else and call them a big fat jerk.

Have a look at the site here and let me know what you think. Would you use telonu when researching a company? Is the system too open to manipulation?

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10 Tips On Attacking The Chicken and Egg Problem: New Users Won’t Sign Up Because No One Is There

by Nathan W. Burke on December 15, 2008

Last night I made a quick post on Hacker News, asking the following question:

I am curious: what are your biggest PR/Marketing problems as a startup? Is it getting noticed? Getting coverage? Differentiation? What problems are startups having when it comes to marketing?

Looking through the comments I saw the following:

1 point by vaksel 10 hours ago | link
The chicken and the egg is probably the biggest problem. The new users don’t want to join/buy because you lack content/users/reputation etc

Followed by:

1 point by josefresco 5 hours ago | link
Tell me about it, my social site relies on heavy user participation (in fact requires it) to be useful to other users. And unlike Digg, my content is worthless 24 hours later meaning I can’t ‘seed’ the site with my own content effectively.

The Chicken And The Egg

When it comes to sites that are heavily dependent on user generated content, one problem stands out: They need to acquire users that will participate on their site, but users won’t sign up unless there are enough users there already. It happens all the time. Over on blogstring, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve written some equivalent of the following statement:

“This site/service looks great and has some really interesting features, but until there are a lot of people there, I won’t really be able to get the most out of it.”

Think of any online service you use. How useful would facebook be if none of your friends were on it? How useful would twitter be if there were only a handful of users? All of the social services we use would be worthless if no one was using them.

And the problem isn’t easy to solve. It’s circular: You can’t get new users because there aren’t users there already. People don’t want to go into an empty restaurant, and the same goes for online services. The perceived utility of a web app is directly proportional to the amount of people already using it. So, how do you get new users so you can get new users?

How To Get Users So You Can Get More Users

So, again, I want to preface this list by saying that this is in no way exhaustive, and is just a jumping off point. Some of these items will be of the “duh” variety, but following these steps will be a good start.

  1. The Friends And Family Round– Since this is the first item in the list, let’s assume you have no members whatsoever. In my article, “Promoting Your Startup- It’s All About Timing“, I talked about using your friends and family as your first group of users. From that post:
    “Friends and family- It’s a hell of a lot easier to apologize to your uncle Frank when a feature fails than a complete stranger that feels like they’re wasting their time when there’s a hiccup. I always like to email all of my friends and family and set their expectations, letting them know this is a project I’m working on that isn’t quite ready for the world yet. I tell them there are going to be problems, so please let me know when something isn’t quite right. Your friends and family are much more apt to take the time to beta test what you’re working on, and they’ll tell you when something is busted.”
  2. Make It Easy To Sign Up– You live and die by your registration form. Trust me on this one. Make it absolutely idiot proof for a new user to sign up. There are several ways to accomplish this. I’ve seen some registrations that just require a username, password and email address, then once those are submitted, ask you more questions. In my experience, users are much more likely to sign up when just asked for 3 pieces of info compared to having a long, complicated, exhaustive form with 25 fields. Even if your service depends on having lots of information on each user, I’d recommend sacrificing the volume of data at the very beginning in order to get the user to initially register.Once they’re a member and you have their email address, you have a point of contact to get them to come back. You can always email the user saying “thanks so much for signing up a week ago. We’ve noticed that you haven’t been back since signing up. Was it something we said? If you have any questions at all about our service, feel free to contact us at ______”. It’s much better to have a registered user with a communication channel than no user at all because your form is far too long.
  3. Contribute Content Yourself- Everyone knows Tom from myspace because he’s the default friend. Imagine what it would be like to be Tom when he was one of, say, 10 people on myspace. I’m guessing he spent all his time actually using the service himself. If you’re the first and only member of your new whatever, use it. Use it to create content often. If you’re expecting thousands (or millions) of users to sign up and use what you’ve built, you’d better use it yourself. Let’s say you have a social news site. Well, get out there and submit stories yourself, vote on them, etc. Set an example for other users.
  4. SEO and Clear Copy– Make sure your site is as easy to find as possible. Make your content and your calls to action crystal clear, and lead with the benefit users will get. Though SEO will not solve all your problems, it will definitely hurt you if you ignore it. For instance, how many people find twitter through a google search of “microblog” or “short messaging”? My guess is very few. But on the other hand, not having copy related to the category of service you offer will put you out of the game.Having clear, concise copy that lets users know a) what you’re offering b) why they should care c) how the can sign up is really the core of what your copy should address. I’m beating a dead horse with all the twitter examples, but look at what they have on the home page:

    Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

    Look at that. Now that’s boiled down copy. We’re talking about a microblogging platform that can be used on multiple devices. Twitter is not a simple thing to understand, but the copy sure is.

  5. Automatically Invite– I don’t really like this one, but for the purpose of this post, I should at least touch on it. You know how when you add an app on facebook, you inevitably get the “Add Friends” screen? That’s what I’m talking about here. A lot of services will automatically bring up a screen allowing you to invite your friends to join. Whether on facebook or through importing contacts from your email provider, this is one way to increase the referral conversion rate. I’m not a big fan because it’s annoying to the user, and if done incorrectly, the user could “spam” all of their contacts asking them to join inadvertently. That does not equal happy users.
  6. Have Viral Hooks– Andrew Chen has an awesome post entitled “What’s Your Viral Loop?” where he talks about “the steps a user goes through between entering the site and inviting the next set of new users”. In one example, Andrew talks about Slide.com. Users findout about Slide.com when they see a widget embedded in someone’s myspace page. If they like it, they can just click on the widget itself and sign up for an account. After you’ve created an account, you can also click to post a bulletin to all of your myspace friends letting them know you’ve added the widget.This is great in multiple ways. First, by having an embeddable widget that can be placed on a myspace/facebook profile, you’ve created something that can be seen by a large population. Second, because the widget links to your signup page, every user that sees it is one click away from signing up for your service. Third, every time someone embeds your widget, you’ll have another link to your site, thus, giving you more google juice. The more incoming links, the higher your page rank. The higher your page rank, the higher your position in search results.
  7. Give Credit For Users That Invite– This one is really dependent on the kind of service you offer. If you have a service that involves limiting the amount of x that users can access, it can work. For instance, there’s a service I’ve seen called jigsaw, which is a directory of business professionals. The idea is that jigsaw has contact info for hard-to-reach people. When you sign up, you get a few credits, which you spend to get contact information. If you enter contact info for someone that isn’t in the system already, you earn credits.This kind of credit system can also work to entice members to invite their friends. Tell them that if they invite a friend who then signs up, they’ll get one credit. Invite ten, get ten. You get the idea. Find a reward mechanism that will motivate users to invite others to join
  8. Target Specific Groups– SpringPad is a great example of how a startups is targeting specific groups to get people to sign up to use their web app. SpringPad is an online notebook that keeps track of to-dos, contacts, appointments, etc. It’s a fairly general tool, but instead of just trying to appeal to everyone, springpad took a different approach: They looked at different target groups and created content and landing pages for each group, and a directory of content specific to each category.For instance, springpad looked at pregnant women as a group that would benefit from an online notebook. They then created a Family & Parenting section of SpringAdvice that contains useful, targeted content. At the end of each post, they have a “Use It” link, which launches the springpad application if a user is logged in, or a signup form for users that are not.

    No matter what you’re offering, I’d bet you can think of different groups of users that could benefit from what you’re offering. For instance, think of twitter. You could think that twitter would be useful for conference attendees. In that case, if you were twitter, you could write blog posts with useful information for attendees of specific conferences with links to sign up for your service.

  9. Find Complainers– This one piggybacks nicely with #8. If your service solves a problem people have, then fire up google and find people complaining about what your app solves. Think about it: people love to complain online. It’s in our nature. Go out and find people that are complaining about something you can help and let them know you have the solution.Usually these complainers hang out in forums and blogs, so be careful not to sound like a spammer when you reach out to them. Let them know you have something that might help, and tell them that you’d be happy to answer any questions they may have.
  10. Run A Contest– Sure, this one might be cheating, but it can work. If you have the ability to give something of value away, go for it. Run a weekly contest where you give away something to one of your users. Use the credit system and give people one credit for signing up, one for every friend they get to sign up, and for predefined goals (uploading a video, etc). Sure, you’re baiting them to sign up with a prize, but you’re also getting them to try out your features in order to gain additional chances to win. For more information on using a contest to promote a user acquisition campaign, see my post “Using Social Media Tools To Promote A User Acquisition Campaign“.

Well, that’s a good start. I hope you find something on this list useful, and I wish you all the best in getting new users to sign up for your service.

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Veedow- Shopping Without Searching

by Nathan W. Burke on December 12, 2008

Veedow is a shopping discovery site that recommends products to users based on their expressed interests. The moment I heard the word "discovery", I was all over it. Frequent readers of this blog may remember that until October, I worked at matchmine, a media discovery company that recommended music, video, podcasts and blogs to users based on their interests and tastes. Because of that, I’m extremely interested in any recommendation and discovery services, so hearing about a site that took the discovery angle to a shopping site immeidately piqued my interest.

How It Works

From the veedow site:

Veedow collects a wide range of products from multiple sources and distributes it to users according to their chosen interests. The system generates a personalised page where users can rate any product, add it to their wish list, suggest it to friends or comment on it. We collate all these actions to learn people’s tastes and generate better recommendations for them and the whole community. For instance, when people leave high ratings for a specific product, this will likely be displayed to other users with the same interest.

When you sign up for veedow, you’re asked to select your interests:

Once your interests are added, a personalized set of recommendations can be found on your veedow page:

You can highlight each product and see:

Clicking the more button will show you user reviews and clicking the "shop this" button will redirect you to a page where you can buy the product.

Summary

Veedow, like any discovery engine, serves a niche interest: people looking for something that they don’t know exists. So if you’re looking to find something new, it’s really a great service. For instance, one of my interests in the Animal section was dogs. Going through my recommendations, I found this:

This is exactly what I need, though I had no idea it existed. My dog keeps trying to jump up in the front seat while I’m driving, and I keep having to elbow him to keep him back. Not so much fun while driving from Boston to NY.

So, if you’re looking for inspiration, I’d suggest checking out veedow. One note: it would be really cool if you could go into "gift mode", where you can change your interest settings for, say, a relative, allowing you to add their interests and see what veedow recommends for them. It would be a very cool holiday shopping tool. But I guess you can just change your own interest settings and accomplish the same thing.

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