these things cannot be forced, they must be built on a foundation of interest. The Five Underlying Dynamics of Social Technologies
(via hiten:suzannexie:smartercities:infoneernet:mary1in)
8 months ago
Do it like Facebook
When I was building my first business in the late-90s, a friend who I was working with on a large project gave me some sage advice: Do it like Amazon.
He explained that for any kind of decision on functionality or user interface, the default answer should be Amazon’s answer. In our case we were asking: Should we have people make usernames or just register/login with their email addresses? Amazon just does email addresses, so do that.
If you didn’t do what Amazon does, there had better be a compelling reason why not, because Amazon had the benefit of the most experienced engineers and one of the largest bases of users to test with.
Now, the web has changed a lot and Facebook is the company that’s pioneeringinternet innovation. Facebook has over 200 engineers — arguably the most experienced team in social-driven web platforms — and over 300 million users.Facebook’s testing many new changes to its site daily with large sample sizes of users, so most parts of Facebook are the way they are for a good reason.
When you’re making all the little decisions necessary at the beginning of your next web project, you might want to consider the default position: Do it like Facebook.
Now of course that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t break with Facebook’s way occasionally or even all the time. But you need to know the rules (and who’s making them) before you can break them.
tedr:
eMarketer shares a list of action items that brands can do that will be most relevant to consumers.
What they should have been taking away all of this time — and have increasingly begun to — are the concepts of the constant beta and agile development,” he says. “Marketers need to abandon the time-limited campaign online and start to think of it as a constant application of a rigorous discipline. They should think of their marketing the same way that Facebook puts out a new feature every two weeks, tweaks it, changes it, and re-releases it. It’s not a coincidence that’s brought Facebook 400 million users and Twitter 40 million. We’ve been applying them to Kashi.com for three years now and have seen results beyond anything that a single campaign could do on its own.
How we got 18,000 beta users in 4 weeks
YES!
We got 18,000 users in our 4-week private beta by emailing relevant bloggers demo codes for their readers. In a Hacker News thread about getting users there were some recommendations to start your own blog and build an audience. That sounds hard. It’s much easier to just borrow other peoples’ audiences when you need them.
Find small blogs (10k-50k subscribers) relevant to your market and offer them 100-1000 signups with a custom-branded demo code. The blogger likes getting an exclusive for her readers, and the readers like getting insider access to a hot new tool. Contact a bunch of them at once, we felt lucky to have a roughly 20% hit rate.
To find these blogs you can try looking for stuff via Google blog search, although it frequently returns a lot of spam sites. We found searching delicious tags was a better way since it’s got more of a human filter around it.
The best way to find blogs is to give personal demo codes to people who missed out on a blog code in exchange for a list of blogs they read. This demo code application form can also get you a wealth of other market information if you ask more questions. It was on a form like this that our users told us what our premium/pay features should be.
Keep track of the contacts at the blogs that post your demo codes. When you launch, email them again and they’ll cover you once more. This also results in a burst of coverage around launch so you seem to be everywhere.
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