You don't need people to make your apps social
Being Dugg. The Slashdot Effect. Having your site Farked. All facets of the network effects that are indicative of, but not exclusive to, Web 2.0 applications. This is the sensible result of the impact community involvement directly has on new media services - allowing users (registered or otherwise) to access, remix, share or interpret your core data in new, innovative, interesting ways.
So while the "Social Web" continues to be all the rage and legions of new sites pop up daily and existing media companies creep towards adoption of emerging paradigms with tons of phenomenal features centered around viral user interactivity, I'm reminded of the fundamentals of network effects, and what makes such services work in the first place. So consider this a lesson in pragmatic technical marketing next time you start pondering how to evolve your online projects.
I realize that not everything's got to have a friends list, AJAX-laden commenting systems, support for one or more IM clients, or tagging to the nth degree. The real magic is in delivering a positive user experience so that growing numbers gravitate towards and frequently use your stuff, promoting it communally.
Recently I implemented a little feature on KUAM.com exhibiting the content of ours that people are consuming with the greatest frequency - "The Most". Similar lists have proven hugely successful across media platforms - from the old radio countdown shows, to Letterman's nightly Top 10 rundowns, to VH1's infinite collection of ordered views of modern day pop culture. So it became obvious to me that expressing such a popularity contest through hypermedia was an opportunity that needed to be exploited. Consequently, we've been able to build a winning social service...without people.
The Most has been received extremely well, has generated positive feedback and has boosted our web traffic, so in that regard it's an instant hit. As a result, our video downloads have tripled. People are re-reading articles and bookmarking items they've already gone over. Users are checking back to see if their search keywords generate more and different results than with previous queries. It's a network effect of a different variety - the "Wow...people are checking this out...it must be good!" upshot. There's no direct user interaction with our lists, but they're the exclusive result of people's browsing behavior.
In other words, we've capitalized on fostering a time-honored marketing device: good ol' fashioned community hype.
The point of this all is that sometimes the most effective solutions are the simplest. And on today's Web this so often gets lost. Developers insist on having bark overshadow bite. Granted, KUAM.com is a well-rooted, existing online property creating and distributing content in a proven industry (news) - not the latest player in the fickle Web 2.0 space. Admittedly, our solution by today's standards was arguably low-tech. With our little creation we haven't wowed anyone from O'Reilly, appeared on Digg's front page or secured a spot atop TechMeme (themselves canonical exhibitions of the power of Web 2.0 network effects), but it works for our users. It was easy to incorporate such a feature into the flow of our existing style of distributing news information without forcing our audiences to learn a radically new UI, or impeding our site's performance. We tapped existing data sources and reshaped the information so that it could be viewed in a new and different way.
Plus, this puts about 40 additional links on my homepage, which is better for SEO. And, more importantly, it gives individual stories one or two more precious hours of primetime exposure.
So give some thought to the effectiveness of your development next time you map out some cool hack. Don't get me wrong - I'm all about next-gen programming, but of greater concern to me is creating the best possible experience. If in certain situations this means scaling back from using high-end techniques and technologies, I've got no problem with that.
So while the "Social Web" continues to be all the rage and legions of new sites pop up daily and existing media companies creep towards adoption of emerging paradigms with tons of phenomenal features centered around viral user interactivity, I'm reminded of the fundamentals of network effects, and what makes such services work in the first place. So consider this a lesson in pragmatic technical marketing next time you start pondering how to evolve your online projects.
I realize that not everything's got to have a friends list, AJAX-laden commenting systems, support for one or more IM clients, or tagging to the nth degree. The real magic is in delivering a positive user experience so that growing numbers gravitate towards and frequently use your stuff, promoting it communally.
Recently I implemented a little feature on KUAM.com exhibiting the content of ours that people are consuming with the greatest frequency - "The Most". Similar lists have proven hugely successful across media platforms - from the old radio countdown shows, to Letterman's nightly Top 10 rundowns, to VH1's infinite collection of ordered views of modern day pop culture. So it became obvious to me that expressing such a popularity contest through hypermedia was an opportunity that needed to be exploited. Consequently, we've been able to build a winning social service...without people.
The Most has been received extremely well, has generated positive feedback and has boosted our web traffic, so in that regard it's an instant hit. As a result, our video downloads have tripled. People are re-reading articles and bookmarking items they've already gone over. Users are checking back to see if their search keywords generate more and different results than with previous queries. It's a network effect of a different variety - the "Wow...people are checking this out...it must be good!" upshot. There's no direct user interaction with our lists, but they're the exclusive result of people's browsing behavior.
In other words, we've capitalized on fostering a time-honored marketing device: good ol' fashioned community hype.
The point of this all is that sometimes the most effective solutions are the simplest. And on today's Web this so often gets lost. Developers insist on having bark overshadow bite. Granted, KUAM.com is a well-rooted, existing online property creating and distributing content in a proven industry (news) - not the latest player in the fickle Web 2.0 space. Admittedly, our solution by today's standards was arguably low-tech. With our little creation we haven't wowed anyone from O'Reilly, appeared on Digg's front page or secured a spot atop TechMeme (themselves canonical exhibitions of the power of Web 2.0 network effects), but it works for our users. It was easy to incorporate such a feature into the flow of our existing style of distributing news information without forcing our audiences to learn a radically new UI, or impeding our site's performance. We tapped existing data sources and reshaped the information so that it could be viewed in a new and different way.
Plus, this puts about 40 additional links on my homepage, which is better for SEO. And, more importantly, it gives individual stories one or two more precious hours of primetime exposure.
So give some thought to the effectiveness of your development next time you map out some cool hack. Don't get me wrong - I'm all about next-gen programming, but of greater concern to me is creating the best possible experience. If in certain situations this means scaling back from using high-end techniques and technologies, I've got no problem with that.
posted by Jason Salas @ 12:56 PM
4 Comments:
At March 16, 2007 5:15 AM,
Anonymous said…
The point of this all is that sometimes the most effective solutions are the simplest. And on today's Web this so often gets lost. Developers insist on having bark overshadow bite.
Could you provide some real world examples of developer's insisting on having more bark than bite in today's Web? It's an interesting observation, I'd like to see examples of what you mean by it.
At March 16, 2007 10:35 AM,
Jason Salas said…
Thanks for the comment. I intentionally didn't point anyone out as not to start a flame war (and I'll openly admit that in several instances in our history, we've been guilty of this, as well). Just have a look around with objective eyes, and see how many sites are sugarcoated with gimmickry.
Nearly every new technology at the onset gets blown way out of proportion. People have a tendency to use a new tech just because it's the new thing. At KUAM, we've used AJAX tastefully and sparingly...not re-doing our entire site in it just because.
It's rare today that web solutions are implemented for true effectiveness, being more geared towards glitz and glamor. Such overindulgence is key to finding the true capabilities/limitations of any platform, but once the drama has passed, people start creating neat, useful stuff.
Think about all the platforms that have arisen over the years on the web: streaming media, CSS, RSS, PDF, podcasting, DHTML, AJAX, etc.
Several business leaders, tech visionaries and realists have said the same for years in all industries.
I recall in 2001 when web services were just starting to make their way around developer circles as The Next Big Thing, primarily for pre-RSS, pre-screen scraping remote data access I wrote an article, showing how the same thing could be done by letting remote clients reference a JavaScript file. Same result, less intrusive, easier to implement.
That's the point. :-)
At March 16, 2007 8:20 PM,
Anonymous said…
I appreciate the idea of trying to keep things simple - take for instance the widget you recently implemented "The Most". It's simple and does the job and at the moment it's probably good enough. Now in the event a direct competitor of yours decides to do something similar - but maybe with a little more glitz and glamor, you would probably have to give the effectiveness nod to them. After all - with all else being equal, I would prefer all the extras that come with a well designed rich user interface. There's so much activity going on in this space to indicate that as a user, I am hardly the exception.
So maybe it is about finding the right balance - in your case there's no pressure to deliver anything more than status quo.. so in the end you have the luxury to produce stuff that's just good enough.
Maybe that's the point.
At March 17, 2007 9:08 AM,
Jason Salas said…
Excellent views. You're spot-on, absolutely right, of course. Thanks for pointing that out (you really need to leave your name, the 'anonymous' thing really doesn't do you justice).
In the news media game, every morning I come to work and every night I go on the air I assume the risk of one of our rivals taking a more intriguing angle on a story, presenting information in some superior way, or dropping their rates at our expense. It's the hypercompetitive nature of the business.
Still, I'd argue a simple point: were someone to do a much richer UI than the one we provide, it wouldn't necessarily be any more "effective". It would certainly be innovative and evolutionary (being a webhead I'd personally love it and be mondo-jealous); but true effectiveness, I believe, is connecting positively with the most users in the aggregate, of varying expertise, technical savvy and ability.
If our local newspaper were to come out with their own implementation of letting users view their stories through some mind-blowing Flash UI, it would blow us away - with a certain portion of the community. But not everyone's that high-end. Creative people, programmers, students, power users and artists would enjoy it, but not the 70-year-old retiree or the neophyte that just got online last month and who occasionally browses. In their eyes, it could be one-and-done.
Even the simple tabbed UI that we use for The Most is too complex for some people.
Consider why Digg doesn't use BigSpy or even the AJAX-born Digg Spy as its default UI, insisting on HTML: performance, scalability, relevance, and overall user experience for the masses. And since we're not a tech company, appealing to a mainstream audience (half local/half global) in a local market not known for having phenomenal Internet infrastructure and cost-prohibitive consumer technology, this is key. People have older PCs, slower Internet connections, older browsers, etc. And some people behaviorally just don't want radical UIs. At the end of the day, we're just providing a simple news service, a fact that we constantly remind ourselves. In news, you serve everyone. How many people in everyday life know about or are sophisticated to use PageFlakes?
Trust me, I hate working with the least common denominator (our streaming video archive is encoded so as to support people still on dial-up, as they still make up a certain portion of our daily traffic), but it's gotta be done to win.
Also, consider that since we're a media company, the vast majority of our total gross revenue comes from traditional platforms (TV & radio), which are rooted in the same "appeal to the Everyman" concept. We generate some money online, but the larger business issue is our integration with, and, to some degree are subsidization by, traditional platform profits. So we're mandated to be as accessible to as wide a range of people as possible to keep our head above water.
And of course, there's the limitations that I have personally as a programmer. I don't know everything, and my skill set is admittedly narrow. Once I hit the wall in terms of my capability to build stuff, there's no next version. So managed growth is something we take into consideration, too - we don't always go all out right out of the gate.
But there's something else to think about: after years of serving our audiences, we have the advantage of our users expecting us to set the pace. If someone were to come out with something of greater perceived value, we'd enjoy get the developmental pressure of everyone waiting to see how we'd respond. They wouldn't write us off immediately, but we'd have to hit back pretty hard. If we failed to respond with something superior, then we'd lose. But it's a competitive advantage that we work towards in people expecting us to be a step ahead.
And that only comes with serving them effectively over a long time.
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