Some Thoughts on Selling BMWs in a Hypothetical Town
May 9th, 2012
Some musings inspired by Mark Birch’s quote from Rick Webb’s post:
Rick Webb wrote: Pay or wait. It’s not that hard. Or go to a friend’s house. If you’d gladly pay for it, you would. Your hand is not being forced, you are being given consumption choices. Why is it their job to give you exactly the choice you want, exactly, when others are perfectly happy to pay a higher price for that? It’s like saying I should get a BMW for free because I want it for free. I’d pay for it, but I wouldn’t pay $50k for it. Well, other people will, and they are setting the price, not you.
While I agree that it’s entirely up to HBO to charge what they want and distribute how they see fit, I also think that going with the “I want a free BMW” comparison is misleading, and misses some important context.
Let’s try this formulation for buying a BMW in a hypothetical town:
You want this year’s $50k BMW, but you can only buy one now if you lease a fleet of cars (mostly Chevy Aveos and Lincoln MKTs) from a specific dealership, at an annual cost of $800k.
It also happens that there’s a neighborhood in your town — down by the docks, probably — where an infinite number of BMWs are parked, unlocked, and with the keys in the ignition.
It’s a kind of sketchy neighborhood, and every once in a while the cops will give someone a ticket for taking one of those BMWs, but for the most part, right or wrong, you can just drive one away without anyone ever noticing.
There are a few additional things to know about this hypothetical town:
- There are still plenty of people paying that $800k for the fleet; some pay because that’s how they’ve always gotten cars, and others because they actually use all those cars once in a while. BMW and the dealership are making good money.
- BMW can’t make those cars down by the docks stop appearing. They’ve tried, but no matter how many they tow away, there are still an infinite number left.
- A lot of people don’t really like going down to the docks for a BMW. The directions for getting there can be confusing, there are a lot of hookers and con artists hanging around, and it is, after all, illegal to take those cars.
- There are an increasing number of people complaining to BMW about the arrangement with the dealership; these people love the BMWs, but really have no use for the other cars that they’re paying for.
- There are new dealerships popping up around town that would love to sell BMWs, maybe without the whole fleet thing. They don’t have the number of customers that the fleet dealership does, and can’t offer BMW the same kind of money, but they’re out there nonetheless.
The question for BMW, then, isn’t whether they can sell cars at the price and on the terms that they choose (of course they can), but whether it is to their own benefit in the long term to keep the current arrangement with their current dealership in light of the changing situation in town.
Yes, BMW is making good money from the status quo, but that neighborhood by the docks and those new dealerships just showed up rather recently. Will that $800k lease (only a small part of which goes to BMW, remember) still look as appealing to the townspeople in another couple of years? Is what’s best for the dealership necessarily what’s best for BMW?
The History and Social (Media) Influence of the Cheese Sandwich
December 29th, 2011
Being some thoughts after reading Fred Wilson’s The Big Five of Social Media and Mocked and Misunderstood. With thanks and apologies to Redcliffe N. Salaman, author of a fantastic book.
Shortly after Fred posted the two items linked above (both of which you should review now if you haven’t already), I found myself with a couple of hours of driving time in a car full of sleeping family. It was dark and quiet, and in my post-holiday daze I came to realize that I see the two posts as linked, though they may or may not have been intended as such.
Not to bury the lede too deep, I realized that Fred’s big five actually cover two distinct eras of “social media;” further, both eras were mocked and misunderstood in their day — as is a new generation today — and there’s an obvious reason for it: cheese sandwiches.
So let’s begin. Allow me to present the big five (plus two) of social media, in cheese sandwich terms.
The Big Five Plus Two:
Blogs: “Today I ate a cheese sandwich, and it brought the feelings I’ve been having into perspective. First…”
YouTube: [Video of someone making a cheese sandwich while rapping about it.]
Facebook: “Emma just ate her first cheese sandwich!!!”
Twitter: “So hungry. Cheese sandwich FTW! #cheesesandwich #ftw”
Tumblr: [Picture that a good photographer took of a cheese sandwich, attribution lost somewhere in the first 1,482 reblogs.]
Foursquare: [I'm at a restaurant that serves cheese sandwiches.]
Kickstarter: “I would like to hand-deliver a cheese sandwich to every resident of Lost Springs, Wyoming.”
[Editor's note: if you choose to make up your own cheese sandwich entries for Geocities and pre-music-explosion MySpace, I won't try to stop you.]
The Big Five and the Eras
Blogs and YouTube belong to an early, barely recognizable, era of “social media.” With the benefit of hindsight, what was being established was that someone with a reasonable amount of talent (and/or luck) could find an audience online.
I myself had a few hundred people reading an earlier incarnation of this very blog in the early ‘oughts, despite an erratic posting schedule and a habit of drinking heavily before sitting down to write. We were learning that — while it helps, a lot — it doesn’t take a massive organization to create something that will interest an online audience. You, a person, can make something that interests other people.
Twitter and Tumblr belong to a later era, when we were (or perhaps still are) learning that someone with a reasonable assortment of interests can find a community online.
On these services I follow, and am followed by, people I don’t expect to ever meet in person, but with whom I share interests, obsessions, or possibly just an aesthetic that I can’t quite define. I don’t create everything that I toss into the pool for this community, but I share it in the belief that it will spark something in this self-selected group.
Facebook I’m less sure about. While it certainly deserves its slot in the top five, Facebook seems to have taught us that the membrane between offline and online is rather more permeable than some of us thought, both for better and for worse.
Or maybe that’s just me.
In any case, Facebook is an interesting blend of the two eras, and time will tell whether sitting on the fence between online and offline is a benefit or a detriment to Facebook in the long term. [Editor's note: you remember that Facebook has existed for less than eight years, right?]
The Mocking and the Misunderstanding
So finally we get to the really interesting part: the common thread across all of these services is that they’re about people. Sure, YouTube broke out with an SNL video, and corporate content plays a significant role these days, but double rainbows and firecrackers stuck places that god never intended are still huge, and the ability to upload your own dumbass video keeps it going day to day.
And that’s the thing: any consumer online tool or service that isn’t immediately and directly focused on extracting money from its users and audience is going to be slapped with the cheese sandwich label.
Consider that Pinterest (and Svpply, maybe possibly) may escape the mockery, because it’s pretty clear how they could extract money from people, even if they’re not doing it yet. But you take a look at Foursquare and Kickstarter and the cheese sandwich catcalls start up almost immediately, because these services are more focused on people doing things than on people paying for things.
This is particularly amusing because I strongly believe that Foursquare and Kickstarter have much better potential to make significant amounts of money in the medium and long term than many other popular services out there today. Even doing the basic Kickstarter arithmetic suggests that they’re already doing better on cash flow than many other “hot” startups.
As was pointed out by many commenters on Fred’s post, being mocked and misunderstood certainly doesn’t correlate particularly strongly to being a huge success as a company. Just remember to consider the fact that the many facets of cheese sandwiches can be worth money to a lot of people.
Identity : Anonymity :: Community : Network (?)
September 5th, 2011
There’s been a fair amount of discussion around Google’s “real names” policy on Google+ in certain circles. Most recently in my stream, Fred Wilson pointed to Corey Doctorow’s post on the topic, and the discussion around that post crystallized some of what I’ve been thinking on the issue. To be specific, the crystal is:
The “anonymity vs. real names” debate is in large part a discussion of a very different issue: community vs. network.
Ages ago, in the days before Google+, the discussion tended to revolve around Facebook comments outside of Facebook. “If we implement Facebook comments,” the corporate presentation went, “it will improve the quality of the UGC on our site, because comments will be tied to users’ real identities. If people’s comments are linked to their Facebook profile, they will be respectful of both our content and other’s contributions, because a meaningful degree of accountability has been added to the system.”
The next slide of the powerpoint was inevitably the real money, though, pointing to the awesome traffic potential that came with hitching one’s buggy to the Facebook rocket: “because users can easily share their comments to their Facebook friends,” the presentation would continue, “we make better use of users’ existing social networks in our efforts to build traffic to the site.”
And there’s the rub.
Requiring a fixed external identity online addresses a very real concern, but it’s reactive. It is, in many cases and possibly at best, a response to the ease with which users can find a new-to-them site or service these days. It is, in an unfortunate number of cases, an attempt to shortcut the process of building a community in favor of importing networks, and then trying to preemptively create some order out of the mess that almost inevitably results from that import.
In Google’s case the network import in question was…well, Google’s, but I don’t think that changes the formulation to any meaningful degree: my Google+ circles are just as far removed from my gmail “contacts” list as the squares, lists, scenes, or cadres dreamed up by any unfunded Brooklyn startup.
The issue, in my view, isn’t whether giving users of a service the ability to be “anonymous” to other users of that service is harmful to that service — I maintain that UrbanBaby settled that question nearly a decade ago, in favor of anonymity — but whether an external identity requirement does anything positive at all.
Because so many people now have established identities and communities online, the idea that you can just tap into that pre-existing structure is incredibly seductive: you find one person who’s right for your new service and they bring a whole community with them.
The problem is that the network effect can help expand an established community, but it can’t build one. Drive-by visitors are generally more trouble than they’re worth, as many Dugg and Slashdotted sites will report.
Until people have a reason to take (credit || responsibility) for their activity on your site, you’ll have a real problem with bad apples, anonymous or otherwise. Once people do care, the community will make an effort to take care of problems whether or not they know the “real name” associated with that problem.
My “network” is made up of many different communities, and some of those communities don’t like one another very much. Assuming that pulling that entire, extended network into one central location is a good idea is…well, just not a good idea.
Bonus: any commenters who provide an explication of the “bartender” label that appears on Fred’s AVC comments get a free beer from me at the time and of their choosing (within reason). Bonus points for offering a (probably inaccurate) derivation of the term “86″.
On Making Stuff
July 1st, 2011
For the past couple of weeks I’ve been spending whatever time I can spare on a little project: building kisttr, a Kickstarter Backer Tracker. It’s a pretty straightforward hack that allows you to “track” (or “follow”, if you prefer) a group of Kickstarter users and see what new projects they’re backing without having to visit each of their profile pages on the site.
As I was putting it together, a part of me couldn’t help but play out a little dialogue:
“So this thing just sends you a daily email that lists the new projects some people are backing on Kickstarter?”
“Yes. Though it does show them on a Web page, too.”
“And you spent two weeks building it?”
“Correct. Late in the evening, mostly.”
“It kind of sounds like a feature, not a product.”
“True. Very true.”
“And it actually kind of sounds like a feature that Kickstarter is likely to release themselves at some point.”
“Agreed.”
All of the points raised above are entirely valid. I fully expect that Kickstarter will sooner or later release an update that makes kisttr obsolete, it’s definitely a feature rather than a product, and it took me an awfully long time to build something that a competent developer could have banged out in a matter of a couple of days.
But to me, all of that is missing the real point.
Kickstarter may well release an equivalent feature, they don’t offer it right now, and I want this right now. Kisttr isn’t as elegant as I’d really like, but it works — and it’s a lot better than not having anything at all.
And while I’m a slow and clumsy programmer, after spending some focused hours designing and building this, I’ve remembered a bunch of tricks that I’d forgotten and learned a few new things, as well. [Amazon's Simple Email Service is kind of neat, I'm an idiot for not making better use of CSS frameworks before, and so on.]
Today I have a better understanding of a few design and development issues than I did two weeks ago, and even though (or maybe because) I’m more of a “product” guy, that’s incredibly valuable.
When it comes down to it, it’s just fun – and wonderfully satisfying — to take a project from a barely articulated idea to reality. Making something that didn’t exist before is a real pleasure — even if what you’re making isn’t that big a deal in the grand scheme of things.
The further I get into this process (it’s still underway, since there are still a number of holes to be patched), the more strongly I believe that I get the real benefit from the process of building kisttr — the end product is just a little bonus.
A Kickstarter Quandary
April 12th, 2011
It was inevitable — and in hindsight it’s surprising that it hadn’t happened before — but earlier this week I received my first email solicitation to back a Kickstarter project.
“We notice and applaud you for helping so many people with their aspirations,” the email begins, which suggests that the project creators looked through some similar projects and found people who both (a) had backed a number of projects and (b) had public contact information.
An interesting situation. In the abstract I really like the idea that project creators can reach out to me: the main difficulty I have with Kickstarter at the moment is that I miss out on too many projects that I’d love to back. (Yes, I know, the tiny little violins are playing for me as I type this.) [Edit: since writing this post I've put together a partial fix for this problem with Kisttr, a Kickstarter backer tracker.]
The problem, however, is that this doesn’t scale. Maybe I’ll back this particular project and maybe not, but what happens when it’s not one creator contacting me, but ten, or a hundred? It pains me to admit it, but that’s a hundred deleted emails right there.
Because I’m a lazy man I want creators reaching out to pitch me, but I don’t want more crap in my inbox. What I want is some kind of structure to handle this stuff within Kickstarter.
So here’s where we are right now:
- I would love to hear from creators that think their project would be of interest to me, but I don’t want to get snowed under by email, @replies, and whatever else (though the first creator to send a handwritten note pitching their project is pretty much guaranteed to get some cash).
- The creator who contacted me had to do a fair amount of work to identify me as a prospect, track down my email address, and contact me, and they probably had other things they’d rather have been doing with that time.
It’s probably inevitable that some project creators will see spam of one form or another as the way to go. That said, if they have a way to contact potential/likely backers that’s easier than manually going through project backer lists, many creators will probably go with the easy approach — even if it doesn’t get them in front of as many people as the manual process.
What if project creators had the ability to “submit” projects to a limited number of Kickstarter users? In addition to the “backed projects” and “starred projects” tabs that already exist, I’d have a “submitted projects” tab that lists the projects that creators have submitted to me.
Yes, you’d need to work out a lot of checks and balances:
- Do users opt in to accepting submissions?
- Can creators submit to anyone, or are they limited based on what the user has backed before (or similar)?
- Is there a hard limit on how many people a creator can submit their project to, or is that number magically derived?
- If I’m accepting submissions, can I limit submissions by category, location, or other criteria, or do I get anything and everything? Can I “advertise” the kinds of projects that tend to be most interesting to me?
And, of course, the list goes on like that for quite a while.
Still, I think it’s an interesting formulation: it helps creators promote their projects to an audience already within the Kickstarter fold, and also helps backers find projects they might otherwise miss. And (I suspect, anyway) it helps Kickstarter by creating a controlled environment for solicitation of potential backers, which makes the potentially problematic ad hoc “backer harvesting” a less appealing approach.
There may be flaws here that I don’t immediately see, but I’d love to have some mechanism like this within Kickstarter: yes, I absolutely want more and different ways to find projects, but it would be incredible if projects could also find me.
All About AdKeeper. And Alliteration.
February 9th, 2011
It’s no surprise that Scott Kurnit, the founder, thinks that AdKeeper will satisfy a very common (if not often expressed) need. And as he points out in a post on All Things Digital today, the idea doesn’t necessarily sound crazy. The two analog analogs he points to for AdKeeper’s model are:
- The broad popular attention given to the Super Bowl ads [people enjoy, talk about, and share ads in certain circumstances].
- The fact that people clip physical coupons and tear ads out of magazines [people save ads in certain circumstances].
He may be right — and a lot of pretty smart money is betting that he’s right — but the “in certain circumstances” that I felt compelled to add to each of the points above makes me a little skeptical.
Ads aired during the Super Bowl are a special case. An atypical amount of time, money, and attention goes into developing each one, and they’re created with a specific situation in mind: you’ve got 30 or 60 seconds in front of people who are explicitly prepared to view your commercial as part of the evening’s entertainment.
Most ads just don’t get that kind of focused attention, either in the creative phase or from their audience. How many ads do you see each day, and how many have struck you enough that you mentioned them to someone else?
For that matter, how do you make a 250×300 static unit as engaging as a 30 second mini-story? Possible, perhaps, but you’re giving the creative end of advertising a pretty heavy rallying cry: “make every ad worth keeping!”
On the coupon/saving front, the parallel seems a little strained to me. People clip coupons because they need to take that physical coupon to the physical store; unless advertisers follow a similar model online (offer only valid if you come via a particular ad/link), this seems like a stretch.
The difference I see is that you can’t get another copy of the coupon once you throw away the magazine…but online? I don’t think my wife has ever purchased anything online without Googling for a coupon code, and she usually finds one.
I think it’s fascinating that AdKeeper is flipping over the ad network model of keeping the “right” ads in front of you until you’re ready to click, no matter where you are online, but then I’m often fascinated by things that don’t work out as hoped or expected.
On Digital Ephemera
January 25th, 2011
Some time ago I said that I would write a little bit about why I don’t entirely buy the arguments in Tom Cunniff’s post The Monoculture of the Mind: How Social Media Makes Us Dumber, and then I promptly forgot to do so. Fixing this oversight now.
Mr. Cunniff’s post is well worth a read in its entirety (and you should really read it before proceeding here), but I believe he captures the core of his argument at the start of the post:
An unsurprising fact about human nature: the people we find the most agreeable are the people we agree with the most.
These are exactly the same people who become our friends in social media — on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. But so what? We’ve always had friends with similar ideas. And groupthink has existed since the first group on Earth.
Two Significant Differences
Here’s what’s new. And the more actively you participate in social media the more important they are.
- Our friends are omnipresent in a way they have never been before.
- The biases and beliefs of those friends are polluting our information streams.
Now while I believe that there’s an entirely reasonable concern being voiced here [I was particularly struck by the post because I had just written about my own worries on how my existing digital social group may affect my view and adoption of new social services], I also believe that there’s an interesting and redeeming aspect of (some) social media that Mr. Cunniff doesn’t address.
Disclaimer: when I say “social media” below, I’m thinking most specifically about Twitter and Tumblr, as those are the services that I consider most representative of digital ephemera.
And what is “digital ephemera?” For purposes of this post, I’m defining it as content that is created without the intent or expectation that it will be meaningful outside of a relatively brief moment in time — contrasted to, um, “archival” digital content, if you will.
While some people use Tumblr — and even Twitter — as a tool for creating archival content, I believe that by and large, they are viewed as ephemera machines: you and I will twitter about, or reblog, something that we wouldn’t write a blog post about. They’re tools that give us explicit license to share things that we don’t feel are all that important.
But that very characteristic, the off-the-cuff nature of what people present using these tools, is what I think can help balance out the echo chamber-y, monoculture-y tendency that worries Mr. Cunniff.
When I read someone’s professional output or their “real” blog, I’m getting a fully articulated, reasoned view of what’s important to that person. After reading a few pieces I usually have a reasonable idea of whether or not I agree with that person on approaches to software development, politics, music, or whatever the topic of interest may be. And, to be fair to Mr. Cunniff, if I disagree with the writer I’m much less likely to add them to my RSS reader.
With Twitter or Tumblr, though, I start following someone because I find something interesting in those little “unimportant” snippets that they share. I like the sorts of photographs that they post, or they amuse me with their observations about their family. They consistently mention great music that I’ve never heard of, or they can toss off insightful little thoughts on a topic that interests me.
I end up knowing a lot of little things about a person — starting to get a sense of what they’re like — through this digital ephemera, but I might go weeks or months without finding out what they think about the topics that they or I consider most important.
On a number of occasions I’ve learned via a disconcerting tweet or post that I strongly disagree with someone that I’ve followed for a fair amount of time on a social or political issue, and that’s where the interesting stuff happens.
This forces me to confront the fact that this person that I’ve found interesting, or insightful, or charming for days on end holds ideas with which I strongly disagree. To take an example from my actual experience, I have to decide what to do with the fact that this person that I find appealing in many ways strongly opposes same sex marriage.
Maybe I ended up unfollowing that person and maybe not, but social media created a situation in which I’d gotten to know them in a hundred little ways before I realized that we disagreed in a way that I find really significant. [And now some of you who found your way here via Twitter may have a similar decision placed in front of you.]
While the tools of social media do absolutely make it easier for us to find people all over the world who are just as right-thinking as we are — and I’m not sure that’s a good thing — the fact that they also make it easier for those insidious people who disagree with us to sneak under our guard, by having good taste in music or amusing family lives, makes those tools seem to me like a push at worst, and quite possibly a net positive.
Two-phase user adoption: from “oh, wow!” to “oh, yeah…”
August 27th, 2010
Note: I’m framing this post in terms of ExtensionFM because of a tweet, and because I believe that ExFM is a particularly interesting case, but this issue absolutely applies more broadly.
A few days ago Lucas Gonze Twittered:
I got drawn back into my Extension.fm setup today after forgetting it for a while. Important for apps to have that longevity.
Anyone who builds stuff online will tell you that this absent-mindedness on the part of users is almost inevitable.
No matter how good the thing you’ve made is, no matter how big the initial “oh, wow!” is for a user, there’s a crapload of other interesting stuff being released (as well as offline life continuing to roll along), and your cool thing will eventually be pushed to a back burner for a while. The question is what happens when your user hits that “oh, yeah…” moment of rediscovery.
I’ve already written about my belief that the wow moment comes from acknowledging that we’re all selfish bastards, and therefore offering users an immediate, obvious return on their investment of time, effort, and/or money. [A post that you're all going to go read, yeah?]
But there’s one thing I didn’t touch on in the post linked above: the fact that a user is inactive for a while doesn’t mean that you have to be inactive, too. In many cases you can offer that user some benefit from what happened during their inactive period.
The most obvious (and most rare) case is new functionality: the features that you release during those days or weeks may include the one that the user really, really wanted to see. Unlikely, yes, but it can happen. At the very least it gives people a feeling that your product is continuing to move forward.
The more likely scenario is that your services other users, or the Internet at large, are doing things that will be of interest to that lapsed user when they return. Carefully selected information from sources surrounding the user can highlight what they would have been getting, and help smooth the transition back into activity — you’re making it easier for the user to “catch up.”
And there is where ExtensionFM has a lovely little advantage: because it’s an extension of the browser (right now, anyway), ExFM can continue to do its very personalized thing whether or not the user remembers it’s there. I could forget to open the library tab for a month, but when I do get around to it I’ve got a month’s worth of music from the sources that I love organized and easily available: the service hasn’t become less valuable with my inactivity, rather it’s been busy while it waits for me.
Sure, ExtensionFM could do more to highlight this advantage, and to make it simpler for me to slice, dice, or “replay” what happened while I was checked out, but the foundation is there and extremely useful already.
While I still maintain that there’s more to be gained from focusing on the “successful” users than the “unsuccessful” ones, giving some thought to what that unavoidable group of “oh, yeah, that was pretty cool, I should check it out again” users will find when they finally return is well worthwhile.
Letter.ly’s Money Issues
July 13th, 2010
A few additional thoughts around the “paid” part of paid newsletters; in short, I’m wondering whether introducing money into the system is actually worth it for personal email newsletter creators.
1. Money as Motivation for Writers
A couple of letter.ly writers have mentioned the motivation to write that comes from having paid subscribers as a factor in their decision to try running a paid email newsletter, but I don’t entirely…um, buy this.
Having paid subscribers creates an obligation to write, rather than amotivation, and confusing those two can easily lead to intense feelings of stress and guilt without producing any additional writing.
Getting paid (even a token amount) can also provide justification for writing more, but that again is very different from providing the motivation to write more.
2. Money as Incentive for Comparison Shopping
Adding money to the system invites comparison to other sources of paid content, and for me, the obvious ruler was Daring Fireball. I pay $19/yr for Daring Fireball “membership,” which basically gets me all the writing that John Gruber puts up for free anyway, plus a bonus feeling of smug superiority.
I took a quick look at the DF archive, and Gruber posts at least one (and usually two or more) substantial pieces of writing each week, plus a number of small links/quotes with a sentence of commentary each day. And while you may or may not like Gruber’s style and positions, he’s an extremely good writer offering solid analysis and insights.
The quantity and quality of Daring Fireball at $19 makes me look hard at the $24 – $48 range that letter.ly writers are settling into; everything I’ve subscribed to has been good, but are the $3.99 newsletters actually $1 better than the $2.99 newsletters? Are they all “worth” more than Daring Fireball? Because I’m paying for them those comparisons inevitably come up, for better or worse.
3. Money as Proxy for Audience Commitment/Engagement
Sam Lessin (letter.ly creator) noted that one of his reasons for switching to a paid newsletter was that he wants an engaged audience, and that with letter.ly readers signal their commitment by paying for the subscription.
Despite the number of words I threw into the “comparative pricing” section of this post, I think that money — particularly a small amount of money — is a terrible proxy for commitment in this case.
Having to pay for a subscription puts a barrier up front, keeping out the most casual and disengaged of potential readers, but once a reader has subscribed we’re talking about a very small recurring charge on their monthly credit card bill: the newsletters that I subscribe to combined cost less than a single drink at some NYC bars.
Unless a writer sends out something that irritates a reader into using the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email, I suspect that a combination of inertia and social pressure [“X will know that I unsubscribed, will they take it the wrong way?”] will be enough to get people to ignore that latte-sized charge when reviewing their credit card bill each month — whether or not they’re actually paying attention to the newsletter.
4. Whit’s Alternative Formulations
I understand and agree with many of the motivations behind letter.ly, but I do question whether paid subscriptions are the most effective means for achieving letter.ly’s goals.
If the issue is curating your audience, then take some responsibility as ringmaster. Why not forget using money as a no-effort proxy and follow the route that the Pho list does? Have people send you an email explaining who they are and why they want to be on the list.
Select from among the people who are willing to make an investment of time and effort to be a part of your list, rather than just accepting anyone willing to spend a couple of bucks a month.
If the issue is ensuring an engaged, active audience, then require real activity from your newsletter subscribers. What if, rather than an unsubscribe link in each email, you had a “keep me subscribed” link? If a subscriber doesn’t click that link (or hasn’t clicked it for n consecutive newsletters), they’re automatically removed from the list.
Or take the same basic approach, but requiring a reply email at least once every n newsletters: if you’re not writing newsletters that people really want and pay attention to, your subscription count shows it.
Put a system in place so that an inactive user an unsubscribed user.
Obvious But Important
February 9th, 2010
Being a post on why I probably wouldn’t actually do what I asked Foursquare to do yesterday.
Yesterday I vented via feature request, noting that Foursquare has the potential to offer me more information about why I might want to be “friends” with people that I don’t know in person. But in talking with a few other people yesterday I realized that—while it felt good to write that little rant—were I Foursquare I would probably ignore my request.
Here’s the deal. When you’re trying to figure out what features to add for your users, there’s often a trap waiting for you: data.
Because you’re already generating a lot of stats about your users for your own use [You are, right? If not you've got an entirely different problem...], it’s incredibly easy to say something like “hey, we’ll add value for our users by giving them a chart that shows what days and times they post most frequently,” or “we’ll give users access to those statistics on the flux capacitor usage of the people they’re tracking!”
So what’s the problem? I mean, those are important metrics, right?
Well, sort of. For you, they’re information. Unless your users can actually do something with what you’re offering, though, you’re just dumping data on them. Charts are pretty, of course, and a screen full of numbers can make it look like your product or service is advanced and space-age, but if users can’t look at what you’ve added and say “oh, wow, I should really…” then you’ve probably wasted some effort.
The classic example for me is Linkedin. On the rare occasions that I log in to the service, I’m invariably told that “someone in the Internet industry has viewed your profile.” Really, Linkedin? I know you’ve got real estate to fill up in that right hand column, but that’s really the best use you could come up with?
But there’s another thing to consider, as well. While what I want Foursquare to do [show me the people and places, if any, that link me to this person making this friend request] does involve transforming data into useful information [would I as a Foursquare user benefit from becoming friends with this unknown person?], there’s an underlying issue here.
You see, if my feature were implemented, Foursquare would be tracking to see whether the change resulted in people adding a greater number of friends; because you’re giving people additional reasons to accept any given friend request (I don’t know X, but they regularly visit five of the places that I regularly visit), users should start accepting a greater percentage of their friend requests. If that starts happening, the change worked! Great, right?
Well, sort of. The issue underlying my feature request is a big one: is it actually good for Foursquare to nudge people towards accepting more friend requests? Are Foursquare users, on balance, happier users when they have a greater number of connections within the system, or should we be looking somewhere else to improve the experience?
It’s not just a question of whether users can do something with the information you offer them, it’s whether that information has the potential to help them make their experience better.
