Saturation or Sense?

Kristina B — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 10:47:00 -0500

I just read a good summary of the general message at SXSW Interactive (which echoed my own summary):

If there was one overarching message at this year’s conference, I think it was this: Businesses or services have customers, clients and/or users. And those are people. Human beings. The way of speaking to and otherwise communicating with those people is changing. The press release is boring. People would much rather read a blog. Corporate-speak is a thing of the past. There are ways to stay professional and better engage customers. Because no one is passionate or really excited about a company that they don’t relate to. The key is passionate users. With so many options for consuming services, it is key to incite passion in customers, clients and users. They should be proud to “buy your t-shirt”—believe in your culture, message and persona. It is the experience that sells. It is the experience that differentiates.

It’s that last sentence along with a question that we heard during the Fried / Coudal keynote that’s got me thinking.

The question was basically: how many subscription-based web apps will one person sign up to before it’s just too much to think about?

Fried suggested that even if this new movement means a single person is signing up to ten $10/month (highly specific, simple, elegant) services, he himself would pay that $100 a month to get tools that are useful and compelling.

Sure, that might make sense. We consumers pay monthly for services all the time: cell phone, land-line, cable, broadband, magazine and newspaper subscriptions etc.. It does seem that the web is moving that way too – rather than buying a box from a store with bloated software in it and buying the update a year later, the software landscape is turning into a more dynamic, web-based service style business.

This change in focus is valuable for everyone involved, especially consumers. There’s no denying that. However, people only have so much passion to go around. Passion is an extreme emotion, and if people ended up passionate about every product or service that they use they’d get burnt out. Similarly, building community is great, but there are only so many communities that one can be a part of. If you’re an avid Flickr user, and let’s say you’re also on Friendster or MySpace or something like that, plus you keep a blog and read others’ blogs… when does it end?

More likely, people will never reach that saturation point. A few great services and products will rise to the surface, and the rest will die away.

On the other hand, it’s not like one day all the products that to need to exist will exist, and then we can all go home. Although there may be some limit to the number of products or services that a single person will pay for and get excited about, there are almost an infinite number of groups and subgroups of people with different needs and interests. So, we’ll probably see a trend toward highly focused applications that cater to very narrow market segments.

Handwire At The Conference

Kristina B — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 21:57:00 -0500

We’ve all been going to panels and parties, and though we are very close to achieving “plum tuckered” status, we’re keeping it alive for the rest of Interactive and then (gasp)... music. And when I say “it” I mean “us”. I, for one, both look forward to this time of year and dread it. Being an Austinite takes endurance sometimes.

Anyway, a bit about the panels we’ve seen. The general consensus in the office is that the Creating Passionate Users panel on Saturday was one of the best panels that any of us have seen so far. It scored not only on content but delivery. Kathy Sierra really did a bang-up job at conveying useful, intelligent perspectives in an engaging way.

The panel focused on the psychology of people’s reactions to things, and how that can be used to build community, buzz and loyalty around a product. I’m not a marketing person, and when I just reread that sentence it sounded like some kind of evil form of manipulation. There was a bit about that, I suppose, but it was delivered in such a genuine and realistic way that it didn’t seem either evil or manipulative. The reality is, for example, that people’s brains respond chemically to positive experiences and everything they are experiencing gets roped into that effect. So, for example, if you show someone a picture of an attractive, scantily clad person along with your product they will respond positively even if their logical mind identifies it as a cheap marketing trick. She really drove home the idea that, yes, there are cheap tricks you can use… but using them effectively is an art form.

Cheap tricks aside, the strongest message in this panel was to focus on your customers rather than yourself. Which, of course! Duh! Everyone knows that, right? Still, look around the web and you’ll find tons of marketing web sites that are really all about companies and products rather than their customers. It’s an easy mistake to make. This year really seems focused on creating user-centric products and marketing them in a user-centric way. Which is a good thing all around.

We sat around at lunch today talking about who the users of Bugwire really will be (people like us, no doubt), and what they might care about. There was no shortage of jokes about putting svelte, naked people on the Bugwire home page.

With the wayfinding work we’ve been doing recently, Steph was intrigued by the Online In Offline Spaces panel. The idea of tying web apps in to three dimensional spaces is exciting and Meetup, Dodgeball, and Socialite are brilliant examples of what can be done there. It’ll be interesting to see if this idea can find more traction in applications that go beyond social networks.

More on panels coming soon. If you missed the conference, some of the panels have been recorded as podcasts.

Handwriting: Tag sxswi

Saturation or Sense?

Handwire At The Conference