When Twitter introduced features to address their retention problems with new users, they failed to address how these features would affect their more active, passionate users. The design of Twitter's Retweet and Lists features seem to have been driven as a response to counteract their high churn rate with nearly 60% of people on Twitter abandoning the service after a month. Unfortunately, the design of these Twitter features only sought to the fix the problem for new users and neglected to address the problems for the service's passionate, as well as their regular, active users—roughly 10% who generate more than 90% of Twitter's content. (Joshua Porter defines passionate users as those who have an emotional attachment to the product and often evangelize and build community around the product or service.)
Anil Dash recently criticized the ineffectiveness of the Suggested User Lists and reported that "being on Twitter's suggested user list makes no appreciable difference in the amount of retweets, replies, or clicks that I get". Many Twitter users, including myself, also prefer the former convention for retweeting, not because it was without problems, but because it allowed users to add commentary, provide attribution and, to some extent, trace a tweet's history.
As seemingly trivial as these things may seem, inviting users to contribute even small retweet comments and giving credit to those who contributed are critical elements that encourage more thoughtful participation and give a more a satisfying sense of a user's individual input and reputation within the larger network.
Consider the story of Betty Crocker's cake mixes:
"The company was still refining their approach to marketing. While they sought to promote a quick and easy product that still retained a "fresh, 'home-made'" quality, 'the market was slow to mature' (p. 168). The company called upon the market research of Dr. Burleigh Gardner and Dr. Ernet Dichter, both business psychologists:'The problem, according to psychologists, was eggs. Dichter, in particular, believed that powdered eggs, often used in cake mixes, should be left out, so women could add a few fresh eggs into the batter, giving them a sense of creative contribution.'
As a result, General Mills (who own Betty Crocker) altered their product, abandoning the powdered egg in their mixes. The requirement to add eggs at home was marketed as a benefit, conferring the quality of 'home-made' authenticity upon the box cake mix. (Whether using fresh eggs instead of powdered eggs actually enhanced taste was beside the point.)"
Although the fresh egg made the entire cake-making process less convenient and efficient, psychologically, it offered a greater sense of satisfaction and real accomplishment when fulfilling the role of baker or homemaker. When the retweet function was oversimplified into a mindless, one-click step, it likewise took away the sense of adding meaningful contribution and the satisfaction of becoming a co-creator.
When Twitter introduced their new features focused on new users, the oversimplified design unfortunately degraded the user experience for their more active, experienced users. Problems often have more than just one side, or one set of users to consider. By focusing myopically on one extreme set of users, the solution may likely break for the other set of users.
]]>Of course, the creative spin is done by marketers and PR folks all the time. But sometimes stories just don't really match up. In particular, when fabricated stories masquerade as news, people subject them to a different set of rigorous, ethical rules.
Take the New York Times' analysis of Kindle's reviews by Nick Bilton. When the story first ran, the graphs were mislabeled. I highly respect Nick and his deft hand at using infographics to tell a story, but, in this case, there was no story—or at least, the materials he used didn't corroborate his story. Seth Godin has a good analysis and iReader Review offers a more thorough one—both pointed out that you can't rely on the star-ratings alone without reading their accompanying comments to draw conclusions (apparently, many of them came from non-Kindle owners). Unfortunately, I think this was a case of "bad" infographics (simplified star-ratings) leading to more bad infographics that didn't take into consideration the value of sentiment within the written reviews.
As we increasingly scan, rather than read, we often fall prey to relying on data visualizations to get a quick summary of large, complex amounts of data. The problem, of course is we lose the fine-grained resolution of the story and, instead, only see a single, simplified, interpreted view of things.
]]>Other contributors include Kevin Kelly, Dan Pink, Chris Anderson, Tom Peters, Gary Vaynerchuk, Guy Kawasaki, Jason Fried, Tony Hsieh, Derek Sivers and Jay Parkinson, and so many more. (Scroll down to view the full list of entries and contributors below.)
Read Seth's blog post about this remarkable project.
Here's a full list of the entries and their contributors:
Search Engine Optimization is not a legitimate form of marketing. It should not be undertaken by people with brains or souls. If someone charges you for SEO, you have been conned.]]> …The One True Way to get a lot of traffic on the web [is] pretty simple, and I’m going to give it to you here, for free:
Make something great. Tell people about it. Do it again.
That’s it. Make something you believe in. Make it beautiful, confident, and real. Sweat every detail. If it’s not getting traffic, maybe it wasn’t good enough. Try again.
Then tell people about it. Start with your friends. Send them a personal note – not an automated blast from a spam cannon. Post it to your Twitter feed, email list, personal blog. (Don’t have those things? Start them.) Tell people who give a shit – not strangers. Tell them why it matters to you. Find the places where your community congregates online and participate. Connect with them like a person, not a corporation. Engage. Be real.
Then do it again. And again. You’ll build a reputation for doing good work, meaning what you say, and building trust.
"The reptilian brain is dedicated solely to survival, whereas the outer neocortex hosts reason and higher intelligence. In between these two, however, lies the sweetest part of the apple: the limbic system. It’s a collection of processors and hormone controllers that govern memory and emotions. The limbic system also enables us to interpret the emotions of others. It is the part of our brain that allows us to care."]]>
My takeaway: It’s all about how your priorities dictate how you manage your time and what you really say when you prioritize something over another. Seth clearly values the people who comprise his network and the attention they’ve offered him and I admire the way he makes time for everyone indiscriminately. He doesn’t want to be perceived as someone who doesn’t have time to respond to emails because he’s too popular and important — and while those things are true, he doesn’t use them as an excuse to diminish someone else’s status by insinuating “I have more important things to do.”
]]>I've watched the organization get bigger and better and the children's entries become slicker. But, this growth, however, comes with huge expenses and they can really use financial help (or technical support). Please consider donating to this worthy organization.
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Gen M is about passion, responsibility, authenticity, and challenging yesterday's way of everything. Everywhere I look, I see an explosion of Gen M businesses, NGOs, open-source communities, local initiatives, government. Who's Gen M? Obama, kind of. Larry and Sergey. The Threadless, Etsy, and Flickr guys. Ev, Biz and the Twitter crew. Tehran 2.0. The folks at Kiva, Talking Points Memo, and FindtheFarmer. Shigeru Miyamoto, Steve Jobs, Muhammad Yunus, and Jeff Sachs are like the grandpas of Gen M. There are tons where these innovators came from.
