[fr]
Mes notes de la keynote de Kathy Sierra.
[en]
Here are my notes of Kathy Sierra’s keynote, quite different from yesterday’s workshop, which I also blogged. My notes are probably incomplete in some spots and may contain mistakes.
Finding Web 2.0 Opportunities (Kathy Sierra)
1) reduce guilt and fear
most of the time, people feel like they suck, like it’s their fault. Sometimes, making the product easier is not always the answer. We need to reduce that kind of feeling/face. How about using facial recognition to see when users are pulling a face? Or even simpler, have a WTF?! button.
Help, FAQ and user manuals do not solve WTF faces. People writing help and FAQ think you’re happy to use the softwa re and a bit intellectually curious about using the software. Not true! Assume that most of the time, our users feel in WTF mode. Even if your software is easy to use, it might be they’re pulling that face because of what they’re trying to do with your tool.
FAQ/Help aren’t wrong, they’re written for the wrong place of the curve.
Recognise that people are miserable, feel they suck at what they’re trying to learn. Let people off the hook for feeling bad that it’s their fault. Books teaching something shouldn’t make people think they’re stupid.
“Appartments for rent: dog required.” In the US, so hard to find a place to live when you have a dog.
“Please walk on the grass, hug the trees, smell the roses.”
“What kind of genius? young, early, or late bloomer (Doc Searls).”
A lot of 2.0 stuff (like Twitter) increases the guilt, because you have to keep up. steph-note: I realise I’ve been letting myself off the hook quite a lot regarding that.
Being an expert is generally just a matter of focus, not a matter of natural talent.
How to write a bestseller? Choose a title that lets people off the hook. “The perfect mess” or “Everything bad is good for you.”
2) Don’t “bait and switch” on the relationship
Don’t start out all nice and interested and seductive, and in the end push away. How do you treat your ongoing users vs. the users you want to capture? The difference between how sales reps treat customers or prospects is often huge and the wrong way around. Documentation quality.
Take the marketing budget and throw it into user learning. It’s not always a problem to not have a marketing budget: teach your users to kick ass.
Every time you think of something that you might do for marketing, think about what would happen if you applied that to user learning. Huge example: camera brochures and material. Glossy brochures that are all about taking great photos — which is the reason people buy cameras! — and afterwards, manuals that teach me to be a tool expert, which is not what I want!
Serendipity Curve. Introduce randomness. Excessive customisation and tailoring strips out the delight of discovering something unusual and unexpected. Encourage people to make connections between your stuff and seemingly unrelated things.
Roger von Oech’s “Creative Whack Pack” (steph-note: looks really good!)
3) Make it real/Make it important
Why are we here? We still need physical presence despite all our technology. A huge part of our brain is devoted to our hands and mouth.
Smell is really important steph-note: shows cup of coffee on slide, it does something to our brain but not just smell. Skin was meant to be used.
A real present trumps a virtual gift (not that the latter isn’t meaningful!!) Think about how you can give something in the real world to your users, related to your product. In the US, the UPS guy is a hero. He’s a sex-symbol. Physically impossible to not smile when you see the Amazon box on your doorstep.
Philosophy of Electric Rain:
- users should do something kick ass within 20 minutes
- the process of buying, downloading and installing feel like you’re getting a special present. E.g. a real human answers the tech support. We don’t expect that!
Unboxing! “geek unpacking porn” Look at pictures of other people unpacking their new geek toy. steph-note: I almost did that with a Flickr photo of my new macbook and roomba.
People are actually coming up with ways to make those pictures more seductive. These things matter!!
Even if you’re working in bits, and all “virtual”, find something you can send to your users offline. People always care about the t-shirts.
T-shirt First Development. ThinkGeek. It’s not enough to send it to them, give them a way to show that they’re wearing the t-shirt.
Don’t make this mistake:
There are women or smaller men in your audience. They won’t feel like they kick ass in an XXL t-shirt. Yes, even if it’s not cost-effective.
Remember we’re not ready to leave our bodies behind just yet. “Real” sex still trumps the “virtual” kind…
Similar Posts:
- Kathy Sierra: Creating Passionate Users (Web2.0Expo, Berlin)
- Jesse James Garrett: Delivering Rich Experiences (Web 2.0 Expo, Berlin)
- FOWA: How to Turn your App into a Business (Ted Rheingold)
- Jeremy Keith: The Beauty in Standards and Accessibility (Web2.0Expo, Berlin)
- Reboot9 — Marko Ahtisaari: Attention! On the Near Future of Marketing
{ 5 comments }
More on coComment Advertising
by Stephanie Booth on 19.04.2008
in Social Media and the Web, coComment
[fr]
Malheureusement, coComment et moi sommes partis pour une "Séparation 2.0: quand les 'social tools' que vous aimiez ne vous le rendent pas." Le choix de leur distributeur de publicité est vraiment malheureux (un cran au-dessus du spam, à mon sens), et clairement, il n'y a pas de dialogue entre coComment et ses utilisateurs, malgré les déclarations acharnées "d'ouverture au dialogue".
A la recherche d'une solution de remplacement pour la saisie des commentaires, donc. Le suivi des conversations m'intéresse beaucoup moins que la centralisation de tous mes commentaires en un endroit.
[en]
I was alerted to this a few days ago by Nathalie, and after witnessing it with my own eyes — well, I’m going to go to bed a little later to blog about it, after all.
After preparing to slap ads in our comment RSS feeds, coComment is staying on the same ugly and obviously slippery slope by inserting ads in the cocobar:
So, slightly more discreet than the big banners placed in the RSS feed, but not in very good taste either. Here are some examples of scrolling ad text:
Reloading a cocobar-enabled page will provide you with hours of endless entertainment. (I’m kidding — but there are more out there, of course.)
Now, I understand that coComment needs to “monetize”, though one could question a business model which seems to be based on revenue from scrolling ads and blinking banners. (I can’t remember who said “if your business model is putting ads in your service, think again”.)
There are ads and ads, though. Here’s a sample of banners from the coComment site:
The screen captures don’t render the blinking quality of most of these ads, but I guess your imagination can fill in. Now, does anybody else than me feel that this kind of advert is just about one step above spam? Based on a few of the comments I can read on the post Matt wrote about the “harsh realities” of advertising, it seems not:
stan
Allan White, in comment
Yes, there are ads and ads. These ones definitely make coComment look very cheap and dodgy, and I’m not sure it would encourage users to hand over credit card details to pay for an ad-free version. Also, what’s with the Hot For Words thing? I’m sorry, but this is not my world. coComment has obviously moved into a space which is very alien to my beloved blogosphere.
Unfortunately, it’s not enough to state that you want to have a conversation to actually be having one (I guess that for starters, that last post would have pointed to the post of mine that contributed to prompt it). A conversation starts with listening and caring, and obviously, despite their efforts to prove the contrary, the coComment team sadly don’t get this.
What could they have done? Well, I’m not going to launch into a session of full-blown strategic consulting for an ex-client of mine (who didn’t seem to value my advice much at the time), but simple things like taking up issues such as the arrival of advertising with the people who use the service before actually dumping ads in their feeds unannounced could be a way of showing you care a little bit about how they feel. Understanding that apologies and justifications when you mess up do not erase the past also seems like a good idea. As my friend Brian Solis put it:
Brian Solis
So, as I told Brian, coComment and I are headed for Breakup 2.0: when the social media tools you loved don’t love you back (yes, you can quote that one, it’s from me).
At the moment, I’m only using the service to “save” the comments I make, because I like keeping a trace of my writings (I used to collect stamps). Sadly, I’m not even sure coComment will allow me to walk out with all my data in an XML dump — I don’t see anything obvious in the interface for that, so if I am able to, it will probably be due to my relationships with the people who have access to the server. (I said “if”.)
The tracking feature is too confusing and overloaded for me to use — I can imagine using something like co.mments to keep an eye on the small number of conversations where I’m on the lookout for an answer. But I don’t have an alternate solution for “capturing” the comments I make. Copy-paste is a bit of a bore, and del.icio.us doesn’t capture the comment content — just the fact that there is a comment.
I’ve been thinking up an idea involving a Firefox add-on. It would have a bunch of algorithms to detect comments fields (maybe would support some microformat allowing to identify comment feeds or forms), have a simple on/off toggle to “activate” the field for capture (some right-click thing, much more practical than a bookmarklet or a browser button, because it’s always there, handy, wherever you click), would colour the field in something really visible when capture is on (red! pink! green!) without disrupting readability (I need to see what I type). It would capture the comment, permalink, blog post name (it knows I’m the commenter, I could fill in that info in the add-on settings), and dump the info in an XML or RSS file, or in the database of my WordPress installation, with the help of a WordPress plugin.
It’s a half-baked idea, of course, and I don’t have the JS skills to actually code anything like this. It should probably be a week-end project for somebody with sufficient Javascript-fu — if you’re interested in bringing it to life, get in touch.
Similar Posts:
Tagged as: add-on, ads, advertising, alienation, brand, coComment, commenting, comments, firefox, idea, javascript, monetizing, screenshots, Social Software, startup, users
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