Last weekend a friend of mine tried to open a beer with a Swiss Army Knife bottle opener. She failed. I’m sure the opener works, but I was left with the thought that sometimes when something tries to be everything, it often isn’t as good as its competition which is focused on doing one thing really well. The latter category includes bottle openers and Foursquare. The former, Facebook Places.
Facebook Places is interesting and may become a juggernaut. I’m a digital optimist so I’ll be using it. However, before we declare Foursquare and Gowalla goners there are a few things worth thinking about.
- The Facebook Places check ins will litter your feed. If this catches on, expect to see streams of check ins throughout your newsfeed. FB has done a good job of organizing birthday wishes and check ins by multiple people at the same place to be under one item, but if everyone starts checking in it could get ugly.
- Typically people have a smaller group of friends on foursquare and these are people whom they actually want to know where they are. With hundreds of friends on facebook, we all know there are many we don’t know that well or don’t really care about, let alone want to know where we are. Part of the beauty of Foursquare and the other check in apps are the smaller groups of friends with whom you can have an ongoing conversation. (more…)
I want my apps word of mouth
Thursday, March 24th, 2011Apps are like bands. Word of mouth is always a better way of hearing about one than through media coverage.
When it’s word of mouth it feels cool like your friend is helping you discover something. When it’s media coverage it feels like the machine is telling you about something that is already guaranteed to be big.
When it’s word of mouth it’s Instagram, memolane, The Situationist, TV On The Radio or Portugal The Man. When it’s news it’s Path or Color, Arctic Monkeys or Kings of Leon.
Instagram feels like you’re involved in a community of people discovering just how something works and figuring out what makes it cool or forgettable. It’s the same as a band you hear about through word of mouth. There is some collective ownership of the people who catch them on the way up.
Color, its $40 million funding and its “leaked” pitch deck feel like overplay on the radio and a Rolling Stone cover.
This notion feels directly in line with what Lucius Kwok wrote last week about The Slow Company Movement on Felt Tip blog. “The idea behind the Slow Company movement is that instead of trying to be the first or to get the most mindshare or market share of any company in your vertical, you try to make something that people genuinely find useful and are willing to pay for it.”
The bands that play the bars, get a following and then grow from there, discover who they really are and learn about their fans. Phish is a great example. Love them or hate them, they know their fans and they’ve been packing arenas for nearly 20 years. Apps that come out quietly rather than launch, give themselves the opportunity to be discovered and grow a fanbase that is proud to share the app with their friends seem to have a better chance at longterm success. Facebook seems to be a reasonable example of this model.
Young bands that sign the record contract get distracted from the real work of becoming a great band. The contract may bring some initial cash, but is also exposes the band to a lot of people at once, many of whom may not be the right audience at all. The same thing can be said about a big TechCrunch article that becomes a distraction for an app or web service that is just trying to walk, but all of a sudden is expected to fly.
It’s as though my first interaction with Color has to be a reaction to what’s been written and what’s expected from the app that got more money from Sequoia than Google did. Whereas my first experience with Instagram is just me hearing about something new and taking time to discover what it’s all about.
With Color, the conversation is – “This app got $40 million. There’s a lot of hype. I don’t get it.”
With Instagram, the conversation is – “I’ve heard good things about this. It’s a rad way to take cool pictures and share them. My friends should check this out.”
Both of these conversations may be right or wrong. It just seems to me that developing a groundswell of users to become advocates of your app is a better way of “launching” than coming out as the next big thing with a bunch of dollars behind you.
Color may be a great app. It’s just a question if we’ll give it time to mature.
What do you think? Do you see the parallels? Any other examples of bands or apps?
Tags: advertising, apps, bands, Color, hype, instagram, marketing, path, situationist, slow company movement, word of mouth
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