Doing Words

How do you get users to upload their profile picture?

// December 11th, 2008 // Social Media

Ever since My Yahoo! introduced personalised content to the web, product strategists like me have been struggling with getting more than 10% of our users to actually use the personalisation features available.

Personalisation matters to a product like My Yahoo! because it’s intended to give the company a far richer understanding of the user’s preferences for content, allowing closer targeting for marketers.

Personalisation matters even more to any social media business, because observing user behaviour has taught me that new visitors often judge the ‘interestingness’ of the product according to how personalised user profiles are. A classic case is MySpace – user experience as ugly as the wrong end of a bulldog but users love it because they can see right away that real people like them – warts and all – use it.

The toughest part of profile personalisation is getting users to add an avatar – an image of themselves (whether that be an actual photo or representational graphic) to their profile page. Privacy fears often take hold when you ask people to post their photo on the interweb.

Socialmedian.com has a great idea for encouraging users to change their profile picture – make the default picture something unbearably horrible.

Far-right Republicans aside, this image is certain to prompt people to reach, shaky-handed, for the webcam.

Thanks to Social Media Today for the tip.