Let your users show you the money
To paraphrase William Gibson, “The street always finds its own uses for things.” If you’re starting an online marketplace, or a social messaging platform, or an online community, one of the big challenges is to stay in touch with your users, to learn more about how they use your platform.
Why? Often ‘the street’ (your customers) will use your platform for surprising purposes. Likely, purposes you didn’t have in mind. Should you ignore their preference and try to force customers to bend to your will, or bend to theirsand try to find a commercially successful model for what they’re doing?
The answer is almost always the latter: try to find a legal, commercially-viable model for what your users want to do with your platform. Ebay, Twitter and Kazaa are all great case studies in learning and adapting to what customers do with a platform (yes, I know Kazaa got sued out of existence by the RIAA but those guys had a successful monetization strategy, if only they’d been given a chance to implement it.)
A new and very interesting example I’ve come across is xtranormal, which is a platform for making and sharing animated cartoons. One cool feature is the ability to create dialogue with text-to-speech — type in the dialogue and your animated characters speak them, in a flat, robotic monotone that really kills the buzz if you’re trying to create an animated romantic comedy or a smooth marketing pitch.
But it turns out this very same flat, robotic monotone works very well indeed when applied to sarcasm. Watch this hilarious exchange between a mobile geek and a girl intended to represent Nokia’s Ovi store, below.
We go shopping in Nokia’s OVI Store from The Really Mobile Project on Vimeo.
So many of the highest-rated videos on the xtranormal website use sarcasm to such great effect — can the founders of xtranormal have not noticed this? Have they noticed it and decided to ignore it? Or are they even now hatching plans to build a community of consumers frustrated and angry with the bad experiences they’ve had with brands and products? Are they even now thinking up ways to use that emotion to motivate customers to create movies and share them with the world?
I know I would be. No, I’m not being sarcastic…
2 Responses to “Let your users show you the money”
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I love “if you offer me another hannah montanna product I’ll hurt one of us.” I am so going to play with this animation system!
Cool, I think your dry sense of humour will be well-suited to it Gavin. Hey, maybe I could organise a competition for wittiest animation… Satirathon2010? Any takers?