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I think active users are great and definitely should be paid attention too, but it depends on the numbers. Example, let's say I'm, oh I don't know, why not... Twitter, and I have a group of active good users. I could focus on this group and make the system more and more towards this group, but then my service might not grow. If I focus on the people moving from non users to users and making sure their experience is better I might be able to have sustained growth.
You could turn the fbook example on it's head and say if Facebook continued to build for it's super users you'd have a service that appealed to just the 18 -22 year old "kids" demographic and not to you and me.
Okay, I have a hat for you. You are my very first FriendFeed friend.
Let's celebrate by getting on each other's blogrolls.
RealNetworks used to abuse the difference between the two stats in a way that, at least to me, bordered on investor fraud. They used to parrot the total number of downloads of the real player on every investor call and press release as if that meant anything or was a reliable indicator of the company's performance. No commentary was ever offered on repeat downloads or the same user downloading each upgrade as they were released.
I find a lot of services do need to think about the userbase being active in a variety of contexts that are not wat they expected. The Who, what, when, where why, and how question is one that is consientently seems to be the most complicated and the one that is either addressed in an amazing sort of way, or is really ignored.
My example of the moment is that I did not get twitter until I started using third party platforms- linking it to secondard products such as Disqus, and was on the go with it. I find it very weird to use it innately as it stands on the web. Just feels funny. But I know people who love it that way. (now if only I could figure out how to on the fly insert pictures into a twitter stream- I know someone who needs that...)
For fear of being accused of shameless self-promotion I try and avoid referencing our personalised news service - ensembli - but I'd love to hear your thoughts on it as this is exactly our objective:
http://www.ensembli.com/
FYI, I'm @egoboss on Twitter. Cheers, Carl
(Hope that's OK, Fred!)
http://ensembli.com/topic/education
and
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If you just did focus groups and asked- there would be no ATMs. People apparently hated the idea when you asked them. You need to sit down and watch people.
Further, a lot of design should stem from the body-the hardware is at least an extension of what your hands, mouth, ect are doing. Software, being in some the most apparent extension of your hardware, should be really easily understood as being somehow, in some sort of abstract or real way, to the body and its systems, and the contexts it is put in. I always get shocked/unshocked by how much and how little thought there is put into software based on how humans work in context to the situations they are and the bodies we proudy have.
A typical Seth post would read something like this:
Inactive users don't talk about your service -active ones do.
If you make active users happier, they'll sneeze even more love out to their friends.
If you want to win, focus on the people who can help you win - your sneezers!
etc, etc
I was just suggesting your advice today had a certain Sethness about it.
The key difference, of course, is that here we can leave comments....
pages of the internet
it would be interesting to know the total registered user numbers
do you know if they share them publicly?
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/15/facebooks-...
So 80% active -- pretty amazing. Not to mention they have 50mm monthly that is unregistered.
The 50mm unregisted is staggering since you can't do much if you aren't logged in
Of course they are hell bent to change that and they will
It is a hangout for us, as we form our identities. A number of people my own age keep mentioning to me how much they dislike all the moves made to open up FB, because it means losing the security of that zone to explore our coolness (or fake coolness, alas).
If there was a way to conformable switch over to something as clean and nice simply, with massive amount of identity protection- a lot of people would. We've been a bit burned by the opening up process- our pictures that we wanted to share easily got shared a little too easily...Same with comments and other thoughts.
I miss the old days when it was clearly more sex drugs and rock and roll...now your bosses boss could theoretically check in.
The 50mm unregisted is staggering since you can't do much if you aren't logged in
Of course they are hell bent to change that and they will
In fact I'd like somebody to define a good ratio (maybe with top 5 indicator variables) for a full-richness online property that approaches the social/economic/cultural complexity of offline communities. Can you define the ratio for a healthy thriving town and extrapolate to a rich online property? I suppose FB would come closest to being like a real geographic city.
Venkat
I'd note that foursquare, which I posted about yesterday, calls the person who has checked in the most to a location the 'mayor' of that location
Seems like your analogy works for social media
Maybe you need to offer more free stuff so people can be active without having to transact
Maybe there needs to be three levels, not two
Maybe you need to offer more free stuff so people can be active without having to transact
Maybe there needs to be three levels, not two
Chris Guillebeau just mentioned something similar in June: http://chrisguillebeau.com/3x5/how-to-convince-...
Oh hey so did I earlier last month:
http://www.victusspiritus.com/2009/06/08/top-4-...
This initial take-up phase can give very positive feedback, and appear as Active/Repeat Users - informed Geek/Maven users expressing 'wow/cool' etc but often there is the danger there is no real substance there and the people giving the feedback may not even remotely meet the profile you were hoping to attract anyway.
I believe that in our industry (services) we all need to better understand 'our' target users and how the profiles of the users we are acquiring during the initial start-up phases align to the market objectives of the services we are offering.
It's like when you lose a deal in business - it's a common trait to focus on why a deal was won (to revel in plaudits, etc) but all too often too little substantive attention is given to why a deal was lost - for fear of attributing blame when in fact it should be a perfect opportunity to better understand your market.
Prompted me to do a rough audit of my own repeat usage patterns vs registrations - hardly scientific but a personal insight nonetheless:
I'm registered (in bookmarked terms - ie, i thought to be of some substance at some point - there will be many others I chose to not even bookmark, being just a transient peek at something new that didn't make an impression to warrant bookmarking) with 48 web services/apps and a repeat user of (ie, I visit more than once a week - often daily) just 7.
As aggregation/personalized news services become more mainstream this becomes an even more interesting topic/metric ...
I know you asked for Fred's thoughts, but I thought I'd take a swing...
In the scenario described it seems to me that you'd do best to have 3 strategies based on each user group, and they'd be prioritized in this order.
1) Active registered users -- Continue to make them successful (to Fred's point)
2) Active unregistered users (customers) -- Support their activity and show how being registered can make their activity more valuable &/or easier for them
3) Non-active registered users -- Expose benefits of being active, encourage and employ core active registered users to communicate the value of being active. Create a way for the value of activity to spread virally. It seems it will mean more coming from other users and not the company.
Great question. I hope my thought is useful. Let me know what you think?
http://ouriel.typepad.com/myblog/2009/07/appsto...
http://ensembli.com/stories/1455345
(videogamer.com)
<shameless plug> I wrote a whitepaper (endorsed by Guy Kawasaki, so it's not total crap) on the subject of the power of Raving Fans: http://bit.ly/HijCT) </shameless plug>
I love the fact that it started with how relative are active users against total users, to how to enhance the customer experience to attract active users, and build on the inactive users.
I would agree with saas, as more companies are looking at the user experience level closer, and how to tweak the work flow, simplify existing features, make small user interface changes and hope that it is the catalyst for a customer to identify to the application itself, and say, "This is me."
I believe that this would be a more viable possibility without a major revamp to an app itself.
While it's important to focus on the active people, and to an extent you're right that if you support and privilege them, they will do more to make others attract, you should also be careful not to punish the other people. That is, their account or their inventory or whatever shouldn't be deleted without notification, and redundant and repetitive notification. I'm still furious that Yahoo put out a notice that they were deprecating the Yahoo Briefcase, they put a mistaken date on their notice, I thought I had longer than I did, and then all my files were deleted. And why? If they can give me unlimited storage in Yahoo email, what was their problem in holding some documents?! And no way to get them back.
To be sure, services that we use for free don't owe us an awful lot, really. And that's the problem. People will value services, and service providers will value people more when they pay subscriptions or at least have a wallet with currency for micropayments.
The way SL and Metaplace and other virtual worlds try to make that log-ons number go up is to give people coins just for logging in, or various presents, points, etc.