(This is cross-posted on EchoDitto's blog)
I too went to the South by Southwest interactive conference this past week in Austin, Texas. The panel discussions covered a healthy range of topics that could fall under blogging, mobile content and distribution, web 2.0 applications, web design and entrepreneurship for web 2.0 ideas.
I enjoyed almost all the panels I attended. Unfortunately, some of the presenters were more interested in hyping their own sites rather than educating the audience. I know, it goes with the territory since most bloggers and entrepreneurs need all the attention they can get just to make ends meet. I can tolerate some buzzing, but the "How To Add Video To Your Blog panel" was a whole lot o' grandstanding and not a lot of best practices.
The most impressive presentation was Kathy Sierra's hour conversation about How to Create Passionate Users. Although she presented by herself, her style was so casual and unguarded that it felt we were in a small room together rather than 500+ attendees packed in large meeting room.
Her explanations were very clear and her presentation was interactive -- she made the audience form small groups and discuss each question -- which added to the conversational tone. Kathy organized her presentation as a series of questions, sort of like a survey you could use for evaluating your own work:
- How do you help your users kick ass?
You have to help your users be the best at what ever you need them to do in order to buy your product or service. For example, Nikon created
NikonNet, a photography training site, to help their consumers kick ass at photography. Sure, Nikon wants professionals to use their cameras, but obviously it's more important to their business that they encourage amateur photographers like you and me. Users care about what you DO with a product or service, not what that product is by itself.
Even more interesting, you will subconsciously relate your pleasurable experience on the site with an actual Nikon camera, since Nikon is adding to your happiness. Kathy called this the "misattribution of arousal" because your brain instinctively pairs a pleasurable experience with whatever happens to be around -- in this case the Nikon brand. The success of celebrity partnerships with advocacy campaigns also exemplifies this trend. Bono helps you kick ass at a U2 concert, so when he talks about The ONE Campaign during the show, you are in a perfect emotional state to get excited about the campaign.
- How to get past the brain's crap filter?
You better excite the brain or else you won't have a chance at attracting passion from users. You best be talkin' to the brain because you'll have to work much harder to convince a user that your product or service deserves their passion. What works? Here is a short list:
- weird stuff, novel, something that stands out
- scary things (even image of people seeing scary things)
- sexy
- babies, children, cute
- funny
- faces, especially if they have a strong reaction
- images that are unresolved
For example, why would anyone snowboard twice? It's painful. Your butt hurts for days. And you will certainly embarrass yourself in front of everyone on the ski mountain. You do it because it looks cool.
- What do you communicate to users?
A conversational style always beats a formal style because, as Kathy pointed out, the brain's retention of material with "you" is much better. The brain interprets content with "you" as a conversation and, therefore, gives the material more weight. My experience with building interactive campaigns certainly supports this. Some of the clearest examples come from email marketing guides.
- How are you building the challenge?
You need to give users bite-sized chucks to digest and tackle rather than asking them to do everything all at once. That's why the best video games have levels or chapters that get incrementally harder. However, recognition of the users skill level is just as important, and often undervalued, as an aspect of creating passionate users. Anyone familiar with martial arts knows that color coded belts are an essential piece of the social language within martial arts communities. It's how community members recognize skill and authority.
If you are successful at creating passionate users, your community will become so dependent that it acts more like a tribe or cult, wearing your t-shirts and sporting your bumper-stickers everywhere. Any technophile will tell you that the Apple community is about as cultish as you can get without having a "______-phobia" associated with the behavior.
- How do you get your users in flow or in the zone?
Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods and Lance Armstrong might be the best examples of athletes who know how to play "in the zone" or "in flow," loosely defined as "being in your optimal experience." If you satisfy the previous questions above, you will lead your users into "flow" and create a passionate user. As someone who plays sports and music, I know what that semi-euphoric, semi-numb experience feels like. I'm going to keep that as a guide post by which to measure the strategies I recommend to my clients.
Kathy has a great blog that follows this topic too. I'll leave you the same way Kathy left us:
It doesn't matter what they think about you. It's about how they fell about themselves as a result of interacting with you. How are you going to give them an "I Rule" experience?"
