Any start-up community needs an audience to embrace them. It’s obvious, but LinkedIn could never be LinkedIn if only small pockets of communities joined and didn’t post full resumes. When you sign up for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. you commit a small amount of time to the community – making a profile, selecting an image of yourself – and then the community must woo you to stay. A shiny interface does little when you can’t deliver the community.
So, it’s easy to see how the beginning of any social-based site or app can deter people from using it. You hop on, you invest, and then no one else is using it. You poke around, give it 30 seconds, then you close it. I downloaded Color when it first launched. I read the buzz on the tech blogs, but interestingly enough, a search in the app store returned various apps that use the word ‘color’ in the description. I found a way to download through Color’s web landing page (thinking to myself, “thank goodness they made me so curious with all that funding”). I was by myself and didn’t instantly grasp why I would love this app, so I closed it. I opened it again when some co-workers suggested we try it out. We had fun blowing off a meeting for about 10 minutes, which resulted in a lot of photographs of us in a conference room. I’ve not opened the app since.
But I have been following Color’s efforts to reach a community and reading about its various attempts. Michael Arrington wrote a piece for TechCrunch about the failed capture of the Royal Wedding buzz. His criticism in this case resides with Color’s positioning of the app as a high-quality photo-sharing experience (which is not what actually occurred either). I think the failure lies more with the assumption that anyone can be the early adopters of this app.
While the use of the app is meant to be ‘in the moment’, it’s difficult as a user to form that habit, especially given that when you have tried, nothing happens. I’m not entirely negative about the idea of a ‘location-only’ experience – but I think one way to encourage use while membership is growing is to give a peek at where people are using it in close proximity to your location. This would certainly help me to understand further about when I should open it up and give me confidence that others would be doing it, too.
Beyond that, it needs a strong community. It needs a group of people that would immediately benefit and be thrilled by the visual, temporal nature of the app. I was inspired to begin thinking of how a location-based communication app could reach the right community when I saw this tweet from Peter Anderson (@peter_and) and reply from Mark Suster:
Coachella would have been the perfect venue for an app like this. The audience is right. The type of event is right. The mood is relaxed, full of ‘free love’ (if you will). The self consciousness of this kind of crowd is practically non-existent. The term ‘Early adopters’ feels a bit clinical for this group, but it’s exactly what they could be, barring problems with phone reception in the desert.
An app like this just needs a little shepherding into the hands of the right people. The buzz in the tech world came first, for better or for worse, but now is the time when the masses must ‘get it’.
I’m the millionth person to write about the success of Facebook early on and the buzz within the Ivy League community. I wasn’t at an Ivy, but I was close. Close enough to hear about it from friends and then to be in the third or fourth round of schools that ‘got Facebook’. It changed my life at college. And mostly because I was in an environment where I felt safe to share my thoughts or whereabouts, I wanted to organize people (parties, events), and I needed to make new friends or develop new friendships. Having the .edu e-mail address made all the difference in the early days. It was enough to take away the associations with MySpace. The adoption pattern of Facebook is a completely different story now (last I checked, the boomer generation is the 2nd most rapidly growing demo), but back in 2005, groups of college kids were eager for access. Why? Because we already had a built-in location-based network around us, and Facebook put it online.
For the new wave of location-based apps that define ‘network’ as the people within a certain proximity of one another, it might help to take a similar approach. Find an existing, real-life network and then show them the benefit of taking it mobile. If the shared interest is the ‘here and now’ then capitalize on it by enhancing the real-life experience with the app.
Find the digital natives and let them take the app through its paces. We may find out that Color changes everything, but we also might need the right people to show us how.
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