Category Archives: User Experience

This is where I share great user experiences and how they can help your business grow.

Public Stats: Twitter and YouTube make me care

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Graph showing Rishi's # of followers

I have no idea why but for the past few days I have been obsessed with the number of followers I have.

It probably has to do with the fact that it is public and everyone can see it. Or maybe it has something with the fact that if someone has a ton of followers we think they are more important than others. I often find myself looking at how many followers other people have to determine if they are worthy of my follow.

Public stats has worked on me over and over again.

First it was YouTube. Since people could see how many views a particular video has, I wanted to promote the crap out of it. I also would email all my friends so I could get 1 more view. If a video is over 5 minutes long and it has less than a 1,000 views I will most likely turn it off before the 1 minute mark (unless it completely engages me).

Next it was LinkedIn. Since the number of connections was public I really wanted to hit the 500+ connections landmark. I quickly lost interest in connecting with more people after I hit the 500+ goal because you can’t publicly see how many connections someone has past 500.

Now it is Twitter. I find myself checking Twitter Counter on a daily basis to see if my # of followers has grown. Do I think it is pathetic?… yes, I do. Will I still check my twitter numbers tomorrow… yes, I will.

Conclusion: If you want your users to care. Show them stats and make it public for everyone to see.

Side Note: I wonder if I would have done better in school if my grades were displayed publicly.

Am I the only one that is like this? Do public stats make you care? Let me know in the comments please.

How Meetup.com Brings in the Cash with Personalized Email Marketing

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meetup.com logoMeetup.com rocks at email marketing! In this blog post I’m going to show you how they make money with their emails. You should walk away from this post understanding the power of personalized location based email marketing and how it can increase user engagement.

Meetup User Life Cycle Comic Teaser

Meetup.com User Life Cycle Comic below

First the Basics:
What is Meetup?
So lets say you wanted to get a bunch of like-minded people to talk about books, web development, parenting, etc. You can go to Meetup.com and launch a “meetup”. You can also go directly to their site and search based on your interest and zip code for a meetup in your area.

How does Meetup.com make money?
Meetup.com charges the organizers a flat monthly fee ($19/mo) to run a “meetup”?
Note: that they don’t have a free plan or trial. Instead they explain why they need to charge and a picture of their entire team. They also try to incentivize you to sign up for 6 months rather than doing a month to month plan (this probably helps them increase retention since it takes 3-6 months to get your meetup really going).

Meetup.com's pricing pageWhy would anyone want to run a “meetup”?
Lots of reasons. But here are a few:
Meet like minded people, recruiting, seminars, business development, build a small community. Oh… also you can charge people to attend your meetup so this can turn into your own business.

Now the Good Stuff. How they do email marketing:
It is meetup.com’s financial incentive to make sure people attend meetups. Organizers are likely to keep their meetup going if people show up.

Step 1: Incentivize the “Organizer” to market the meetup using their existing community and location.
Meetup tells the organizer to email their contacts, post flyers up, and publish an ad on craigslist in their city. This helps meetup.com reach new users.

Step 2: Automatically assign email alerts to the user based on the meetup they joined. For example I joined a board-game meetup and it assigned a bunch of tags for me based on that meetup:

Meetup.com auto tagsThe beauty here is not only do they know I’m into board games but they know that I’m also located in San Francisco. Now, whenever a new board-game meetup is created in San Francisco I will get an email alert.

Step 3: Ask the new user to update their interests. This is done in the app and each email alert they send out.

The more things meetup learns about you the better they will be able to fill up their new meetups by alerting users.

Step 4: When a new meetup is created alert the people that are interested in it. This will help organizers fill up their meetups and keep them as a happy paid customers.

meetup's email announcement for things you are interested inSo, What’s The Point?:
Community driven sites can increase retention by simply alerting customers via email when something of interest happens on your site. So ask your users what they are interested in and let them know when it happens.

Meetup's User Life Cycle - How they Keep Paying Customers Happycomic art work by jenniart. feel free to reblog or embed this comic

If you have a community driven site and need help with figuring out how to make this happen just let me know in the comments or here. I would be happy to help you out. I’m also constantly tweeting about web marketing so feel free to follow me.

Update 3/23/11: Awesome quote in the comments by Ish

“Bottom line you are playing with fire with email alerts — make sure its clear to the user whats causing the alerts to happen and give them fine-grained tools to control them.”

Colour Lovers gets my browser

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Colour Lovers tells you what your screen size is and allows you to download the pattern in that size.  I wish all wallpaper sites and image download sites did this.
This is a great way to make the user experience better by knowing their browser data.  Colour Lovers could have had a drop down asking you what your screen size is… but there is no need to do that since they can figure it out themselves and just present it to you.

Very Clever Toyota – Donate your way to more email opt-ins

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Toyota has been trying a lot of different marketing techniques.  This post is about my favorite one.
Smithsonian Magazine is sponsoring a Free Museum day.  To get your free museum tickets you have to fill out a form with your email address.  As I made my way to the bottom of the form I see two opt-ins which I immediately unchecked (see screen shot below). And then it happened… I read this:
“For every person that requests more information from Toyota Avalon through this registration, Toyota will donate $1 to museum programming and educational outreach (up to $10,000).”
After reading that I felt like a total jerk and decided to opt-in to the Toyota information.
This is a great way to incentivize people to sign up to get more info about your company.  Note that it says “up to $10,000”,  so even if they get 100k subscribers they only have to donate $10k.