Rodney Rumford from
facereviews.com, lays out 5 key points to making good Facebook applications.
(Disclaimer: I've only watched a few of his videos but I've already
seen a particular slant and attitude in them. Watch for it.)
I think the five points are a good starting point for thinking
about why things spread (outside Facebook as well). The five points
(BEVUS):
- Branding
- Engaging (as in "engaging applications")
- Viral
- Useful
- Smart
I'd almost want to kite an application on these scales (kite or
radar chart, that is) - the bigger the kite, the more likely
something (an idea or an application) will fly. Let's take your
usual marketing effort: heaving on the brand, not viral, not
engaging ("buy our stuff"), and not useful or smart (to the
viewer/consumer). It might look like this:
If your nephew Brian came to you with a kite shaped like that
that he had built, what would you say? You know that no amount of
pulling is going to get that off the ground - even if it is orange
and beautiful. Sorry Brian. The other end of the spectrum would be
the "perfect storm" of BEVUS - the maximum surface area to catch
the maximum air:
Real Kites: Simpsons I was watching a code geek give
a presentation at Yahoo! about javascript (warning: technical).
Sprinkled throughout his slides, he has little quotes from people
on his coding team. Instead of just the quotes, he used their Simpsons avatars
and bubbled the quote over them.
"Wow, that is a remarkable
thing. This guy is using Simpsons avatars everywhere - for no
reason really: except that he though they were fun. The Simpsons
movie & show, etc. really picked up good marketing there."
Then I wondered, "why is it remarkable?" Along the 5 BEVUS
lines, my first thought was that "they are leveraging a huge
brand." The Simpsons show has been around for a long time, is in
many languages, and is popular. So anything Simpsons that you
create is going to make noise. But this effort of the avatars is
obviously flying higher than Brian's kite (which is what we'd
expect from just a kite that had marketing/branding power but not
much else). (aside: there are a large number of people using
Simpsons avatars instead of their profile pictures on facebook [and
probably other places] - this further underlines their popularity
& virality.)
The Simpsons thing is engaging. Maybe not perfect, but I'll
score it 6/11. It is viral - if you see one, you can quickly create
your own - so let's call that 6/11. Useful? Smart? No so much. That
kite looks like this:
Now that is a kite that is obviously more likely to fly than
Brian's kite was.
Note: I've only used scores for all my kites from 1-11. But in
the real world, the scores are 1-11: they go much higher (in other
words: the Simpsons brand is probably bigger than 11 - so this kite
is actually bigger).
Word, Google, YouTube How about MS Word.
Completely different kite. Good brand, somewhat viral (someone
emails you "RecipeForGazpacho.doc" and you have to get Word to read
the doc [or Goodle Docs or OpenOffice... but mostly people get
Word]), very useful and somewhat smart. Not so engaging, but then
it doesn't need to be, because the kite is still:
How about Google search (branding score before they became
the search engine):
Enough to catch wind. Once it did, and grew and everyone knows
them (brand) and the kite looks like this:
How about YouTube videos:
To be fair, sometimes YouTube videos are useful - but usually
they aren't, but they are entertaining (engaging) - I'm counting
the majority - the beauty of a big site is that something is bound
to be engaging even if a lot isn't.
Summary I could do this all day, but I
won't.
I think that there are other axes here and with some fine-tuning
you could make a profitable "pre-launch web 2.0 business
evaluation" consulting business out of this if you did the research
to back it up and had a very complex system for rating.
But you don't need to - you can probably draw the kite in your
head. Maybe your area of work has different metrics or axes. But
I'll bet if you can nail down a few axes, you can better understand
when things launch and when they don't.
And, if you think about things as a visual kite, you'll quickly
know which things will fly and which won't.