Kites: Why Ideas Fly

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):

  1. Branding
  2. Engaging (as in "engaging applications")
  3. Viral
  4. Useful
  5. 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.

Thursday, September 13, 2007, 12:00 AM

tagged: bevus, charts, ideavalidity, kites