|
|
W20: Customer Co-Creation
 Session: Building Awesome Web Sites & Services Using the Power of Happy Users
Speakers: Ted
Rheingold - Dogster, Stewart Butterfield - co-founder of Flickr (now at
Yahoo!), Joshua Schachter - founder of del.icio.us (also at Yahoo!),
Biz Stone - Twitter
This
was a good panel, not a great panel. I'd give it a solid "B" as a
grade. However, the experience transcended the actual presentation
which made it solidly worthwhile. Why? Because I was sitting 10 feet
away from the respective founders of three of the hottest Web 2.0 sites
in America right now i.e. Twitter, Flickr and del.icio.us.
The
focus of this panel was customer co-creation. It sort of followed that
path. The moderator was a guy named Ted Rheingold who was the least
successful of the group (and he owns two sites with 600K members). He
did a decent job framing the questions to the panelists but he was no
John Battelle.
Below are select insights/responses from the group:
Ted/Dogster:
I was surprised that nobody offered up great JavaScript or cool logo
ideas. However, I did get plenty of offers to beta test along with a
number good recommendations for new features and functionality.
Joshua/del.icio.us:
making your API's available is a great way to get your
customers/community to provide suggestions to you. They can do whatever
they please with your core application.
Question from the moderator: What motivates your customers to work for you?
Stewart/Flickr:
at the end of the day, it's recognition and acknowledgment -- although
sometimes direct compensation doesn't hurt. Some people just like to
help.
Ted/Dogster: I found that my customers contributed because they were happy the site existed -- nothing like it existed elsewhere.
Question from the moderator:
was there a fear that your acquiring companies would "screw things up"
when they bought you? All panelists said that there was some concern
but in some ways, Yahoo and Google (Stewart worked at Blogger before it
was acquired by Google) were so concerned with not undermining the core
values of deli.cio.us, Flickr and Blogger that they were overly
sensitive to the founders needs.
A few insights from the panel on leveraging some of their best customers for feedback:
- Joshua
said that del.icio.us did (and still does) create releases as fast as
possible -- it's vital to get feedback from your customers, even when
you release major bugs.
- Biz Stone said that Twitter has a group of "friends and family" that they release 1/2 baked updates to.
- Stewart
said that they leverage the "wisdom of crowds" of amateur photographers
for feedback. He did mention that there is a danger to listening to
your best customers TOO much because they are such advanced users, they
don't necessarily represent the masses.
- Biz said that he is an
avid reader of posts about Twitter and pays attention to a lot of the
Twitter activity. He also personally reaches out to users to make them
feel engaged (makes them a friend or "stars" their posts). He learned
this lesson from his early days of blogging (one of the founders of
Blogger linked to his blog and it left a lasting impression on him).
- When
Flickr first launched, Stewart and his co-founder (now his wife) used
to personally welcome people into the community. They found this
crucial to creating deep relationships.
- All three founders
agreed that if possible, it's great to hire people from within your
community/customer base. These customers are often product zealots and
sometimes know your product as well as you do. This works particularly
well for community moderators and technologists.
A note about
the panel -- and to a degree the conference itself. It's amazing to me
that so many of these guys and gals have been part of several different
successful start ups. At the end of the day, I guess it shouldn't be
that much of a surprise. You start a successful business, you make your
money, you leverage your wisdom (and $$) and move on to the next
successful start up. Even so, it's impressive that there is such a
collective body of work within such a small group of individuals.
Tue, Apr 17 2007
|
|
