social apps

social apps — 1 Comment
5
Dec 10

Groupon Continued

Since my post on Groupon is one of the most read posts on this blog, I figured it was worth referencing a blog post from HBR last week. In his research, Utpal M. Dholakia found that almost half the businesses that attempted to use Groupon would not return because the service was attracting a type of customer they didn’t necessarily want. From his post:

In my study sample of 150 businesses that ran Groupon promotions between June 2009 and August 2010, 42% said they would not run a Groupon promotion again. Their main reasons were that a significant proportion of Groupon redeemers are extremely price sensitive, barely spending beyond a discounted product’s face value. Not surprisingly, repeat-purchase rates at full price were also low — just 13% — for these businesses.

It goes without saying that Groupon could definitely design to solve this problem, but it’s going to take a different perspective that they have now.

Half-Baked Ideas / social apps / technology — 1 Comment
1
Dec 10

Grinding out Happpiness

I’ve been wondering what it is about social games that bug me – you know those massively addicting games like Farmville, Maffia Wars, and WeRule. There’s something really fascinating about how these interactions have captured the attention of social circles way beyond the web. It seems like everybody knows somebody whose mom is playing Farmville on Facebook. There’s something simultaneously brilliant and insidious going on in these games, and I think there’s a way to tweak the game design to unlock the good and bury the bad.

Most of the social games we’re seeing today are largely about ‘grind and reward’; you have to farm to get a currency (grind) and then you can trade currency for that little special something to show off to your friends (reward). The props are different, but the mechanics are largely the same. The games are really approachable because anyone with enough patience and tenacity can grind out goods, and the experience is satisfying because in some small way, you’re earned for that reward. In a society of complex tasks and relationships its satisfying the same way cleaning your house might be, or working in your yard. From a distance its mockable, but the experience is real. There are millions of people grinding on virtual farms and frontiers even as you read this. The rewards are satisfying too; people pay real money to buy virtual currency to skip grinding out their rewards.

In certain circles, people have a problem with these sorts of games. You see when you have a grinding mechanic in a game and your repeat the same action over and over, it starts to feel like a little bit of an addictive mechanism. Players are sure to go back to their farms everyday to play and earn goods (and the games are designed to promote that). Just like mindlessly dropping tokens in a slot machine, players head back to their farms just after the cyber veggies have ripened to retrieve them and sell them. Zynga is the darling of the startup world because they’ve figured out how to do something no one else has; they’ve got an algorithm that makes people predictable.

Lately, I’ve been wondering if there’s a way to redesign some of these game mechanics. I’ve been wondering if there’s a way to navigate the tension of making the game exciting enough for people to play often, but make it rewarding and diverse enough and get rid of the grinding. I think if the game designers flipped the scarcity model in the game they could unlock something completely new, I’ll explain.

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Half-Baked Ideas / inspiration / social apps — 7 Comments
11
Oct 10

Probability, Possibility, Monopoly, & McDonald’s

This morning I caught this tweet in my Twitter stream:

@LenKendall – I’ve got Park Place for McDonald’s monopoly. If you have boardwalk I want to be your friend :)

This made me think about how times have changed. When McDonald’s Monopoly was originally designed, the world wasn’t connected. So the possibility of you finding the elusive Boardwalk piece to complete your set and win millions was extremely slim. Today, in the connected world, I wonder if you would have a better chance? (Think Lazlo Hollyfeld.)

Ionically, from McDonald’s perspective the probability of you winning today was the same as it was 10 years ago. McD’s releases 3 Boardwalk pieces into the world and those pieces divided by the total number of play pieces released is your probability. The underlying assumption is that the only pieces you can play are the pieces you earn through buying fries/drinks/burgers. It doesn’t work that way anymore, (and hasn’t for some time). In 2007 people were selling pieces on eBay. The contest just launch and nothing’s changed..

The best inspiration/example to explain the difference between yesterday and today is the DARPA balloon challenge this past December. DARPA wanted to know how fast a networked group of people could solve a large-scale, time critical task. To learn, they offered $40k in a challenge that involved releasing 10 8-foot balloons in secret locations across the US. It took a team from MIT less than nine hours because they created a pyramid scheme around the challenge. Before the challenge they issued the following message:

“We’re giving $2,000 per balloon to the first person to send us the correct coordinates, but that’s not all — we’re also giving $1,000 to the person who invited them. Then we’re giving $500 whoever invited the inviter, and $250 to whoever invited them, and so on…”

So imagine if a networked entity (like 4Chan) decided to unleash the same wrath on McDonald’s that they did on Time’s Time’s Person of the Year. There are already Facebook and MySpace groups with the same intention. There was a Andriod app in the UK for the last contest.

Let’s say only 5% of McDonald’s customers are capable of pulling of this sort of collusion, should McDonald’s design the game differently? (It would cost the same either way.) Should the game be built for the connected world? Individually, those consumers aren’t that significant, but collectively they could screw the game to the wall.

I’m sure McDonald’s has all sorts of rules to prevent this sort of collaborating, but maybe they shouldn’t? The whole contest is about marketing and buzz. maybe they should invite people collude. The cost to McDOnald’s would be the same, but the engagement from their consumers would be radically different. They would reframe their brand in an entirely different context, you would have stories celebrating how people were collaborating to win. The game would be about collaborating to win, not gobbling more McDonald’s. It feels like the publicity alone would reach new audiences and meet our culture where it already is.

inspiration / openIDEO / social apps — No Comments
18
Aug 10

Crowd-Sourced Pay Raise

Today I spotted this link in @faris’s Twitter feed. It’s a homegrown report comparing the current salaries of account planners in large advertising agencies. Now salary comparison reports are nothing new, and I have zero interest in what account planners are paid, but the way this report seems to have come into existence is pretty incredible.

According to the foreword in the report, the author ( Heather LeFevre ) found herself in a pretty normal predicament; she felt she was underpaid, but couldn’t prove it. So instead of sitting on her hands, she put together an anonymous survey and sent it out to her network inquiring about their skill level and pay scale. She promised to share out the results and she’s been conducting this experiment for a few years. So, with a cheap web survey and a decent address book, she completely turned an age old process on it’s head.

This is pretty inspiring for me for a few reasons. First, instead of wringing her hands that she didn’t have the information to figure out her problem, she just went after the data. Instead of reinventing the wheel, she used simple tools she had at her disposal- an anonymous survey and an email. The data we don’t have often seems to be the first roadblock to progress; we don’t start because we’re not sure. This is such a great example of how to keep it simple and get it going.

Second, she solved for her problem, not all the world’s problems. If she would have stepped back and thought to herself “this is a big idea, how can create a salary report for the entire industry” she probably would have failed. Even limiting to the industry, she probably wouldn’t have gotten enough responses to complete the first report. By keeping the effort small, she could actually engage her audience. There are salary comparison websites all over the web (Glassdoor.com, Salary.com). These sites promise to share salary data, but they never seem to get enough scale to be useful. The idea behind the concept is so big people don’t know where they fit in the process. I love how she used technology to amplify her effort and didn’t make building the tool the object of her project.

There’s a big idea here for me. It’s the same thing that drove the success of Facebook (and social media in general). How can you use technology to amplify the network, connect people and then get the hell out of the way. The Internet isn’t much different than a good house party- if you can set the stage for people to interact, the party will usually take care of itself.

markets and models / social apps / technology — No Comments
20
Oct 09

Investing with the Crowd

An interesting article in the NY Times yesterday detailed a tech start-up called KaChing. The site basically allows people to create mock portfolios and try their hand at investing in the market. The big news in the NYT article is that KaChing now allows you to be able to create actual investment portfolios that mimic user portfolios on KaChing.

The site seems to have built some pretty interesting ideas around investor transparency – you can see current holdings and trades, investors are rated on returns over time, etc. The metrics aren’t so different from what’s offered by mutual funds (at least on a quarterly basis), but there’s something very powerful about the service being framed around an actual person. It also allows KaChing to position themselves as an interesting alternative against this big, evil, opaque $10T mutual fund industry.

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social apps / technology — No Comments
11
Aug 09

The Twitter plot thickens

This thing is just getting more and more interesting.

Reason 1: The denial-of-service attack that brought Twitter down, could have awoken a sleeping giant – the fact that Twitter is a single point of failure. If that service goes down, the fun stops…and the internet hates it when the fun stops. This Wired article covers some of the particulars, but this sounds similar to something I wrote a few months ago. Mark my words, this event will ultimately spawn the services that displace twitter. Competitors won’t compete directly with Twitter, they’ll just begin to wrap/mask it.

Reason 2: Tweens aren’t Tweeting. I had seen from some of our internal research that Twitter just wasn’t resonating with younger users, but now these reports corroborate that fact. For me this is interesting because (if this service becomes more than a fad) it will be the first service that a younger generation didn’t bring to an older generation. It’s another incident of technology moving in a bidirectional pattern, (which means our society is reaching some comfort/satuation point with technology, it’s no longer an emergent/youth thing). Clay Shirkey had another great example of bi-directional technology movement in his excellent TED talk (the first story, the one about elections.)

As an aside, here’s a great story of how the Twitter was born. Oddly enough, there was a team in pace to build a different piece of software that ultimately became less and less promising. They had to come up with a different idea mid-stream.

My colleague, Diego Rodriguez commented that Twitter works a little like MMPORGs like World of Warcraft. From a distance, it just looks wierd and socially strange. But if you get into it and try to understand all the underlying principles and interactions, it’s infinitely fascinating. (I’m paraphrasing what he said, but I think he’s dead on.)

social apps / technology — No Comments
23
Apr 09

Bigger than Twitter?

(Warning, heavy nerding ahead….)

So, I’ve been struggling with this Twitter thing for a while. It’s the first piece of technology to gain lots of users that just didn’t feel right to me. I get all the interactions, I get the viral part, I just couldn’t see anything substantive. It’s massively popular, but besides that I can’ see where it’s going (and, like Twitter, I decided to just ignore the “what’s the business model question”).

This post from Grant McCraken has been hanging out in my browser for a few weeks. He has a fascinating point comparing Twitter and the social conventions of puns. I’ll spare you from quoting the whole post (please read it), but this sentence has had me churning since I read it.

Maybe we groan at “twitter” because it represents a cultural confusion, a semantic overload, an immensity of messages too much for our frail cognitive capacity.

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