What Problem Does It Solve?: Convincing Grandma She Needs a Feedreader
05/13/2008, 3 months 2 weeks ago
Much has been made of the early adopters vs. middle America argument when it comes to much of Web 2.0 technology. And while everyone likes the "cool factor" of being part of the first tribe to have adopted a product or app, we all know that reality dictates more widespread adoption for a company to succeed.
There are some companies who have already managed to gain more widespread adoption. LinkedIn is one of them, and I know that because even my dad has an account and regularly updates his contacts and information. But LinkedIn has managed to do this by maintaining a more professional image and marketing the site as a conduit for business networking. It's much easier to convince people to adopt a social network that could help them in their careers than it is to explain why anyone would need to be SuperPoked or be attacked by zombies.
Likewise, I've seen a huge uptake in my family's use of Geni. Genealogy and family history is a booming business, and by making it dead-simple to get started, they've managed to lure in even my mother, who does a lot less online than my father does. And with Geni's announcement this week that they have finally enabled GEDCOM importing, I'm sure even more of the older generations in my family will join in once they know that they can upload the information they've had stored on their floppy disks for their 386s and have some of the younger generation get involved as well.
Aside from being social networks at their core, LinkedIn and Geni don't seem to have a great deal in common. LinkedIn focuses on business knowledge, while Geni focuses on family. But what they have managed to do (and where other social networks are failing) is to pare down the concept of social networking to solving a basic problem. For LinkedIn, that problem is how to manage a business network across the globe, and for Geni, it's how to manage a family's history across the globe. By enabling only the features necessary to solve those problems (asking questions, posting jobs for Linked In and tracking genealogy, remembering important dates, and sending greetings to family members), these two social networks are luring in even the most technophobic users.
The real question that other companies should be asking themselves is how to be more like these two companies, and ones like them. If an application or product isn't solving a problem that the everyday person has, you aren't going to see them adopting it. RSS and Atom feeds mean nothing to my mother, even though she knows I have a blog (a concept she can't quite bring herself to care about either). Trying to get her to use a feed reader so that she could read anything I've written is never going to motivate her to try any type of feed manager. But when I tell her that one of my feeds is the weekly Target ad, and that I get the sale items right on my laptop when I roll out of bed in the morning instead of having to wait for the paper and shuffle through it, her ears start to perk up.
The first thing that any company should figure out is what problem their product can solve for Joe and Jane Average. The product should appeal to the tech elite who will hopefully be the Patients Zero in your viral adoption campaign, but if my mom can't sit down and figure out how it would make her life easier or more interesting in less than five or ten minutes? You may not stick around longer than it takes for the early adopters to move on to the next shiny thing.
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That’s a sobering article and it makes a lot of sense. I was trying to explain RSS via Eventful.com to a friend who probably has better than average computer skills the other day and only got him mildly interested when I mentioned how you could subscribe to calenders and be notified of new events automatically. I was also wishing the other day that my Mom would just look at my FriendFeed stream if she wants to know what I’m doing but I know that won’t happen. I’m not sure what would motivate her to get into RSS or social media. She’s only had broadband for about a year now.
You have given me my quote of the day: “It’s much easier to convince people to adopt a social network that could help them in their careers than it is to explain why anyone would need to be SuperPoked or be attacked by zombies.” I loled.
Good post. Contrary to what some early adopters might say, I think it’s actually harder to attract and retain mainstream “joe average” users to new technology, partly because as you point out, most want a definite need demonstrated to them before they’re willing to invest time. Many early adopters think checking out a new technology is fun and entertaining and it’s a chore to the mainstream users I know.
So I am actually not all that impressed when technology attracts a bunch of early adopters, and I think early adopter adoption is overrated. The real litmus test toward usefulness is when you can actually charge money for your service and mainstream users will pay for it because it fulfills a definite purpose and utility in their lives.
Really good point. My dad’s a software applications developer, no less, and tends to be up on tech things, but I have yet to convince him that he ought to use a feedreader. He subscribes to my blog via e-mail, and goes to check on other people’s when he feels like it. I think he feels like having a lot of content coming to him would be more time-consuming to sort through than going out to the content when he has time and inclination; he may actually be right (it’s easy to get completely overloaded on RSS feeds), but it means I hear about all the cool stuff first.
Lindsay mentioned getting mainstream people to look at FriendFeed, or other life aggregators — that’s a difficulty I have, personally. A good chunk of my life is available online, either through my blog or Twitter or Tumblr or Facebook or Flickr (and thus FF), and I have to be careful not to get frustrated with non-early adopters who ask me, so, what’s going on with you? And I’m like, if you paid attention, you’d already know.
It is more than solving a problem of geneology or professional connections; there is a generational privacy issue involved. I gave a talk to a tech networking group — not grandmas — last night, and said they didn’t use social media because they didn’t want to be exposed on the Internet. I had to explain to them that they were already exposed! They use LinkedIn, but they don’t consider it social media. To them social media is Facebook and MySpace.
I asked them to set a Google Alert for themselves and see what they come up with.
I run a social network for small businesses in the UK, so I am clearly a Web 2.0 fan, but even I struggle to get excited by Twitter-like micro-blogging, comparing movie tastes and selling friends. Now I am bored of Scrabble I don’t even sit on Facebook anymore.
There is little doubt that for any social network to stay in use beyond the hype and support of the uber-connected, it needs to show value and offer simple answers to common problems. I have long predicted the next wave of social networks will be much smaller, niche sites catering to specific needs or interest groups. These will be much more valuable to users and advertisers alike.
Ian Hendry
WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz
@Lindsay Thanks! I LOL’d when I was writing it, so I’m glad others can appreciate my sense of humor. I may be wrong, and it’s just going to take adoption by the next generation to push things into the mainstream, but I’m still not sure anyone but information addicts will jump on the train unless it has some non-Internet value (like calendar feeds, sales notices, etc.)
@Webomatica Thanks, and I agree. My husband is as techie as they come, and was the one who actually introduced me to blogging and RSS feeds way back in the day (although I did originally teach him how to code HTML ha!) and he sees no need for most of the current crop of services. He’s on LinkedIn, but doesn’t participate in any other social networks. He begrudgingly started to use Twitter, but refuses to follow anyone he doesn’t know offline. He’s often more of a litmus test for me than anyone else, because he’s not someone reluctant to use technology like, for instance, my parents, but rather, is selective with his time and only uses what he finds helpful.
@Jandy Your dad sounds like my husband then.
I honestly can’t really imagine a point where FriendFeed goes mainstream. Twitter, yes, because it has that IM sort of vibe. But I don’t think that the majority of the world wants the constant glut of information I try to swim through each day. Some days *I* don’t want that constant glut of information!
@francine I’d have to say, then, that the attitude is ironic, because the older generation (Boomers and Silents) are often the ones giving out WAY too much information online. They are the prime targets for phishing schemes, etc.
@Ian I’m actually working on a profile of one of those niche sites. I’m not entirely sure how it will play out, since economic viability with the current monetization models (ad revenue) depend on a large number of eyeballs hitting a site, so something will have to shift. I just don’t know what that something needs to be.
Thanks Cyndy. You are right that advertising methods probably need to change for the niche sites to pan out. But sure no-one can deny the value of a smaller community of more likely purchasers over a casual glance from a bigger number of less qualified people? Perhaps site sponsorship is a better way forward. Or the same sort of “Featuretisement” model that BlueTie uses for e-mail but within the dialogue and profiles of social networking members?
Both are established technologies so would be easy to do. We’re going for the sponsorship model.
Ou other revenue stream could also be membership fees. We’d like to think we provide so much value that our members would be prepared to pay a small sub for access to our most useful features. Harder to do on facebook of course, but easy to do on sites providing content that can’t be got elsewhere.
Ian Hendry
WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz
Sometimes I think its a generational pattern mixed with social behavior. My 50ish year old Mother knows about the Internet but she wouldn’t give a rat’s you know what about the social atmosphere on it because she is used to having real friends in the real world and getting information through mainstream media or word of mouth.
She once told me the only news she really cares about is the one that concerns family or her work. She is happy getting the information she needs through the ways she gets them.
If it’s not broken why fix it I guess.
I’m not sure feedreaders, per se, are as much a generational issue as it is an informational one. If you consume enough information from a multitude of sources (and you value your time), feeds start making a lot of sense.
But not always. We all fall into habitual patterns of doing things - internet use included. I know people 20 years younger than me who consume lots of information, but do it via web pages an email.
But I think you make a really cool and valid point about getting the Target specials before the paper comes. Hm, maybe my Mom would be interested in that
Tom Landini
@Ian I do think that there may be some value in a vertical market, but I really think that advertising will move to a more individualized targeting.
@Cesar I think some of that may be true, but as families and friends spread out more, I do think that the older generations are using the web more and more. For instance, my mother and her cousins LOVE Geni because they are using it like a closed social network for our family. They get birthday reminders, can send online greetings, keep up with family news, etc. all from their computers.
@tommyl I do agree that it’s an issue with how much information you are trying to consume. It’s the main reason that I’m not sure something like FriendFeed will ever go mainstream; the majority of people don’t want that much information coming at them all the time. My husband, an Enterprise developer, still reads blogs from bookmarks. For him, it isn’t that he’s opposed to a feed reader, but that he hasn’t found one that does what he wants it to do.
I do think that feedreaders could be useful for things like shopping ads, as well as taking portions of a younger generation’s lifestream for the family to keep up with. I’d love to see a bit of that brought into Geni, so that if you have a blog or a Flickr account, you can have that fed into your family news and automatically update the family.
I’m 67. So for me this is not hypothetical. I love feedreaders because 1)they aggregate political news for me and I’m a news junkie, and 2) my friends are bloggers and I want to keep up with what they’re saying. Would I subscribe to shopping ads — no effing way. Everyone has his/her unique interests. And it doesn’t matter the age, it’s the utiility. I use Upcoming for events, but I wouldn’t subscribe to Robert Scoble’s Upcoming stream, because it has too much information in it. And I wouldn’t subscribe to San Francisco Upcoming, same reason. To me, some things aren’t worth cluttering up Google Reader for.OTOH, I subscribe to my daughter’s Twitterstream , and to my Friendfeeds through RSS.
Francine, that’s awesome! Political news is a huge thing to keep track of, and I should know! I’m a political news junkie, but far too often have to mark most of it as read because I simply don’t have the time to keep up with it!
The shopping concept is still iffy, but if I could get the weekly ad for my grocery store that way, and then use that feed to create my shopping list? I think not only would I go for it, but you’d start to get the idea of subscribing to online content into the minds of the mainstream users.
My parents are younger than you, and have no idea Twitter even exists, and I’m happy to keep it that way.