On Giving Them What They Want
When I was a TV program director, there was always the temptation to program just the stuff I (or my friends) personally liked. That's a good way to low, low ratings. And we all know what that means.
I suppose it's kind of the same situation for marketers or any sort. In the tech content providing biz right now, there's a similiar danger. Many services are frequented by early adopters, and who knows if their needs are the same as the mainsteam that the marketers hope will follow?
Well, it's becoming apparant that the needs or early adopters and potential mainstream users aren't the same. Otherwise, everyone would be an early adopter.
Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Note to Web 2.0 Companies: Early Adopters are not the Mass Market does a good job of fleshing out this situation. For example:
Although RSS has turned out to be a key technology which powers a number of interesting functionality behind the scenes (e.g. podcasting) actually subscribing and reading news feeds in an RSS reader has not become a mainstream activity of Web users. When you think about it, it is kind of obvious. The problem an RSS reader solves is "I read so many blogs and news sites on daily basis, I need a tool to help me keep them all straight". How many people who aren't enthusiastic early adopters (i) have this problem and (ii) think they need a tool to deal with it?
So we kinda know that. What do service providers need to do to get beyond the early folks and really start raking it in. Not as difficult as you'd think; common sense, really.
However the one overriding theme is that all of these recent entrants is that they solve problems that everyone [or at least a large section of the populace] has. Everyone likes to communicate with their social circle. Everyone likes watching funny videos and looking at couple pics. Everyone wants to find information about topics they interested in or find out what's going on around them. Everybody wants to get laid.
So there you go - it always seem to come back to that sort of stuff, doesn't it?
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