Hey,
Rapid web development is all when and good but when it takes 4 months
to rise anywhere in google it certainly takes off the shine.
You hear of zero to hero… crashed the server… minted before toilet
break… I was wondering if any heros would share their marketing
strategies… or prehaps an amazon link to “Post-Agile Web
development”.
Does anyone plug an app purely based on its AJAX ability? Sure
presentation and delivery is important, prehaps more so than concept
on the web, but does your AJAX get you press coverage? … I think it
does. The developer in me says “keep it quiet and functional… it’ll
be confusing otherwise”. While I’m sure the PR guy in my head would
say otherwise… if he was there… at all.
beers
-henry
It sounds like you’re talking about a consumer site and you’re not
talking
about spending money on marketing. If that’s the case you need to do it
through word-of-mouth.
Think of it like your app is a virus - two things determine how fast a
virus
spreads - the first is how good it is at spreading from person to person
and
the second is the nature of the community it’s spreading in. If you’re
modeling a real virus you would look at two numbers - if you’re exposed
do
you get infected (keep coming back to the site) and how many people does
each person expose the virus to. You need to understand if people who
use
your site actually come back and will they tell other people about it -
and
why (or why not).
The last part is key. If you get 10 people to use it and they all yawn
and
don’t tell anyone, your done unless you can figure out why and fix it.
One
thing to look at - though not necessarily the first - is how well your
app
spreads itself - are their links to email content to other people for
example.
Assuming you solve that problem, you have to understand the network
topology
of the community you’re trying to reach. Where do they hang out on the
web,
what mailing lists, blogs, forums, news sites (slashdot/digg/etc) do
they
use. You need to focus your efforts on the key sites and key people. I
know a guy who did a book review on slashdot, with a link to his home
page,
and he got thousands of hits from it.
Last thing, even if you’re trying to reach everybody - ala myspace - you
should probably start by picking a subset of that community to focus on
initially. Metcalfs law says the value of a network increases
exponentially
with the number of users, but not all users are equally interesting to
all
others. A site with a hundred teenage girl members is much more
attractive
to teenage girls than one with 100 people of all types.
hope that helps
Hey Larry,
Thanks for the reply, especially the breakdown on how to analyze your
viral appeal.
APIs must be very infectious, even the simple ones. The number of
technorati/delicious/digg links around is almost over the top.
Much apprecitated.
-h