I’m just back from SXSW interactive and instead of starting praising the festival/conference for all the good it does (read Cecilie first impressions), it also got a good bunch of “Mehh ideas done right”.
A mehh idea ?? wait, what?
Well a “mehh idea” is in my eyes:
an idea that seems fun, socialy engaging, forward thinking (I’ll create the new twitter, foursquare, etc…) but do not actually rely on users needs or users desire.
It can be OK, has the potential or looks like it could be great, but stays “mehh”
The first key to succes is to “Address a Real Problem” as discussed in this article ” 5 Tips for Startup Success From a Co-Founder of HootSuite“.
There are three applications that stood out to me for being right on the money on how they present themselves: Stuffpal, a sharing facilitator facebook app and Blue Calypso, a brand endorsment android and iPhone app and Planely, the social travel revolution.
The issue I got with these services is that the value for me, as a user is very little, they do not solve a real problem for me… yet.
Stuff Pal is a Facebook app that allows you to create and track your personal media library for lending and borrowing among friends.
The idea seemed at first interesting, let’s see what my friends own, so I can borrow it. Well, I thought about it for a momentand it struck me. It’s a great idea but I don’t need facebook for that. And why is that will you tell me? I’ve got around 350 facebook friends, and there’s only about 50 to whom I would actually lend or borrow something from. Why would you ask me? Because I know them very well, because we actually live close enough to meet, and overall because we do not rely on facebook to share our interests. We just talk about our latest TV show favorite, movies seen, etc, and the conversation always ends with “I got the first two seasons on DVD if you want…”, no need to a 3rd party to help us talk and share.
Stuffpal is not a bad idea, it’s just not for me. It feels like the folks at stuffpal (lovely bunch by the way) have the heart in the right place, and have all the boxes checked when it comes to market their app.
- Cartoony design – Check
- Game mechanic with characters earnings – Check
- Sharing accross Facebook and seamless integration – Check
- Facebook fan pages with funny pictures of the team and relaxed vocabulary – Check
- Useful to me and making me want to use it – Not so checked
But they do not help me share more with my friends because I didn’t have a “sharing problem” in the first place.
Go check them for yourself and let me know I got it all wrong at: http://stuffpal.com/
When friends talks, Friends listen. Blue Calypso is a mobile and social media marketing company that activates and measures branded word of mouth campaigns through consumers personal texts, posts and tweets between friends.
Before I go further into what Blue Calypso is about, I must say that I’m not the main target of the app, marketers are. It’s clearly expressed on their brochure, website and all the marketing materials. But still, the app would be nothing without the users, so that’s how I decided to review it, from a user’s perspective.
Blue Calypso was up to a good start: I get a free app, set up an account, and get some cash for spreading the good words about brands or product. I’m all about free stuff, but I know as well that nothing comes free, EVER.
By endorsing “brand X” I should incites my friends to try it. Again it boils down to the idea that community-driven messages are stronger than Brand-to-Consumer messages. And I agree, but the community in this instance must be self-generated, moving at its own pace, and of course, be free. By endorsing a brand through the Blue Calypso app, I feel like a digital human billboard that merely passes along the new “Student Credit from Western Union” (I made that up) because I’ll get a $20 voucher for amazon. It’s like when brands use tweets to relay press releases. I have no interest in that. It feels fake and forced. It’s used in the wrong way.
Blue Calypso is a great idea for marketers and getting even more details about what we consume and how to sell us more things. But as a user, I get very little value out of it. I have no controls over the brands that are featured on Blue Calypso.
I don’t need to surrender more of my personal life to get even more free stuff I don’t need. No problem solved here either.
Join the ‘social flying revolution’, meet some new people and above all else start to enjoy flying again.
I have to say that it breaks my heart (sort of) to put Planely into the Mehh ideas done right because they hit all the right spots and there’s really nothing wrong I can find with their service.
In a nutshell, Planely let you register your flight and find matches against other Planely users. Thus letting you contact them and maybe setup for a coffee meeting in the lounge, a chat in the aisles and whatnot. I read about it a couple of weeks before flying to SXSW and got all excited about the possibilities. Registering is a breeze but setting up the flights can be a bit tedious. Nevertheless I kept going and could see that my matches grew over days. I had 5 matches at Heathrow Airport, 4 in Dallas, etc… And most we’re going to SXSW.
I also received some well scripted/personalized and friendly email from the CEO himself inviting to connect and asking me for feedback.
All is done by the book, and tries to engage me in a very efficient way. But it eventually failed because I had no interest in talking with someone I don’t know when I’m travelling for 14 hours between 3 countries. I’m jetlaged, tired, hungry, and eventually want to spend as much time as possible trying to rest and relax.
Planely has 1,274 people who likes it on Facebook. I wish they would get more, meaning that more people could mingle and travel could be more social. But the real question is: do we want it?
So was SXSW the place to be for “mehh ideas”?
There’s no denying that SXSWi is “the place to be” if you have a brand-new-revolutionnary-game-changer service or application to showcase. Between the sponsored lounges, meetups, presentations, showcases, and huge trade show, every single participants wants a piece of the cake. But no matter how big the cake, the more you share it, the smaller the slices. And everybody is hungry.
Mashable wrote about “6 Successful SXSW Startup Launch Stories” and in most case, there wasn’t a real problem to solve to start with. How many times in the first years of twitter did you hear this question: “what is twitter anyway?” ? The point being to actually create a need, a desire. Foursquare, Gowalla and the likes are huge successes now, even though 3 years ago nobody “needed” those services.
So maybe I’m all wrong, and the INTERNET will get back and bite me in the bottom next year when you’ll have borrowed and read the entire Encyclopædia Universalis from your 1257th facebook friend, or spend most of your flights talking with your lover met through planely.
So be the first to tell me I’m wrong and comment below.
