Dear valued reader,
This is one of the topics I find most interesting and insightful. Enjoy!

The term ”Internet” has to most people become equal to the ”World Wide Web”, though it’s not. Many communicators focus all their efforts to site-centric technologies with the exception for mass-email outreach. Users are cultivated using various tools like “forward to a friend” and “connect to people you know”. These users are then given a site-specific toolbox to get some kind of user experience.

In the best cases this kind of approach will form a user-centric experience inside a site-centric concept and that will most likely provide for viral growth.

When it comes to campaigns based on mass-emailing it is now a long time since anyone thought of email as an independent platform for viral growth. To get a viral growth factor higher than 1 (meaning that each generation of new users are larger than the previous one) a user experience beyond the email is necessary.

The key to viral growth of a user-base is to find a user-centric way to cultivate new users and provide a positive user experience. The Internet is an unprecedented platform to do this, but the “www” alone will not do it! Only the user-centric concepts will and the “www” can only play one of many parts of the user experience. The farther away from your own website you can take your users and still provide an experience the better chance you have to succeed.

This is why our technology has the potential to change the face of online advocacy, fundraising and grassroots campaigning forever. We won’t even give users a website where they can use our tools. We give them the ability to connect using all the websites and email-clients they already use – i.e. totally user-centric.

Posted on July 17th, 2008 by Linus
Filed under: Advocacy, Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Internet, Media, Technology