Viral video to come, but first I thought I'd talk about a case which exemplifies a lot of what NOT to do when marketing.
I don't know how many of you have ever used delicious.com; it's a site that lets you bookmark pages and share your bookmarks with people. It was the most widely used site, run by yahoo, and, of course, it was free.
But as we learned, "free" is not a business model, and early this year Yahoo decided to sell delicious to AVOS (the founders of youtube). Delicious users, who had been worried that all of their bookmarks would be lost, rejoiced that the service would continue.
The only problem was that AVOS did not actually know anything about the Delicious userbase. When they took control of the site, they changed nearly every aspect of it. They wanted to make it more "social," but their vision for the site clashed with what current users loved. Many important features were removed; other aspects that AVOS thought would improve functionality and usability only turned off the existing user base. Some users were so upset, they fled to competing sites (such as pinboard.in, which actually charges a one-time subscription fee to use the site).
The AVOS team has slowly worked to restore the features user wanted, and they're making an effort to listen to the users though their forums. Unfortunately, they've lost a lot of the goodwill and trust the company had before. Maybe they don't need the users that fled -- maybe the new design will attract a new type of userbase. But it's fairly obvious that when they decided to take over the site, they did not actually understand why customers valued it.
Further reading:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/240873/delicious_relaunch_riddled_with_bugs.html
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/violetblue/avos-delicious-disaster-lessons-from-a-complete-failure/705
No comments:
Post a Comment