We’ve come a long way from scribbled x’s and o’s and characters that
form little smiley faces. We’re even eons beyond e-cards from Blue
Mountain, and yellow-faced emoticons. The current lingua franca of
self-expression and communication is poking, nudging and winking. Slide
is adding to this vocabulary with kicking, slapping, proposing, and
throwing sheep - aka Superpoking. As Max Levchin, CEO and founder of Slide,
said to me in this second-part interview, SuperPoke apps are “literary
emoticons,” and basically the Hallmark Cards of this century. (Click
here for the 1st part of our interview: How Slide plans to make a profit.
Slide
is a social entertainment media company that’s attracted some 170
million unique visitors, sharing bits and pieces of themselves in a
photo slide, or images with personalized graffiti. Think virtual
scrapbooks gone haywire! But it's the SuperPoke (among other aimless
apps) that's become one of Slide’s biggest viral applications, probably
because of the simplicity of the action and mindset required. It
doesn't take much thinking to fling a sheep when you're bored.
On
the San Francisco-based Slide platform, thousands of SuperPokes can
often be measured in thousands-per-second. According to Max, more than
10,000 pokes were sent per second on Valentine's Day. And, McDonald’s
wanted to run a campaign, called "Flip a burger with... " to connect
people who may have flipped burgers together in their youth.
It’s
a dizzying set of mind-boggling activities on the face of it. But the
fact that people actively contact one another through such mindless
sentiments shouldn’t surprise anyone. People – subconsciously or not -
are constantly promoting themselves, or at the least, actively trying
to be acknowledged. When I asked Max why people do what they do on
Slide he said simply because they want to be noticed. “I’m really cool.
In fact, I’m so cool, you should notice me and here’s my story,” he
said, describing the motivation of his users. “That’s what we enable.
At a very basic level, that’s what we help them do.”
Indeed,
people want to be enabled to express themselves. And, it’s not that
difficult these days to do so when you don’t have to handle the
intricacies of editing tools and technology, such as a 35 mm camera (to
the dismay of Eastman Kodak and Fuji Film).
In a recent Sanford
Bernstein report, analyst Craig Moffett writes that the next major
movie studio will be UGC – user-generated content.” He pointed to a
recent eMarketer report that predicts “over the next 5 years, up to
half of all Internet users will be posting their own movies,
photographs, etc.”
Of course, quantity is one thing, quality is
another. When you count up the plethora of post-its and scraps of
mementos in your desk drawers, and add up the many digital images lost
and forgotten in the gazillion digital cameras or phones you have, etc.
– the inventory of personal production goes through the roof. Anyone
can make a movie by fusing all these together. On social networks, the
act of producing or creating is even more robust because of the simple
nature of the creativity or contribution required.
As one
person said to me the forms of expression online, particularly in
social networks, are akin to modern-day bumper stickers, or
personalized license plates. Indeed, as Max points out, the reason that
10% of Slide users create most of the content for the other 90% to view
is that the content on Slide is easy to create. It’s a lot harder to
create or add value to a Wikipedia article, he said. While 10% doesn't
seem high, about 1% of the visitors to Wikipedia create two-thirds of
the content.
Why they stick around
Even more
fascinating than how people express themselves is how that expression
drives an audience. The phenomenon with applications made for social
networks is their viral nature. Products couldn’t be viral unless they
compelled and engaged people to take action and participate. To me that
was the most interesting question I had for Max, after all, Slide - for
all intents and purposes - was a lot like Film Loop back in 2005. They
both had the same goal. One survived and one didn't. (Watch my interview with Max on lessons he's learned and why he thinks Slide won over Film Loop.)
How do you keep people constantly engaged, given their fickle nature, and demands on their time?
As
Max sees it, the lifespan of a social network is about 2.5 years. First
Friendster ushered in this notion of a “social network,” giving way to
MySpace and then Facebook. To this end, as far as he can tell, the
stickiness of an application or network has more to do with the
enablement of collaboration than it does with creation, paritucarly
creation of a mere profile.
When friends or people contribute,
they essentially create a new kind of shared experience, with much more
meaning than the original piece of content on its own. That content is
then enhanced to the point that the original creator and contributors
cannot walk away with the same product. To this end, social networks
consisting of profiles that live in isolation are of no value. “The
value of images dissipate quickly,” said Max.
Indeed, recently
I moved to a new home, and realized that the boxes of sentimental
“stuff” I used to collect is now mostly digital. For the past three
years or so, my life has been pretty much documented online. And,
there’s so much of it that I don’t really know, and more often than
not, don’t care if I ever find it again. It can be stuck on a social
network, or on a computer forever. Why - because I can create new
memories.
But memories created with other contributions may be tougher to walk away from.
Content
shelf-life aside, the bigger challenge for Max is convincing Madison
Avenue that regardless of the shelf life of such content, the
"activity" or engagement is worth being in front of. To this end,
demonstrating that people will engage for several hours on mindless
activities is as relevant as them tuning into a show. The trick is
capturing that engagement and defining what is relevant engagement.
According to Max, his team follows about 200 interactions, including
how many people sign on as a "fan" for a widget.
It's a lot of
data to capture, and certainly far more sophisticated than just
counting up an audience of passive viewers. It's a lot of actions to
capture, but maybe worth it.
No longer will x's and o's and smiley faces sent be just be a personal matter. Max is looking to monetize your feelings.
