The Mother Factor and How to Overcome It
I have a lot of respect for the folks over at Six Apart, who in my opinion have come a long way now that their model has been progressively solidifying and they've been maturing as a business. When I was listening to this podcast from Blogon Between Mena Trott of Six Apart, Steve Rubel, and Ben Mcconnel / Jackie Huba of the Church of the Customer blog, that respect grew even more based on where they are going with their platform and the justification for the pretty big changes.
Now let me be clear, although they are focused on the retail market where Tucows and Blogware is focused on the wholesale, they are a competitor to our retail partners so let me explain…
Six Apart has recently announced Comet which they have touted as their next generation platform that's been designed to be so easy to use that even her Mother could use it. This was the motif of the presentation they did at DEMO this year where Mena brought up her own Mom to show how a 48 year old would be motivated and interested in using the Comet platform to enter blogging.
The “Mother” factor is a demographic you can't ignore when trying to penetrate a typical ISP customer segment with a blogging tool.
When you look at demographic data coming in today, such as this report that indicates over a third of those between the ages of 14 and 21 have created and are using a blog you'll notice a pretty big disparity between this and older data that indicates only about 7 % or so of all ages have done so.
The biggest reason for the disparity is what you would call the communication factor, and how blogging in conjunction with IM have pretty much replaced email as a primary communication medium in this younger demographic. One thing about youth is they find amazing ways at streamlining processes, and you may attribute this to laziness or attentiion deficit, but it's true and if you have a teenager at home you know exactly what I'm taking about. This then starts to make even more sense when you notice that blogging allows tracking of views, multiple conversations just like a party, it has a structure that supports a one-to-many approach that still feels as intimate as one-to-one, subscription capabilities so you know what's being said no matter where you are… so why hasn't your mom figured this out yet?
During the podcast Mena talks about a few of the barriers that people in older demographics (35+) use to justify why they aren't blogging, and I can substantiate most of it with customer surveys we have done in co-marketing campaigns with retail partners attempting different techniques to roll out our tool. The two largest reasons why users do not try the tool in our findings have been:
- Not enough time
- Nothing to write about
How do you address that? Well when it comes to time or what to write, your mom does send email and make phone calls, heck even some grandma's send email, so she has the time to post a note about things most of our moms chat about such as family gossip, the weather, her job or career, her soaps or any hobbies that interests her. I mean if your mom is anything like my mother used to be you know there are no limits to the topics she was able to cover and the means by which she would take to be able to reach you.
Now, when you realize she does have time and she has plenty to talk about, you have the ability to really dig down to where the barriers lie, and that's that most of those conversations are pretty intimate. She doesn't want everyone to know everything, she wants to be able to have multiple conversations on multiple levels dependant on the audience.
Since the release of 1.0 back in early 2004, Blogware has had some pretty cool content access and publishing controls that allow you to filter by audience multiple views into your content seemlessly and easily. This should be a focus for any campaign you do to your customers about our tool such as how your mom could easily shoot out a user/pass to a friend and enable that friend to be a part of her “friends group” that can only see certain views of content or can only post to certain sections.
Add to this some really robust subscription capabilities where all of these friends and family can subscribe via RSS, which even for some teens is still a little too hard to grasp, or our emailing feature so that everytime your mom posts something new everyone she wants to see that post will get an email with what she wrote and the photo or video she attached.
Oh, did I mention that Blogware also has some of the best photo management features inherently built in to any blogging tool? I know my mom had more photo albums than cook books, and trust me that was a lot.
As you can see Blogware has always been designed for your mom, and all you have to do is make her realize that this service is the best way to reach you and there's a good chance she'll never put down her keyboard again.
