Passionates
Robert Scoble has a nice piece on “passionates”, people who are early adopters of technology. He says that companies need to focus on passionates in order to drive their business forward, as non-passionates just don’t care enough to share and promote you.
He makes a really good point: it’s better to have 100,000 passionate users than 1,000,000 non-passionate users. This allows you to actually sell a product to those 100,000 people and make some profit at the end of the day. If you have a ton of users, most of which aren’t passionate, then you have a much harder time actually convincing them to give you money for the thing they’re not passionate about.
However, I think Robert misses something crucial in the dichotomy he sets up between “passionate” people and “non-passionate” people. This is the same complaint that I have with Forrester’s research, that they bucket people into being either “this” or “that”…with the implicit assumption that it doesn’t change: you’re either use technology at a certain level or you don’t.
The reality is that people are passionate about some things, and not at all about others. They love some activities and don’t care about others. The activity is what they’re passionate about (not the technology) and when they’re passionate enough they’ll learn the necessary technology as they find appropriate. Passion depends upon the activity in question.
Take knitters, for example. Most knitters are non-passionate technology-wise. They are not early adopters of the latest new gadget, and they’re not scrambling to sign up for the latest social network. Some are, undoubtedly, but most aren’t. They probably don’t care about Twitter, or Friendfeed, or Seesmic.
But they’re passionate about knitting, so when ravelry.com comes along and offers a place for knitters to gather online, suddenly they start to consider actually using a social network because it might be of value to them. They sign up and suddenly appear to be one of the early-adopter passionate people that Robert talks about, when in reality they rarely do this sort of thing but, well, this is knitting and that’s what they’re passionate about.
This doesn’t mean that people using ravelry.com are suddenly early adopters of all technology. It simply means that technology came along to help them practice their passion better, and so they adopted it because the value proposition made sense to them. The way this would normally happen is if some other knitter says “hey, you should check this out”.
This happens to me all the time. I’ll talk to web designers about some new software and I’ll get really excited, talking about in-depth details of how it works. Then I’ll get into a conversation with a photographer about the latest lens they bought and my eyes will glaze over. I just want a no-brainer camera that I don’t have to think about. I’m not passionate about cameras…but I am passionate about other things.
The activity is the thing to focus on, not the technology. Technology enables the activity, and people will get excited about the technology if they’re excited about the activity first and the benefits of the technology has been explained to them. But you don’t make passionate photographers by showing them lenses, you make passionate photographers by showing them pictures that rip your heart out.
That said, I understand the point Robert is making. There are some people (early adopters) who will try out anything simply because it’s new and interesting. But those are technology early adopters…a very small population of people who get a large amount of attention because of their predilection to try new things. A much larger population (although much more fractured) are those people who are already passionate about some activity or other, and can become passionate about new technology as it relates to that activity, but they just haven’t been introduced properly.
Introducing people to a new product properly is the biggest challenge facing companies today. We all rejoiced when the Web came along because it meant that you could sell something to anybody, anywhere, and at any time. I could write my simple blog from Newburyport, MA and have readers anywhere in the world. But the reality is that everyone else can too, and with everybody trying to do the same thing at the same time the cacophony of products and pitches and blog posts is simply deafening.
In other words, the task is not always to make people passionate about something, it’s to show them how technology (or your product, etc) can make them even better at what they’re passionate about. Robert isn’t mentioning FriendFeed every 2 seconds because he’s passionate about activity streams. He’s mentioning it because he’s passionate about reading, spreading, and talking about the latest technology news. That’s the activity he cares about most, I dare say. Technology is merely the enabler of that activity.
So while yes, you should take advantage of early adopters, learning from them and focusing some of your effort on them, you can’t assume that just because people aren’t early adopters they’re not passionate. Passion is more about doing an activity well than it is about using the latest technology to do it.
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Comments
1. Dave Tufts 7:43am, Wed 30th, 2008
I agree that audience passion depends upon the activity in question, and successful sites use technology to let early adopters express and spread their passion.
However, sometimes it’s the personality of the site, more than the technology or feature set, that inspire passion. Yes, you need basic features and working servers, but the site’s personality — the design, UI, messaging, combined with the underlying technology and features — is where passion comes from.
When Ravelry started it only had a couple features, but the boyfriend/girlfriend couple behind the site had such great messaging and openness it was easy to be passionate.
Similarly, take Y Combinator’s Hacker News–A million sites have the same features, but programmers are more passionate about Hacker News because the site’s personality perfectly matches a passionate programmer’s personality.
2. D. C. Toedt 8:38am, Wed 30th, 2008
This ties in with Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Solution. Its main thesis is that companies should figure out what products to make (and what services to offer) by first figuring out exactly what “jobs” people actually want done in their lives, and then focus on doing those jobs well, with a cost structure that will allow profits. As he and his co-author point out:
• The Palm Pilot was a success because it did just a few “jobs” that were important to people — calendar, contacts — very well, and inexpensively.
• In contrast, the earlier Apple Newton had been a bust because it tried to tackle too much and didn’t do any of it all that well.
3. lisa 9:18am, Wed 30th, 2008
I’m a Ravelry user, and an early-adopter (or tech-passionate). I think that the general public assumes that knitters are largely non-technical, which is inaccurate. Perhaps the majority are, but there is a huge community of knitters who are technical, and I would argue that they played a large part in seeding the community and spreading the word. It’s these people who acted as opinion leaders in their knitting groups and spread the word.
You’re totally right, though, about niche communities being passionate about their activity and seeing the community as a means to be better at their passion.
I agree with Dave above that the personality of the site has a large impact as well. Ravelry with a different tone/face may not be as successful.
4. Josh 9:31am, Wed 30th, 2008
@lisa – thanks for your feedback. I tweaked the post to say “most” knitters, leaving room for the tech-savvy ones.
5. Nabeel Hyatt 11:34am, Wed 30th, 2008
Great post. “Early adopter” does not, in fact, mean techcrunch users as each market has it’s own early adopter. I have this conversation I think on a monthly basis.
However, we should also keep in mind that as long as we are creating social web sites, there is a bit of vin diagram at work between “tech savvy” and “passionate user” of this community. For instance building an online portal targetted very specifically at uber-audio hipster snobs may be a problem — as many of them are self-professed ANTI technology, preferring vynl and seeing bands live.
The best communities being built on the web are started by appealing to those in their community that were passionate, and likely to look to the web as an outlet for that passion.
6. shammara 6:36pm, Wed 30th, 2008
good points. however, i do think that the ‘early adopters’ of new technology just love trying new technologies, whether or not it serves their needs.
they’ll try it out, tell their friends who they think will benefit from it. it’s that early buzz of those few who want to see what innovative new products are coming out, that talk about what it does, and those whose needs it covers will stick to it.
TechCrunch covers tons of new products every day, there are a few products that I’ve stuck on to that I’ve learned through TechCrunch for example..
7. Jeremy Horn 10:12am, Fri 1st, 2008
Passionates are good for driving early success. But, to win big and succeed in the mainstream, you have to tap into those late adopters and “Less Passionates.” Nice writeup. I think this is a good Weekend Read for my readers…
http://tpgblog.com/2008/07/25/the-product-guys-weekend-reading-july-25-2008/
Jeremy Horn
The Product Guy
http://tpgblog.com
8. Ryan Ward 12:40am, Sun 3rd, 2008
Middle of paragraph 6: “because it might be of value to them”
Convey value to your target audience and the rest is easy – all you need to do is marekt it correctly and it sells.
9. Jonathan 7:40am, Wed 6th, 2008
Excellent observations in this post. This is also why Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point” is such a pile of baloney. Predicting who will adopt new behaviours is impossible. If was as simple as finding the early adopters, or those who carry the message about the behaviour to others, – and marketing the crap out of them – we wouldn’t have 90% of the market failures we have.
10. Marta Strickland 3:04pm, Thu 7th, 2008
You are right. There certainly isn’t a black and white here of “passionates” vs “non-passionates”. First there is the passion-tribes you belong to. I get passionate around wine, food, web, chocolate, horror movies, 80s music, etc. Someone else could get passionate around half of those things and whole list of others.
Then there are sliding scales of passion. Am I passionate enough about 80s music to post a blog about it? Maybe not, maybe only to read a blog. Am I passionate enough about wine to post a blog about? Yes definitely and sign me up for some wine blog RSS feeds while you are at it.
But even that is too static. We also need to add in the dimension of time. With the right encouragement, circumstances, and tools, I can potentially become more passionate (or less) about a particular area.
This is where I will whip out Kathy Sierra’s Kick-Ass Curve:
http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2005/10/getting_users_p.html
So there is no passionate and non-passionate. There are multiple tribes to which I am a part of, but at varying degrees of engagement that changes over time.
Marta Strickland
Editor, ThreeMinds
http://threeminds.organic.com
11. Owen Yeats 9:42am, Sun 10th, 2008
Nice article with several interesting insights into the matter. I couldn’t agree more about the binary opposition of passionate and not-passionate states. As far as hunans are concerned it is a mistake to classify the rigidly into a certain condition. Instead, one should place each person on an axis with passionate and not-passionate extremes at both ends. Moreover, it is quite obvious that human behaviour is likely to change.
12. See-ming Lee 8:34am, Tue 12th, 2008
I like this blog post. It makes me think that perhaps the reason I love Flickr so much is not necessarily because its user experience is so great, but that I truly enjoy photography–but having a great UX certainly does not hurt.
13. Josh 10:39am, Wed 13th, 2008
Hi Joshua,
I love the topic you are touching upon here. Passion is fenomenon that affects all sides it relates to. Firstly, those who put all of themselves into making/promoting a product and those who receive it, on the other hand. There is no better motivational drive than passion when trying to attain anything and this force is capable of moving mountains. That is why a given final product is viewed with appreciation and respect for those who put all efforts to create it. And more importantly there is no better convincing argument for a product than to be labelled ‘made with passion’.
14. John Howell 10:11pm, Tue 19th, 2008
Great article! Totally inspiring and excited about how I can relate this to the work that I do!
15. John B. 12:39pm, Wed 3rd, 2008
I’ve worked at two companies (founded by the same person) that have attempted to create successful online virtual worlds. The first one just wanted people to come and hang out while the second one promoted itself as a place where people could come and create 3D ojbects like clothing and rooms. Both had a large amount of early adopters, but guess which one is floundering while the other is doing pretty well…
There is something to your product/service having a point other than just being a new technology.
16. Loznica 9:22am, Thu 18th, 2008
Hi, I just dropped in to say how much I like your whole blog. You really write for people and have a great content too. Guess I am a passionate about good content.
17. Billigflug 5:53am, Fri 19th, 2008
I totally agree to shamaras #6 opinion. Anyway you can´t connect or equalize the terms of passion and early adopters, since the is no dependend correlation. Some people might be passionate about living in mud huds without any technology, other people do love other things, e.g. give you technologies a try.
18. Adam 7:46am, Fri 9th, 2009
I think that the most important thing it is not to find these passionate people, there are a lot of them in all the areas, it is to make people passionate about something, for example about the new technology.
19. plavix 7:48am, Fri 13th, 2009
Looking for information and found it at this great site.
20. RC Modellbau Shop 8:15am, Thu 26th, 2009
“In other words, the task is not always to make people passionate about something, it’s to show them how technology (or your product, etc) can make them even better at what they’re passionate about.” – I agree here. We have passionate RC shoppers and we try to offer them the latest technical info and products to meet their passion.