From the outside in

Positioning is a great marketing term. A definition from Wikipedia  "positioning is the ...relative competitive comparison' your product occupies in a given market as perceived by the target market"

Gunky language. This is back to a more simple challenge: "Who will spend money on your product/service. And why yours instead of the competition?"

This is a topic that business founders are battered over the head with. Both to challenge their commerciality and also to pull them away from their narrowly focused view of the world. And it can be confusing to figure out in the early stages of a service.

Take Flock as an example to consider. This son of Firefox browser comes laden with easier ways to connect to the social fabric of the internet - del.icio.us, blogging platforms, Flickr etc. This screams "early adopter" tool to me.

And this was the basis for a comment of mine that Tom Raftery put to Chris Messina - Chris is Director of Experience and Open Source Ambassador for Flock. Tom asked me for a question for Chris for the interview as I had previously posted on my experience with Flock - and I told him I did not have a question as I did not use it? And so Tom extracted a valid question as follows:

"I would love to switch to Flock - but cannot find solid reasons for doing so. I use del.icio.us, I blog on two platforms and I collaborate a lot online - and the majority of what I want from a browser I get from Firefox and the extensions that I need..."

And Chris's answer really surprised me. In summary it was this: Flock is positioned as the browser for internet newbies who want their functionality integrated. It is not aimed at Firefox users who have extended their browsers because they don't need it.
The interview podcast is here.

Hence my confusion. Why would a new browser build in really good connnectivity to early adopter web services if it is aimed at newbie users who do not tend to be online service users? (A question full of generalisations I admit!)

The relevance for Pure Play? We have a potential audience who are using the internet - there are a variety of guitar sites with very active forums and users - yet they are not innovators or early adopters. What is behind that assumption? A combination of Fintans personal knowledge of the market and the fact that those same heavily populated and used sites are barely tagged in de.licio.us (last time I looked 16 was the top rating for any of them).

So for us we need to veer on the side of conservative in the visual presentation of our service and also in the development and pitching of our functionality. And we need to watch our language. My 8 year old son understands tagging because he enjoys watching me on the computer. Contrast that with a recent discussion I had with an experienced internet user about tagging. We went round in circles for 10 minutes before he (or I) realised that tagging was "free-text entry and search" for him.

He is a more traditional internet user and so has not had a chance, or reason, to absorb the newer wave of services. The simplicity of describing a field as "Tag" or "Tagging" will now have to be replaced with a better description - and our help function will need to be really clear.

We have also kept our service simple and paired back for the launch. That will allow us to watch our users and take subsequent decisions for extended services with some solid information to hand and not just endless informed guesswork and assumptions!

When you are asked to get inside the heads of your users there are good reason for doing so :-)

keith

Comments

[Chris Messina]

Hey Kieth, good point. However, the things that we're *building* into Flock are ones that we believe should be included in the browser by default, because they are generally useful -- not just useful to early adopters.

Consider the Flickr uploader and browser. It works well for established Flickr users, for sure, but it's also something we'll be user testing and probably redesigning to make the concept of "sharing your photos online through the browser" an easy concept to master -- if not desire!

The same thing should be true for blogging as it is for email; as it is for investing what people are talking about on the web; as it is for people using the web for any kind of social interaction.

For example, when I submit this comment, either I'll have to bookmark it, keep it in my tabs to refresh periodically or just never return to follow up if you reply. Why is that? Well, the browser has no Sent Mail box. CoComment and co.mments start to address this problem, but it's pretty fundamental that conversations go two ways right? So those are the problems we're trying to solve -- general issues of communication and socialability in the browser.

And really, we're focusing on the next generation net users -- those tweens playing in MySpace in LiveJournal. As they outgrow that space and migrate to their own blogs, Flock will hopefully be the browser that's there when they're ready for it.

[keith bohanna]

Hi Chris

Appreciate the feedback. It is great to have another level of detail on your positioning explained here.

For me this would indicate that the early majority are your target audience - who are playing with some of the tools and yet have not switched from IE.

I truely hope Flock succeeds - the internet space is all the better for this innovation of the end user software. Which is far from intuitive.

keith