The Click #14

The last few Clicks have been rather serious. I apologise.
Websites should be fun. People want to be entertained. Make
someone smile and you’ve made a connection.

Flashing lights
My bro-in-law (hi, Tim!) sent this email from Aus…

Tom, thanks for a timely pop culture reference! Thanks, Grant

Edward, If smart enough to tell the difference then one would hope skillful enough as marketers/rhetoricians enough to make the difference. Great point. We have at least 3 relationships out there (according to diffusion stage) and we should have one language for each. But if you are assuming that all the early adopters are passionate and wants an intimate language, I’m not sure this is so. Some of the early adopters are thinking not “you have done something wonderful” but “so you’re the ones who figured out, what do you want, a medal?” Thoughts only. Thanks, Grant

I believe the issue is all about targeting. The Flickr email reads
like it’s sent from the passionate owners to the equally passionate
group of consumers and users. Perhaps to should have just been sent
to the most frequent users and earliest adopters, rather than everyone.

It’s like being a music fan and liking a song; both are interactions
with a band, but the relationships are very different.

If bands treat fans differently, why shouldn’t brands?

Some people want a relationship and others want to be left alone.
Surely we are smart enough to tell the difference.

Ed

I can just see the Flickroobies (!) accosting the evil attornies now: “You caaaan’t make us say thaaaat!” and then watching them relent, like we ineffectual parents everywhere inevitably do, “OK, but only this one time!”

It reminds me of The Flaming Lips song, “Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots”:

Her name is Yoshimi
she’s a black belt in karate
working for the city
she has to discipline her body
‘Cause she knows that
it’s demanding
to defeat those evil machines
I know she can beat them

Oh Yoshimi, they don’t believe me
but you won’t let those robots eat me
Yoshimi, they don’t believe me
but you won’t let those robots defeat me

Those evil-natured robots
they’re programmed to destroy us
she’s gotta be strong to fight them
so she’s taking lots of vitamins

‘Cause she knows that
it’d be tragic
if those evil robots win
I know she can beat them

Etc.

Flickr users who’ve spent any time reading any of the writing on the site (including the privacy policy, FAQ and other typically unamusing text) — or who read the Flickr Blog — will recognize the email as my own fairly corny and/or over the top voice, and see that it’s exactly the same kind of jocularity as Flickr has had since its inception, even when making serious announcements, as in http://blog.flickr.com/flickrblog/2005/03/yahoo_actually_.html

The email was sent out at the behest of the legal department. Surely we as small-timers up in Canada would not have even known there was anything to be done when moving datastuff from here to there, but indeed, it turns out when you move people’s stuff over international borders, you have to tell them.

We whinged that legalese was not our style and insisted that this Very Informative Email use the same, semi-ridiculous, and vaguely mad voice we’ve always used, and they said, well OK. Even to the point where we had the lawyers attempting to write their own paragraphs in Flickrese.

Lucky for us, our corporate overlords at Yahoo are sensible people, allowing us our odd idiosyncracies, and thus you received my wholly overwrought and sadly uninformative missive.

Cheers!!

The companies that buy these startups (Yahoo and Google, at least) may have that in their roots, but no one feels that way about them now, do they? Especially the people that work there, no doubt.

So Flickr is making that transition from beloved-among-the-digerati startup to part-of-a-corporate-monster. And the missives from them make sense, given that. And I believed them as earnest if inaccurate (rather than the Snidette Whiplash of Yahoo! Marketing composing it complete with geographical referenes to make ‘em sound just small-town-hick enough to be charming, etc.) indicators of what was going on for those individuals that were having a career change.

And for me (and not the others here) it FIT. It fit perfectly with my expectations of ‘em. Did you folks see blog entries with Yahoo buys Flickr? Did any of you care? I don’t know how universal that was, but I suspect not at all, and it’s not really that relevant.

Please note I’m not correcting or chastising anyone here; I’m really intrigued by the space between us in terms of what these brands mean to us.

Characteristically on the money comment and analysis by Grant McKracken of an email from the Flickr team. Anyone with an account will have got this email recently. It tells readers that their servers are moving from Canada to the USA….

Matt, exactly, there are lots of models to be accommodated, and I think there is a gender split that says that males communicate much less “phatic information” than women tend to do. This will be part of the targeted proposition, I guess. Thanks, Grant

Debbie, thanks, much appreciated, Grant

JD, good questions all, and only ethnographic or some other method would supply the answers, but you leave out the one I find most disturbing, the one that uses a peppy tone to say, “we are not a business, and can be trusted to act from other, higher motives.” This is a consumer expectation I find disturbing, but I am not judge from a couple of recent threads, in the minority. Some people want to hear that your motives are non commercial, because, I guess, commerce is dangerous. Frankly, I find myself much more uncomforable, threatened, actually, when someone is pretending to be my friend. Or, as you say, perhaps this is the new coin of deference. Thanks, Grant