Sparking a Crush: Attracting and Retaining New Users

Getting people to fall in love with your site is never easy. For “people-powered” services, from Yahoo! Answers to MySpace, attracting and retaining a critical mass of active participants is essential. Unfortunately, the web has become saturated with social sites, and people’s attention is spread thinner than ever. If your site does not “spark a crush” during sign-up and ramp-up, it will quickly be forgotten.

Fortunately, you don’t have to sit back and hope for passionate users to come along. There are steps you can take to make yourself more “crush-worthy.”

In this session, you’ll receive practical relationship advice, along with concrete examples from the Web 2.0 landscape and Adaptive Path’s work for MySpace, that will equip you to:

• Give people compelling and tailored reasons to join
• Nudge new users to get established and stay active
• Retain users by making connections and creating memorable moments

You’ll also take away practical tools that individuals or teams can use to diagnose and address attraction issues. You’ll learn how to:

• Get in touch with your core identity using an elevator pitch
• Identify attraction issues using conversion models
• Diagnose these issues using root cause analysis
• Generate solutions by applying principles and patterns

Through a lighthearted case study, you’ll learn how easy it is to put these tools and patterns to use to give the imaginary startup, “Snapfood” a makeover.

By blending concrete examples with broad principles, this session will not only leave you with a toolkit of approaches you can put to use immediately, it will give you the understanding you need to generate your own.