Being the Hype
Two weeks ago I started a series that I knew would ruffle some feathers. I knew there would be people that would agree with me and I knew there would be people who vehemently disagreed with me. I knew there would be people telling me that I was simply writing this series to get traffic (ummm, I like people reading my stuff, do you?) and others that would simply resort to calling me names. In the end though I am glad it worked.
We are a very emotional community. It is easy to get us excited and even easier to piss us off. Tell us you have a new redesign coming out and we get excited and the anticipation starts to kill us. Attack one of our peers and we will quickly form an attack right back. With this in mind you can understand how easy the hype machine can be built up amongst ourselves.
Some companies like to start hype on purpose. For instance, Blinksale had arguably the best hype campaign in the community this year. It was tough going a day without seeing it linked from some designer’s site singing praise for the invoicing web application even before it launched! The problem with all of this hype? Many will argue that they didn’t deliver due to a large amount of downtime. In this sense, the hype worked against them (I don’t use Blinksale so I cannot speak on the quality of the application or its uptime).
Many of us seem to frown on the hype machine, but I enjoy it. I love studying it. If you have a company I am sure the people who run it are interested in it as well. That’s why you see many companies today wrongly jump on the blog bandwagon because they believe they can create buzz with a blog. Creating buzz is not hard if you already have an audience. However, many times you will find that companies work more on creating buzz than creating a quality product.
And that’s where the hype starts to get annoying.
Mike Davidson is a good friend who is working on his own startup company. He won’t tell me a damn thing about the company and for good reason, he doesn’t want to start any hype (but I think I just started some for him). But that’s crazy! Hype means you have an audience. Hype means you have customers from day one. He knows though that he is not creating the world’s most revolutionary app (or maybe he is) and even admits that when people see it many will just say it simply is App 1 mixed with App 2 mixed with App 3. But he also believes that it will be a great app/service that people will use and that’s what’s important.
With the way information spreads on the web there really is no need to hype our products anymore because many times we fail to live up to the hype. Hell, all Inman did was put a signup page for Mint and you can already feel the electricity. We all know it will just be a stat tracking program, but that doesn’t mean we won’t get excited about it.
What do you do if you are in Inman’s position though? You simply let the app speak for itself and I believe he is doing a wonderful job of that.
On Business Logs last week I jokingly wrote an entry about our redesign and did some major hyping of it. I mainly did it to poke fun at all the hype going on this year and to also freak Rundle out a little bit because he knew that the redesign wasn’t anything revolutionary. That’s what hype does to people though, it pressures them to achieve better (I think).
If you continue to hype every product you release, hype will no longer be generated. This is what 37signals was doing wrong in my opinion. It’s not that they are releasing a number of products or that many of them, some will argue, share the same qualities. It’s that instead of just telling us that a new app will be launching next week or simply just launching it, we get a taste of our 4th product marketing speech which begins to wear on people. Apple gets hype because they don’t bother hyping anything themselves. The rumor sites take care of that. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Microsoft hypes every new OS and has no chance of living up to their own hype.
I am not saying you shouldn’t bother trying to get the word out about your product or service, but once the word is out the product should speak for itself. If you are too caught up in your own hype then you lose focus on what’s important. Small companies need all the help they can get to spread the word of their product, but I feel many are starting to put the focus on the marketing and not the product. That was the main point of my series.
Tomorrow starts another four part series on sites that get hyped and how they are able to achieve the hype, whether you believe they deserve it or not, because we all can learn lessons on how to create buzz. Even freelancers can benefit from a bit of buzzmarketing about their services.
Tomorrow: MySpace.
Outdoing yourself again Scrivs… good article, definitely some valid points.
I’m excited for the MySpace article, I’ve wondering for a long time just how much bandwidth they could save by going to valid markup with css. And they give you the ability to “customize your html layout”… I assure you, having explored this, it requires some of the most gruesome table manipulating code I’ve ever set eyes on, and yet kids are more than willing to learn it to spice up their profiles. Imagine if they had access to CSS??
By Dann Ryan on August 22, 2005 11:14 am
Great article, lot of good points.
BTW,
On the opposite end of the spectrum, Microsoft hypes every new OS and no (know it?) has no chance of living up to their own hype.
By Christopher on August 22, 2005 11:22 am
Thanks Christopher, corrected. Time to go over the article again since I got some sleep.
By Scrivs on August 22, 2005 11:28 am
“But he also believes that it will be a great app/service that people will use and that’s what’s important.”
Best quote to describe why making web applications, software, or even products in general is something we aspire to. If you believe in your product, that’s ultimately what matters.
Mike touched on his blog about how Stewart from Flickr and others were ‘unphased’ by their success finacially. I think what seperates them from the rest of us, it that thier passion is for the pursuit of the success, not the success itself. Or in this case, the hype.
Not sure if that made any sense, but it’s the best I got.
By Dominic Damian on August 22, 2005 11:50 am
Agreed. With regards to my situation, just a quick clarification: I’m all for telling people about it and showing some of the site off when the launch date is a bit closer. I just would rather talk about it when it’s demoable, you know? If you start talking about something too early, you end up building up false hopes and outside skepticism. Furthermore, the grapevine sometimes works in ways you’d rather it not.
When we are a month or so away from launch, friends will certainly get a look. But for now, I have to stay somewhat stealth.
By Mike D. on August 22, 2005 11:56 am
I think a ton of hype gets created because bloggers want to be the first to “know” about something and link to it on their blog. Then when someone asks “Have you heard of such and such..” they can be like “Yeah, I blogged about it like a month ago. Where have you been?”
I like the way Mike D. is doing it. Everyone knows his new company has got to be something great since he left a job at ESPN to start it. But he ain’t sayin’ a damn thing –no hints, no nothin– which keeps everybody wondering even more in the back of their minds.
By Summerville on August 22, 2005 12:24 pm
Mike definitely has the anti-hype hype machine working (Apple strategy). Don’t say a word, and people are falling over themselves to see what they put out.
By JohnO on August 22, 2005 2:22 pm
Yep, Mike D.’s got it goin’ on in that regard. Being all secretive, low-key and quiet.
Or…maybe he’s just sitting at home, flipping through channels on HDTV, enjoying his freedom from a life of 9-5.
geof
By Geof Harries on August 22, 2005 3:14 pm
After 3 days at the Blog Business Summit in SF, it is now clear: The buzz or hype does several things:
a) promotes the product
b) creates links from the hype-spreading blogger to the product site which escalates it’s position in Google.
c) If done properly, the promoter links back to the blog spreading he buzz as a positive review, which escalates the blogger’s Google page rank.
d) every link pings Technorati, et al, which gets more bloggers involved, and also escalates rank in Google still further.
BTW. I’m trying Blinksale, and I like it. I hate bookkeeping but this is simple, easy, obvious and web-based (like the rest of my life).
By Rich Webster on August 22, 2005 4:18 pm
flava flav said it best… “don’t believe the hype”
By evan on August 22, 2005 6:04 pm
Some great points, Scrivs. Not just in this entry but this series of entries as a whole.
Hype creates just as many cynics as it creates customers and I think as blogs continue to grow into this uncontrollable word-of-mouth monstrosity, people need to make sure not to disappoint their audience.
By Jack on August 22, 2005 10:07 pm
Too much hype can lead to disappointment in the end, if the product or service doesn’t actually live up to all the buzz generated about it. It always bugs me when people talk about the imminent release of a new product with constantly increasing excitement, but the when the actual product is released I end up looking at it and going, “Oh. Is that all it is? I thought it would be so much cooler”. Even if the product actually is great, there’s always a touch of disappointment because the hype made it seem bigger and better than it actually was.
By Sara White on August 23, 2005 12:13 am
The myspace article was very well done glad i read it.
By personals on February 4, 2006 3:55 am