This morning I rolled into a busy Starbucks off 148th Street in Redmond. It was a beautiful fall morning. I was there to meet Marty Collins, the head of the Community Team for Microsoft’s Windows/Windows Live programs. Marty is both a client and a friend. She’s whip-smart as it comes to community and engagement. Our collective team has been working on a labor of love (known as the ‘Clubhouse’), and it was our topic of conversation this morning.
As we plopped down, we spent a couple of minutes catching up. We talked about kids, Halloween and her friend, who having just moved to Chicago from Seattle was freaking out over some early season snow flakes.
Quickly our conversation shifted to the topic at hand. Clubhouse. If you are not familiar with Clubhouse, you might want to check it out.
In this month’s Fast Company, there is an article dubbed ‘Young Flakenstein’, in which the head of Microsoft’s new Live Labs is churning out some amazingly cool new applications. In the article, Flake states, that he sees an unparalleled collective power in Microsoft’s customers. After all, Microsoft touches over a billion computer users world wide every single day. Flake states that he sees a huge asset; the collective power of these people. The more people contribute to a site, the richer it becomes for every user. It’s here; in this collaborative network effect that he sees Microsoft’s advantage.
I do too. Here is why:
As Marty and my conversation shifted to Clubhouse, her first comment was about The Metric. We (the Microsoft dedicated team associated with this project) launched the Clubhouse in combination with a new WindiwsLive.com. The site was a pretty radical departure for Microsoft and its historically traditional approach. Reflecting on it, the idea was a pretty brave step to take, representing a decent sized line-in-the-sand for a host of people. Bet all the chips on black. If it worked…fantastic. If we were wrong, there’d be some serious explaining that would need to be done and most likely, we’d move the Community movement backwards a ways.
However, we had faith in our abilities, our advocate base, with whom we worked with to make the Clubhouse a reality and our passionate customer base. It worked. Taking a sip from her coffee, Marty said, Can you believe it? Can you believe some of these numbers? They are gigantic. I mean, the activity counts are the equivalent of a country! Imagine, all of Germany or France all working together to collaborate on something that is of shared interest and done in a way that is meaningful to everybody. Each person having a personalized and rich experience in which they give something meaningful to the community and also take something away to use elsewhere and then wanting to come back and experience more. That’s the power of community. That’s the power of the Window’s Live Clubhouse.
A friend and co-worker of mine, Sean O’Driscoll has a saying. Good customers like you. Great customers love you. But Advocates will defend you. We found that in Clubhouse, this axiom holds true related to the Microsoft products members are using every day. However, and of equal importance, we have found that this axiom also holds true for how they relate to each other. Like. Love. Defend.
The new WindowsLive.com site and its associated Clubhouse have only been online for a relatively short time. The whole concept of the Clubhouse is that everyday users use all sorts of Microsoft products for all sorts of important things. Like managing their son’s basketball team. Planning a wedding. Keeping up with family members deployed in Iraq. Creating a video and picture diary of a long anticipated trip across Europe. The value of the Clubhouse is not centered around the Microsoft Live products, but instead the users themselves and their great ideas. Ideas, examples, tutorials, people and other content are sorted and showcased in a variety of ways and places. The most obvious is on the homepage of WindowsLive.com.
One specifically clever and insightful piece of UGC created by an every-day user named Jamie had a massive impact one day shortly after launch. The content and idea he shared with the Clubhouse was thought to be pretty good. It quickly benefitted from word of mouth. People telling others about it and pointing to it. In a matter of less than one day, Jamie’s contribution racked up 11 million views. It then proceeded to shut down the portion of the Clubhouse serving Jamie’s content due to the rapid onslaught of traffic. In only a few weeks, it had generated over 30 million views and engaged, excited and helped tens of millions of people the world over do the things they wanted to do…along with understand how to be a master over the products they used rather than visa-versa.
The interesting thing about this piece of content was it wasn’t clever and distinctive or rocket science. It wasn’t even particularly even exciting. It was just the right thing at the right time. It was insightful and helpful. Jamie had other posts that got higher rankings. Others had more of a wow effect. However, Jamie knew what people needed help with. Why? He’s one of them. He interacts every day with others like him. Difference is, he has some advocate tendencies (a burning desire to help others) and he’s a little farther ahead than most on the learning curve of how to do certain things. It’s this calculus that makes him powerful…him and the thousands of others like him.
This, in my mind, is exactly how great marketing should work. It should be additive. It should be helpful. It should be genuine. It shouldn’t just include the voice of the customer; it should be the voice of the customer.
Needless to say that word of this event travelled quickly through the halls. Clubhouse members and their peer-to-peer activity were quickly setting new benchmarks for activity.
Last week, one of my colleagues, located in Denver encountered an unsolicited recommendation that included a link to Jamie’s contribution. A couple of days ago, I stumbled across a posting on Twitter suggesting that we should check out the Clubhouse, as well.
The health index (I’ll talk about Community Health Indexing in a future post) is solidly in the green and trending ever upwards. Customers are excited and engaged. They are collaborating and creating a rich set of experiences for all to experience at an unparalleled rate that I can only correlate to Wikipedia’s unprecedented success.
Can a Microsoft product change how the web is used? Can tens of millions of collaborating, inter-connected users with shared interests and passions helping one another change the web? Yes. Can it change how software is viewed and used? Yes. Can it change Microsoft’s value proposition? Yes, in fact, I believe that this shift has already begun.