Marketing v Being Loud

Great post by Eric Sink on what I’ll call ‘the difference between marketing and being loud.’ The problem with it as I see it, is the problem that Digg may run into. The gist of the post is that if you build a great product for a small group the group will talk, and before long you’ll have more buzz than you know what to do with - that’s pretty much what happened to Digg / Del.icio.us / etc.

The problem with Digg (relating to the post I pointed to yesterday) is that the group has gotten too defensive. It’s nearly impossible to get into the Digg Elite. If I wanted to become a Digg fanatic I don’t know that I could… it would take far too much effort to become one of the Digg elite (a digger that can get a 5 digg story on the homepage). To me Digg is almost a closed network.

Designing for a few is great, but make sure that the community is open to newcomers. Maybe this is part of the reason that Digg expanded beyond tech. Unfortunately, the same going to keep happening with each topic.

It’s an interesting problem and one that I don’t think has a perfect answer yet… Make it easy for newbies, but reward the long time users - someone will figure it out.

J.D. Amer is a guy that dreams bigger and thinks smaller everyday. — I’m going to start adding a signature to every post, here’s why.