I'm not a Microsoft basher, not at all. And, I'm not one to charge around the Web looking for stuff to criticize. However, their Show Us Your Wow campaign strikes me as getting a fundamental thing instructively wrong about corporate-sponsored community.
The basic idea is a photo contest, and the photos are displayed via an interaction that simulates the Windows Flip 3D feature in Vista. The site seems to have been a mild success, with about 50,000 submissions (less then half, interestingly, from the US). However, browsing the site is slow and clunky. You can rate photos, but there seems to have been low participation in the ratings mechanism. You can't comment on photos. My guess is that most participants simply submitted a photo and disappeared.
Now, I do think the relative silence of the "community community" about this site is telling. Nobody got excited about this site, so it was ignored. However, there's a key lesson in Show Us Your Wow that is so perfectly exemplified that I think it's worth talking about. Web 2.0 aspiring corporations take note:
IT'S NOT ABOUT YOU
Show Us Your Wow has a concept that's good-sorta. It wants to be about "When you experience the amazing, the incredible, the exhilarating. And when you do, there's only one way to express it: 'Wow.'"
Who can't get behind that? It's not a stretch to feel like the Wow concept can be expressed in pictures, and pictures are easy to upload, so there's a low threshold of entry. The concept is brand-aligned, which is a key attribute of successful corporate community initiatives. (See the Converse user-generated film gallery. Navigate to Features > Made By You.)
But there's a problem:
Microsoft is asking you to show them your Wow. Aside from sounding a little off-color (especially in translation), do you really care about showing your amazing, incredible, exhilarating moment... to faceless Microsoft employees somewhere in cramped Redmond offices? Probably not.
Now, you might want to show your Wow to family and friends. You might want to show your Wow, even, to other people out there in the world. But the site is neither messaged or built that way. It's an archetypal example of the corporation wanting to do something community-enabled and just not getting it: "Hey customers! Send your most special memories to our corporate PR department!"
And just in case you aren't into just showing us your Wow because you love us, we'll make sure you want to... by bribing you with a prize offering.
Stay tuned for my next installment, where I'll break down another community site that does something similar and nails it.
Otherwise, the "us" refers to "the people," which itself seems problematic. For, if that is the projected idea behind the message, the polemic becomes whether a large corporation can be perceived as a legitimate voice of the people.
Posted by: wex | March 27, 2007 at 12:56 PM