How do we plan to register physicians for our community site? Are we going to do a marketing blitz? Bribe current members with payola to cajole them to post/ contribute? Beg their colleagues to register? Nope, nope and nope. We’re leveraging our friends to be the first users. If they like the site, then we hope they’ll recommend it to their friends. That’s the master plan, and that’s always been the master plan.
Slow, sustained and measured community growth is actually aligned with the product development process from multiple standpoints.
There will invariably be problems for some of the first users - interface issues, a dearth of content, perhaps not enough trusted colleagues are members. Early adopters however are placable, and most will stay with us as we navigate through the iterative improvement processes. This will help make the experience better for the middle and tail, who are less forgiving. Any serious concerns that those latter two groups have would likely result in a permanent exodus, so we need to ensure that we’ve addressed their issues before their first visit. Engaging in an unfocused marketing campaign would capture individuals from all three groups - that would be suicidal during the site’s infancy.
So how can we get early adopters who become true believers to express their advocacy? I’m smart enough to know that there’s got to be a methodology to do these things - it certainly isn’t rocket science - but it would be nice to see some sort of defined plastic template that could be personalized to our specific situation. It cannot simply be “build it and they will come.” We would be waiting around forever. I never got around to researching this much, kept it on the backburner until… I heard about Andy.