Friendster realizes that it has lost the attention of its earliest adopters. This morning, Friendster sent a message to a select number of people that they labeled as “SuperFriends.” It’s a usability survey where they are asking for users’ advice on an email campaign. There are four different potential emails that they sent out as screen shots. Here’s a sample one:
Subject: Friendster Now
So you’re working. Who cares? You have a lifetime to work. What you’ll really regret coughing and wheezing on your deathbed is not looking up all the old high-school friends, college buddies, summer camp alums, Burning Man acquaintances and ex’es who are just hoping you reach out and find them. And discovering new hiking partners, book groups and jam band fans. And setting up that person you really would date yourself if you were single. There’s oh so much to do.
Seriously, you should go to Burning Man. It’s pretty cool. The jam band stuff we understand if you’re not into. We just needed an example there.
Thanks.
www.friendster.com
Oh, to make sure you keep getting these vaguely sarcastic emails, please add Friendster to your email address book now. If for no other reason than it will look cool to have Friendster in your address book.
The tone of these messages is desperate, begging for attention of the original early adopters – the ones that Abrams told me were ruining his system. One focuses on Burning Man types; one mocks the old Power Point COO; one charges non-users with harming children; one is a desperate love poem. They’re hyper American-centric, SF-centric, white collar, wannabee hipster, intentionally attempting sarcasm (and clarifying that below) and complete with 80s references.
I guess Friendster isn’t happy with the majority of its users being young and from Asia. Does this mean that Friendster has its tail between its legs about its early egotistical behavior? Apparently, viral marketing isn’t working well enough anymore.
Anyhow, you *have* to read the full message that these SuperFriends got (included in the full message). It has had me ROFL for hours.
Below is the message that Friendster SuperFriend’s received. The text was followed by four email screen shots; i have transcribed those for ease of access.
Hi,
As a SuperFriend, we would appreciate your feedback on a new email
campaign. Friendster will soon be sending emails to two groups of
Friendster members – active members who use the site and inactive
members who have not recently used the site. We created two email
versions for each group and want your opinion to help us decide which
versions to use.
Please refer to the two versions for each group and reply to this email
(at usability@friendster.com) to answer the related questions. As
always, we greatly appreciate you taking the time to tell us what you
think on behalf of the Friendster community!
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
For the Active member email:
*Which of the two versions do you prefer? (version 1 or 2) _____
*Is the email appropriate to send to active Friendster members? (yes/no)
_____
*Would you be likely to click the link and go to Friendster if you
received this email? (yes/no) _____
*After receiving this email, would you assume the Friendster website had
an updated design? (yes/no) _____
*Would you be open to receiving similar emails from Friendster in the
future? (yes/no) _____
*Any additional comments?
______________________________________________________
For the Inactive member email:
*Which of the two versions do you prefer? (version 3 or 4) _____
*Is the email appropriate to send to inactive Friendster members?
(yes/no) _____
*Would you be likely to click the link and go to Friendster if you
received this email? (yes/no) _____
*After receiving this email, would you assume the Friendster website had
an updated design? (yes/no) _____
*Would you be open to receiving similar emails from Friendster in the
future? (yes/no) _____
*Any additional comments?
______________________________________________________
Thanks!
Friendster
Subject: Friendster Now
So you’re working. Who cares? You have a lifetime to work. What you’ll really regret coughing and wheezing on your deathbed is not looking up all the old high-school friends, college buddies, summer camp alums, Burning Man acquaintances and ex’es who are just hoping you reach out and find them. And discovering new hiking partners, book groups and jam band fans. And setting up that person you really would date yourself if you were single. There’s oh so much to do.
Seriously, you should go to Burning Man. It’s pretty cool. The jam band stuff we understand if you’re not into. We just needed an example there.
Thanks.
www.friendster.com
Oh, to make sure you keep getting these emails, please add Friendster to your email address book now. If for no other reason than it will look cool to have Friendster in your address book.
Subject: Don’t Tell Anyone
You’re our favorite subscriber. Seriously. I know we here at Friendster shouldn’t play favorites, and our chief operating officer (he’s the old guy in the office) told us not to do this, but seriously, you just totally rock. The way you reconnect with old friends. The way you’ve figured out just how small and interconnected the world really is. The way you discovered people with the same interests as you. We suspect you’ve even gotten a date out of Friendster, or that if you didn’t, you could have if you needed to. Easy. With one of those three suspiciously hot people who keep popping up right above your friends list. For other people, we just use those pictures as cruel, aspirational temptation. But for you, they’re totally getable.
Hey, don’t tell anyone we told you all of this. That old guy in the office will just start lecturing us again and pulling out charts and graphs and PowerPoint displays. He’s such a loser.
Thanks.
www.friendster.com
Oh, to make sure you keep getting these vaguely sarcastic emails, please add Friendster to your email address book now. If for no other reason than it will look cool to have Friendster in your address book.
Subject: The Suffering You’ve Caused
We totally miss you. By “we” we don’t so much mean we here at Friendster. No, we like you and all, but really, to be honest, we’re not all that close. No the “we” here are your real friends, the one you reconnected with through Friendster but have been ignoring as of late. They’re the ones who are suffering. They’re the ones who are crying late at night, screaming your name as they wait for you to contact them. Not to mention all the old high-school friends, college buddies and ex-es who are just hoping you reach out and find them. And the hiking partners, book groups and Wilco-heads who need you to discover them. It’s them, the children, who are suffering. That’s right, the children.
So come on back. We’ve made it easier for you, getting much faster and easier to navigate as we’ve grown. We won’t judge. We’re just here to help you. Help you help the children.
Thanks.
www.friendster.com
Oh, to make sure you keep getting these vaguely sarcastic emails, please add Friendster to your email address book now. If for no other reason than it will look cool to have Friendster in your address book.
Subject: We Still Care
We miss you. There, we said it. It feels better. So we’re going to do everything we can to bring you back to Friendster, all the way up to that John Cusack boom box Say Anything bit. So before it all comes to that, just come back to Friendster. We’ve already made it easier for you, getting much faster and clearer as we’ve grown. Now, in just minutes you can find people you’ve been wondering about: friends from summer camp, college roommates, high school buddies, cousins, people you used to date, people you wanted to date, these people you know, and don’t know, are connected to each other and what a beautifully small world it really is. Or date, or help a friend find a date. We don’t care. We just want you back in our lives. And we can tell you that you want the same thing. We can see it… in your eyes. The light, the heat. Your eyes, we feel complete. See, we told you.
Thanks.
www.friendster.com
Oh, to make sure you keep getting these vaguely sarcastic emails, please add Friendster to your email address book now. If for no other reason than it will look cool to have Friendster in your address book.
danah gets funny email about friendster
danah boyd has a great marketing-survey-thing that Friendster is apparently sending out to SuperFriends. It seems they are offering four template letters, and askign the SuperFriends which they like most as the center of a new campaign. Here: Subject: …
Superfriends?
Frankly, I’d rather they call it Super Best Friends, but that’s just me.
And then, once you start having Superfriends, isn’t that having like multiple best friends? Or a favorite child? Won’t all my friends want to be my superfriens? Lame.
Wow, as a copywriter, I have to say that these letters are facinating attempts at targeting a demographic. But, as any smarty can tell you, the minute your attempts to “target” the reader are transparent (as they so clearly are in these emails) it starts looking desperate.
For what it’s worth, I visited Friendster today for the first time in over a month. Tribe, meanwhile, I visit almost daily.
Friendster Copywriting
danah boyd posted some facinating emails that Friendster sent out: apophenia: Friendster is desperate; viral marketing failed. From a copywriter perspective, these are really interesting, because you can see them trying hard to catch their demographic …
For what it’s worth as well, I count 4 ‘marketing’ emails from Flickr this morning in my Inbox. 7 from LinkedIn, 3 from Tribe, and 2 from Orkut, all from this year.
I count zero “marketing” emails from Friendster, I assume because they have been too busy with getting their site fast, which has apparently worked, from the looks of it. I’ve had better success getting into Friendster the past 2 weeks than I have Orkut and Tribe, due to “downtime” messages.
After reading these and looking at all of the marketing spam I get from other places, I wonder how many other social networking sites actually ask their users what sort of email they’d rather get. Does Orkut or Tribe have a “SuperFriends” group ? Maybe they’re doing this now because Abrams is out of the picture now ?
Friendster is desperate; viral marketing failed
Friendster realizes that it has lost the attention of its earliest adopters. This morning, Friendster sent a message to a select number of people that they labeled as “SuperFriends.” It’s a usability survey where they are asking for u…
Friendster is desperate; viral marketing failed
Friendster realizes that it has lost the attention of its earliest adopters. This morning, Friendster sent a message to a select number of people that they labeled as “SuperFriends.” It’s a usability survey where they are asking for u…
To Friendster on their 16th Minute
Dear Friendster, Now that the 16th minute has arrived, as you desperately attempt to resurrect the buzz once swarming around your service, don’t be that guy. The loser who sycophanticly tries to fit in with the cool group, don’t be…
As a so-called “SuperFriend” I got this as well. My feelings on Friendster right now. They are going to crater within 12 months I figure, and it WON’T be pretty.
Yes, this may be desperate marketing. It may also be the exact type of marketing that works. Why? I wouldn’t be surprised if they concocted up this whole idea of sending around feedback questions on ridiculous emails SOLELY to get these connected people to bring up friendster on their blogs and in conversation. And because of this discussion, what do people do? They remember friendster, they log into their old accounts, and they take a quick run through friendster once again.
Friendster has been off my radar for a few months. But after hearing about these ridiculous emails, I most certainly signed back on and will probably sign on again tomorrow or the next day. And this is for no other reason than it is now back on my radar.
No press is bad press holds true in this case.
just saw this from socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com:
Friendster traffic on Alexa
if the sample size is all people who have the alexa toolbar installed, then I doubt there will be a “crater”.
friendster superfriends
Danah, friendster most active promoter writes on friendster beeing desperate due to majority of its users being young and from Asia and that its viral marketing doesn’t work any more. http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2004/06/25/friendster_is_d…
Tribe.net is dying. Friendster is getting desperate. Orkut is ascending. And Tickle is blowing everyone away.
Alexa agrees
I don’t see Orkut ascending there. They have been higher in the past. Tickle is not a surprise, they have been consistently higher than all for quite some time, and Monster.com’s buy of them will most likely continue that trend.
I don’t see Friendster getting desperate at all, they have been consistent on that graph.
Note: that graph is logarithmic, so Orkut will have a tougher time to catch Friendster than Friendster will to catch up to Tickle.
Holly has the most hysterical advice to Friendster on this one:
– The loser who sycophanticly tries to fit in with the cool group, don’t be that guy.
– The aging has-been trying to prove he’s still with-it by using contrived pop culture references, don’t be that guy.
– The outcast begging for friends and acceptance, don’t be that guy.
– The marketer who latches onto the canned irreverence trend by sending hammy, schmaltzy, faux-personal mass-emailings in effort to prove their product’s coolness to their target demographic, don’t be that guy.
– That same marketer who approaches a segment of that same target audience to solicit opinions on which feigningly “off-the-cuff” plea will garner the best results, seriously, DON’T be that guy.
Friendster Fumbling
Friendster has a love-hate relationship with most everyone I’ve ever encountered that uses the system. For the most part, the excitement surrounding Friendster seems to set in early in the process and then quickly dissipates. Any user that’s attempted …
This is really embarrassing. It sounds like a script that a telemarketer would read to you over the phone. Ugh. Who writes this stuff anyway?
Mike wrote: “Tribe.net is dying.” It is? Among the social niche that uses it (mostly Burners and members of other fringe subcultures), it seems to be doing pretty well.
friendster should think about a real PR person.
between this and this (and, of course, the fact that it’s so slow no one but southeast asia will bother…
friendster should think about a real PR person.
between this and this (and, of course, the fact that it’s so slow no one but southeast asia will bother…
friendster should think about a real PR person.
between this and this (and, of course, the fact that it’s so slow no one but southeast asia will bother…
friendster should think about a real PR person.
between this and this (and, of course, the fact that it’s so slow no one but southeast asia will bother…
dear friendster,
i’d rather be on myspace.
sincerely,
everyone
dear friendster,
i’d rather be on myspace.
sincerely,
everyone
Security at Friendster either not a priority or a big concern
A small update on my recent policy post, wherein I quote a Friendster rep saying in a Wired article: We have a policy that we are not being hacked. Security isn’t a priority for us. We’re mostly focused on making the site go faster. A couple of readers…
Security at Friendster either not a priority or a big concern
A small update on my recent policy post, wherein I quote a Friendster rep saying in a Wired article: We have a policy that we are not being hacked. Security isn’t a priority for us. We’re mostly focused on making the site go faster. A couple of readers…
Security at Friendster either not a priority or a big concern
A small update on my recent policy post, wherein I quote a Friendster rep saying in a Wired article: We have a policy that we are not being hacked. Security isn’t a priority for us. We’re mostly focused on making the site go faster. A couple of readers…
Security at Friendster either not a priority or a big concern
A small update on my recent policy post, wherein I quote a Friendster rep saying in a Wired article: We have a policy that we are not being hacked. Security isn’t a priority for us. We’re mostly focused on making the site go faster. A couple of readers…
Security at Friendster either not a priority or a big concern
A small update on my recent policy post, wherein I quote a Friendster rep saying in a Wired article: We have a policy that we are not being hacked. Security isn’t a priority for us. We’re mostly focused on making the site go faster. A couple of readers…
I hate those marketing people who misuse the term “usability” to cover their marketing rubbish. 🙁
I hate those marketing people who misuse the term “usability” to cover their marketing rubbish. 🙁
I hate those marketing people who misuse the term “usability” to cover their marketing rubbish. 🙁
Security at Friendster either not a priority or a big concern
A small update on my recent policy post, wherein I quote a Friendster rep saying in a Wired article: We have a policy that we are not being hacked. Security isn’t a priority for us. We’re mostly focused on making the site go faster. A couple of readers…