{"id":161,"date":"2005-03-09T11:38:19","date_gmt":"2005-03-09T18:38:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp\/?p=161"},"modified":"2005-03-09T11:38:19","modified_gmt":"2005-03-09T18:38:19","slug":"wake-up-to-the-long-tail-of-passion-and-plug-ins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wake-up-to-the-long-tail-of-passion-and-plug-ins\/","title":{"rendered":"Wake Up To The Long Tail of Passion and Plug-Ins"},"content":{"rendered":"

More great stuff from Kathy Sierra<\/a> over at Creating Passionate Users<\/a>. The notion is that a product creates a “wake”, like a boat. This wake is a wave in its own right, which can be enhanced, you can speed up the boat, swing from side to side, give the waterskier a more interesting ride.<\/p>\n

Does your product or service support plug-ins and add-ons? Does it lend itself to follow-on products, accessories, support and training, etc.? Does it inspire others to be part of your wake?<\/p>\n

Whoever competes with the iPod has to compete with a lot more than Apple’s device–it has to compete with this great wall of stuff riding in the iPod wake. And these things all make the iPod a lot more appealing and flexible.<\/p>\n

Inspiring a wake–where passionate people add value to your product or service with new things–is one of the fabulous side-effects of having passionate users. And your chances of creating passionate users just keeps going up the larger the wake gets. So it’s a great big happy reinforcing feedback loop<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As we have also seen recently from Firefox, a wake can pay for ads, lead to a plug-in ecosystem and so on. It is important to encourage the wake though. That is one reason i think Apple can succeed this time around in a way it hasn’t before; by that i mean dominating a mass market rather than creating a market and watching another vendor take advantage. Let other people sell monitors, hard-drives or whatever for the Mac mini; that’s wakeful behaviour. Meanwhile just check out all iPod accessories<\/a> out there.<\/p>\n

I don’t know if the rhyme of metaphor was intended, but a Long Wake is a lot like a Long Tail. An ecosystem is not just a product launch, its a long standing conversation, and users can become more passionate about the boat, not less, over time. There are some important lessons for producers<\/a> in these memes. <\/p>\n

Apple sometimes tries to kill the passion and yet still succeeds<\/a> so there don’t seem to be hard and fast rules, but I would certainly argue thinking about wake effects is a good way to think about ecosystems rather than just products. If you want to create passionate users give them a wake to surf. Somewhere to plug in and or sound off.<\/p>\n

So what about different meanings of “wake”, and their relevance to the meme?<\/p>\n

wake<\/p>\n

n 1: the consequences of an event (especially a catastrophic event); “the aftermath of war”; “in the wake of the accident no one knew how many had been injured” [syn: aftermath, backwash] 2: an island in the western Pacific between Guam and Hawaii [syn: Wake Island, Wake] 3: the wave that spreads behind a boat as it moves forward; “the motorboat’s wake capsized the canoe” [syn: backwash] 4: a vigil held over a corpse the night before burial; “there’s no weeping at an Irish wake” [syn: viewing] v 1: be awake, be alert, be there [ant: sleep] 2: stop sleeping; “She woke up to the sound of the alarm clock” [syn: wake up, awake, arouse, awaken, come alive, waken] [ant: fall asleep] 3: arouse or excite feelings and passions; “The ostentatious way of living of the rich ignites the hatred of the poor”; “The refugees’ fate stirred up compassion around the world”; “Wake old feelings of hatred” [syn: inflame, stir up, ignite, heat, fire up] 4: make aware of; “His words woke us to terrible facts of the situation” 5: cause to become awake or conscious; “He was roused by the drunken men in the street”; “Please wake me at 6 AM.” [syn: awaken, waken, rouse, wake up, arouse] [ant: cause to sleep]<\/p>\n

Source: WordNet ® 2.0, © 2003 Princeton University<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So how about wakeful as a word like clueful. Get a clue. Get Awake!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

More great stuff from Kathy Sierra over at Creating Passionate Users. The notion is that a product creates a “wake”, like a boat. This wake is a wave in its own right, which can be enhanced, you can speed up the boat, swing from side to side, give the waterskier a more interesting ride. Does<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-161","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9wfjh-2B","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=161"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}