Robot Loves Kitten

Currently developing an online green community for launch in late April 2008.

One of the most important aspects of SMITH is how low the barrier to signup is. I felt that it was critical not to cruft up the signup process with unnecessary info.

Usually, all the department heads get together and have a meeting about the signup process, and it turns into a brainstorming session about how best to pimp out your prospective user. Ironically, this process is made all the easier since, most times, you don’t have any users yet, and abstract constructs receive this kind of abuse quite well.

Signup is a very delicate time. You are trying to cajole passers-by into entering your little world. They don’t know your world or fully understand its benefits. The best way to show them is to let them in as quickly and as easily as possible.

We also make a grave mistake in our terms. This new person is not a “member.” Filling out a form doesn’t make you a member of a community. Your actions and contributions make you a member. So, maybe we call this person a rookie. And rookies need to be handled carefully and watched. Most good communities integrate concepts of user-levels, where more experienced members are granted more access and control. This is completely appropriate if your goal is to build a vibrant community.

These experienced members dominate your community and should be the ones you focus your attentions on. They are the ones you want to know about. Not the rookies. They haven’t proven themselves yet, and might not even stay around for very long.

As SMITH grows, we have plans to build out the profiles & community spaces, so we can integrate newsletters, geographic functions, etc. But that’s all stuff that will benefit our active members, not the rookies, so we took it out of the sign-up process. Adding extra fields for marketing would only muddy our core message (“share your story with us”).

If it doesn’t apply to the core selling proposition, then it doesn’t belong in the sign-up. There’s lots of ways to hint, prod, remind people to fill in their profiles as they continue to return to your site. And frankly, it’s going to take some time for new members to really understand the benefits that additional information might provide.

So we are taking it slow, and I think the approach is really working well. Our sign-ups have really exploded since we launched the new site.

SMITH is an online magazine and community devoted to storytelling I co-founded with Larry Smith back in 2004. We went online in January of 2006, and have since produced two graphic novels, Shooting War and A.D.: After the Deluge.

In November of 2006, we ran a six-word memoir contest with messaging startup Twitter. The more than 12,000 entries we received led to the book, Not Quite What I Was Planning, published in February 2008 by HarperPerennial.

In advance of the book, we created a promotional video that actually helped a great deal in selling a product that didn’t fully exist yet.

Then we embarked on a complete rebuild of the Web site. We really worked hard to deliver on SMITH’s core mission: everyone has a story, and SMITH is the place to tell it. It was a difficult task, blending editor-driven and community-driven content, but I think we’ve gotten pretty far. Part of the difficulty is in activating a formerly passive audience: they came to SMITH to read great stories, not add their own.

XOXO.com, a company run by our friend Ben Brown, developed the simple community tools we use on SMITH. One of the most important things we are able to do now is to integrate story submissions and member signups. It’s all one simple step now, and that’s really helping spur the growth of the site.