Learning Viral: What my Brita taught me about Commitment

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I just moved into my own place in Pacifica,CA. Feel free to come work over here with me if you are interested. Can you believe I have my own place? Anyways, I bought a Brita water filter to have some delicious filtered water.

After I took out the pitcher it made me tear apart some stickers saying when the pitcher would expire and put them on the outside of it. Now on July 14th at 7pm I need to replace the water filter. Then the light bulb went off in my head about virality in that getting a higher conversion is really about making the user commit to something and then asking for what you want!

How can you apply this to your site? Let’s take a look at Quizzes:

1- How Sex & the City are you? You click the quiz from somewhere and then fill out 25 questions. (I hope I am like Samantha)
2- Then it says to find out your results please compare yourself to 4 friends. Damnit, I don’t want to bug them but I’ve already spend time doing this so I will.
3- You find out you are like Charlotte. Bummer, but now the viral loop has started and you are on to the races.

Take away:
1- Think about how you can allow users to access / use your service before you want them to do anything.
2- The faster you can on-board (getting them into the core of your product) the more likely they are to stick around. As long as your product doesn’t suck.
3- When you agree to something or put time into it you are more likely to come back. Retention increases virality (more on that later). Think about World of Warcraft people who’ve spent 20 hours getting to level 49.a, when levels 50-60 come out, do you think they are going to do it?

There are 6 comments. There will be one more after you add yours, though.

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6 Responses to “Learning Viral: What my Brita taught me about Commitment”

  • matt
    May 31st, 2008
    9:59 am

    I like the article. I have been thinking a lot about how users want to interact with one of my products lately.

    Also, only insane people get to level 49 in WoW, in 20 hours. Most people spend weeks or months ^_^.

  • Shaping Youth
    May 31st, 2008
    11:31 am

    Hey Noah, welcome back stateside, hope to catch you @ Barbara’s Fishtrap sometime.

    To your point about commitments, ironically, I’m doing a piece for Shaping Youth about a beta community, http://www.StickK.com with the tag, “put a contract out on yourself” which has people in the community ‘hold you to your goals’ no matter how arcane. Kinda cool.

    Also along these lines, have you seen the Brita ‘pledge’ to reduce bottled water waste by co-branding with FilterForGood.com using the green nalgene scene? Perfect pairing/pledge to go viral…

  • Warren
    June 3rd, 2008
    12:29 am

    Sorry, the phrase “Sex and the City” must never be on OKdork.com. On behalf of all men, I beg this of you.

  • rachel
    June 5th, 2008
    8:55 pm

    you’re a nerdface for just jumping on the brita bandwagon. i’ve been drinking brita filtered water for years.

  • Justin Lee
    June 9th, 2008
    12:03 am

    so is this a beach front house? pacifica is lovely!

  • Shaping Youth
    June 11th, 2008
    7:51 am

    Heads up…the cartridges for Brita’s filters aren’t recyclable in No. America? How can this be? Sheesh…

    Here’s the scoop/petition from the Have Fun Do Good blog:
    http://havefundogood.blogspot.com/2008/06/fake-plastic-fish-take-back-filter.html#links

    And I guess they’ve set up a URL directly: http://www.takebackthefilter.org/

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