“In the old days, getting customers was easy. You could just outspend. You could use brute force to get the word out. Now, thanks to social media, you don’t have to outspend. There is a much better technique. It is to out friend. If you can just be friendly enough and get your users to party with you, the rest is really easy. If you don’t want to take the time to develop – building like 20,000 to 200,000 close, intimate friends can take a few weeks – then we have the viral model so you can do this really quickly.”
Skewering social media is just one of many things Kathy Sierra does in this brilliant talk from BoS USA 2009. If you do one thing today, watch this video. Cancel lunch, shut down twitter, don’t go to that meeting. Whatever you do, watch this.
Kathy Sierra
Kathy Sierra is the author of books that have sold over a million copies on knowledge management and design and winner of several Jolt Cola/Software Development Awards.
She has spent the last 20 years as a game developer and knowledge engineer/designer. An original founder of javaranch.com, she has also created the Creating Passionate Users blog, and the Head First book series for O’Reilly. She also developed and taught the New Media and Interaction Design courses at UCLA Extension’s Entertainment Studies Department and the IBM New Media Lab at Universal Studios, built games for Amblin’, MGM, and Virgin Sound & Vision, and developed the Java programmer certifications for Sun Microsystems.
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