Addressing Steemit's Retention problem - Lessons from a Former Cafe Owner
A few years ago, I ran a café in the middle of Melbourne CBD with my wife. I was primarily responsible for the marketing aspect of the business. If you’ve lived in Melbourne before, you will know that Melbourne has a vibrant coffee culture. There are literally cafes everywhere, especially in the CBD.
To stay ahead in this competitive environment, one of the most important things our business focused on was the retention of existing customers.
It was all about keeping our customers happy. Our baristas tried to remember the faces of every regular customer and what they usually ordered; even before they made their order, our baristas would know what they wanted. When our regular customers didn’t have their money on them, that was OK. We would trust them to pay back next time. Because we know that the cost of attracting new customers is many times more than retaining an existing customer. In addition, my marketing training tells me that when a customer has a negative experience, they are much more likely to tell their friends than if they had a positive experience. And the potential damage caused by these X-customers to our café brand would be so much more than our small gestures we could take to keep them satisfied.
So what does our café have to do with Steemit?
I believe that just as staff at our café would go out of their way to retain our customers; those driving the future of Steemit need to put user retention as one of their top priorities.
Yesterday morning when I logged into my account, I read a post from one of the authors I follow @jaredcwillis. His post was titled,
Why I’m Taking My Content Elsewhere. Although I don’t agree with all his points, his post made me think about Steemit’s problem with the retention of users. The friend who first introduced me to Steemit is no longer active here either. I feel really sad about this because I see huge potential for Steemit, and am worried about all these discontented x-users on Steemit who will be telling their friends about what’s wrong with Steemit and to tell them to stay away.
So what’s the solution?
The number one issue I see repeated over and over again is to do with communication. A lack of explanation as to why certain posts were flagged by @ned or @dantheman is very harmful forcommunity sentament. Just look at all the comments relating to Ned’s systematic flagging of the Daily payouts leaderboard posts by @masteryoda. Now, to Ned’s credit, he offered an explanation in the comments to one of @masteryoda’s posts, but the damage has already been done, many people who were upset may have missed this comment.
There are many other recent examples of this lack of communication in action; the push to remove posts of featured authors without a proper dialogue with the community, or taking sides in the recent Sock Puppetry debates. All these things are not necessarily negative in themselves, as there are often legitimate reasons for why the actions were taken. But the most harmful aspect of this is the lack of communication as to why they were done, and lack of dialogue with the community and listening to the views of other Steemians. What our community needs is to have a sense that our concerns are heard, and to have a channel to voice our questions to those heading up Steemit.
My proposal: Weekly Q and A with @ned or @dantheman
My idea is that each week I would collate questions from the Steemit community and have a few top questions that @ned or @dantheman would address. This weekly post would be an opportunity for @ned and @dantheman to dialogue with the community and address any concerns or issues that the community may have.
What are your thoughts on this? Do you have any other suggestions on how we could better retain our users?
Please let me know your thoughts and suggestions in the comments below.
Jimmy
Great analogy, if you don't keep the customer happy you won't have that person as a customer for very long! Basic business 101, but it's surprising how often the basics get overlooked.
For flagging, I would support making it a requirement to type in a reason when you flag (a little pop up box could ask "Are you sure? Please explain why you are flagging this post and press OK"). Then instead of flags being lumped in with the other votes as a minus sign, they could be listed separately and hovering over the flagging username should display that user's reason for flagging.
Collating questions for a regular community QA is a great idea. We do something similar at my office. There is a monthly "town hall" meeting where the company executives get together and give updates to all the lowly minions such as myself. They always reserve the last 15 minutes or so for questions. People can submit their questions ahead of time, by e-mail, and then they get collated anonymously and the executives pick a few to focus on. Some kind of similar Town Hall posts for Steemit would go a long way toward maintaining good feelings and positive energy between the community and the founders.
Thanks for your input and feedback @cryptomancer. I really like your flagging suggestion. Yes I agree, sometimes an explanation goes a long way. And what a great initiative by the executives in your company.
There's a fundamental difference between Steemit and other social media sites, and that is that in many ways the customers ARE the owners.
If you have Steem Power, it is very much like owning stock in a corporation. You have voting rights, you earn money on your shares like dividends, and if you have a lot of Steem Power, your influence is well known.
So I don't think we need to worry about attracting and retaining "average users." Not at this point. I think we need to focus more on attracting users who understand what it means to be a stakeholder and want to contribute to the long term success of Steemit, by building it to the point where it's attractive to the average user. That takes time and smart people.
So could it be that steemit are interested with investors not authors?
I think we need both. Just as when I was running our cafe, I couldn't just focus on regular customers and ignore infrequent visitors, in the same way I believe we need to try our best to build a positive community that attracts and retains all kinds of users to our platform, because negative word of mouth is extremely harmful.
And what majority of authors here might have that negative word of mouth because they lost in oblivion while watching other authors like a stars in the sky twinkling with rewards.
This proposal is the answer of your post. A very good retention plan for all steemit users;
https://steemit.com/steemit/@ellamaeamor/a-reward-system-proposal-that-will-make-everybody-stay-in-the-platform-and-will-invite-more-signups
Lower cost to retain an existing customer vs attracting new ones... such a great point made perfectly with your café experience comparison. I think better explanation and communication from the powers that be would be very helpful. It would be discouraging to have one of your posts flagged and not get any feedback as to why. But part of the retention issue at Steemit is also intent - many users don't come here with full intention or commitment to stay. They hear folks make money for posting. They throw a few posts out there to see how it goes for them. They get little action or money, and then they leave because their intention was only a curiousity.