Love Your User #1: Keep Friction Low

I twittered on this earlier today, and thought it good enough for a blog post to share with the rest of you.

I saw a cool campaign for some pretty valuable B2B information - sounds snore-o-riffic, but it was some pretty cool stuff for business nerds.

However, when I got the link from a friend, I got a note that “the form was too long and they want too much information, but it sounds interesting.”  Well, I went over there - and lo and behold, 20 fields of information that they need.  Obviously, they are qualifying people for follow-up; however, don’t you just basically need a name, an email and (maybe) a phone number?  After all, there is nothing stopping someone from entering 20 fake fields of information instead of just say 4 or 5.  The term in the industry is to aim to have “low friction.”

The lead-generation CRM nerds might dislike me for this - but we’ve seen consistently that more fields = less participation = less reach.

One of the reasons I like to “put things out there” and make sure podcasts are in big directories like iTunes and the blog that’s attached to the podcast is in Technorati and other high-profile places is that you want content to be sharable for this whole “viral” thing to work.  Yes, metrics suffers a little, I know - but the goal is to sell stuff, or influence minds, isn’t it?