As Campaign Ends, Was Calling Out "Dying Platforms" Good for Posterous?

"We knew we had to make some bold statements to break through the clutter but weren't intentionally trying to piss people off." Rephrased: we had to create a completely BS and offensive marketing message in the hope that people get offended and start talking about our import tools and this marketing campaign. We call it buzz marketing.

And yes, indeed, the short term bump has been "huge". As if they'd use any other word.

The real question long-term is how many people have they put off compared to the number of people they are going to gain. Personally I am never going to recommend Posterous to anyone from now on.

I thought Matt Mullenweg, WordPress founder, left a great comment on the "top 5 reasons to switch from WordPress post" at http://blog.posterous.com/top-5-reasons-to-switch-from-wordp... that clearly communicated his commitment to serving his customers.

   "Do you mean WordPress.org or WordPress.com in this post? The graphic 
    isn't entirely accurate for either, but would be best to specify. Also, 
    if you get a chance, WordPress usually has a capital P if you wouldn't 
    mind fixing that up.

   Also, do you guys still support posting to WP? I sent a few people your way  
   including Jason Calacanis before we had our own email feature, but I can't 
   find info about that on the site anymore.

Though I still use and enjoy Posterous (as well as at least two of the tools they criticized in this campaign), this entire campaign has bummed me out.

I generally am against defining yourself oppositionally, but concede it's probably hard to avoid when the other side is doing it, too. But the competitors weren't doing it.

Not only did the campaign not match the feel of the market (users were not being zero-sum about their publishing choices, competitors were talking more about their product and communities than competitors), it didn't match the feel of Posterous. Having read and listened and enjoyed what little I know about the founders, it didn't match my picture of their real vibe.

Most of all... probably everybody on this board agrees... feature lists are over as compelling marketing. What does the product help me do? User experience is what wins. (exhibit A, iphone... it redefined the entire feature phone market that came before)

And the funny thing is... Posterous's user experience is awesome. They didn't even have to go the feature route. It really is "dead simple" (their original catchphrase) to use. When they used that phrase (not that they invented it, but they use it really well), it stuck in my brain. I repeated it to others. Posterous totally had a marketing gimmick nailed and working: emphasize the experience and the easy angle.

All their feature comparison charts have felt totally disingenuous. For every X a competitor gets for something Posterous has, they usually have 4 things Posterous doesn't. I mean, making WP look like it less features than Posterous??! What an unnecessary risk of credibility.

Posterous people:

I LOVE your product. I use it alongside WP and Tumblr (Tumblr is social and has conversational hooks built in. I've never compared the two.).

Your campaign really bummed me out and disappointed me. I guess I just don't think it's the real you.

Your experience is awesome, and you keep adding new features. I have no concerns about your product, and will confidently recommend it. Just don't indulge the feature troll. We've come so far in an industry. Feature lists are for dying enterprise companies trying to make us feel better about software we hate using.

Go back to the OG Posterous flavor.

Your fan in Portland,

Andy

Pretty dirty if YC did indeed remove an article criticizing one of their start-ups. Maybe it was the right move short term, but that kind of crap does the site and YC long term harm. Can a moderator confirm or deny:

"The debate was heated even further when posts discussing the issue were deleted from the popular news discussion forum, Hacker News. Some accused moderators of the forum - part of Y Combinator, a startup incubator from which Posterous graduated - of intentionally removing the anti-Posterous discussions."

How ironic: just yesterday email was dying in tech media and today it seems that an email blogging company has taken on obsoleting web-based blog publishing :)

Seriously, nobody needs to die here: we're not at war! :)

When a competitor goes out of business or is acquired it's not uncommon to announce a "white knight" or "rescue program."

It's a little more unusual to claim that a number of larger competitors, several of whom appear to be growing more rapidly (at least in adding number of users if not %), are "dying platforms." Offering a migration to folks unhappy with a competitor and suggesting differentiating benefits that you offer no one can get unhappy with, it's called positioning.

Characterizing more than a dozen of your competitors as "dying" seems like it will leave a bitter lingering aftertaste in both competitors and their customers.

What's overlooked in Pearson's statement "We have nothing against our competitors - we're just playing to win," is that few markets are winner take all and competitors often have to cooperate to create a viable industry.

If they had tried to own their niche and enabled bloggers to migrate who wanted their feature set I think they would have gotten 90% of the benefits, maybe more since it's not credible that they are "better than everyone else" which is what their chart graphics purport, and not laid the groundwork for long term negative feeling if they had left out the buzz generating "dying platform" characterization.

This is a lazy, one-sided, and incomplete story. A good article would have gotten comment from ANY of the competitors, or at least noted they refused to comment.

I have learned that

* "legacy software" is anything not from Microsoft

* that salesmen will sit in a meeting with you and your PHB and say of the company that sold your iron "Are they still in business?"

* and in general that the two most powerful words any salesman knows are "Everyone is". That the rest of the sentences takes on steadily changing and commonly contradictory values (going to .NET/App Engine/Drupal) does not seem to diminish the effect.

So I may not believe the Posterous message but I wouldn't single them out for the delivery. After all, Nobody ever got fired for buying Posterous.

I don't get the whole kerfuffle - the people that are most likely to get pissed off over the "dying platform" verbiage are the exact opposite of the target demographic anyway. If you're happy with your blogging platform of choice, then you're probably not the type to switch away.

But if you have gripes, or have at least wondered if there's something easier than might keep the posts flowing, then posterous is for you. And they're showing they're dedicated to ease-of-use by rolling out 15 different importers.

<i>"We knew we had to make some bold statements to break through the clutter but weren't intentionally trying to piss people off."</i>

I wish they had the balls to say "Yes, we did want to call out the other platforms!" Basing your campaign on this saying and then seeing this quote makes me think they're going back on their words.

I could see another company call posterous a dying platform due to lack of revenue.

Judging by the "huge" (any numbers Posterous?) short term bump, the campaign is successful for its publicity and buzz. But I doubt it will result in long term sustainable draw for Posterous. As the article rightly pointed out, many are also pissed at how it was carried out. I suspect many of those who signed up during the campaign are not actual switchers, but bloggers who created a Posterous account just to test out the import tool. Switchers or non-users whatever, Posterous at least has the number to show to their investors.

I was of two minds about it. On one hand I thought it was rude. On the other hand, there's a saying that no publicity is bad publicity, even bad publicity. The only thing worse than having some people saying bad things about your business is if nobody anywhere is saying anything about your business.

That said, I like Posterous and want them to succeed.