heisel.org

User registration - not the way?

Thursday | May 27, 2004 | 4:41 pm  

I had a chance to talk with my friend Adrian the other day while he was in Atlanta on a lay­over from a Poyn­ter conference.

We got to talk­ing about some­thing we mutu­ally detest… user registration.

User reg­is­tra­tion, I think, is merely a bad imple­men­ta­tion of a real busi­ness (and edi­to­r­ial) con­cern — that is, get­ting to know your audi­ence.

We should want to know more about our audi­ence — it allows us to pro­vide better con­tent and advertising.

Had our print breth­ern tried to gather more infor­ma­tion about their audi­ence, ear­lier in the game, then cir­cu­la­tion (and maybe the entire con­cept of a news­pa­per) wouldn’t be in the bad shape it is today.

Let’s recap: * Get­ting to know your audi­ence — good * User reg­is­tra­tion (in its cur­rent form) — bad

Over the next few entries, I’d like to tackle imag­in­ing an alter­na­tive to UR. To start, I’m going to list the information/goals that UR tries to serve, and we’ll tackle them individually.

I’d like this to be a com­mu­nity process, so feel free to add your ideas, sug­ges­tions, crit­i­cisms, via com­ments or trackbacks.

The cen­tral idea behind this system is that people are bad at pro­vid­ing data. It’s 3:04 p.m., do you know how truth­ful your UR data is?

I should clar­ify, people are noto­ri­ously bad at giving you data, for the sake of giving you data. And they’re really bad at giving you truth­ful data when what they get in return isn’t tied to the data they’re asked to pro­vide.

If I offer you a muffin for your zip­code, why should you give me, a total stranger, your real zip code.

Now, what if I’m offer­ing you a list of great bak­eries with spec­tac­u­lar muffins that are all near your house. In return, give me your zip code… get the idea?

Drumroll….

Here’s the list of prob­lems our “new UR” should try to solve:

• What con­tent does the user like to read?
• What adver­tis­ing or adver­tis­ers would the reader be inter­ested in?
• What kind of a reader are you (demo/psychographics).
• Where does the user live?
• Does the reader sub­scribe to the paper?

While I go and try to find the answers to some of these ques­tions, and maybe a muffin, feel free to write in with other things that we need to know about our users in order to be able to better serve them — then we’ll take stab at trying to find ways to gather them.

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