What Problem Does It Solve?: Convincing Grandma She Needs a Feedreader

Much has been made of the early adopters vs. middle America argument when it comes to much of Web 2.0 technology. And while everyone likes the "cool factor" of being part of the first tribe to have adopted a product or app, we all know that reality dictates more widespread adoption for a company to succeed.

There are some companies who have already managed to gain more widespread adoption. LinkedIn is one of them, and I know that because even my dad has an account and regularly updates his contacts and information. But LinkedIn has managed to do this by maintaining a more professional image and marketing the site as a conduit for business networking. It's much easier to convince people to adopt a social network that could help them in their careers than it is to explain why anyone would need to be SuperPoked or be attacked by zombies.

Likewise, I've seen a huge uptake in my family's use of Geni. Genealogy and family history is a booming business, and by making it dead-simple to get started, they've managed to lure in even my mother, who does a lot less online than my father does. And with Geni's announcement this week that they have finally enabled GEDCOM importing, I'm sure even more of the older generations in my family will join in once they know that they can upload the information they've had stored on their floppy disks for their 386s and have some of the younger generation get involved as well.

Aside from being social networks at their core, LinkedIn and Geni don't seem to have a great deal in common. LinkedIn focuses on business knowledge, while Geni focuses on family. But what they have managed to do (and where other social networks are failing) is to pare down the concept of social networking to solving a basic problem. For LinkedIn, that problem is how to manage a business network across the globe, and for Geni, it's how to manage a family's history across the globe. By enabling only the features necessary to solve those problems (asking questions, posting jobs for Linked In and tracking genealogy, remembering important dates, and sending greetings to family members), these two social networks are luring in even the most technophobic users.

The real question that other companies should be asking themselves is how to be more like these two companies, and ones like them. If an application or product isn't solving a problem that the everyday person has, you aren't going to see them adopting it. RSS and Atom feeds mean nothing to my mother, even though she knows I have a blog (a concept she can't quite bring herself to care about either). Trying to get her to use a feed reader so that she could read anything I've written is never going to motivate her to try any type of feed manager. But when I tell her that one of my feeds is the weekly Target ad, and that I get the sale items right on my laptop when I roll out of bed in the morning instead of having to wait for the paper and shuffle through it, her ears start to perk up.

The first thing that any company should figure out is what problem their product can solve for Joe and Jane Average. The product should appeal to the tech elite who will hopefully be the Patients Zero in your viral adoption campaign, but if my mom can't sit down and figure out how it would make her life easier or more interesting in less than five or ten minutes? You may not stick around longer than it takes for the early adopters to move on to the next shiny thing.