I Signed up for Orkut and I Don’t Know What It Is
Yea, long title, bite me.
So I signed up for orkut today, without knowing what it was. You might say “What? I thought you were all web 2.0-savvy” and such, but the truth is, a lot of stuff flies by the radar. The web moves too fast for me to consume all of the new stuff on a daily basis and keep my job.
Anyway, I read a Google blog entry from several days ago where they mentioned orkut. I have a tendency to Cmd+Click every link in a blog entry, and orkut was no exception. But when I swapped over to the orkut tab, I wasn’t on a “Welcome to orkut! Please sign up!” page. I was taken directly to the “Complete your registration!” page.
It got me thinking. At first, I was like “Oh, this is a Google thing,” so there was acknowledgment of credibility (but not brand — interesting, yes?). The site had the audacity to start asking me questions like my date of birth, and this wasn’t like an acquaintance asking you such a question — it was more like a stranger asking the question. I’d never, ever met orkut before to my knowledge. Why would I tell it my date of birth?
Well, as it turns out, I did sign up. I didn’t know what the service was, or what it did, but it wasn’t asking me if I wanted to sign up. It was telling me to. It didn’t say “Would you please,” it said “Come on!” I was captivated.
I wonder if this more direct, no-BS method of getting people involved is over-the-top or not. I don’t think it was intentional, because orkut automatically detected my Google cookies and knew my name/email address already, but if I had been taken to a “Hi, stranger! Sign up for this thing, please?” page, I wouldn’t have signed up.
So, recap. The most immediate approach to getting someone to sign up: tell them to sign up, immediately. I didn’t even know what the service was until after I registered. Of course, this comes with one caveat: if people don’t recognize you, your brand, or your affiliate(s), they will be disoriented, confused, or suspicious, so be advised that this may be the reason your introduction is important. I guess the balance is to make a landing page that says “Hi, we do this. Sign up,” although that still requires a person to be interested in what the product or service does.
Interestingly, I find that I’m drawn to sign up for Google services or products that I probably will never use, simply because I want to see what they’ve done. I think this is very similar to what Apple has done (sans the sleek cool factor, unless, of course, you’re a geek such as myself) with their products. Apple’s iPad sold twice the units they anticipated. I’m not even sure that the iPad is such a great product (although, after having played with my boss’s iPad, I have gotta say, it’s pretty cool!!) compared to other products, but I think that Apple sold the iPad over the years by making so many people uncontrollably curious about what the next Apple product can do, or what can be done with it, as the case may be.