2) Social hoooks - Your product/service must be social. It must encourage your users to invite others to try it out. Hooks into Facebook and Twitter are obvious

2) Social hoooks - Your product/service must be social. It must encourage your users to invite others to try it out. Hooks into Facebook and Twitter are obvious. Email invites are another obvious feature. The product should allow people to express themselves in it. Profiles, personalization, etc will allow the users to feel ownership of the product and tell others about it. Foursquare's adoption of a game dynamic when it launched is a particularly clever implementation of a social hook. Games are the most social of all things on the web. Ugh. Maybe it's just me, but I can't stand this. Whatever happened to just being useful? If I like your product, I'm fully capable of sharing it myself. You see so many pages now that look like they were designed to maximize the possibility that you will accidentally like them on facebook. There's nothing wrong with a "share this post/page/app/etc" panel but, unless your core functionality is based on social interactions, please keep it reasonable. Also, not everything needs to be customizable. I don't know who all these people are that supposedly love making accounts and filling out profiles for every little thing they want to try on the internet - I think it's a huge pain. When I studied UX it was pretty well agreed upon that you shouldn't force people to create an account until it was absolutely necessary, not the other way around. Jeez, I'm way too young to be having these get off my lawn moments. edit: I also have a problem with his opening sentiments, but it's more of a semantic issue. I believe that marketing is what you do when your product or service sucks or when you make so much profit on every marginal customer that it would be crazy to not spend a bit of that profit acquiring more of them (coke, zynga, bud, viagra). It's views like this that make people sneer when I say I'm doing marketing. So, thanks. I believe marketing is how you capitalize on the thoughts and feelings of your audience. This is why you should take support very seriously - people spend sick money trying to find out what your customers (current and potential) are thinking - when they offer it to you for free, that's the biggest marketing opportunity you're likely to get, so treat it as such.