Communicating with users

[jonathan-s]

From what I've understood after watching a video on youtube with Chad, Gittip doesn't have access to the email of users at all. Not then and not now.

And the user count is still growing every week. Getting in touch with users will become more and more difficult for every week at least if you want to get in touch with them on a semi-manual basis.

When I look at my own behaviour I usually sign up to a service and if nothing happens I'll simply not use the service. I assume this is the same thing that happens with a majority of the users of gittip. There is no interaction, no information and perhaps they don't even know to whom they would like to give tips to. I certainly don't when I just look at some of the profiles. I have no connection to little connection to them.

Email is usually the best way of communicating with users in one way or the other, so how do we get it?

First off, it seems it would be really easy to just turn on that feature for users signing in with github, right? I looked at the Twitter oAuth and apparently it doesn't support getting the users email address. So when a user signs in with twitter they would get to a page where they need to fill in their email to complete the signup process. Bitbucket doesn't seem to support it either.

Reaching out
One idea for the users that signed up with twitter would be to actually reach out to them through twitter and ask them to fill in an email address to make it easier to communicate with them.

When you've decided on a call to action you could start writing variations of that message and then let a program cycle through the variations while mentioning said users. Say that you reach out to a hundred users a day that way. That way it shouldn't trigger a twitter spam alert while still being quite automated.

[chadwhitacre]

Thanks for jumping in, @jonathan-s! You're basically right. We need to start collecting email addresses and communicate with users better. #89 is where we're tracking email address collection. #646 is where we've been talking about a Twitter bot. I've added +1s for you to those tickets.

We're in a period of infrastructure development right now. Once we emerge from our shell again in a few months and are collecting email addresses, let's reticket specific kinds of emails to send.

[troy]

Step 1 of this is to add something to the signup/setup flow, so users explicitly opt in.

Regarding:

When you've decided on a call to action you could start writing variations of that message and then let a program cycle through the variations while mentioning said users. Say that you reach out to a hundred users a day that way. That way it shouldn't trigger a twitter spam alert while still being quite automated.

Please don't do this. It's an efficient way to destroy the reputation which Gittip has built.

[jonathan-s]

Perhaps you're right @troy, another way could of course be to tip these users and making them more active that way. And then mentioning them as explained in #646

[troy]

To @jonathan-s's point, I'd go further: make it easy for me to have a reason to use the service (rather than leaving it to me to seek out projects to tip). Solve that problem, ideally as a natural part of becoming a new user -- something I want to do.

Once the underlying problem is solved, revisit whether or how to communicate that the service is now way easier to get started with. Don't settle for a workaround.

[chadwhitacre]

@troy I've added a +1 for you to #536, "Show me my friends who have Gittip accounts."