Business Insight Zone

Let’s start with the moral of the story: If you want someone to take a particular action, remove friction everywhere along the way.

It applies to sales cycles. It applies to getting someone to go on a date with you. It applies all over the place. But in this particular case, the idea came to me because of an exchange I had this week on Twitter. (Don’t worry, you’ll get the point even if you’ve never used Twitter.)

Context: If you write something useful on Twitter, you might see it “re-tweeted.” That’s when I read your tweet and then send a copy of it along to my followers, with due credit to you. (This is easier than it sounds — it’s one click of a button using tools like TweetDeck or Seesmic.)

The other day I passed along a basic piece of advice: if you want people to re-tweet something you write, keep in short in the first place, because whatever you say will now be prefaced by “RT @YourNameHere,” and you only had 140 characters to work with in the first place.

One Twitter correspondent pointed out that there are tools that will shorten tweets for you automatically. These mk yr tweets luk like lyrix 2 a Prince song. Personally, I’m enough of a wordsmith (read: writing snob) that I don’t like to write or read messages is l33t-speak, but the underlying lesson about friction goes way beyond my grammatical elitism.

Here’s the exchange I had with my Twitter interlocutor:

Me: Sure, somebody *could* abbreviate to [re-tweet] (automatically or manually) — but why make it hard for them?

Her: That’s hard?

Me: No, it’s not hard, but *any* friction in [the] process makes it less likely you’ll be retweeted.

How do I know this? Because I’ve bailed out on re-tweeting something interesting if it looked like it would take more than a few seconds.

Let’s review that for a second. I’m a pretty fast typist, I’ve sent more than 20,000 tweets over the past couple of years, and I have access to all the technology I need to make sending tweets really easy. Oh, and I’ve been a professional writer for many years. And yet I still bail out when something I thought would be really easy turns out to be less-than-really-easy, even when it would take, what?, 30 seconds of work.

Again, the lesson: remove friction.

Somewhere or other — sorry that I couldn’t find the reference — Paul Graham has written about his early days of building his Web startup Viaweb. There was a setup process for new users. Too many of them were bailing out. From looking at the stream of clicks users were making, page by page, Graham figured out exactly where they were bailing out most, and he had a good guess as to why. He simplified that page, made the navigation clearer, and even inserted a message that told them they only had a couple of steps to go in the process. The abandonment rate plummeted.

It’s a simple concept. People are busy. They don’t know what they want, and they believe they don’t have time to figure it out, especially if the figuring looks remotely like it will be laborious.

So remove the labor. Loosen the brakes. Eliminate friction.

What’s your best example of business friction?

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Image source: Richard Masoner. Used under a CC-Share Alike license.

Category: Marketing & Sales,Social media,The business brain