avatarLouis Petrik

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SOCIAL MEDIA / MARKETING

How Walmart Failed Badly Copying a Famous Social Media Site

Don’t make the user feel like a product

Photo by Daria Rem from Pexels

In the early 2000s, the Internet made its way into society. The rise of social media became apparent.

Even before the Facebook hype, there was MySpace, which became a digital meeting place. Slowly the Internet had huge potential, and the big companies wanted to jump on board. Not without reason did the dot-com bubble form.

Walmart tried it, too.

In 2006, they launched their own social network called The Hub. Like MySpace, users could upload content and build their own presence on the Internet¹.

The site was a huge failure. After just 10 weeks, The Hub was shut down¹.

Here’s why the MySpace clone was such a bad idea.

Source: Pinterest

They underestimated the network effect.

The platform was far too monetized to be “cool” from the start.

Waiting to make money with the platform is a pattern that can be seen on all major platforms — whether Facebook, WhatsApp, or Instagram. On all of them, the strategy has been to build a user base first. There was still no advertising on WhatsApp, on Instagram, and Facebook; it took a while.

Thanks to the lack of monetization, there was no contra-side for the first users and interested parties. No one likes to see advertising, and in excess, it can scare people away.

Once there are enough users on the platform, it comes into play — the reason we all have WhatsApp installed because everyone else has it. This is called the network effect.

What’s the point of having a social network if there aren’t other people there?

With Walmart’s The Hub, it was immediately obvious that it was about making money. Conversion from visitors to users was too poor to build a real user base.

Nobody wants to feel like a product.

Time and again, there are successful cases of guerrilla marketing. Companies manage to establish something big through the back door.

Walmart didn’t even try.

Would you use a social network that came from a company like Walmart? You wouldn’t associate the giant retailer with launching a platform like Facebook or MySpace — and that’s probably what made most people skeptical. What reason would Walmart have to create such a thing?

Only one comes to mind: marketing.

Walmart didn’t even try to hide the fact that the MySpace clone came from them. It was a Walmart project, and everyone knew it. That was a huge mistake because people are not stupid.

No one wants to be a user of a platform centered around monetization — in The Hub’s case, that was obvious.

Walmart already failed with the pre-history of the platform.

Simply said, there wasn’t one, but people love the stories of nerdy Harvard students who single-handedly build a platform — that’s how Facebook was born. Anyone who was part of Facebook was a part of a digital revolution.

A revolution that ensured that people from all over the world could connect. Old friends and schoolmates could reconnect.

Everyone could express themselves and communicate without having to leave the house. That was the feeling behind Facebook — not a super-rich corporation that launched a loveless MySpace clone as a marketing ploy.

A missing game changer.

We don’t download a new app out of boredom.

We don’t try out a new social network without an incentive. There has to be an incentive through a real change.

If you think about it spontaneously, it’s not so easy to find innovation in popular platforms.

What could Instagram do that Facebook couldn’t when it was gaining popularity? That’s a tough question because Instagram didn’t really offer anything new at first.

On the contrary — you could do much more with Facebook than with Instagram.

That’s what’s so special about social media innovation — it’s usually not new features. What brings people to the platforms is their demand for the platform.

Users have a purpose, and the extent to which the platform's spirit matches their own is critical.

Facebook was ruined by what you might think was an advantage. There was too much complexity. There are now too many options, no clear guideline on how to use them. That’s exactly what the company is trying to slow down on Instagram now.

You can see how crucial the user’s attitude towards the platform itself is in the example of VSCO. It’s an app where you can essentially only upload photos — no Stories, no tags, no comments, no likes.

You might think it’s a boring, bad idea — but the platform is now widespread, especially among young people.

It’s the lack of other features that make the platform feel alive — users feel unobserved because there are no comments. Their goal is to express themselves — uncompromisingly — VSCO provides the ideal environment for that.

The feeling VSCO gives its users is innovation.

So whether there are brand new, unique features are relatively irrelevant — getting it right is what counts. Walmart’s TheHub was like a MySpace clone. Nothing less, nothing more — users weren’t offered anything really new and no new user experience.

The site is about what you’d expect… a sort of lame knock off of youtube and myspace. A Disney version of what makes the web exciting to a lot of people.

- Seth Godin

Sources

[1]: https://www.forbes.com/2006/10/02/myspace-walmart-youtube-tech-media-cx_rr_1003walmart.html?sh=34b5e1d6e364

Marketing
Social Media
Branding
Walmart
Digital Marketing
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