Please don’t do this
Sometimes I see something that makes me cringe as a PR person. This is one of those times.
A new service just getting into Beta called put.io, which is a cloud-based storage service that allows you to stream your media, has this as a splash page if you try to sign up for its closed beta. In an attempt to be Web-developer cute, it took this tone in its image: “Dear friend. You are using Internet Explorer. Please don’t do that.”
You see, this is a great way to alienate an audience. A potentially paying, engaged, promotional audience. In this case it is also alienates more than 63 percent of Internet users, myself included when I’m at work.
What may be cute in Silicon Valley is not cute in corporate America or in most households that are connected to the Internet. My initial reaction was surprise.I was surprised that somebody allowed that to go public. I was surprised that somebody didn’t do the market research. I was surprised somebody was not thinking about a business model.
Please do this
I am an admitted Mac user at home. I run Firefox and at times Safari. But at work, I am on my PC. Running Internet Explorer. Like 63.27 percent of the country.
The lesson to this is to make sure the message you are curating is one that supports your core business model. Having a corporate personality is an essential part of today’s digital media landscape. But don’t do it at the expense of potential revenue.
I know that Internet Explorer has compatibility issues with some technologies and it does not have the robust external developer ecosystem that Firefox and Chrome enjoy. But insulting the user for the choice in technology they’ve made seems asinine.
This is an instance where a solid PR counsel would have raised this issue and helped this young company along its path to success. By offering guidance around messaging, market perception and helping to craft the language used, PR could have helped this company have at least one more customer.
UPDATE: It was just pointed out to me that the percentage of people who would be looking to try this app that run IE might be quite low. Maybe this is a case of “Know your audience” and I’m just being overly sensitive.
What do you think about this messaging and tactic?
From a developer’s perspective, supporting Internet Explorer is one of the most challenging aspects of web development. You can spend 3 days building something that works on all major browsers /except/ IE, and spend another 2 days trying to hack in support for it. And that’s just basic rendering and doesn’t include advanced functionality that simply isn’t possible on some versions of IE.
IE truly is a nightmare to support.
That said, even though I understand their pain, it certainly wouldn’t hurt to be a little less cheeky in their message.
As a pseudo-geek, I fully understand some of the challenges of non-standards-based Web development. When there’s no rules to play by, we make up our own.
And there’s no winners in that game.
My huge issue was with the way they positioned it. As an average consumer, all I know is what I know. To have a company essentially insult me based on my available technology seems ill conceived. My point from a PR perspective is that there’s a better way to do it. One that doesn’t alienate the majority of Web users.
Although I agree that this icon is a little much, I worked for a company not too long ago where we advocated our clients download something other than IE because the developers had a hard time working around the security settings. In the five years I worked there, we only managed to alienate a few people — many users couldn’t believe they had other browser options.