User Engagement — A Billion Dollar Problem
The business world has been buzzing over Twitter’s plunging stock price.
Twitter seems to have solved their past monetization issue and their revenue is growing each quarter — even above expectations, yet their stock is on a steep decline.
Why?
User Engagement.
Their CFO has said that “meaningful user growth may not come for a considerable time”.
Why does this matter to us? I’ll set aside my personal desire for twitter to exist and think about how the user engagement issue can impact other companies that either develop or implement software.
Sure, you’ve found a way to monetize your software, but is anyone really using it?
Almost weekly, I talk to clients who have spent anywhere from hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars on software that no one uses. Last week, I met with someone who had invested over a million dollars on a software product that only 10 users were actively using.
My company, Rittman Mead, works in the data and analytics space primarily with OBIEE (Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition). We’re putting together a User Engagement service that helps you monitor your DAU (Daily Active Users), MAU (Monthly Active Users), delivers dashboards to monitor queries and positive user engagement and engages users via email to spur software use.
You can’t control what you can’t measure and once you have the statistics, you can start planning change.
If you’re part of an OBIEE shop, let me know if you’d like to see this report on your users.
If you’re not, there’s still reasons to think about this issue! What are you doing to increase user engagement with your software or software you work with?
If users aren’t actually using the tools, you’re headed down a slippery slope!
