Kitely Mentors Group Meeting, 24 April 2013: summary

[Bladyblue Bommerang]

I told you that designing such a landing page would require us to delay the marketplace which is something which many people are waiting for and for which we were already behind schedule.

One has nothing to do with the other. Just hire an outside web designer to design it offline and then load it up.

I told you that our conversion rates from the homepage are also very high (which they are) and that we are therefore not eager to replace the homepage itself unless we have something we are sure is better.

Even a journalist pointed out what was wrong with the Kitely website - and you just refuse to acknowledge that or me at all. It's very frustrating to keep telling someone something they won't act on because it is not anything that effects them.

We have limited development resources and can't do everything at once, that's why we try to crowdsource things to you, our users. I therefore told you that if you want you can create such a landing page yourself and that if it's good enough we'll use it. You didn't come up with something we could use (see below) and we started discussing this issue in the last Kitely Mentors Group meeting and are continuing to do so now in this thread.

And then you say we cannot have a banner ad campaign until something you decide is useable is created. I am sure you see how the bureaucracy of the situation makes it impossible to get anything in regards of a marketing program completed.

You have your priorities but other Kitely users have theirs,

I am a Kitely user. And I worked to include my priorities into Kitely Management's priorities. I think you feel that the marketplace is a priority to the entire user-base - it is not. And there is no reason that parallel projects cannot take place at the same time. But you only want to support anything that supports the marketplace BEFORE you support the banner ad, website and community issues. I see no reason to put everything else off in that manner.

I have personally spent a lot of my time working with you on things that were important to you at the expense of working on things that are important for other people (all of them being important to our success).

Well actually, all you needed to do was rez the 4-sim megaregion and give us access to it. The rest we did on our own.

It's not that we don't want people to be able to create a community in Kitely. Quite the opposite actually, as people who've attended the weekly Kitely Mentors Group meetings over the last year can attest. We do however have to prioritize what we focus on at any given point in time.

No you do not. If you do not micro-manage - the community can develop community programs for Kitely easily.

We can't make everything important to our success a priority, working on one thing delays another. We have to balance multiple people's needs and focus on what we believe will have the most impact first. Obviously that is not optimal but it is what we'll have to contend with until we have more resources.

This just isn't true. Teams can work together to move initiatives forward and report back to the main group to reach conclusions. That is how large, multi-goaled projects come together and meet the same deadline.

I haven't been giving you busy work, I've been working with you on things that you said you'll organize. In fact, just last week I spent many hours with you discussing a greeter program.

It was the same disagreement we had two months ago when I spoke of a volunteer incentive program. This time you just gave up and let me move forward as planned. Now Dennis is completing the Greeter HUD and the Vendor needed to put the plan in action. I wish you would have agreed to this two months ago.

You worked very hard to organize the building of the Kitely Plaza and deserve a lot of credit for. However, you seem to be ignoring the amount of time I've put into the Plaza as well.

As I stated, all you needed to do was rez the islands and make the group. I was there day and night with the builders. You really did not have to spend any length of time there at all. The builders are experienced professionals. It really wasn't possible that they would mess up.

It's true we didn't stop everything else we are doing to address the unresolved issues that you wished us to work on. This isn't because we don't think the issues you've raised are not important, it is because there are many other things which we think are also urgent for us to work on. Focusing on things that can increase the amount of money we make can help us have more resources to quickly address other issues.

Again, that is not true. The resources needed to do the things I wanted were already in place - you just would not agree to the terms of the incentive program, you did not re-visit the start page design after you turned it down in March and you said no to my banner ad slogan.

This isn't putting our interests above those of our customer's, it's in everyone of our customer's interest that we have more resources to use to make Kitely better.

Your increased income is not going to do anything for community initiative development at all. Community development is just hard face-to-face work by a strong volunteer team. Volunteerism has nothing to do with financial gain.

The mockup you sent me for the homepage redesign was (A) too crowded and presented too many payment options at once therefore increasing confusion (what we have now is already confusing due to the amount of options it presents), (B) would have required using very small fonts for it all to be displayed as you laid it out

The lay-out could have been adjusted and discussed further. Dismissing it completely just stops progress.

was focused on one selling point, the ability to get 20 regions for $35/month (as you can see from this thread, this isn't the ideal pitch for everyone).

The adverting does not have to be "the ideal pitch for everyone". That is not possible. It has to attract people looking to work on large projects. I am the only one that made an effort to get an advertising campaign going for Kitely. I have no idea why I am vetoed and it has turned into a random discussion with no solid start date of the marketing campaign.

All I encounter are pages full of reasons why things cannot happen. It is very frustrating. All you wanted was the mall. And now that you have that in your name - nothing I had said was apart of the mall project matters at all.

[Dot Macchi]

Could I suggest perhaps splitting out this discussion into a separate thread, so that the banner ad discussion does not swamped?

[Bladyblue Bommerang]

The banner ad discussion should be done and the advertising campaign in place. I developed 3 banner ads so far:







There are no other banner ads to look at. I will happily pay the $35 USD to run the ad if money is an issue. Once the marketplace Dashboard goes live, the focus on advertising will need to shift to that. So we only have a few weeks to get an ad campaign going that will appeal to people looking for inexpensive virtual land.

We delivered on 60 mall spots that will enhance the marketplace initiative by the original date we said we would. I think that earns the community initiative some consideration.

[Ilan Tochner]

Blady,

I have spent hours on end talking with you about issues, during my nights, weekends, and family time. I did that just last week when we discussed the greeter program. This was after the plaza was already done. A Plaza which you initiated and we spent resources provisioning. It is a world that is always active, and which required us to develop automated services to ensure it will stay that way, to track its usage, to direct people to it when they create a new account, etc. Things that are not required for worlds that are started on demand. You have no idea what we do behind the scenes to make sure things will work as expected, you only see the end result and assume that because it looks trivial that it is simple to make trivial.

When I say "we need to prioritize" I mean Oren and myself, not the people who volunteer. We welcome people taking personal and/or group initiatives to help promote Kitely to other people. In most cases, we don't need to be involved and only need to assist if we're requested to do so. However, the Kitely Plaza is not just one of more than 3000 worlds on Kitely or some community initiative we can just sit back and let other people run. It is the gateway to our service, if we send people there it will affect our conversion rate - which is currently high. Expecting that we have no active say in what happens in a major part of our service that can drastically change our bottom line (for better or for worse) is a very unrealistic expectation. Once we committed to having an official greeting world I was forced to be involved to make sure that it is developed to something that addresses the needs of all our users, not just reflects your vision or the desires and creative abilities of the volunteers who build it.

Even outsourcing things requires time on my part to make sure that what is developed meets our requirements and then Oren's time to integrate it with our system. I'm currently spending that time with the people in this thread who are trying to help us achieve the goal you want us to achieve. I suggest you focus on what needs to be done now and not on what you think we should have done differently in the past.

With all the respect I have for Maria, she doesn't know our site's conversion rates. She talked in generalities, some of which make a lot of sense but can't be taken as absolute truth without doing A/B testing to see how they affect our conversion rates. Doing that takes time, we won't just roll out changes to our homepage without testing them. Ad landing pages, on the other hand, can be tested much more easily and replaced without effecting our existing conversion funnel.

I didn't say you couldn't have a banner ad campaign, I said we won't allocate resources to something which we don't believe is good enough. It doesn't stop you from doing so if you want (not that I expect you to, just saying that the way you present it isn't accurate).

We work on MANY things at the same time, but our time is limited. We can't finish everything all at once. The minutes I spend writing you this response are minutes I don't do something else, such as working on the ad campaign that you are angry that we haven't finished designing yet.

[Bladyblue Bommerang]

This is a little wordy, but it is subject of the ad that needs to go out at this time.

[Ilan Tochner]

Blady, I saw your last 2 posts after I already replied.

The ads need to have specific dimensions in order for them to be usable on SLuniverse:

Top Banner- 728x90 pixels
Square Banner - 200x200 pixels
Side Banner - 160x600 pixels

The ads you posted here are not in the correct aspect ratios.

[Bladyblue Bommerang]

I already said that Cristiano (owner of SLU) happily fixed the dimensions of the ads I ran on his site.

[Ilan Tochner]

Blady,

The top banner you have now is 640 × 139 it needs to be 728 x 90 for SLU, which means that your current layout just won't work without creating very deformed images. It also makes the text much smaller which, as it is, needs to compete for people's attention on a site where they would rather not see any ads at all (most people filter out ads either mentally or using ad blockers). An ad needs to really catch the viewer's attention for it to get clickthroughs. Tiny text and tiny images won't do that. That's part of the challenge we're trying to overcome. Getting a selling point across with very little text so the text that we do have will be prominent on the page the ad is displayed on.

[Dot Macchi]

Blady, sorry, but your ad design is not very good.

A boring photo.
Too many words.
An ugly mix of typesizes.
Poor line and letter spacing making the text difficult to read and take in.

And it's only what YOU think the message should be.

The fact that you need others to do a simple thing like put an advert into the correct format suggests that you do not have the skillset needed here. A true professional would recognise their limitations and properly work with others.

[Bladyblue Bommerang]

I have spent hours on end talking with you about issues, during my nights, weekends, and family time I did that just last week when we discussed the greeter program. This was after the plaza was already done. .

that is because it took me weeks of begging you to get a volunteer incentive program in place so the Greeter program could move forward.

Kitely Plaza is not just one of more than 3000 worlds on Kitely or some community initiative we can just sit back and let other people run.

But that is just what you agreed to two days ago. A community team that oversees the social structure of Kitely Plaza. We will approve all events using the runways, galleries and venues. We will plan festivals n Kitely Plaza and get the event information out to social media. We will greet new residents and conduct classes.

It is the gateway to our service, if we send people there it will effect our conversion rate - which is currently high.

You have been sending people there since it was built with no issue. If you do not have a community group to oversee the Plaza it will quickly turn into a ghetto of spammers and troublemakers.

Expecting that we have no active say in what happens in a major part of our service that can drastically change our bottom line (for better or for worse) is a very unrealistic expectation.

Having a say and stopping community development are two different things.

Once we committed to having an official greeting world I was forced to be involved to make sure that it is developed to something that addresses the needs of all our users, not just reflects your vision or the desires and creative abilities of the volunteers who build it.

Ilan there was nothing you added to the plaza development that changed the original plan I laid out. The volunteers stayed on track and created what we agreed to create. I would not have initiated such a large-scale project if I had no ability to see it through.

Even outsourcing things requires time on my part to make sure that what is developed meets our requirements and then Oren's time to integrate with our system. I'm currently spending that time with the people in this thread who are trying to help us achieve the goal you want us to achieve.

I did not give my opinion in the texture for the transfer station because I am not a texture artist - and I do not have any professional knowledge of texturing.

I suggest you focus on what needs to be done now and not on what you think we should have done differently in the past.

The way things got to this point is important. Because we are going to need to continue to move forward. This procedure should not be so convoluted and self-destructive.

With all the respect I have for Maria, she doesn't know our site's conversion rates. She talked in generalities, some of which make a lot of sense but can't be taken as absolute truth without doing A/B testing to see how they affect our conversion rates. Doing that takes time, we won't just roll out changes to our homepage without testing them. Ad landing pages, on the other hand, can be tested much more easily and replaced without effecting our existing conversion funnel.

I just quoted someone who said yesterday that they signed-up in 2012 and still cannot make out the plan information - therefore they have not been back. I have sent you quotes from other potential Kitely residents that said the same thing. But you still deny it is happening on a large scale and you will not make our lives easier by making the website make sense.

I didn't say you couldn't have a banner ad campaign, I said we won't allocate resources to something which we don't believe is good enough. It doesn't stop you from doing so if you want (not that I expect you to, just saying that the way you present it isn't accurate).

How is it any better by randomly asking people who have never run a banner ad campaign before? Accordingly, it is only 'better' when you hear a slogan that you personally like. The banner ad campaign I initiated focused on people looking to create large projects. There is nothing wrong with advertising to that audience.

We work on MANY things at the same time, but our time is limited. We can't finish everything all at once. The minutes I spend writing you this response are minutes I don't do something else, such as working on the ad campaign that you are angry that we haven't finished designing yet.

The ad campaign was finished being designed in March. This chit-chat going on here, (with no banners but the ones I developed being looked at) I have no idea what it is.