Overview
The overall goal of the LittleShoot MIT Innovation Lab User Development/Marketing Plan group should be to come up with the most effective strategies for LittleShoot to maintain a strong brand relationship with its users with the overall goal of growing the user base. We would like the group to come up with recommended approaches both for the LittleShoot 1.0 release and more general strategies moving forward.
We would like your approach to be as open ended and creative as possible with a focus on developing the most powerful techniques to make LittleShoot ultimately succeed. It's perfectly fine for the group's ideas to require technical changes or additions to LittleShoot. An API allowing external sites and developers to integrate LittleShoot would be an excellent example. It's not currently on the road map for 1.0, but it certainly could become a "must have" to particular strategic approaches the group may recommend.
We would also like to take advantage of the group's expertise in this area as much as possible. The LittleShoot approach has been very "bare bones" up until now - we haven't even issued any press releases and have relied almost entirely upon personal connections with bloggers and journalists and e-mails to our mailing list. While those have proved quite effective, we clearly could do much more even with basic marketing approaches.
Potential Strategies
Some of the most effective strategies may come from viral elements we're adding to LittleShoot 1.0 as we speak, such as the sharing of LittleShoot links on social networks - especially Facebook and Twitter. The nice thing about that strategy is that it's inherently word of mouth and takes advantage of users' existing behavior of downloading and publishing content using LittleShoot. The more we can tap into users' existing behavior to help market LittleShoot to more users, the better. It's also quite easy to envision certain links quickly becoming popular and getting forwarded many times over. Each person who wants to use those links needs to install LittleShoot, a significant hurdle but also a major driver of installs when users do decide to go through the install process.
It's possible the groups strategies may be more clearly thought-out approaches in this area.
Changes to the web site are also fair game. The SEO is horrible on LittleShoot's page as it stands, and that's something we know we have to take care of. We have already received a great deal of feedback in this area, but any specifics the groups may have are certainly welcome.
Deliverables
I think it makes sense for the group to produce a simple midterm progress report sometime in the first 2 weeks of November before a final presentation at the end of the semester. The group can determine the form it takes, but the initial progress report should be roughly equivalent to 3-5 written pages, and the final report should be equivalent to 10-15 written pages. The group can also determine the exact dates these will be due to accommodate everyone's busy schedules as much as possible.