One of the things that’s fascinating about the web is the way that users adopt and own brands, and the ways in which that fervent passion colours their usage of a product.

Usually, it’s great when people are passionate, loyal users of a web service. You can count on them to visit, provide feedback, and keep the faith when you go through hard times and change things - they’ve got a lot of forgiveness for your brand and service. New and casual users are trickier - they demand more in the way of stability and performance, weirdly (you’d expect it would be the loyal users, though, wouldn’t you?) and you have to work harder to earn and keep their trust.

But there comes a point at which loyal, passionate users become rabid über fans, and the idea of changing anything is anathema to them.

These are often your harshest critics when things go wrong, or change, because they love you so much. These are the people who complain loudly and vociferously when you redesign (”This design makes me want to poke my eyes out with a stick! Change it back!”), or introduce new features (”We don’t need this! Make it go away!”) or shuggle things around a bit (”Where is X? Bring it back IMMEDIATELY! Oh, it’s over there? I LIKED IT BETTER WHERE IT WAS, DAMMIT!”).

Think of it like Kathy Bates’ character in Misery - she loved the author so much, she couldn’t bear to see him try out a different kind of story. And we all know what happened, there.

Basically, your most passionate users are hardest to please. They identify so closely with your product or service that any change feels invasive, hyper-personal, intrusive. You’re not changing your product - you’re changing something they love to the point of wanting to preserve it as-is. You’re changing their product.

You may think that you own your brand, but actually, they do.

In this rather crude graph I just drew on the back of an envelope, you can see that the permission to change things follows a bell curve.

But there is another way. Play.

Playing can mean public, acknowledged experimentation - but it must be communicated as experimentation, because otherwise it seems like change without consultation.

Play can also mean the insertion of easter eggs and special features - things which reward the deepest and most fanatical of users for their curiosity. But these special nuggets of tasty playfulness can’t be a substitution for real features - in fact, they shouldn’t be features at all, because a person shouldn’t be punished, functionality-wise, for not finding the secret way to do something. Instead, easter eggs in apps should be adornments, enhancements and hidden stuff. A good example of this was on Flickr, last December, when the cheeky scamps added a little easter Christmas egg which meant that photos could be auto-adorned with santa outsifts by adding a note saying “ho ho ho beard” or “ho ho ho hat”.

Play can also be, rarest of all, doing things out of the ordinary, but in line with the brand personality and in such a way that if feels completely natural and unobtrusive.

Brands which have the permission of their users to play are a rare thing. One way around this is to make the playfulness optional.

Last week in a pub with a bunch of geeks, I was telling Cal that I’d done a workshop last year with a major UK charity in which people kept referring to how much they loved “Flick-R” - they pronounced this as two words: Flick and Arr. I tried in a subtle way to normalise it, saying “yes, FLICKRRR is great”, but they kept reverting to their preferred way of saying it.

Eventually, I enquired why they pronounced it like that. They said they assumed it was two words because the R was in a different colour. Flick. R. I mentioned to Cal that perhaps this showed Flickr’s piratical roots, and he smiled enigmatically.

Which is why I was amused this morning to see that Flickr had gone all high seas and dubloons - or at least, had offered users the option of doing so (and thereby drew attention to the power of their language engine, to boot) - in honour of International Talk Like a Pirate Day.

Flickr is pretty unique in having this permission to play with its service - the brand personality is already lighthearted, and this seems entirely the kind of thing which fits with the people who work there. And why not?

Having said that, I’ll bet that through the day we’ll see an undercurrent of grumbling from people who think that it spells a start to increased wackification of the service - what next, a Swedish Chef language option?

Oh, it’s already been done by Google.

The only thing missing from the Flickr playful pirate treatment is an easter egg allowing users to auto add an eyepatch/parrot/tricorn hat to their photos by adding a note like “Arrrr eyepatch”. In the absence of such a thing, I’ve taken the liberty of doing it myself, after the jump.


And if any of you scurvy sea dogs laugh, I’ll make ye walk the plank. Ahoy!