In the last few months, I’ve become a big fan of Twitter. I even blogged about my new love here. Last week, however, I was really frustrated by Twitter. The service was down … again. The outage lasted several hours, and as soon as the site was back up, the Twitterverse erupted with complaints about the platform’s lack of reliability. The irony: Twitter is completely free to its users. The problem: Twitter’s user-base is a tech-savvy lot who are big on information, connectedness, and instant gratification.
Even though Twitter is free, the “you get what you pay for” mindset won’t cut it for Twitter’s users. If Twitter doesn’t get its act together, users will surely continue to complain at the top of the lungs, and eventually abandon the service in favor of something more reliable. (Read Bill Seaver’s thoughts on the matter here.)
To me, the lesson here is simple: Just because your service/product/site/whatever is free doesn’t give it the right to stink. In an ad-supported world (TV, Internet, radio, etc.), tons of things are free (Twitter, Gmail, AIM, Blogger, YouTube). But that doesn’t mean those things should target mediocrity. Novelty can attract a crowd, but it takes excellence to keep the crowd.
Hopefully, you’re putting this into practice at your church. After all, your services are free (except for that offering plate), but that doesn’t mean “good enough” is good enough, right? You can invest in postcards, door hangers, billboards, and micro sites to promote your upcoming SEX series, and you just might attract a crowd. But if you don’t invest in your message (or the music, media, or childcare), the crowd won’t be back just because the service was free. In fact, the crowd may even start complain on their way out the door, which I’m sure the Twitter team would tell you is slightly embarrassing.
Regardless of what you charge for whatever it is you do, try to do it well.