Creating ‘Stoke’ around your product

I had a great day today — caught up with Joel (one of my early mentors) and had a thought-provoking few hours, as usual. He’s an amazing guy — has worked with an amazing string of computing pioneers (Visicalc, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon) which doesn’t come by accident.

We talked about a wide range of topics, but one that stuck with me — he talked about the concept of getting users to ‘stoke your product’ — he compared two skiing sites Teton Gravity Research and Epic Ski. He frequents both of them, but TGR empowers users to Stoke their experiences — it encourages photos, videos and action content, whereas Epic Ski is more tuned to technical descriptions of skis and equipment.

TGR gets to the technical as well, but they take a more circuitous route — that is, they show you the 1,000 foot vertical the equipment carried you through alive, complete with radical photos… then they get to the mundane details about why the skis are killer. Epic focuses on the details from the get-go.

Of course, it only takes a 3-second glance at each homepage to see where their focus is — I think I’d prefer to spend some time at TGR… how about you?

So, which one’s a Mac… and which is a PC? 🙂