Marketing Begins At Home

Flock beta testers discover it won’t cure cancer or bring them gifts on Christmas morning*

Can you hear the whining? No, not my kids “asking” for chocolate milk, I mean the loud sigh of “is that all there is?” I can hear all the way from the Valley.

It seems that a whole lot of people have a bad case of buyers remorse over Flock. The hubbub even moved Flockster Chris Messina to provide a spirited reason d’être for Flock’s existence.

But the bigger question is … is Flock a victim of its own hype? Michael Arrington thinks so. He had this to say, responding to Chris:

My guess is Flock is suffering from a bit of backlash over its early hype. And my further guess is that Flock, backed by an impressive group of founders and investors, has a few massive tricks up its sleeve that will be announced (or leak out) sometime soon.

The whole release early, release often mentality is good in theory. When practiced against an impatient audience, it can quickly squash whatever goodwill and coolness factor a start-up can generate. And the process will only feed itself as more start-ups do alpha releases (if alpha is the new beta, what’s the new alpha) and invite-onlyl pre-alpha pre-releases in response to a blogosphere hungry for the Next Cool Thing(tm).

So what’s the solution? Managing expectations can only take you so far. So release early and put on your flack jacket.

And regarding all the fuss over Performancing’s Firefox plug-in, I can already blog from Firefox. I’m doing it right now. Through WordPress’s interface. Funny isn’t it?

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*I nicked this image from Sadly, No!. They are a very cool site… go visit them.