I know, I know, my second post in a row about social. But I have to tell you, I am really excited!
I just went for a run this morning, which I do almost every day. The only thing is, today was the first day I went on a training run when I knew that I would be sharing my results with the world when I got back.
Here are the results of my run below:
http://www.runkeeper.com/pub/act/iwxpQDYVSQEpgUDtBUHR
So, what is so exciting about that (you ask)? Well, there are two things that are exciting about that. The first is what happened during the run. Traditionally, when I have gone out to run, even while using RunKeeper, it has been all about me. It is my private dashboard that stores my results, and no one else sees them but me. If I cut the run short, or if I slow down my pace, no one knows and no one cares! But this time was very different. The whole time I was running, all I could think about was all of you seeing my results and wanting to put in a good showing. Whether “all of you” is one person or millions of people that are actually seeing these results isn’t so important. What is important is that, because I knew I would be making this data public, it lit a fire under my butt to push myself harder! This is exactly the feeling we are trying to harness—using the power of social to motivate the individual to train harder.
The second thing exciting about this is the viral aspect. By sharing your runs with others, it not only motivates you to train harder, but it also turns all of your friends onto RunKeeper in the process. And by turning them on and having them become users, they share their activities with their friends and the cycle continues! This fits into our broader mission of getting the world to be more active. It also helps position RunKeeper as the vehicle to help make that happen!
So, try it out, start sharing those activities! My favorite way so far is to click ‘make activity public’ and then copy the URL into Twitter. The same would work for Facebook, your email, your blog, etc.
Today, this is a manual process (although a pretty easy one). The next step is for us to remove any friction from this process and automate it. So you can expect soon the option of turning these activity feeds to your favorite sites on automatically. Exciting stuff! Let me know what you think.
Jason
info@runkeeper.com