Stickiness: Let your users customise

Customising is a great way of users adding their own content and making it relevant for themselves. I prefer customising that allows the users to share with friends too – booklists, music lists etc – as we then see user-generated content being passed within and throughout the community.

Companies can escape the commodization trap by the same route as all other offerings can take: customization. When you customize an experience you make it just right for an individual-providing exactly what he or she needs right now-you cannot help changing that individual. When you customize an experience, you automatically turn it into a transformation, which companies create on top of experiences (you’ve heard the phrase “a life-transforming experience”), just as they create experiences on top of services, and so forth” (Pine II and Gilmore 1999, p.165).

These guys wrote books you can buy from Amazon – and you can download some .pdf documents for six bucks (Aussie) from there too.