At SXSWi I attended a fascinating panel on Virtual Worlds and Virtual Humans (aka avatars). One panelist I was unfamiliar with, Susan Wu, is not your run-of-the-mill profound futurist. She’s also a Partner with Charles River Ventures and the former CMO of the Apache Software Foundation. She has a great blog which you should read.

Her most recent entry “Why emotional relationships with your users matter more than ever” is the first time I have read a industry analyst’s understanding of what we consider to be the heart of success.

Let me give some background. Early on we realized that our users (members and non-members alike) did not treat our offering as a service, but as an entertaining place to be, and even more profoundly, a touch-stone to something very special to them. We didn’t understand this perfectly - as it’s kind of like trying to understand love itself - but we could feel it. Later, when we thought there were enough happy members, we hoped we could initiate a subscription program such that some people would pay for extra features. Of course I say ‘we thought’ because not all sites have users interested in making the financial step from being a free user to being a paying member (as so elegantly clarified by Josh Koppelman recently.) We really didn’t want to waste time building features that were not going to be well adopted.

We consulted our confidants and they consistently recommended we release the best functional features we could such as more photo storage, easier uploading tools, more visibility. While those features are liked, however, it turns out that as a community-oriented subscription program the most popular ’special functions’ turned out to be decorating pages and photos, giving virtual gifts to friends (a last minute item we added for fun) and socializing with other subscribers, though again, this wasn’t clear right away, but we could feel it.

About 6 months into the adoption of our Plus services, we met Angelo Sortira, the brilliant founder of DeviantArt.com and many other wildly popular subscription communities before that, who elucidated to us that our members are primarily joining because they want to take their emotional connection and commitment to the next level. Of course I am speaking generally and each member is unique and wonderful, but subscribing to our sites, for the most part, is not about getting access to our powertools, yet is, for the most part, about having a more profound emotional connection with your community. (Other than Kathy Sierra, almost no one was talking like this a year ago.) For our members, subscribing is akin to wearing a letterman jacket or joining a social club. We were advised to come up with a value proposition where the bucket of features easily justifies the $20 investment, but really it’s all about emotional sense, not a money-saving transaction.

In her entry, Susan compares a person’s connection to a website with a romantic relationship, which makes perfect sense to us. Our members join and often send emails to us often aflutter with excitement at the possibilities and joy of connecting with us. As the months turn into years we see those members becoming admins of popular site groups, learning html and photoshop tricks, making fantastic games for each other within the site, using vacation days to meet site friends in person and still taking the time to say hello to new members and welcome them to the club.

It’s funny, I’ve been asked hundreds of times “do people date on the site” and though I’ve only heard of that happening a handful of times, I have completely lost track of how many members have made what will likely be life-long friendships on-site and off. As it turns out, real, meaningful emotional connections is what sites like ours are all about.