attention industry

The Harry Potter Principle.

JK Rowling isn’t successful just because she tapped into a need for wonder that drives most children to explore literature.  Her most intelligent move was to create a property that matured with the audience.  The first Harry Potter book was, for all intents and purposes, a young adult novel.  The book was short, accessible in terms of language and subject matter, and filled with relatable moments for children of the appropriate age.

By the end of the series (I will admit I only read until book 5) each book was a tome of several hundred pages, deadling with adult concepts, and serious issues of morality and mortality.

Rowling let her product mature at a rate that kept her existing audience engaged.  If she’d written seven 150 page young adult novels, she would have needed to find a new audience, and new evangelists, by midway through the series.  Instead, a generation of kids grew up with Harry Potter as a series, and grew up with Harry Potter as a character.  When you’ve been interacting with the same product for seven or more years, you evangelize it constantly.  It becomes part of you.

Facebook has to take this into account, and it’s likely related to (according to eMarketer) some teens losing interest in Facebook.

I’m not going to indulge in ‘the sky is falling’ paranoia, because when it comes to numbers Facebook still has reach and engagement that the rest of the social networking space would kill for.  At the same time, it’s worth noting that technologies and social networks need to mature with the people involved.  

As such, facebook is faced with a complex and inenviable task - how do you mature with the generation of university students that launched the site into success, while still attracting an upcoming generation of teens and tweens whose older siblings, and at times parents, have already claimed the site as their own?

It’s the Harry Potter Principle: to succeed in maintaining a connection with an audience over time, you need to mature with them.  To continue growing that audience, you also need accessibility across multiple maturity levels (which can relate to age, or to knowledge of the material).