Are your users passionate?

Do your users LOVE your product or service? Do you have fans? We'd love to hear your stories for both the tutorial we're giving at ETech, based on our Foo Camp talks (see Caterina's notes)) and the book we're working on. We're particularly interested in stories from people who've generated passionate users by developing products or services (or support materials AROUND their products or services) that get people involved, engaged, and thinking about THEMSELVES as a result of your product or service. In other words, we want to hear stories about customers who tell you how your product or service has made THEM cool/special/smart/whatever rather than than stories where customers tell you how great YOU are.

Our core approach to "creating passionate users" is based on one simple concept:
It doesn't matter what your users think of YOU. It's not about you. All that matters is what they think and feel about themselves as a result of interacting with your product, service, website, etc.

We want examples from things other than the obvious big ones (Apple, Harley Davidson, etc.) such as:

* SmugMug
(Gives people a way to make their pictures look great, and share them with others...)

* Type Pad
(If you're reading this, it's obvious you know what Type Pad has done for making people have an "I Rule!" feeling.)

* iStockPhoto and the Art of the Start cover contest
(You just have to see how people have used iStockPhoto art to do amazing things, including the cover submissions for Guy Kawasaki's latest book).

* Nickel Creek
(As with many other bands and artists of all kinds, fans of Nickel Creek feel "special"... somehow superior for being a key supporter of such a talented group of hard-to-pin-down young musicians. If you've seen the movie High Fidelity, you know how far you can take the "I'm more indie than thou" attitude, and fostering that among fans is a great way to inspire passionate users...).

You can post comments here if you like, although I'd prefer to get them in email (see the email link).
Cheers and thanks!

And oh yeah, if you're still working on generating passionate users, we'll all be talking a lot more in this blog about ways to help make that happen. In fact, we'd love to have a few stories for the book of folks who walked through the process successfully, so if you're interested, you can follow along over the next three months with this blog as we go through some of the steps.