the easiest way to make your community happy
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the simple fact that you have a community around your service or a readership around your blog means that you’re doing at least something right, and that people want to participate. at the same time, however, the participants aren’t always necessarily happy or as happy as they could be. what amazes me about this situation is not only how easy it is to make these people happy/happier, but also how many people fail to do this.
as james surowiecki describes in his book the wisdom of crowds, according to the human-relations movement led by sociologist elton mayo, people are not only happier, but also more productive when they feel their concerns are being listened to. it’s rather simple, really: just listen to what your community has to say and the next time you make a decision, take their thoughts into account. if you end up implementing one of the suggestions, go ahead and give credit where it’s due. but before you do this, you need to have a system in place that easily let’s your community get in touch with you, and create a culture where the community actually believes that their concerns won’t fall on deaf ears.
it seems foolish to me (if not self-sabotaging) that socially driven news and content sites in particular have managed to get millions of people to participate in the process of submitting, voting, commenting, and sharing content, but have failed to institute a system to allow the same community to recommend improvements to the sites and discuss the best way to go about making those improvements. do we honestly think that the 15 people at digg know more than the site’s million-plus users know about where the site needs to be going and what improvements should be next? the same applies to all other social media services. in fact, i find myself wondering if these sites even know the first thing about the very phenomenon they are presumably taking advantage of (the wisdom of crowds). so far, the only site i’ve seen that allows people to participate in the process of site improvement is reddit, where you can submit self-referential posts pertaining to the site (and they’ve usually been implemented fairly speedily).
as for the argument that digg or any other site may not want community input because they want to make decisions which increase the sellability of the site the direction where many claim they are going), i think its impossible to differentiate between features that the community wants and thinks will improve the site, and the features that make a site more sellable. lastly, fevote is a site that allows people to make suggestion boards around communities (for example, here’s one for digg), but ultimately, for any such system to work, it has to be hosted on the site itself, and be instantly available to the entire community.
so help your community get one step closer to nirvana, listen to the very people who are responsible for your success.
this post is a part of my journey through james surowiecki’s the wisdom of crowds.
Technorati Tags: digg, reddit, social news, community, james surowiecki, the wisdom of crowds
January 13th, 2008 at 3:30 pm
Great post and I agree with you M. One thing that that I tend to think is that as long as the people behind digg and other such sites are making money (presumably off of display advertising etc…) they simply might not care what everyone thinks.
If they see their revenue going up and and up, they may say to themselves “why should we open up a debate about how to structure the site?”.
THis is the only reason I can see them holding back. But as you rightly point out, as some point in time they’ll alienate the very users who help make them great.
January 14th, 2008 at 2:13 am
I think that listening to the user it’s just the very first step. Users should be able to create, modify and actively influence what digg or whatever company does.
Feedback and listening are a given they are vital. If you do not listen to feedback you will be out in few weeks, if you do not actively involve your users you’ll be out in few months. Great post snyway
January 14th, 2008 at 7:39 am
Hey Muhammad,
First off GREAT POST! I am glad you brought this up. I feel it is very important for the owners of the site to listen and make their users happy.
I know I sound like SUPER MIXX FANBOY most of the time, however Mixx.com actually listens. A forum was set up by MIxx users and the team at Mixx actually stops by and listens to it’s users. A lot of features were added to Mixx because of user feedback.
As you pointed out Reddit does the same as well. If more social news sites we to act on this philosophy, then they would be better off for it. Again thanks for bringing this up, and great post!
January 14th, 2008 at 10:37 am
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January 14th, 2008 at 12:59 pm
I agree, that the collective intelligence has the potential to provide better information than a small amount of experts. But it also depends on the individuals that constitute the community.
If (lets say) all digg users were interested only in linux news, then the data collected would be biased.
It also depends on the role of the administrator in the regulation of the community.
January 18th, 2008 at 6:52 pm
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