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i’ve been following the social web since before it became fashionable to do so. the one thing that i’ve found most appalling+ over the past 3 years is that almost none of the socially driven or community-based web 2.0 ventures have really understood the importance of the community and how to leverage it to their advantage (apart from purely participatory purposes). while the example works for pretty much any product or service with an actively participating community, let’s use the example that most of you are going to be familiar with-that of digg.

every single active member of the site is in a way an employee of the site that is working for free (in monetary terms). these members work for free because they get paid in the form of an experience. the users can submit, share, vote on, and comment on stories they find interesting, as well as connect and converse with like-minded users on the site. however, the users aren’t always happy with the number of options they are given or how they can use these features and are always looking to improve their experience on the site, which they can only do by improving the site itself.

when these users see a problem or a glitch, they report it, and sometimes even present possible solutions. they react similarly when they see a feature being abused or think that a feature hasn’t been implemented properly. furthermore, when the community sees that the platform is lagging and needs to be updated (as in the case when they demanded that digg add a specific section on the sites to handle images, improve search, and so on) they voice their concerns. their concerns, however, often fall on deaf ears. sometimes this is because the people behind the platform are busy with other things, but i honestly believe that most often this is simply because most web 2.0 companies don’t have enough faith in their communities and believe that they know better which direction they should to take the platform in.

contrary to what you would expect from these socially driven and community-oriented services that are built on the very principles of collaboration, these companies still function in a very hierarchical and inflexible manner. web 2.0 companies are in a very unique position. their very nature should keep them on the cutting edge of innovation and keep them flexible enough to adapt to change speedily and efficiently. what completely confounds me is that instead of taking advantage of their position, these companies work function like the bloated and inefficient corporations of 1970′s america.

as surowiecki so clearly explains in his book, the wisdom of crowds,

…attempting to run an entire company by command and control is a futile task. it’s too costly in terms of time; it requires far too much information-information that top executives would not be bothering with; and it saps the initiatives of workers and managers. when coordination takes place inside a company without being dictated by top-down leadership, it has the potential to make the company as a whole lighter and more flexible. but that can’t happen when power is concentrated at the top of a company…

how such a structure would come about in a traditional company is completely understandable though not justifiable. why it still happens in web-based enterprises today is completely baffling. the community is here to serve you, pay attention and delegate.

this post is a part of my journey through james surowiecki’s the wisdom of crowds.

Technorati Tags: social media, community, digg, james surowiecki, the wisdom of crowds

if you’ve contributed to any of the major social news sites, you are probably aware of the fact that the commenters on these sites are not the most articulate or the most civil members of the social web. in fact, in many cases, on sites like digg, the commenters are juvenile and downright abusive. for most people, this is a deal breaker because of which they refuse to participate in social news, or seek out the social news audience as potential readership. in fact, many big companies are actually afraid of being picked up by a social news site because of this potential backlash and the potential for brand suicide at the hands of the rioters.

it’s fitting then, to use the example of the baiting crowd as laid out in the wisdom of crowds, to analyze this subset of the social news audience. surowiecki explains, borrowing from a study conducted by leon mann, that baiting crowds are formed mostly at nighttime, when it is both easier to go unidentified and but also for each individual to imagine himself as a part of a bigger group. the crowd on digg, for example, acts similarly. the most abusive users are those who have very little invested in the community, are virtually anonymous, and are usually opining as a part of a larger thread rather than a single contrarian voice.

their willingness to riot depends on what other people in the crowd are doing. specifically, it depends on how many other people in the crowd are rioting. as more people riot, more people decide that they are willing to riot, too.

there are, of course, some people who will never act in this way. people who are invested in the community, those who actually take the time to read the comment and want to make a substantive contribution to the discussion, or are simply not radical by their very nature.

what is interesting as a content producer, is to look at the reaction of a social news audience, and then compare it to the reaction of your regular readership. the main difference, apart from the very nature of loyal readership, is that commenting on blogs is less anonymous. you can require people to enter certain pieces of information before they comment (although this information can be faked), and you can always record people by ip addresses and ban them from commenting if they abuse the system. the extra steps they have to take to leave a comment, and the ease with which you can eject them from the threads if they misbehave make a lot of people think twice before they mouth off.

even more interestingly, the kind of comments you get depend on the culture you create as a content producer. i have been published on a vast number of different sites but the nicest and most productive comments and criticism i received were quite unsurprisingly from the problogger audience. similarly, the crowd on stumbleupon tends to be much lest hostile than the crowd on reddit, which tends to be much less hostile than the crowd on digg. as surowiecki concludes,

…if there are enough people in the crowd who will not riot under any conditions-that is, whose actions are independent of the crowd’s behavior as a whole-then a riot will be far less likely, because the more people who do not riot, the more people there will be who don’t want to riot.

apart from creating a culture of constructive input and criticism-which is easy on your own site but not easy on a social news site-you as a content creator can set the tone for the rest of the conversation by commenting yourself or you as community members can prevent unnecessarily hostile babble from taking over the discussion threads simply by voicing your sane opinion before the fools take over. (more on influencing discussion) ultimately, the main problem many of these sites face is that the rioters tend to scare the more sane people away and therefore can run wild with their opinion. the best way to fight it is to be a part of the community and actively start your own discussion threads or talk back to the rioters. if enough sane people step out and voice their opinion, they can change the tone of the entire community.

this post is a part of my journey through james surowiecki’s the wisdom of crowds.

Technorati Tags: social news, comments, digg, reddit, stumbleupon, discussion, problogger, blogging, james surowiecki, the wisdom of crowds

i’ve written a post on problogger on how to become a comment leader.

as a content producer, make sure that your audience is comfortable stating their opinion, and as the audience, take full advantage of the platform given to you to express yourselves.

read on and become a comment leader today.

this post is a part of my journey through james surowiecki’s the wisdom of crowds.

Technorati Tags: blogging, commenting, community, leader, conversation, platform, problogger

i’ve written a post on problogger on the matthew effect in the blogosphere.

as james surowiecki makes the case in his book the wisdom of crowds, ‘ideas are meant to triumph not because who is (or who is not) advocating them but because of their inherent value…’ but in reality this is hard (though not impossible) to come by.

read on to learn how to make yourself heard.

this post is a part of my journey through james surowiecki’s the wisdom of crowds.

Technorati Tags: matthew effect, blogging, blogosphere, problogger

i’ve written a post on search engine land giving out 7 tips that will help your next social news submission shine above the rest.

how can you increase your chances of appealing to an average digger, stumbler, or other social media user, and actually get them to vote for your content?

read on for all 7 tips.

this post is a part of my journey through james surowiecki’s the wisdom of crowds.

Technorati Tags: social media, social news, james surowiecki, the wisdom of crowds, keynes, search engine land, digg, propeller, reddit, stumbleupon

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

while reading the wisdom of crowds by james surowiecki, i came across an old (but highly applicable) forbes article titled are you a chump? the article is a commentary on the american tax system, tax avoidance, and whether it makes sense. let’s think about this problem.

the money that the government gets from tax collection goes towards things that benefit everyone. you get public services such as roads, police, firemen, and you get a military that protects you, irrespective of whether you actually contributed to the pool or not. why then do people pay taxes? ultimately what it comes down to is that if you cheat on your taxes, chances are that you will be caught, and the penalties you will have to pay then are high enough to deter most people from playing the numbers.

comparing cheating on your taxes to gaming a social news site may be stretching it a little but bear with me for a minute. the more i participate on these sites, the more it becomes obvious that certain sites and people are participating in a way that isn’t the ‘good citizen’ way of contributing to these sites, even though it might not explicitly violate the terms of service. take the example of digg and propeller. both these sites have systems in place that allow users to share their submissions with other people (shouts versus site-mail). though the systems are in place to allow people to share one-off interesting stories with a few of their friends, they are increasingly being used to mass-spam entire friends lists to rally for votes.

until today i had resisted using these systems simply because it’s not the ‘good citizen’ way to participate. however, now that more and more people are abusing this functionality, at the cost of users in good standing, and aren’t being punished for what they’re doing, i can’t help but wonder why any user shouldn’t similarly abuse them for their own benefit. most of us are contingent consenters, i.e. we are willing to participate and abide by the community rules as long as everyone else also abides by the same rules and those that don’t, are punished. if the system breaks down, the community leaders have no choice but to resort to the same methods. after all, no one likes to be the chump.

what do you think?

this post is a part of my journey through james surowiecki’s the wisdom of crowds.

Technorati Tags: rules, contingent consenters, james surowiecki, the wisdom of crowds

what is the first, most important element that you need to have before you even begin to think about building a community? the answer is undoubtedly trust. without trust, platform owners cannot get community members to participate, content producers can’t create audiences (and have the community members share their content), and community members will have no desire to socialize if there is a lack of trust. without trust there is no participation, no contribution, and no collaboration.

that said, it is also one of the easiest things to acquire. human beings are by nature social beings, and social interactions are impossible to maintain without the existence of trust. we realize the potential benefits of trusting others, but even more important, we recognize the benefits of being trustworthy ourselves. as a community, we also know that there are punishments for betraying someone’s trust, and likewise if someone betrays ours. but as much as our social interactions are dependent on trust, building confidence and trust are equally dependent on social interactions, namely maintaining long-term relationships rather than one-off encounters.

(for more discussion, check out what james surowiecki has to say in his book the wisdom of crowds.)

take, for example, a blog, or a social news site. if you know that your interaction with your audience was going to be a one-time occurrence, you might be very tempted to use a bait-and-switch strategy. however, when you know that you are going to have repeat interactions with the same people (assuming you plan on being a part of the blogging or social news community), you are much more likely to be a trustworthy citizen.

rather than starting as skeptics, the social web starts by assuming that everyone is trustworthy and testing that assessment as the relationship progresses. so in essence, the problem is not even getting someone to trust you, rather it is maintaining trust. so how do we do that?

1. don’t build to sell: the biggest mistake most people make is that they build/write/participate to turn a profit. while you obviously cannot blame anyone for wanting to make a living, you have to tread lightly between selling your product and letting the product sell itself. don’t create an identity purely for monetary gain. the relationships you build, the branding you get from personal interactions, and what you learn just from your conversations with others are gains that shouldn’t be overlooked.
2. be a humanoid: while you should take care in determining what information you are comfortable divulging, make sure that you are yourself. it’s difficult for the average person to imagine why someone would want to be anonymous if they don’t have something to hide. you can create this additional confidence by creating about pages, using your real name, geographical location, pictures, and so on.
3. take the next step: while continuing the conversation with people on your blog, or with your friends on a site, is a great idea, take it one step further. continue the conversation via email, instant messenger, or even telephone. even better, if you get the chance, go out for coffee, or collaborate on a post or on your next project.
4. reciprocate: you should give at least as much as you get; to your readers, community members, other people in your space. the social web is not a zero-sum game. everyone learns from everyone else, and ultimately the experience is better for the entire community.

these are the four simplest things that i base my interactions on, and use to evaluate with whom i will have continued interactions. you probably have other checks (if so, please let me know). your value and standing in a community is determined not only by your integrity, but also by how much you give to the community, and you will be fairly rewarded for your efforts. don’t think in terms of just yourself and your community, but think of your community as a part of the larger ‘social web community’.

this post is a part of my journey through james surowiecki’s the wisdom of crowds.

Technorati Tags: trust, social web, blogging, social news, participation, james surowiecki, the wisdom of crowds

the el farol bar problem, as james surowiecki explains in his book the wisdom of crowds, goes something like this:imagine that there are a certain number of people and on a particular day, they all want to go to a bar called el farol. the problem is that the bar is rather small and if everyone goes at the same time, it will be crowded and no one will have fun. these are the rules:

if less than 60% of the population go to the bar, they’ll all have a better time than if they stayed at home.if more than 60% of the population go to the bar, they’ll all have a worse time than if they stayed at home.

the other problem is that you have no way of telling how many people are going to go to the bar because all the people have to decide at the same time, whether they are going to go or not. social news sites, it seems, have an incredibly similar problem when it comes to content submission. if everyone submits at the same time and a large volume, some people are always happy and some people are always unsatisfied. however, if everyone submits in turns and in moderation, everyone gets a chance to have their content promoted and everyone is happy at least some of the time. let’s start with the following conditions (for sake of this example, let’s assume all the submitters and the voters are the same people and are all relatively equal power-users):

1. there is a fixed maximum number of articles that can move to a site’s front-page on any given day.
2. this number is without a doubt smaller than the total amount of interesting/cool/promotable content created on that day (never mind the preexisting content that will be found and submitted).
3. there is fixed average number of votes that all users are going to cast on all the stories, and these votes are less than the total number of votes needed to promote all the stories, and are not uniformly distributed among all stories.
4. once a story is submitted and not promoted, it loses its chance of ever being submitted and being promoted.

to put this in numbers, let’s assume there are 500 great stories, all of which will be submitted, and each of them needs on average 50 votes to be promoted. however, a maximum of 200 stories can be promoted, and there are only 100 users, each of whom will cast on average 100 votes (meaning that 10,000 votes will be cast, which if distributed uniformly, can promote all those stories). what we see is that because all users over extend (submit 5 stories rather than 2), the votes get divided in such a way that even less than 200 stories get promoted.

1. if every user submits 2 stories, we get 200 stories promoted. the content producers are happy, the users are happy (for a perfect ratio), but we create a backlog of good content.
2. if every user submits 5 stories, we get 150 stories promoted (because of the vote split the average is less than 2), and the group as a whole is less happier than it could be.

the ideal case

like in the ‘el farol’ bar problem, all parties would be better off if they took turns in participating and did so moderately. the easiest way to institute this would be to have a mechanism where everyone is limited to a certain number of submissions daily. the problem here is that this system would not only go against the basic principles of socially driven sites, but it would be much hated and would elicit an extremely negative response. the simple fact is, even if it hurts us, we love and value freedom of choice above most other things. so the system we want to find is one that comes naturally, from the community, through consensus between the individual users.

what actually happens

what happens is that users fail to coordinate their submissions with each other for several reasons. first of all, some users are simply unable to (networking issue) or don’t find it efficient to (time issue) to coordinate their submissions with other users. second, for many users it’s not in their best interest to throttle their submissions. we have to keep in mind that not all users are equal, even from within the good content, not all content is equal, and everyone thinks that they got it right and therefore the vote split will work in their favor. furthermore, you can never be completely sure that you made the right calls and there for submitting 5 rather than 2 is better for you because you get to hedge your bets.

in fact, i’ve tried to talk to several top users, many times, to try and come up with a system where we all don’t clog the system to the point where no one is having fun, but also get to participate to a point where we are having enough fun. one major problem we faced in trying to come up with the system is getting everyone else to participate. if 5 users participate and 5 others don’t, the 5 who decide to throttle their submissions lose out.

this post is a part of my journey through james surowiecki’s the wisdom of crowds.

Technorati Tags: social news, el farol, bar, problem, james surowiecki, the wisdom of crowds

to get a sense of why i think this could be the case let’s first look at how nielsen media research currently operates (as james surowiecki explains in his book, the wisdom of crowds) and then at how hey! nielsen is making their job easier, better, and cheaper for them.

most people with even a passing interest in televised media and ratings knows about nielsen media research and their tv ratings. what most people don’t know is that these ratings are actually calculated based on the habits of an insignificantly small number of people. for example, based on the last count, nielsen’s ratings are formulated based on 5,000 american homes, where they have wired the television sets with electronic monitoring devices called ‘people meters’. whenever someone from these families wants to watch tv, he or she has to punch in a unique code to make sure that nielsen knows who is watching what show and at what time.

since the company uses only 5,000 families for data that has consequences for over 300 million people across the country, nielsen has to work hard to ensure that the 5,000 families are a good average demographic representation of the whole country. even when the company manages to do that, it is hard to make sure that every family logs every show it watches, and the data that gets across inevitably gets sloppy and somewhat less reliable over time.

though ‘people meter families’ provide somewhat sound data, the major networks have adopted a tradition of ‘sweeps’ that makes matters much worse. 4 times a year, nielsen will send paper diaries to 2.5 million americans and ask them to record what programming they watch, for a week, and then mail the diary back to the company. this creates several problems:

1. sweeps ratings rely heavily on people recording data correctly. unlike ‘people meters’ there is no way to ensure that the data is accurate.
2. the sweeps system has an incredibly low response rate (of about 30%) which creates a ‘cooperator bias’ (i.e. people who respond are likely to watch all the same shows and people who don’t respond all watch the same shows which don’t get recorded).
3. people are lazy, especially if they have nothing to gain. even for most people that respond to the surveys, the are a chore, which means filling them out is probably not done systematically (as people watch the shows) rather done all at one time (possibly after the week of watching tv is up), causing even more inaccuracies in reporting.

all this data is important because this advertisers are interested in who is watching what, and when, because they want to reach the most targeted audience. it’s in everyone’s interest to have more reliable data, but the problem is that to get a substantial installation of ‘people meters’ would require an investment somewhere in 9-figures. enter hey! nielsen.

hey! nielsen: now with more ‘people meters’

hey! nielsen is nielsen media research’s foray into social media. for an overview, have a look at my review of the site. i said back then, ‘with hey! nielsen, nielsen media research has hit the social media nail on its head,’ and this rings even truer in this context.

we know you love tv, movies, music, the web, and the personalities behind it all, just a little too much. so here’s your chance to let your voice be heard, your face been seen, and your opinions be a force for change. you, plus the exclusive access and power of nielsen means that your opinions not only reach millions of people via the web, but may also reach the media moguls who decide what goes on the air and on the web.

with that said, and requiring only a strong opinion and an email address, everyone can become a ‘people meter’ with almost zero marginal cost for nielsen media research and no barriers to entry for the user. while you can read other people’s opinions without registering, you have to register to have your say. and when you do register, they record your location (zip codes are mandatory for u.s. and canada), gender, and age right away. furthermore, and so there is no doubt, let’s make sure that they do plan to use this site to aggregate opinions and information for marketing research analysis.

from their privacy policy:

we also automatically collect certain non-personally identifiable information including ip address, browser type, requested and referral urls, time spent on certain portions of the site and other forms of site usage data from members and visitors to the site…we may use this information along with the other information we collect for general market research purposes, including preparing reports and analysis on the opinions, behavior and characteristics of the members and users of the hey! nielsen site.

as a leading provider of information and services for the media and entertainment industries, one of the goals of the nielsen company is to help others understand consumer behavior and opinions across all media and entertainment platforms, including the internet. one way we do this is by conducting market research and analysis on the opinions, interests, demographics and behavior of the users and members of the hey! nielsen site. we use this information, along with information we may obtain from other sources (such as other market research firms), to prepare various market research reports and analyses for our clients and prospective clients relating to the various content and other information made available in connection with the site.

there are several reasons why i think this is a great move for nielsen and one that shows that at least one media company knows what’s going on, on the internet.

1. it’s dirt cheap: brainstorming, creating, maintaining, and marketing the site, and aggregating the data from the site is far more cost-effective and efficient than attempting to install ‘people meters’ by the same volume or continuing with sweeps month.
2. there’s much more information: users have the option to read, react, and respond to information the other users post and can rate events, shows, and personalities. not only is the degree of interactivity much higher, but even if a visitor doesn’t interact with a page, just visiting a page is measures a degree of interest.
3. it’s completely hands-off: people-powered content aggregation and content rankings ensure that the ecosystem keeps working without outside intervention (unlike the sweeps). furthermore, data is automatically aggregated and sorted so that the community does all the work and nielsen can reap the benefits of the users’ interactions without much work and without having to push the users.
4. it projects the future: profiles and calendars help nielsen keep track of what people are interested in currently, but they also show what what upcoming events people are looking forward to.

overall, hey! nielsen is not just cheaper, but it is more efficient, more accurate, and accumulates much more information than is possible using existing means.

this post is a part of my journey through james surowiecki’s the wisdom of crowds.

Technorati Tags: nielsen media research, nielsen, hey! nielsen, entertainment, television, ratings, rankings, advertising, james surowiecki, the wisdom of crowds