Web Social Architecture

Winning with Logic, not Bullets

Boy howdy, do I ever love the header on this post!

What I'm actually thinking of is an approach I use to prepare presentations, which I learned from the best presenter I've ever worked with. He said something to me along the lines of, "Don't present the work, present the rationale for the work." And from, I think, that moment on, I broke free of the much-critiqued built-in rhetoric of popular presentation tools, which fragments when it should elaborate, reducing arguments to discrete, disconnected points, fragments the points into sub-points, and so on. The typical presentation relies on overviews and summaries to hold its rhetoric together, when it should be building and refining a cohesive point of view you can read, start to finish, and feel like it makes sense.

The fact that Tufte's classic lambasting of PowerPoint has become a cliche makes perfectly clear how much pain and suffering presentations cause. And the proliferation of books on the topic also makes clear how difficult it is to actually make good presentations. But I don't think it should actually be that tough.

In the consulting world, you have to go fast, and you have to collaborate. What ends up happening a lot of the time is that you divide up the work, and everyone goes off and makes some slides, then the account director puts them all into a "deck." (And the very word "deck" hints at exactly what's wrong with this approach.) When you present, the meeting is full of uncomfortable moments where someone says, "Justin, I think this is yours. Did you want to talk this slide?" But the problem with the deck concept isn't that labor can't be divided, it's that decks can be shuffled, and logical arguments can't.

So, If your slides make just as much sense almost no matter how you order them, go back to the drawing board. Simply put, if you can easily reorder your slides, their rational threads have frayed.

So here's my presentation tip: Approach the outline for the presentation as you would a persuasive essay. I think of it as outlining the presentation's rhetoric, as opposed to outlining the presentation's slides. Like so:

1. Your brand sits at the convergence of high trust and personal passion. Your customers are most likely to participate online in venues they trust around topics of great personal interest. Your products serve your customers passions, and your brand is highly regarded.

2. So the opportunity to build a customer community is there. This isn't true of every brand. Your great relationships with your customers are hard-earned, and the next logical step is to extend them online.

3. But it's not enough to build it and hope they will come. The Internet is full of empty, static communities that make perfect sense on paper. In truth, the social web is a highly competitive arena, and just showing up won't be enough for to realize the full opportunity.

4. You therefore need to think beyond innovation and create uniquely relevant customer value. Innovation is important, but it's not enough. You need to create value not realized elsewhere on the web of off--value your customers will wonder how they ever did without.

5. We have the chops (and the rigorous methodological foundation) to help you create a community where your customers will rush to engage, then discover on arrival that they already feel at home.

Not bad for completely generic copy! Reading back through that outline it almost feels like it... uh, makes sense, even though it's not about anything. The reason for that is the rhetorical connections across the paragraphs. Words like "so," "but," and "therefore" are like signposts, guiding the audience through the logic of the argument and connecting each point to the previous.

Now, this only works when you can torpedo the presentation-by-committee approach and put one person in charge of the outline. In my experience, everyone appreciates the person who will step up and figure out how to tell the story. Done right, with input from everybody, this approach ends up making everyone look better.

It's important, once you've created the outline, to stick with it. The random informational slide someone wants to drop in at the last minute has to inform the presentation's rhetoric or go into an appendix.

In practice, I usually end up putting the bold text on slides and using the rest as talking points. The last thing you want to do is read your slides. I'm lucky to work with top-shelf designers who contribute layers of visual meaning to the text, and frequently the text ends up getting replaced with something visual. That's fine, because the outline ensures that the final presentation holds together.

So there's Ryan's Ten-Cent Presentation Tip. Try it out!

ZAAZ Needs UX People: Associate Director of User Experience, and More

We just posted a job opening for an Associate Director of User Experience to manage the UX side of our Microsoft accounts. This is a great chance for a top-level UX mind to lead in a fun, creative, leading-edge environment.

We also are looking for UX folks at every level, from entry to senior. If you know folks with the UX passion who pass the road trip test, send them our way.

You can see all the job descriptions here.

Flickr's Inclusion of Video Ignites Rebellion

Here’s something fun from the last couple days: Flickr launched a new video feature this week. It’s the first time the site has deviated from its focus on photographs, and the change has sparked a mini-rebellion:

 

But actually, the rebellion isn’t that small. The We Say No to Videos on Flickr group has grown to over 22,000 members in the past two days, and another similar group has over 8,000 members.

 

 

 

A small percentage of Flickr’s community, to be sure, but these are also the most hard-core Flickr fans. So far I haven't seen any response from the Flickr folks, but I'm sure it's forthcoming, and I also expect it'll reflect their typically thoughtful and sophisticated approach. Can't wait to see.

So a couple things are interesting here:

1. What happens when your hard-core community members get mad at you?
2. How will the Flickr team respond?
3. Is the addition of video a benefit to users, or is it a loss of focus that dilutes the meaning and identity of the site and community?

The moral of the story, for me, is that for communities, doing one thing well, being about one thing people care about, is in some situations more important than adding capabilities or features, even useful ones. To the extent Flickr benefits from its character as a community of photographers, the video feature is a mistake.

Still, there's clear value in a high-quality platform integrating photo and video content. Nobody likes having separate accounts to manage on separate platforms hosting content that's functionally very similar. What's the benefit to me of having to use both Flickr and Vimeo? Flickr's clearly creating value here. And folks on this side of the issue are even spoofing the anti-video crowd!

And still, the uproar. However you slice it, the sheer passion of the debate is a great sign for Flickr. Choose fury over apathy any day! And another benefit to Flickr is the coverage of the debate. Earned media anyone?

It’ll be interesting to see whether the needs of casual users who might appreciate the ability to share photos and videos in one integrated setting will outweigh the sense of community Flickr has created among its tier of hard core community members.

What do you think?

Good or Bad Experience? Not Always Obvious

Have you seen this video yet? You gotta:

Pretty fun example of techno-speak, thanks Paul. Lee says it was created as a joke for a Rockwell sales meeting, presumably to make the point that too much babble won't sell baubles.

But on the other hand, what it brings to mind for me is that for the right audience, the video might well be perfectly calibrated--the real joke, in my mind, is that there might in fact be people out there to whom the sales guy makes perfect sense. Who on earth are those people, and what must they talk about at their dinner parties (if anything)?

And that's really the core activity of user experience: Understanding the audience, and delivering the message in a way that makes sense. Which is harder than it sounds: As easy as it is to fall back on usability rules of thumb, to invoke "audience-appropriateness," "user-friendliness," and so on, the truth is that many audiences are idiosyncratic, and our best guesses are no substitute for first-hand interaction with users--letting them get their hands on the design, and observing them with the methodological approach of a user experience professional, is often the only way to know what works or doesn't, and why--or most importantly, why not.

Getting It Right: Designing Community to Support Your Core Offering

These days, there's a huge amount of interest among corporate marketers about how to "tap into," "harness," or "ride the wave of" online community, Web 2.0, and social technology. And, despite the metaphors, despite the herd-like hype-chasing, rightly so. ("Herd-like," by the way, isn't a metaphor; it's a simile. A world of difference, if you're asking.)

The truth is, the widespread adoption of social technologies, including on the Web, are absolutely changing the game and creating new markets. Companies getting left behind on the Web are getting left behind in market share. For that reason, one recent survey indicates 90% of businesses will add Web 2.0 features to their sites in the coming year. (See Burby's ClickZ article for some caveats about that survey.)

But social technology is tricky to get right for companies who aren't selling social technology. The tendency is to implement a community that's either trivial, fails to produce business value, or simply fails altogether because nobody wants to use it. And failure hurts: Just ask Wal-Mart.

 

No, I Don't Want to Be Your Friend

There's an assumption out there that people "want to connect" with each other online. After all, people are increasingly connecting online, discussing topics of shared interest, getting dates, keeping in touch with friends and family. But on sites offered by companies that aren't in the business of connecting people online, in highly branded spaces in particular, this couldn't be further from the truth.

We do a lot of user research at ZAAZ, an increasing amount of it around social technology. Participants, when asked whether they want to connect with their fellow customers online, collectively say something along the lines of "absolutely not, no way, what do you want from me, what a creepy idea."

But changing the question changes the answer. When asked whether information or content provided by other customers in the context of a specific need would be of interest, the answer is, increasingly, yes, I must have it, it's crucial.

So what's the difference? Simply put: People aren't on your web site to make friends. They're there to get something done, and using community to help them get that thing done is a huge value, because it promises responsiveness, detail, honesty, and affinity.

 

Don't Just Build Community for Community's Sake

If you're in, say, the sailing equipment business, selling boat parts, life jackets, apparel, accessories, navigational charts, electronics, and so on, it might be tempting to create, say, a discussion board for your customers. Don't do it. It will fail.

I'm not saying nobody will use it. Sailors, after all, probably have stuff to talk about with other sailors. They might show up, possibly even in numbers to sustain a thriving discussion setting. Properly managed, a nice little community could emerge.

More likely, however, usage will be sporadic, volume low. You won't have the level of value needed to encourage repeat and sustained use. Your logo in the upper left-hand corner of the page will reduce the sense of authentic passion behind the community site, and users will wonder what your motives are. You'll moderate and be called a fascist. Threads will veer off course, so to speak, and topics will list hard a-starboard. You'll spend money keeping the thing afloat for a while, then late some Super Bowl Sunday, when nobody's looking, you'll quietly jettison the whole thing.

At best, your thriving discussion boards will give you a little brand boost. At worst, you'll end up a cautionary tale on some consultant's blog.

 

To Win with Community, Support the Core Offering

So instead of simply throwing open the gates to a discussion forum, think carefully about your real offering. How might your customers create more value around that offering?

Step 1: What do you sell?

Sailors, all of them, are gearheads. They love their gear, and because boats need a lot of maintenance, they're constantly tinkering with their gear. They read your catalog in the evening after work. They talk gear with their sailor friends. Other than sailing, talking about sailing gear is their favorite thing to do.

And hey, you sell sailing gear. So creating a venue for sailors to talk gear has the potential to not only appeal to your customers' enjoyment of gear talk, it also can drive sales. So create discussion forums, yes, but structure them around a taxonomy of sailing gear, and most crucially, tie them into your product pages. Excerpt discussions about products on product pages, and link to products from pages where people are discussing them. Add ratings and reviews for your products. Invite outstanding community content contributors to write posts for a group customer blog.

If your products are complex or require special knowledge to use, provide space for customers to support each other.

Step 2: Is what you sell the real offering?

If you're in the sailing equipment business, your offering might not be gear alone. Do you sell, for example, gear of a certain quality, at a certain price? What's your real brand promise? It's probably not "We sell sailing gear." It's probably something more like "We take the hassle out of boat maintenance, so you can get out on the water."

Another way of saying this is, What differentiates you from your competitors?

Step 3: How do you improve the core offering?

Without losing sight of the thing you're actually selling, think about the core offering of the business, and architect community to do more of it, extend it, complement it, enhance it, improve it, or fix what's broken with it. Providing highly-responsive technical support through community is sometimes a no-brainer, but there's always more you can do.

Imagine, for example, your sailing community offering a space for sailors to share their efficiency tricks. If your brand is about making sailing less fussy, you can offer a community site that promises not just gear, but the collective knowledge of the sailing community about how to get out there more and fuss with gear less.

Step 4: Tie Your Community to Your Product or Service

Remember, the core offering isn't always the thing that's getting sold, but that doesn't mean you can ignore the need to sell. And you don't have to feel bad about it! It's really tempting to want to adopt a perspective along the lines of "It's not about selling, it's about people." The truth is, it can and should be both. People aren't going to hate you.

I've been surprised many times by community participants' willingness to accept. selling within the community, as long as it's done right, without hard sells, and the community is providing value. Your customers know you need to make a living, and they'll find it perfectly normal for you to see a direct business return on your community site.

Think of it this way: If you were hosting a speaker at your sailing gear store presenting a slide show about a solo voyage around the world, folks wouldn't resent the visible presence of your products at the event. In fact, they'd appreciate it. You could even announce an upcoming sale or special deal for attendees, if you did it with taste and sensitivity, respecting the fact that people came primarily to hear the speaker and only incidentally, and only in some cases, to shop. Doing something analogous in your online community space is perfectly acceptable.

Don't be afraid to be in business. And don't be afraid to measure your community effectiveness in dollars--after all, if you're making money, you must be offering something of value! Without a doubt, branded communities require a different kind of thinking. But it's worth the investment. When community is working for you, you're not only running a cool web site that brings you cachet--you're co-creating, in partnership with your customers, a stronger realization of your brand promise.

Self-Organizing for Discovery: Relatedness in User-Generated Content

The quality of user-generated content varies widely. As I discussed in an earlier post, it's possible to separate the wheat from the chaff using combinations of explicit and implicit metadata. But once you've identified the good stuff, you start to find more and more of it. User-generated content on successful sites accumulates in real time--lots of it. How do you present it in meaningful ways?  How do you keep the presentation of "best" content fresh? How do you make it findable, rememberable, parsable? You need to set it up to self-organize, and creating a folksonomy is a great way to start.

In a traditional folksonomy (there are several uncommon kinds I won't get into now), users add "tags" or labels to individual content objects. These tags become the basis for a living, breathing categorization scheme that informs search and navigation. On sites like Flickr, folksonomy is used in powerful ways to organize photos into a multi-level hierarchy, which can be filtered by "interestingness" (Flickr's quality concept), by location, by camera, and more to produce dazzlingly multifaceted content organization. Take a look at this page, a Flickr "tag cluster" filtered by interestingness:

 

One strength of tagging systems is that they can organize content across an unlimited number of pivots (though the value of that capability, in terms of informing navigation, decreases as the number of pivots increases). For example, an apple can be tagged with both "fruit" and "red," making it findable within category schemes based on either food type or color.

This is really wonderful stuff. But folksonomy as rendered by tags has its limitations, especially in contexts where there are fewer content objects or less incentive for users to take action to tag them.

In such situations, creating dynamic relationships between objects based on combinations of explicit and implicit metadata adds new layers of meaning, helping users discover content of interest.

There are lots of ways to accomplish this. I'll describe a few in this post, but what it all boils down to is increasing discoverability by grouping objects and presenting them in association with each other. If you're interested in one battery charger, for example, there's a decent chance you'll be interested in another. But from there it gets a little more complicated.

 

Basic Similarity

When I say basic similarity, I actually have in mind a specific kind of rule governing the association of content objects, namely, that they share an attribute. For example, when I view a video on a social media site, the system might suggest other videos I might want to see based on a common tag, a shared word in the title, or a common creator.

But in systems with user-generated content, there are often a huge number of objects. Most often, there needs to be a threshold of similarity applied in order to narrow the number of similar items, such as a certain number of common tags applied, shared tags within taxonomic groupings, or association within purchase patterns.

 

Complex Similarity

Basic similarity is rarely enough. Imagine shopping, for example, for a camera lens. Looking at a detail page for a particular lens, you see a list of "related items." If this list were to include every other lens on Amazon.com, you'd have a gigantic list that wouldn't be helpful. Likewise with a list of all Canon products. But a list with multiple shared attributes, such as "lens" and "Canon" is potentially more useful. But you can take it even further than that by layering in implicit metadata--information provided by people.

In this screenshot from Amazon, there are implicit and explicit metadata layers added to the basic similarity construct. In this case, the user-driven similarity is among search queries. The set of similar queries describes a set of user sessions in which purchases were completed from within the objects returned by the searches. The objects purchased.are therefore similar.

You might wonder: Couldn't you get to this set of relationships using simple metadata from within a controlled vocabulary? The answer is no, because the similarity is ultimately constructed of value judgements by humans. People interested in the same stuff as me decided to buy these items. That's a layer of social information you can only get with robust behavioral metadata. Here's an abstract picture of how this looks:

 

Each of the ovals represents a content object, and each line represents a set of shared attributes. The attributes shared are the same in every case.

 

Complementarity

Complementarity is not the same thing as similarity, and it's very useful to think specifically about the difference. Objects that are complementary are not "like each other" in the sense that similar objects are. Instead, they sort of... "go together."

But what does it mean for objects to go together? How can we understand the relationships between peanut butter and jelly, peanut butter and honey, peanut butter and bananas? Each peanut butter complement has a relationship with peanut butter, but they don't share the same relationship with each other (I'm sure someone out there eats honey and jelly sandwiches, but that's not complementarity, it's surrealism). 

So the relationships among complementary items are differently structured than the relationships among similar items. Whereas items similar to a given object are also generally similar to each other, that's not generally the case among complementary items. You can picture webs of similarity, but complementarity, from a structural perspective, looks more like a spokes on a wheel.

Here's an example from Amazon to illustrate the point:

This illustration is from the detail page of a camera lens. The lens is the primary content object on this page. Each of the items in this list are secondary content objects--each "goes with" the lens. The secondary objects are related to the primary object in a singular relationship, and they are meaningfully related to each other mainly by virtue of their parallel relationships with the primary object.

The lens is the hub of the wheel, and each of the items pictured above is connected to the hub via a spoke.

But if complementarity is a wheel-shape, how do we understand the nature of the spokes in a way that allows us to build complementary relationships into a web site architecture?

Complementarity is about supporting a core function of, completing, or adding value to an object. So to architect complementarity we need to understand a type of "aboutness," the thing that the object is good for.

Behavioral metadata doesn't tell the whole story of complementarity. Here's a case where hybrids of taxonomy and folksonomy come in handy.

 

Preference Among Similar

Adding yet another layer of social data to groups of similar objects, you can create another kind of value. In this example from Amazon, similar items are ranked by strength of correlation between object views and purchases. Here an implicit judgement, expressed through sales conversion, shows which of the similar objects is most preferred by other users.

Very useful for comparison shopping, especially among groups of complex, similar, or specialized objects (like digital cameras). Here's what this type of relatedness looks like in an abstract architectural view:

 

The objects are identified as similar by virtue of their shared attributes. The percentage indicated on each object indicates its percentage of total purchases within the group as a whole.

Preference needn't always be based on implicit metadata like sales conversation, though. Here's an example of preference among similar from YouTube that uses ratings. After a video plays all the way through, the YouTube video player offers up some suggestions about what to watch next. The suggestions are similar to the video that just played, in this case on the basis of their shared authorship and title words. Preference is expressed via ratings, so the suggestions are the top-rated similar videos. 

And this makes perfect sense: If you watch a video all the way through, there's a decent chance you liked it and would be interested in discovering similar videos of high quality.

 

Affinity Recommendations

Simply put, affinity recommendations are recommendations based on people with whom you have preferences in common. The logic goes: We both loved Friday the 13th Parts 1 through 6; you've seen Halloween IV and liked it; therefore there's a decent chance I'll like Halloween IV.

Netflix has made a huge investment in its recommendation engine, and affinity recommendations are a huge part of how it works. Netflix has recognized that choosing a movie to rent is very often a socially-driven activity. Faced with thousands of choices, we turn to friends for advice. But the best recommendations aren't made just by friends--they're made by people with whom we share a common taste in movies. Netflix makes the degree of commonality explicit. Here's how it looks:

 

Netflix has built in a number of social features around explicit relationships with the people we know, and they're constantly tinkering. But affinity recommendations aren't always situated within existing relationships. In many cases the shared preferences are enough (including on Netflix, in the absence of "friends").

Here's what this looks like in the abstract:

 

 

In this diagram, the big bubbles represent people. The people are color-coded to indicate a profile of preferences. In the Netflix example, these preferences are explicit--ratings of particular movies. (I'm not sure whether Netflix also looks at rating patterns within classes of similar movies--but they certainly could if they needed to build a more extrapolated flavor of affinity. My guess is that they have sufficient volume of ratings that they don't need to extrapolate.) But preferences needn't be explicit in all situations. Preferences can also be gleaned through behavioral metadata and through algorithmic combinations of explicit and implicit metadata.

In this diagram, the two people represented by red bubbles share preferences for objects represented by small bubbles A, B, C, D, and E. Because person 2 also liked objects F and G, the system can present affinity recommendations of objects F and G to person 1.

Obviously, related ness gets pretty complicated at this level. For example, if person 1 has already expressed a non-preference for objects F and G, they'll be annoyed if you keep recommending them. So you need to build controls for that kind of scenario.

Nonetheless, the payoff for a strong system of affinity recommendations can be huge, in terms of overall perceived quality, conversion, and social collateral. If you're working with a system that includes a strong base of dedicated users and many content objects, you can add a lot of value.

 

The Devil in the Details

As with all social systems, even the most carefully-built system is likely to function a little different than you imagine after you let a bunch of unpredictable humans play with it for a while.

Keep close tabs on the health of your related items engine. Plan for and retain budget to tweak ongoingly. Establish KPI's to measure system health, and run A / B tests to optimize performance.

Above all, as always, have fun with your metadata!

Consulting Skills: Word of the Day is Autopoiesis

My colleague Aaron Louie busted out this unpronounceable mouthful in an instant message the other day (I wonder if he knows how to pronounce it). Here's the definition from Wikipedia:

Autopoiesis literally means "auto (self)-creation" (from the Greek: auto - αυτό for self- and poiesis - ποίησις for creation or production) and expresses a fundamental dialectic between structure and function.

Here's what I love about it: You can think of the "dialectic between structure and function" as a relationship between tool and purpose, what and why, technology and value, system implemented and need answered.

To me, this is a great expression of the basic challenge of consulting. To be effective, we need to maintain a value-adding, strategic point of view, fastidiously avoiding the easy tendency to focus on tools, technologies, and systems. Simply put, if we're focused on tools, we're fooled into thinking we understand the need, because the need is an element of the tool. If we're prejudiced to implement a blog, for example, we naturally see the problem in terms of the solution provided by blogs.

Even further: We need to resist approaching problems from the point of view of solving them. Why? Because the problems we're assigned to solve aren't always the problems that need solving. Instead, try to understand the shape of the need first, arriving at the tactical solutions as reflections of the need.

Holding the right mindset opens up the possibility of real insight. When we see opportunities to create value, the way to execute arrives with the insight, as naturally as leaves arrive to the tree.

Ratings and Reviews: Implementation Details Make All the Difference

Are Ratings and Reviews Worth It?

New data illustrates the power of enabling customers to enter into conversation with each other around purchase decisions. Simply put, everyone selling stuff online should consider adding customer ratings and reviews. Consider the following, lifted from Bryan Eisenberg's ClickZ article:

According to Jupiter Research, 77 percent of online shoppers use reviews and ratings when purchasing.

Reviews drive 21 percent higher purchase satisfaction and 18 percent higher loyalty, according to Foresee Results.

In a study of 2,000 shoppers, 92 percent deemed customer reviews as "extremely" or "very" helpful, finds eTailing Group.

BizRate found 59 percent of users considered customer reviews to be more valuable than expert reviews.

In a CompUSA-iPerceptions study, 63 percent of consumers indicated they're more likely to purchase from a site if it has product ratings and reviews.

86.9 percent of respondents said they'd trust a friend's recommendation over a critic's review, while 83.8 percent said they'd trust user reviews over a critic, according to MarketingSherpa.

92.5 percent of adults said they regularly or occasionally research products online before buying in a store, found BIGresearch.

According to Keller Fay, 63 percent of all WOM is positive. Across all Bazaarvoice clients, 80 percent of products rate 4 or 5 stars out of 5.

So user ratings and reviews are, very often, a good thing for e-commerce sites. But not all ratings and reviews are created equal, and there are better and worse ways to work with them.

 

Ratings Are Meaningless, sort of, and that's OK

I've heard arguments that ratings are bad because they are too subjective. And this attitude is only half wrong. What, for example, do ratings mean? This is far from clear. Is your four-star rating of a movie the same as mine? Clearly not. Ratings are subjective to begin with, and they're especially problematic when you consider that for some users, a five-star rating means "the best thing EVAR" and for others it means "nothing terribly wrong with this thing." When you average out a collection of subjective ratings along a scale whose meaning is subject to a range of biases, you have muddy waters indeed. So yes, ratings are subjective.

Done well, tooltips help. Hover the mouse over three stars and a little popup message says "average." But still, one person's "good" is by no means the same as another person's "good."

There are a couple approaches to increasing the meaningfulness of ratings. One is to use more specific tooltips with a clearer value statement than "good." For example, use labels like "useful," "professional-quality, " or "would recommend."

But ultimately, ratings don't need to be meaningful in the strictest sense to add value. Ratings are, after all, a basis for comparison among like objects. So fixing a quantitative value to an object based on user ratings isn't important--what matters is that you can tell which object is more liked than which other object.

 

Use Multidimensional Ratings for Non-Equivalent Sets of Objects

The more specific the context, the more meaningful ratings can be. The more equivalent the objects are, in other words, the more meaningfully they can be differentiated based on subjective measures like ratings. This is why ratings are so useful for resellers like Amazon.com--if you're like me, you need help deciding between the 17 varieties of 6" non-stick omelette pans, and the opinions of people who've used them are valuable.

This is also why I occasionally discourage clients from simply adding a typical five-star rating system to their product pages. Take the following scenarios:

• A retailer offers a huge range of highly specialized and very similar products--fanny packs, for example. Here the approach is not to create the very best fanny pack, but instead to create the perfect fanny pack for every conceivable need.
• A retailer offers a very limited set of products with complex feature sets, mobile devices for example. Here the approach is to offer the premium product within each of several discrete subcategories.

In each of these cases, simple ratings, comparing the products to each other, adds little or no value. The fanny pack shopper gets no help finding the particular fanny pack to hold her water bottles, energy goo, and cell phone firmly while training for a marathon. The mobile device shopper learns nothing about the premium features and services of each device.

This is where complex, or multidimensional, ratings come in. Instead of rating the product along a single scale, site users rate individual attributes of the product. Here's a very simple example:

Here the overall rating is the average of the user's ratings of individual attributes. The attribute ratings convey some very useful information the overall rating doesn't: That the Corolla, according to this user, looks great but drives crappy. Good to know.

But this example also illustrates some of the challenges of implementing a multidimensional rating system. What, for example, does "quality" mean? How is it separate from the other dimensions being rated?

To implement multidimensional ratings effectively, you need an unambiguous rating taxonomy that applies across all the objects in the set. This is a place where strong user research can help: Understand the way your customers think about and evaluate products, and provide individual attribute ratings that address the specific criteria they use to make choices.

 

Put Reviews to Work

When they first appeared on the web, reviews were typically structured like flat discussion threads. Each new review appeared in chronological order in a list of reviews. The list was more or less fixed to the product detail page, and beyond a certain volume they ceased to be useful. But you can do better than that.

Treat individual reviews as content objects. Attach behavioral metadata to them, and use quality measures to build self-organizing structures. (See my earlier post about quality for more on this.) Surface the best ones alongside detailed product information. Use them on product comparison charts. Run A/B tests to compare conversion across different presentations of reviews.

 

Attach Ratings to Individual Reviews

When users add a review, require them to also add a rating, and display the rating with the review. The typical colored stars are widely understood and instantly provide context to individual reviews, enabling readers to skim long lists of reviews and quickly identify the general gist of each review.

Beyond reading aids, though, ratings can be treated as attributes of individual review objects, providing metadata to aid dynamic presentations.

 

Add an Explicit Layer of Social Metadata

Provide a way for readers to give feedback on individual reviews. Typically this mechanism works through some kind of voting, along the lines of "Was this review helpful? Yes / No." This kind of feedback can help you separate the wheat from the chaff and present the most helpful reviews. In combination with the rating metadata, you can architect powerful presentations of user reviews, along the lines of what Amazon's done recently:

Here the ratings are separated into "favorable" and "critical" groups using the attached ratings, then the reviews from each group deemed most helpful by users are presented together--an instant conversation that provides in-depth, two-sided information about the product.

 

Stay Out of the Tool-Centric Mentality

In the world of social tools, ratings and reviews are about as plug-and-play as it gets. And there are plenty of situations where you can buy a tool like BazaarVoice or PowerReviews, plug it in, and call it good.

But take care to think strategically about what you want to accomplish, and consider whether a custom implementation might serve your needs better. The worst thing you can do is to lock yourself into an approach that fails to take full advantage of the opportunity to add the credibility and persuasiveness of the customer voice to your site.

Do simple ratings make sense on your site, or do you need to consider multidimensional ratings? Can you attach layers of social metadata to your reviews to provide a basis for self-organization among them? How do you present customer reviews alongside product detail information? Alongside excerpted third-party reviews? Do you have an opportunity to leverage the reputations of individual users to provide "expert" voices? What's the relationship in that case between reviews and the identities of their authors?

And beyond even the architecture of ratings and reviews on your site, think about the ongoing maintenance requirements. How will you moderate reviews? What's your policy for appropriate content? What legal considerations do you need to address?

So yes, do add ratings and reviews--just don't let any technology vendors tell you it's as easy as installing something on your server.

Setting Up a Corporate Blog: Easy as 1,2,3

Readers familiar with my sense of humor will recognize the title of this post as being, of course, tongue-in-cheek. Like anything worth doing, setting up a corporate blog is difficult. There are numerous issues to work through, from technological to legal—not to mention selling blogging through the gauntlet of marketing, PR, and executive circles in the first place, no small feat in many corporate contexts.

Without a doubt, the biggest challenge in creating a corporate blog is to secure active participation and engagement from authors who can contribute great content.

Still, there are some steps you can take to increase the likelihood of a your blogging program succeeding. Here it is, the three-step breakdown! (Is there anything that can't be turned into an "easy as 1,2,3" blog post?)

 

Step 1: Cultivate Content Authors

Identify a core group of blog contributors, and get them engaged. To the extent possible, formalize their blogging efforts as part of their jobs. Give them public recognition.

Remember, the best people to blog aren't the people with the words "Director of" in their job titles. This is a common mistake--but directors, managers, VPs and the like are busy, and they often aren't as engaged with the work practice as they are with leading and managing. They're probably the people least likely to blog consistently. However, they're probably the people who are best qualified to help you identify the real contributors.

What you're looking for are people with two key qualities: Passion for the work, and comfort expressing themselves in writing.

Stay in constant touch with your core group. Send them links. Ask them for their opinions. Give them ownership.

But don't let the core group become an exclusive group. Extend the invitation to contribute as broadly as you can. Actively solicit contributions from new authors--you never know who might catch fire and become a consistent contributor.

 

Step 2: Create an Editorial Calendar

What we're talking about here is not a proscriptive list of posts you'd like to have written, but an "inspiration list" of topic ideas to help contributors think of stuff to write about.

Get your core group together, and brainstorm a list. This early conversation will help get everybody on the same page about what kinds of things will be included in the blog. You should emphasize the opportunity to address a breadth of topics and stress the freedom of individual authors to take their writing in any direction they feel is appropriate.

Show your core group a couple sample posts from blogs you like, including both short and long posts. Emphasize that a wide range of posts is desirable--folks should be think about their effort as more akin to writing an email than writing a white paper, but a few white-paper level posts won't hurt a thing.

 

Step 3: Develop Guidelines, Policies, and Processes

Editorial guidelines are about communicating your requirements as clearly as possible to authors. It's about helping them understand the legal and ethical requirements, and it's the place to communicate the line between appropriate and inappropriate content.

Your policy, on the other hand, is a legal document. Have a lawyer help you with it. Publish it on your blog. There are some specific requirements about copyright, privacy, and so forth that you need to address.

In terms of process, you need to figure out what level of editorial support you'll provide authors. At a minimum, it's a good idea to approve posts before publishing them, so at least two sets of eyes confirm every post's compliance with your policies. At the other end of the spectrum, highly-engaged editorial support can make it easier for authors to crank out content while ensuring high quality--and don't worry, a good editor won't dampen the individuality of your authors' voices.

Lastly, create an explicit policy for moderation. You need clearly-communicated rules about what comments can be published, and you need to enforce the rules consistently and transparently. I encourage you to think very liberally about publishing critical comments.

 

That's it. A very boiled-down step-by-step to get started. For more, I recommend you pick up The Corporate Blogging Book. I've just started reading it, but it's good and very thorough.

A Marketers' Guide to Social Network Popularity by Country

It's been some time since I've been part of a marketing strategy conversation that didn't include some element addressing social networks. Nine times out of 10, the conversation starts with: "We need to do something on MySpace." (The other one of 10 times, it's "We need to do something on Facebook.")

I'm all for it. Reach out to customers in their native online environments, and engage customers through their relationships.

But don't just assume you need to go big in social networks because social networks are big. This can be just another version of the tool-centric, shiny object approach I find myself mitigating almost daily in this busy and fascinating 2008. Think through instead:

• How important are social networks in the digital landscape of my customers?
• Which social networks are they using?
• Am I prepared to engage ongoingly with social networks? (One of my colleagues said, "Web sites are like sharks: If they stop moving they die." That isn't 100% true of sharks, nor is it it of web sites, but of social media marketing efforts it might be.)

If you're marketing to teenagers, especially teenage girls, and increasingly Gens Y and X, you actually do really need to think about social networks--not as a discrete campaign but as a facet of an ongoing strategy to engage users of social technology.

So, per the title of this post, here's a great resource sent over by my colleague Justin Marshall:

Réseaux sociaux : des audiences différentes selon les continents
LEMONDE.FR | 14.01.08

Awesome map here, plus the whole thing has a SUPER FABULOUS French accent. Enjoy.