Mining the Business Value of the Social Web: Behavioral Metadata

As an information architect, I work with metadata a lot. I help define interfaces based on information about the content. For example, an object on a home page might be the "newest" object in a system, or it might be a rotating series of "newest" objects by each "author" with "home page" authority. See my other posts on quality and self-organization in the presentation layer if you want more on that.

I work at a company with a strong focus on performance-driven design, and so I work constantly with web analysts, who specialize in understanding behavior on web sites and using that behavioral data to drive business decisions, and I work constantly with designers, researchers, and information architects whose focus is creating innovative, valuable stuff people want to use.

I'm working where I work partly because I think there's tremendous potential in the intersection of information architecture and web analytics, in particular on the social web.

While some companies have been implementing sophisticated web analytics programs for years, many are just starting to measure behavior on their sites. Very frequently, there's lots of data collected but no real plan for taking action based on it.

At the same time, many companies are just beginning to experiment with social media marketing. They're getting out there and participating, and their customers are creating content, but that content is hard to present meaningfully, and partly because of that most social media marketing efforts fail to realize their full promise.

And naturally, the new focus on measurement and data raises the question of how the success of those social media marketing efforts should be measured. I've posted in the past about measuring communities, and there are a lot of people out there contributing to that discussion. What I think is frequently overlooked, though, is behavioral data helping to create value in social systems. Not data about value, but data creating value.

I made this handy chart to help explain what I mean. Click the image for a more-legible view:

 

When users interact with web sites, information about their behavior accumulates--information attached both to the user as object and content as object. That information about people and the things they do--what's called behavioral or tacit metadata--tells a lot about people and content. And in complex, emergent and self-organizing systems, behavioral metadata is especially powerful, because in those kinds of systems it's a challenge on the one hand to present content in meaningful ways and on the other hand to generate business intelligence to drive smart decisions.

As content and people increasingly cross freely between domains in the emerging standards-based social universe, I think we'll see a shift in business models from today's focus on owning content to a new focus on owning the metadata about the content and the people interacting with the content. I'll risk a prediction: In a short time, behavioral metadata, the information about what people do with content, will be more valuable than the content itself.

What do you think?

Comments

[Jay Fienberg]

Apropos of your prediction, one might look at Google as a prototype for a meta-content-oriented web business. Their operation is essentially one of capitalizing on data about user behavior in relationship to data about content.

btw, some people have suggested that there is this thing called "implicit metadata," meaning the same thing as you're calling "behavioral metadata." I think behavior data or activity data is the key concept, so I like your phrase better. Also, as tends to happen around the jargony-sloppiness of the concept of metadata, people also use "implicit metadata" to mean something totally different than what you mean! But, you can find some references to what you're calling behavioral metadata as "implicit metadata" in books like David Weinberger's "Everything is Miscellaneous."

Also, relative to your chart, I'd like to imagine it with a 3rd overlapping circle representing user created content (or, really, dynamic content in general). Basically, the intersection includes another circle reflective of the dynamic creation of (new) content. Specifically, behavior can effect and be effected by the act of creating (especially when the content creator is acting in a system defined in part by social behaviors).

[Ryan]

Thanks for the note, Jay. As always, you have your finger on the pulse.

Google is the prototypical exemplar of the business model I'm describing, without a doubt. I didn't say it because I didn't want to be, you know, a fanboy. But those dudes are smart.

And like you, I dislike the term "implicit" metadata, as much because it's not meaningful as because it's misused.

I think the big hurdle for behavioral metadata as both business intelligence and intelligent presentation of content is cost to implement. Maybe Google will release the tool that brings it within reach?