Web Social Architecture

Crafting a Great Community / Social Media Policy

I've said before that there are three crucial elements of online community policy: Legality, appropriateness, and relevance. I'm now thinking that there's actually a "hierarchy of needs" among those three, and that taken together and put into practice, they are much more than a set of rules for what's ok to do in the community. They’re more like a social contract, a creator of quality and value.

 

Legality isn’t exactly black and white, as you’d sort of want it to be. But it is quite straightforward in that you basically need to do what your lawyers tell you. In many cases there’s some education and negotiation, but there’s also a reason lawyers get paid a lot. In the end, you do what they say.

Likewise, appropriateness is pretty easy. You generally rule out profanity and abuse. From there you can dial the politeness requirements up or down to suit your needs. In fantasy football, for example, smack talk is part of the fun; in a forum for survivors of childhood sexual abuse, behavioral standards are much higher.

But deciding what's relevant and what isn't is a very different story. I consulted, for example, with REI on their online community strategy and governance, and there are a few great examples from that exercise of how challenging relevance is to define:

 

• It’s tempting for an outdoor retailer with a merchandising focus to align community discussions with its product taxonomy. But REI doesn’t sell photography stuff, and photography is a huge part of many people’s outdoor experience. They want to talk about it. So, this one isn’t too tough, right? How about:

 

• Would it be ok to talk about snowmobiling? To post photos and videos of snowmobiling? What about heli-skiing? REI’s focus on stewardship and sustainable enjoyment of the outdoors makes this tough, because most cross-country skiers despise snowmobiles, and heli-skiing is accessible only to the well-off. And then there’s the whole snowmobiles in Yellowstone thing. Yikes. But wait:

 

• In regions like Texas, among the outdoor activities most enjoyed by REI customers are hunting and fishing. Would it be ok on an REI web site to post a photo of yourself posing with the elk you just shot? The poor barefoot hikers in Portland would pass out! But the folks in Plano, or Missoula, would get it. So maybe the elk feels like an extreme example. What about a photo of your six-year-old proudly displaying the day’s catch of bluegill?

 

The thing is, these are brand questions. And when you involve customers in content creation, you expose yourself to all the variety of your customers’ senses of what your brand is all about, from regional variation to variation in taste and preference.

It’s messy. And yes, you have to exercise control. But a degree of openness is also critical, and not only because people won’t participate in a system they perceive as restricting their self-expression. Online community and social media represent a tremendous opportunity to give customers an emotional stake in the brand, a sense of ownership that will increase value at the far end of the funnel—increasing loyalty and generating word of mouth advocacy.

Craft your policies—both outward-facing in community settings and inward-facing for managing your own company’s social media activity—not with the mindset that you need to restrict activity or restrain creative self-expression, but with the mindset that you need to enable creativity and empower participants. I think of it as analogous to sports: The rules are there to make the game safe, fair, and fun—not to keep people from playing.

How Twitter Promotes Quantity to the Detriment of Quality, And Why Twitter Matters Nonetheless

My Twitter experiment was a “successful failure.”

I started an experiment a few weeks ago, basically using Twitter differently than I had previously. Until then, I'd only followed people I know personally--friends, family, colleagues, and professional acquaintances. But a couple weeks ago, I decided to try following everyone who follows me.

This is not a large number of people by Twitter standards (a couple hundred), but I was immediately annoyed with Twitter, and I stopped looking at it for a while. The people I was using Twitter to keep tabs on were simply drowned out by the deluge of incoming tweets, which I found almost entirely uninteresting and not at all useful.

I didn't give up. I created a group in TweetDeck for people I know personally, so I could follow them separately from my full collection of tweeters. That kind of worked on my computer, but it didn’t work on my phone--I never used poor, neglected Twidroid any more. I had to turn off the updates.

I started sort of hating Twitter. What I thought was interesting, though, was people sending me messages thanking me for following them. "You're... uh... welcome...?"

That was what raised the question:

Why do people on Twitter care how many people are following them?

The answer is, because Twitter wants it that way. The affordance for social capital on Twitter is all about quantity: How many following, how many followers, and how many updates posted. The measure of a person, in Twitter, is all about the total amounts accumulated:

The display of these measures represents just a fraction of the text on a Twitter page, just a few pixels of space—but they’re critical, because they are the attributes attached to the representation of my identity. Effectively, they are me, and I am valued on the basis of their accumulation. Other people, at a glance, get a sense of who I am that’s based on the amount of stuff I have, and not what kind of stuff, and not on the value of that stuff.

This is a bad thing. As Twitter’s massive increase in number of users the last few months has started to illustrate, an increase in users also increases the breadth of topics, decreasing the signal to noise ratio. Six months ago, when Twitter was populated mainly by a relatively narrow group of social software and Web aficionados, there was a stronger sense of Twitter being a community. Today there’s much less topical focus, and Twitter’s limitations as a social tool have become much more readily apparent.

The fix: Build quality-based social capital.

What if, instead of showing, underneath my photo and name, the number of people I follow, the number of people following me, and the number of times I’ve posted, Twitter showed data that reflected the value of my activity? For example, what if my Twitter identity were associated with the percentage of my posts replied to, favorited, and re-tweeted by others?

I’m going to go ahead and suggest that this tweak would substantially alter the way people use Twitter—for the better. Because the measure of a person would be their ability to consistently create value, people would be encouraged to be more interesting. But notice that the measures I’m suggesting don’t reflect the number of people finding any particular tweet valuable, only the percentage of tweets found interesting by someone. That’s an important difference, because it says you don’t need to play to the crowd—that one-to-one value counts the same as one-to-many value. So you don’t have to be interesting to lots and lots of people, only interesting to a single person.

And there’s more here yet: Because the social capital of the system would be tied to recognition by others, the system would encourage connections that were active, and based on mutual attention and interest. “Capital” here works in the sense of “currency.” We’d pass it back and forth—if I like your tweet, I reward you with a reply, a retweet, or a favorite. My doing so counts for you. You look for an opportunity to reciprocate.

Quality and value, when rewarded, are fundamentally self-reinforcing. So if Twitter supported quality and value, great ideas would be passed along more, reaching more people. Reputation and credibility would flow from meaningful contribution. Relationships grounded in mutual helpfulness would flourish.

Now, as Twitterers like the prolific Nancy White illustrate, quality and quantity are not mutually exclusive. And it’s certainly better to have more good stuff than it is to have only some good stuff. So a shortcoming of my suggestion is that it doesn’t reward the consistent creation of value over time, or put another way, the creation not only of consistent value but of a LOT of it, consistently.

Batting average only counts beyond a threshold of at-bats. Total home runs matters only relative to years played. If Ichiro goes 4-for-4 in the season opener, he’s batting a thousand, but that doesn’t yet qualify his season for any discussion of the all-time best. So the real answer, if we’re going to get serious about it, is for Twitter to create a quality algorithm and use that as the measure of an individual’s contribution.

Twanalyst is a gesture in the right direction. It’s a service that analyzes Twitter accounts across a number of quality-focused dimensions, resulting in a (sort of cheesy) personality test: I am very pleased to tell you I am a “chatty coherent guru.” Yes!

Kind of fun, but what I actually really like about Twanalyst is that it’s looking primarily at the nature of what you’re doing on Twitter, rather than the amount of it. That, I believe, is the future on an increasingly noisy web.

Speaking of the future, what about Twitter’s future?

At this point, it’s kind of common knowledge that Twitter has passed a… can I say… Twipping point. As Twitter gets huge, and as the purchase offers get bigger, which direction it takes—toward signal or noise—will help determine its fate as a social application.

Will Twitter end up yet another spammy channel, a trivialized feature of a larger social network, under pressure to monetize? Or will it add a valuable layer of ambient awareness to rich, multi-channel online relationships? I’m rooting for the latter, not just because I’m a fan of Twitter (I am), but because I want to live in a digital future where quality, meaning, order, and value trump unwanted noise.

 

But what I’ve said here is also kind of wrong. The story (like stories always are) is more complicated.

Despite all that—despite the shortcomings of a system that rewards meaningless connections, high volumes of worthless posts, and claiming to listen to more people than anyone possibly could—the truth is we can’t ignore Twitter.

And there’s a reason it’s hard to get comfortable with that truth. Twitter, in the midst of its deluge of valueless tweets, also produces a kind of magic: The collective value of all the noise has a tremendous potential to add up to something meaningful—something with a value beyond what any particular contributor can produce. As the Moldova uprising most recently illustrated, and as did the presidential election and Katrina did before it, Twitter, at its best, is a powerful venue for the expression of real-time collective intelligence. And that’s where businesses need to stand up and pay attention.

Leadership in Three Easy Steps

I was on the road a lot in the early and late parts of 2008, which is fortunately not something I have to do a lot most of the time. I am not a fan of business travel. But there's a single note I took during all those road days that sticks with me still. I'd almost say it made it worthwhile. (But, let's get real. I missed my kids.) I'll share:

Martin Sorrell, CEO of WPP, the parent company of the company I work for, said something that was well worth the 18 hours of travel to get to a conference in Athens. Yes, Athens Greece, not Athens Georgia. Long flight(s).

Leadership, he said, is three things:

"Vision, alignment, and execution. That's it."

I take it as a given that we all lead, as well as follow. So this isn't about rank, seniority, or the org chart. It's about effective leadership, period. And it's clear that the best "anointed leaders" in effective organizations know how to "follow" their most junior colleagues at the right times.

Vision. Alignment. Execution.

I could expound for a while on each of those, and end up with a nice, meaty blog post, but I give you more credit. What a great, simple way to encapsulate such a difficult practice! Sorrell said it well.

How to Give Customers a Say in Community Policy and Moderation

Here's an anonymized approach from some recent client work, in which we're developing a global branded community. Questions around policy and moderation have raised a bunch of interesting issues around how to manage brand in a large-scale user-generated content environment, where there's significant variation among "local" or micro- communities within the community at large.

The approach we're recommending hinges on top-down / bottom-up approaches to both policy and moderation. Let me explain.

When you define a community policy, there are three broad concerns you need to address: appropriateness of behavior, brand-relevance of content, and legality. Legality is something your lawyers need to work out, and in my experience there's a great deal of variety in terms of corporate comfort levels with legal risk. All I can say is, get Legal involved early. But appropriateness and brand-relevance are less clear-cut. A number of parties within the organization need to weigh in--and so does the community itself. Here's a picture from a recent presentation that illustrates the concept:

 

 

Here's some of what's going on in the diagram: The idea of social contract has to do with the appropriateness dimension of community policy. You can think of it this way: The policy makes explicit the unspoken agreement between you and your customers, and among your customers, about how it's ok to behave in the community. The social contract gets communicated implicitly by example and through social feedback and captured explicitly--defined--in the community policy. Legality and brand-appropriateness are likewise defined at a corporate level. And those three elements taken together are the policy. The policy is defined, in other words, centrally.

But policies need to be interpreted in actual practice and scrutinized as they are applied. Moderators need to apply it as a guide for their work, community managers apply it as they engage with the community, and individuals within the community apply the policy through self-moderation--moreover, the community itself responds and reacts to the applications of the policy.

So how does this work in practice? Here's one way.

 

 

The key here is that the site includes two separate content domains. Think of them as sets of pages that hold content related to local areas only, and pages that hold content of global relevance. Individual content objects might belong to one or both of those domains, but  they're managed, in effect, separately.

The way this works, basically, is that there are two sets of moderators--global moderators, who manage content on pages relevant across all areas, and local moderators, who manage content on pages relevant only to a local community. These sets of moderators include both corporate staff and individuals within the community.

At the local level, local judgements trump global judgements. So content that's inappropriate for the broader audience on the global level might still be appropriate at the local level. And the opposite holds true as well. In each case, the policy defined at the corporate level is interpreted and applied at the local level, enabling the community to hold together within the structure of a common policy while accommodating a degree of difference within local contexts.

This is just one approach, but I think it's pretty interesting. The real challenge, I believe, arises inevitably as businesses engage users in interpretation and enforcement of brand-appropriateness as expressed through on-topicness. Is it ok to talk about snowmobile apparel on a site about cross-country skiing? In some communities, probably. But, but! What are the ramifications for the brand?

Yes, engaging users exposes the brand identity itself to scrutiny by its customers. What a challenge! But who better to have that conversation? I'm fascinated--but it's a topic for another post.

Have you had experience with defining, interpreting, or enforcing a community policy, online or off? I'd love to hear what you learned.

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?

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.

Separating the Wheat from the Chaff: Quality in Emergent Social Content

Users create tons of terrible content!

We must not say so. We'll say instead, users create content that ranges widely in terms of its degree of interest to other users.

I've been doing a ton of work on quality the past few weeks, in several different contexts. Consider the following challenges:

1. Our design for a client's corporate group blog includes a prominent list of "Most Popular" posts. In this context, where the blog is fully integrated with the main site via primary navigation, we expect many non-regular blog readers to wander over to the blog landing page, and we want to increase the likelihood that they'll see something both compelling and fresh.
2. Another client's technical support forums include thousands of posts, many of them addressing the same or similar issues, and only one of them providing the single best solution for a particular user's problem at a particular time. The most common handful of solutions address 90% of user's issues.
3. A client's social media site uses a set of algorithms based on user behavior to rank user-created content objects, and the best are exposed on the home page of the site. However, their exposure on the home page garners them more attention than average, strengthening their ranking and producing static "best" lists. The rich get richer.
4. A client's community site is wide-open, allowing posting on a range of subject areas. The home page of the site shows the most popular posts, but the popular posts have tended to be less than germane to the business rationale behind the site.

Let me take a step back, though, and talk a bit about the general approaches to organizing emergent user-generated content:

 

Emergent Content

Emergent content is content that shows up automatically, based on a set of rules. No single person decides what content is visible and what content isn't. Instead, content objects appear in various contexts based on attributes encoded in their metadata. Sometimes this means the good stuff shows up, sometimes it means stuff shows up based on similarity to other stuff, sometimes it means complentariness, and so on.

In the business, we call it "The Magic of the Web."

 

Algorithmic Approaches

In many contexts, especially on web sites with huge volumes of user-created content, quality is derived algorithmically, based on user behavior. And user behavior can be thought of as including explicit behavior like voting and rating and implicit behavior as well. For example, the number of people viewing a video object can reflect its quality--and beyond that, quality measures can include views of the entire video, comments on the video, time on page for the video, qualified page views, and more. And other measures can reflect negatively on the video's quality--incomplete views, time on page below a qualifying threshold, bounce rate, and more. 

Bits and pieces of behavioral metadata stick to content objects--less like fingerprints than like the folded corners, weakened binding, marginalia, and coffee stains on an often-loaned book--and provide a basis for us to construct the rules that govern how the objects behave.

Algorithmic approaches to measuring quality take into account a combination of these measures in ways appropriate to the type of object and culture of the site. Which measures are more important (and how much more important) depend on the context of user needs and business requirements--every site is unique. "Quality" is quantifiable only with the right formula.

The most bad-ass example of algorithmically-derived quality is, no doubt, the Explore category on Flickr. Based on its concept of "Interestingness," Flickr finds photos that are interesting and shows them in views filterable by date, camera, location, tag, and tag cluster.

What's so amazing about the Flickr Explore feature is that it's constantly refreshed and the photos are always, indeed, interesting. Flickr has an advantage: Millions of content objects. Naturally, the best hundred are pretty darn good.

 

Editorial Approaches

As appealing as is the idea the bottom-up, self-organizing content architecture, editorial participation has a key role to play in many branded online communities. First and foremost, an editorial presence can provide a human face for the company, a point of social contact between the community and the brand. An editorial presence can also model appropriate behavior, highlight the kind of contributions that best serve the needs of the community, and speak for the brand without being perceived as a constraining or intervening voice. It just has to be done with a delicate touch.

A while back I wrote about a quality problem on the social media site Treemo. Since I wrote that post, Treemo has rearchitected its home page, which used to highlight popular content, to feature editorially-selected content. The result is a much stronger affordance on the home page for content that aligns with the site's mission. Over time, that affordance will help improve the overall quality of content on the site--though Treemo's too-simplistic separate display of most viewed, favorited, and commented still render horrors upon the unsuspecting eye.

 

Hybrid Approaches

Combination approaches can offer the benefits of both algorithmic and editorial quality measures. Typically, an initial level of quality valuation emerges from user behavior, qualifying a top tier of content for editorial review.

A great example of the hybrid approach is JPGmag.com. JPG is a social media site, which announces a theme for a period of time and invites users to submit photos related to the theme. Users view photos one at a time and vote whether each photos is "good for (theme)." The experience is compelling, partly because the emergence of photos is affected by the votes of other users, so the photos that aren't voted up tend to disappear quickly. On the surface, the interaction is extremely simple. But there's some good, solid magic going on behind the scenes.

Photos that rise to the top based on user voting are qualified for review by the editorial panel, which selects photos for inclusion in the theme-based print edition of the magazine.

 

 

Beyond the Top-10 List

Ranking content objects based on quality makes possible some powerful uses of quality content--including but greatly improving on the typical idea of the "top 10" list. Quality can be superimposed on other metadata to produce content presentation that are both highly faceted and of high quality. For example, you can search Flickr for photos tagged "gorilla" within a geographic range limited to Rwanda, then sort the results by interestingness, and even filter by the type of camera you own. You can see the best photos of Rwanda's gorillas taken with your particular camera model, and see how your own adventure travel pictures measure up.

Amazon's customer reviews page is another great example. Customer-written product reviews are ranked based on a simple "usefulness" vote by users. Amazon highlights the most helpful reviews above and below a rating threshold. The most helpful favorable and unfavorable reviews appear side by side, an instant conversation that socializes the shopping experience, adds credibility to the buying process, and creates a unique value for online shoppers.

 

 

Quality in Action

All of the challenges I described earlier require a solution with some kind of quality measure. Over the past three or four years, I've found that my information architecture work is less about labeling and organizing content and more about creating mechanisms to apply descriptors and rules to govern emergence. As user-created content becomes more important, the IA work happens at a remove. It also feels more critical to get it right and to design flexible systems that can adapt to unpredictable user behavior.

Likewise, new possibilities to create value have emerged--and quality is just the beginning. Let me know what you think, and stay tuned for more posts on this topic.

A Simple Formula for Online Trust

Online consumers, bless their hearts, are skeptical. Rightly so. Their communication channels are saturated with ads from people who want their money. From web site banners and popup ads, it gets worse: Having long since ruined our inboxes and mandated "fake" email addresses (I have three dedicated to spam-inducing activities like online shopping), advertising has moved on to our IM clients, our social network sites, even our mobile devices via SMS.

Everyone's selling. And gosh darn it, online sellers are pushy. And, frequently, they're deliberately deceptive. (The whack-a-mole banner ads get me every time!) This creates a challenging situation for marketers who want to create genuine value in online social spaces: Internet users are extremely sensitive to, and generally averse to, online marketing.

Getting it right is tricky. Everyone's after the most elusive of brand qualities: Authenticity. Everyone wants to create relationships with their customers, to be trusted. And the difficulty of accomplishing that can be measured by the rise of the host of online marketing consultants and technology startups with turnkey solutions for all your trust needs.

In that spirit, I'll offer up my own solution:

Creating a trustworthy brand presence in cyberspace couldn't be easier. Just follow this simple formula:

 

                        

 

 

 

 

 

Of course, I'm joking, kinda. Because the real key to being trusted is to be trustworthy in the first place. And ironically, being worthy of customer trust is harder than it sounds.

Still, the ideas in this "formula" are important.

By "authority," I mean visible expertise, the undeniable kind that makes you a resource for people needing accurate, comprehensive information. By "passion," I mean emotionality. Excitement, fired-upness.

The combination of authority and passion is critical. Neither works without the other, because trust requires both credibility and emotional connection. Consumers want to connect with humans, not brands, and when we need information--to keep our gadgets running, or to make a health care decision--we want to get it from a human we trust.

Transparency is the antidote to online consumers' skepticism. To some degree, exposing your mistakes helps. Giving air time to your critics helps. Admitting you were wrong helps. The occasional typo helps.

My overall message: There is no formula for online trust. Start by being trustworthy. And from there, seek out ways to bring your whole self to your online relationships, speak with confidence, be right (most of the time), show your excitement, and take your customers on tours behind the curtain.

Your Online Community Beta Program: Metcalfe's Law and the Cold Start

Two Approaches to Solving the Cold Start Problem

Part of the challenge of launching online communities is offering something valuable for participants right from the start. Think of it this way: When the value of the system is provided by users, the system has nothing to offer its first user. So why would the first person to show up have any interest in sticking around?

This challenge is known as the "cold start problem," and there are two important ways to address it. One is to provide interesting content and present opportunities to engage with it. The other is to seed the community with participation from an invited group of people who have a reason to help you.

We've used these two methods in combination recently on Microsoft's The Art of Office and on Helio's The New Social Etiquette. In both cases, it's begun to work: we're seeing increases in both traffic and registrations. Content, and the value potential of the good content, is starting to accumulate.

But neither site is really there yet, in terms of offering instantly perceivable value. How do we get them there? And how long will it take?

Metcalfe's Law Provides Some Guidance

Metcalfe's Law says the value of a social system is proportionate to the square of the number of users:

I love that kind of stuff! Here it is expressed in a line graph:

 

Now, I do think you could overstate the relevance of this principle to online communities, because it assumes, for example, that all "value" is created equal. There's a lot more to value than volume of activity. I also think there's a ceiling on value, because at a certain point the value provided by the site starts to become redundant. However, Metcalfe's Law remains very useful as a way of thinking about managing an online community launch.

The line graph above has another assumption built into it: That the number of users increases in a linear manner. Not true out in the wild, but in a controlled beta situation, this is more or less "equivalent to" accurate (in the same way value is, according to Metcalfe, "proportionate to" the number of users squared).

Nonetheless, the important message of Metcalfe's Law holds true: Value can increase at an exponential rate relative to the number of users. (See my post on the early woes of Treemo for an example of the opposite being true.) This is especially important to consider in a beta environment.

Metcalfe's Law Applied to a Beta Program

A common misconception is that Web 2.0 beta programs are designed to provide a preview to the site before it's fully functional. Not so. That is, it shouldn't be so. Your beta program should be designed to accrue value for your site to the extent that casual users will consider it valuable enough to engage.

Your beta program should get you to the point where your site's value crosses the threshold of perceived quality--the point where new users instantly recognize the value of the site and want to participate.

 

But how do you know when you're there? How do you know when your users consistently think your site rocks? How can you be sure enough to bet the cost of your expensive launch PR campaign that people will like the site and want to use it?

There's one good way: Survey first-time users in your beta program, users who aren't biased by their familiarity with the site.

Yes, this means you need to keep adding users as your beta site matures. In, kind of, a linear way. Because only first-time users can tell you whether other first-time users will get the impression that your site rocks, that is, that enough value has accrued to make the value of the site obvious.

 

When the value of the site reaches a point where people begin to spread the word, then the increase in the number of users becomes subject to a network effect, increasing exponentially and sparking a proportional increase in the rate of value accrual. 

Like so:

 

You can imagine the potential: People go nuts, they throw you a parade, and so on.

Hey, it's worth a try! Why shouldn't you have a parade?

Creating an Online Community is Like Parenting

In the next couple weeks, we'll be launching two very interesting community sites for major clients, one in a private beta and the other ready for prime-time. I'll post a bit on why I think they're interesting as they come out.

Over the past months, we've been working hard to prepare our newish-to-community clients for the level of attention that's going to be required from them as their new community sites start to wake up. If they don't know what they're getting into, well, I'd have to say that's our fault--and on the other hand, it's probably also true that nothing can really prepare you.

The run-up to launch has been typical, with mysterious bugs, conflicting ideas about what decisions are most current, sudden late-night panic attacks--the works... just like with any site. But there's a difference. In these cases, the real work is just about to get started.

Yes, your first community site is like your first child. You spent months preparing for the birth. You thought pregnancy was pretty tough. Then the baby arrives....

And like a child, your community will exhaust and frustrate you, but it will also amaze and delight you. It will reinvigorate you and fill you with a new sense of purpose. It will remind you why you're here in the first place.

Your community will rebel against you. It will rage against and defy you. It will call you on every little mistake you make. Ultimately, you'll sense at certain moments, it loves you and wants to be with you (unlike a real child, it has a choice about whether to pay attention to you at all), and it wants you to love it back.

Companies launching into the brave new world of online community and Web 2.0 need to remember, your community is not your web site. Your community is made of humans, and your web site is where they have relationships with each other and with you. Be prepared to nurture those relationships.

The worst thing you can do is throw the switch and walk away, unless you want to see your neglected kid, for the first time in a week, on the nightly news. Goodness, imagine what the neighbors would say!

So my advice is the same for aspiring Web 2.0 corporate marketers as for starry-eyed young couples considering parenthood: "If you feel moved to it, by all means go for it. Just be ready for your business model to change forever."