Web Social Architecture

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.

Straw Horse: An Enterprise Social Media Platform Feature List

We did an internal exercise recently that produced a list of the advanced features we think are crucial for a successful enterprise social media platform. The idea is that functionality for user participation across every owned venue should draw upon a central system, enabling a multifaceted approach to CRM, data analysis, reporting—and ultimately leveraging distributed corporate efforts to generate enterprise business intelligence.

I’ll share the results of that exercise here, with the caveat that this is undoubtedly a partial list only. Your comments and suggestions are welcome, of course!

I helped think through this some of this stuff, but the bulk of the credit (including for the writing) goes to my ZAAZ colleague Ariel van Spronsen. We also had input from another longtime friend and colleague of mine, Gary Carlson, an expert on enterprise metadata management. Enjoy:

 

Reputation (authority systems)

When properly implemented, reputation systems are excellent for creating trust and motivating users to participate at greater and greater levels of engagement. When implemented poorly, High volume of participation or seniority are rewarded—the key to getting reputation right is to focus on the quality of the contribution, not the amount of it.

In implementations where credibility matters, reputation is critical. See this great presentation from Bryce Glass of Yahoo for more detail.

User management

The platform provides the opportunity for centralized management of user data and permissions, including authentication, account management, personalization, segmentation, and behavioral targeting.

User data can provide the connective link among multiple social networking implementations (personal, business group). Content owned by a user can be shared among these via permissions or syndication.

Identity services

A unified data repository means an individual user can centrally manage her public-facing identity, and also create a more robust data picture for the business .

Interfaces from the platform access custom degrees of information contained in the central identity.

Quality algorithms

User-generated ratings have important utility, but translating them directly to measure “quality” is fallible. Ratings are opinion-driven and the ability to control input is minimal. However, combined with analytics data using weighted algorithms quality becomes a more stable and useful metric that both users and business can trust.

Recommendation engine

An important use for user-generated data and analytics is the ability to enrich experiences with recommendations, prompting discovery and deeper engagement. A centralized social networking platform is primed to leverage this functionality.

Taxonomy-driven folksonomy

Tags are a powerful way to augment search and increase information “find-ability”. They also give the business a powerful view into how people are thinking about the tagged content.

A purely user-generated tag set (a “folksonomy “) has issues such as misspellings, tense shifts, and count (singular vs.. plural). A taxonomy-driven folksonomy maps user tags to a controlled vocabulary authority to allow for specific schema analysis.

Video, audio, and photo streams

A significant part of the communication among social networks will be in multimedia forms. Easy uploading, tagging, and sharing features will create a robust social media environment, greater user satisfaction, and increased engagement.

Mobile

The demand for social media in the mobile space is undeniable. Application development for a new breed of smartphones is rapidly increasing as the ability to manage social networking functions becomes a key differentiator for users. The platform should provide for mobile implementation as well as web and API calls, and it should support both content consumption and content production via mobile.

Custom syndication

Custom syndication allows users to filter and process feeds in ways that are meaningful to their specific information needs. Yahoo! Pipes is an example of a custom syndication mechanism.

Custom syndication can augment other elements of a social networking system, especially for a user group that is highly specialized in goal and purpose.

Social bookmarking

Social bookmarking functions promote the development of shared information collections among networked groups.

Collaborative filtration

Collaborative filtration gives users the ability to vote submissions (bookmarks, feeds, entries, etc.) up or down. A popular feed-based example of this is Digg. In the marketing realm, Dell’s IdeaStorm lets users identify the best ideas for product development.

Private groups

Ad hoc, user-created groups for sharing or collaboration can support communities of practice and leverage user data management features.

Microblogging

Twitter is perhaps the most ubiquitous example of microblogging, which invites low-threshold, stream-of-thought information sharing and ambient connection among networked groups. Link sharing, whether to photos or other assets, is pervasive in microblogging, creating connections that can be used in many ways.

Marketplace

A social networking platform could provide functionality for connecting people to products or services, offered by the company or by one another. Examples are Craigslist, eBay, and Xbox Live Marketplace. Marketplace connections give a strong view into communities’ product needs, and they also support, to varying degrees, the purchase process itself.

Chat

Instant communication among community members creates a synchronous communication layer that can be particularly useful within a collaborative environment for communities of practice.

Moderation Tools

Property owners need tools to support management of their users and communities, along with the structures to support governance and workflow at distributed and global levels.

 

I’m sure there are other ideas out there. and for that matter lots of ways to slice and dice what constitutes a “feature.” For example, is blogging a feature, or is discussion? Or are those both higher-order uses supported by features like WYSIWYG publishing, commenting, etc?

I don’t really want to get into an argument about that stuff, but I am very interested in what kind of emerging capabilities corporations need to support in order to realize the full promise of engaging with their constituencies online.

Do share!

Death of Email: Not a Minute Too Soon

Email is dead!

OK, maybe not yet, but the latest news certainly suggests the end is inevitable: Social networking has now passed email in global use. Here are the highlights (from Nielsen via Mashable):

New stats from Nielsen Online show that by the end of 2008, social networking had overtaken email in terms of worldwide reach. According to the study, 66.8% of Internet users across the globe accessed “member communities” last year, compared to 65.1% for email.

Some other key findings from the report:

- Globally, Facebook reaches 29.9% of global Internet users, versus 22.4% for MySpace.

- MySpace remains the most profitable social network, generating an estimated $1 billion in revenue versus $300 million for Facebook in 2008.

- Facebook is the top social network in all countries except Germany, Brazil, and Japan (Nielsen still has MySpace as tops in US in the report, but as of January ’09, that had changed).

- On Twitter, CNN, The New York Times, and BBC have the greatest reach among mainstream media companies as of late February.

Details are here: http://mashable.com/2009/03/09/social-networking-more-popular-than-email/

It’s worth mentioning that “member communities” is a pretty broad definition of social networking. It encompasses more, obviously, than formal Facebook-style social networks—it essentially includes every kind of online space where people can interact with each other!

What this points to for me is less that social networks are better than email and more that email is an obsolete tool. Simply put, there isn’t a single thing you can do with email that you can’t do better with a different tool. (And feel free to challenge that point if you like!)

The reason email, like the occasional tape deck, is still around is that it’s been a dominant norm for business communications for long enough that people depend on it. It's a standard.

But rest assured, in the same way email for personal social use is fading, it will also fade in business. It’s just a matter of time, and obviously it won’t happen overnight. And no, email won't disappear off the face of the earth. It'll go the way of snail-mail instead: Relegation to use by Luddites, a few innovative specialized uses (a la Netflix with snail-mail), and saturation with junk.

The transition to a new set of web-based communication and collaboration tools is already well underway, and it’s happening partly invisibly: The new web-based tools, for now, integrate really well with email. You can post to a Typepad blog through email, edit a SocialText wiki through email, update a Basecamp discussion thread through email, and so on. Email users the world over are, at this very moment, authoring blogs and editing wikis, some without knowing it!

The first step in supplanting a standard is to build in compatibility with it, and that's what the newer tools are doing. Email lovers beware! Your demise is at hand!

Ok ok, clearly I have a personal vendetta against email. My point is, so should everyone.

What do you think?

A Conceptual Map: The Mobile Web as a Social Space

Following last month's release of the iPhone 3G, along with the launch of the App Store, and what Brian Fling called the "first true Mobile 2.0," everyone around here is talking about the emergence of the mobile device as a critical facet of web strategy. My colleague Anders Rosenquist, who is seriously deep on mobile, presented a first take on the company point of view on mobile strategy at a recent meeting; another colleague, Justin Marshall, is knee-deep in an iPhone app; and in general things are just all abuzz about mobile.

And Brian has pretty much convinced me that mobile is, in fact, a huge deal. But I don't think it's a huge deal in quite the obvious way. The initial reaction to everyone's sudden attention to mobile seems to be along the lines of, "We need to make our web site accessible on mobile!"

Not so fast.

I got  a lot of help on this diagram from Anders and Justin. It's meant to be a framework for thinking about the mobile experience, in particular about how the mobile web experience is different from the web experience in general. There's quite a bit to debate in that question, and we could talk about it for hours. And of course, this kind of diagram certainly oversimplifies a very complex system in a complex space. It doesn't show all the elements, and it doesn't show all the relationships between the elements. What I hope it does do is provide a framework for thinking about the mobile space that makes it easier to uncover opportunities to create real value for real people.

I do think there are some issues unique to mobile that go beyond form factor, device compatibility, and the challenges of adapting content. Let's get this one out of the way: It's not enough to just take your web site, add some new CSS, and deliver it to the mobile device. If that doesn't strike you as self-apparent, bear with me.

In the longer term, the mobile device will become the hub of our social worlds, an indispensable tool for navigating our physical, cultural, and relational landscapes. Does that sound like an overstatement? I don't think it is.

Let's take a closer look at the major elements of the diagram above. Taken together they illustrate what I think is interesting about the human-centric view of mobile computing sketched above:

The mobile context is fundamentally different:

• A contact is the combination of 1) a person you know and 2) the ways you communicate with them. Because it goes with you everywhere and it directly enables communication with people, the mobile device is the logical primary home for contacts.
• Task orientation is the focus on a single primary task at any given moment. The mobile device lends itself to neither multitasking nor complex tasks. Unless you're waiting through a flight delay or sitting on a train somewhere, your focus on the mobile web is probably singular, with a specific goal and a discrete activity. And as mobile evolves to support more kinds of tasks, a self-reinforcing cycle will emerge, where the mobile device becomes the device of preference for an increasing number of activities.
• Location awareness is a critical differentiator between the mobile and, um, non-mobile web experience. Whether or not the device itself includes location awareness per se, the context of use is, well, mobile--away from the desk, network-independent, and out in the analog world we'll always call home. And the more things you can accomplish untethered from your desk chair, the more time you'll spend that way.

And the mobile device has a different relationship to content:

• Regardless of the advances in the browsing experienced introduced by the iPhone, the mobile device will not soon become the preferred medium for web surfing. Mobile content will be increasingly targeted, driven by subscription, syndication, filtering. It will adapting dynamically to the context of use: Locations, tasks, and relationships.
• Web sites have a different relationship with content consumed on the mobile device. The New York Times site will still be the New York Times site, of course--web sites per se aren't going anywhere. But the mobile context creates demand for different uses of the site: The site will increasingly function as a container we interact with through services like syndication. My friend Chris uploads baby photos to Flickr, I subscribe to Chris, and his photos are delivered to my device. The site is a holder of content, syndication is the delivery mechanism, and the device is the receiver; and, APIs deliver content to the site from, you guessed it, the mobile device:
• Artifacts are the things we create on our mobile devices, like pictures and videos. Part of the reason I think mobile really lends itself to social applications is that it is both a producer and consumer of content: A two-way channel between you and the world. And not just any world or the world at large, but the world of your choosing, your place and time, your relationships.

So the most important difference between the mobile web experience and the computer-based web experience is that the mobile web has a context of use that features place and activity: What I've labeled on this diagram Task Orientation and Location Awareness. Also, the mobile device, unlike desktop and even laptop computers, is essentially a communication device. Its heritage remains the cell phone, and its core use, despite its profound evolution the past several years, is to enable communication between people. It's the context that's different for mobile.

Developing web sites and services for mobile requires a keen sense of this different context. Users of your mobile site are out and about--and they're less likely to be reading the New York Times or researching a health care topic than they are to be trying to get directions to a restaurant where someone is waiting for them, maybe take a quick look at the menu, and send their friend a quick SMS apology and ETA.

None of this is to minimize the challenges of designing and developing for mobile. There are still a bunch of screen sizes to deal with, hundreds of devices with different functionality, and no fully-effective standard for adapting content to the variety of requirements. And as important as the iPhone is, it's still only a small slice of the overall market. These are all real challenges you still have to address.

Nonetheless, the opportunity is huge, and soon you might not be able to afford to ignore mobile. Look to Asia and northern Europe for a sense of mobile's future importance in the US.

So what does your business have to offer your customers via mobile? And maybe even more importantly, what do your customers have to offer each other?

Innovative Uses of Portable Content: A New Category of Products and Services?

I realized recently that several of my favorite things on the web have something in common. They're taking content that lives elsewhere and not just mashing it up, but transforming it into something new. I've started to think this approach might be part of the next generation of social media services--tools that take advantage of data portability in new ways.

We talk about data portability all the time in terms of newly-enabled distribution, and beyond a doubt, distribution is a huge benefit of widgets, APIs, standards, and syndication. But there's also a new opportunity to innovate, beyond viralizing, mashing up, or recontextualizing content. Some of my favorite tools go another step further, transforming the content itself. Let me explain.

Flickr, as regular readers of this blog are (all too?) aware, is my very most favorite web site. And Flickr's combination of public APIs and open-source projects has spawned a huge number of tools and services, like Flickr Graph, Shozu, and Mappr, that recontextualize photos from Flickr in all sorts of interesting ways. The problem with these services, from a business perspective, is the lack of a revenue model.

Printing digital photos, on the other hand, is a no-brainer. It was a big part of the revenue model for the earliest photo sharing sites, including KodakGallery and others, and it's a nice business. The problem with it is the lack of differentiation among the many competitors in that space. You have to either compete on price, build a reputation for superior quality, or retain exclusive access to the content itself.

A couple standout services go farther.

Moo basically just prints out your photos, like the all the similar services--but the difference is that they enable you to create distinctively-shaped business cards from your photos. And the shape of the card is really the thing that works. They're smaller than a standard business card, and proportionally longer. So they stand out, and in an interesting way, they're informal. Moo has really put forward a new version of a throwback product--the personal calling card. Moo transforms the personal digital assets hosted on Flickr into personalized, real-world artifacts--a new use for a thing you already have.

Animoto is a little different, in that its product stays on the digital side of the digital / analog frontier, but like Moo, they have taken advantage of an existing asset by transforming it into something else.

Using Animoto's web application, you can import your photos from any of a number of media hosts (including Flickr) and turn them into a movie. Animoto's user experience really stands out. The whole process is, dare I say it, simple. You import your pictures, arrange them, select or upload music, click a button, and a few minutes later Animoto spits out a polished, fun, unique movie you can import into all the social media contexts you'd expect.

Here's an Animoto video I threw together just for fun, starring a few of my colleagues. Took about 5 minutes to make.

Cool! Ok, maybe you had to be there. But what I love about Animoto is that it takes your photos and increases their entertainment and storytelling value--increasing the usefulness of your things.

There are many other examples of products and services that take advantage of portable content, and I think they represent an emerging category--and an emerging opportunity to create new kinds of value.

The Four C's of Social Technology Vendor Evaluation

We do a lot of helping clients pick technology solutions for social media and online community efforts. It's a big challenge, partly because the requirements are always a little different for every project and partly because there are so many community tools and platforms out there.

Obviously, vendor assessment and selection is complicated, and it's important to get it right. Most of the formal assessment processes I've seen do a great job of differentiating between products on the basis of their feature sets. But in the social media space, there are many, many players, the landscape changes quickly, and many of the products out there do a lot of the same stuff. The effort required to assess all the viable options is prohibitive. So, you need a simple way to narrow the field.

The other day I had an epic consulting moment, spontaneously creating a framework for simplifying the vendor selection process in the middle of talking in a meeting. OK, so it's not the theory of relativity, and it might not be perfect, and someone else might have a better idea, but moments of clarity are rare enough for me that I'll go ahead and claim this one, and call it "epic." Here it is:

The Four C's of Social Technology Vendor Evaluation: Capabilities, Cost, Compatibility, and Customization

Capabilities:  This is pretty straightforward. Does the tool do what you need it to do? Does it have all the required features? And less obviously: Does it have the flexibility to scale to accommodate unforeseen future needs?

The challenge here is that in the social software space, there is a great degree of feature parity. The major tools do most of the same stuff. That's why you need the other three C's.

Cost: Pick a tool you can afford! But beware the hidden costs of cheap tools, like maintenance, scaling license fees, extra customization, and lack of scalability. While on the one hand it's tempting to pay good money for a tool you can count on, on the other hand don't forget to evaluate open source and custom options--vendor management creates overhead, and the costs can surprise you.

Compatibility: Be careful with this one. Unless you're working on a fully standalone service, you're likely to be integrating your social tool with other systems--if not now, then in the future. Make sure your systems can talk to each other.

Customization: Most white-label tools out there are very flexible and can accommodate a great deal of customization. But you need to think through who will do the customizing. Does your in-house team have the bandwidth and capabilities? Some social technology platforms are built on proprietary scripting languages. Paying for customization can get the thing built, but it can also add significantly to the total cost.

 

There you have it. I hope that simple (simplistic?) framework helps. If you have other approaches, please do drop me a comment and share.

If you need a list of vendors to start from, there are a number of them out there, including this helpfully-annotated one I stumbled across a couple days ago.

Google Explores Participatory Search Results

Google’s success was built on their early recognition of the value of tacit social data (like linking, and more) to help gauge both relevance and quality in search results. Now it seems they’re moving toward an approach that combines their traditional algorithmic approach to search with an explicit voting system, where users vote individual results up or down for a given query. Here’s a demo:

Naturally, because it's Google, everyone's talking about this. For an overview, check out the  comment thread at TechCrunch:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/16/is-this-the-future-of-search/

In general, there’s great precedent for combined tacit / explicit quality measures. Users express preference and valuation in a number of different ways on different sites, and those expressions control which content shows up where. This works well. Digg and Reddit, for example, use yes / no voting systems like the one Google’s prototyping combined with algorithms; de.icio.us uses the act of bookmarking as an explicit expression of valuation in combination with tacit factors like timing; YouTube uses ratings combined with views and other factors; and Flickr uses a “secret” combination of views, comments, favorites, and other factors to identify the good stuff.

Applying this kind of explicit quality measure to search results is new, as far as I know. But does it make sense? I can imagine a couple problems:

First and foremost, how do you know whether an individual result is relevant and high-quality before clicking through the results page and accessing the resource? And if it’s exactly what you wanted, why would you go back to the results page and vote it up? There’s an assumption baked into the idea behind this that users have a strong enough investment in providing feedback on their searches that they’ll interrupt their task at hand to participate. I say, unlikely.

So if the best results aren’t getting voted up, an explicit voting system won’t reward them.

What will happen is that the results that look best on the search results page itself will get rewarded, and the results that look bad will get punished. So an important effect of this kind of system is that it will place a premium on optimizing the metadata that gets displayed on the search results page. Don’t forget those page headers!

One thing that I do think might motivate users to participate in this voting system is revenge. If you feel lied to or misled by the information displayed on a search results page, you might be a tad more likely to go back and register your displeasure. So, one of the effects could also be an improvement in the accuracy of search results page descriptions. Power to the people!

What do you think? Is Google on the right track here, providing an explicit feedback system, or are they just being lame Digg copycats?

Wendy Chisholm on Universal Design for Social Applications

Wendy Chisholm presented on Universal Design last week at the social media event at ZAAZ. Wendy is an independent consultant wrapping up a forthcoming book for O'Reilly on accessibility, and she's been involved with accessibility issues, first with the W3C and later as a consultant, for many years.

I asked Wendy for a take on accessibility on the social web, and here's the result. There's a lot involved, but a good portion of it boils down to standardization and semantics in APIs and I/O interfaces.

For 15 minutes of wisdom and righteousness click here:

And here are the slides: 

| View | Upload your own

Because SlideShare's player lacks important accessibility features, Wendy also posted a tagged PDF version.

I must say, I'm chastened not to be posting a transcript in support of that video, but Wendy's post on eating her own dog food while struggling to make her slideshow accessible makes me feel better... a little better.

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.