Category Archives: social media

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I had the great fortune to get to see Ward Cunningham talk about the design principles of wiki, and then afterwards to chat with him informally in the offices of AboutUs.
Ward is a programmer’s programmer. You wouldn’t confuse his presentation with the slick production of some social media marketing guru, but his wisdom shines through. I was a moderately early adopter of wikis (circa 2001), and I’m been consistently amazed by the almost magical way in which they work. It was a real honor to hear Ward speak and get to talk to him.
Though my notes focus primary on the wiki side of things, I want to note Ward’s key role in helping to both define and create the legitimacy of the Agile development methodology. Creating the first wiki, the C2 Portland Pattern Repository, was in support of this community of practitioners and activists who wanted to document and advocate for how software was really developed, rather than how it “ought to be done”.
The presention was sponsored by CHIFOO, the Computer Human Interface Forum of Oregon. Their theme for year is collaboration: putting “us” in user experience
o       #chifoo09 hashtag for anything relevant to chifoo program for 2009.
Here are my notes for the presentation.
–          Ward Cunningham
o       Currently CTO at AboutUs
o       Influenced object oriented programming, design patterns
o       Invented first wiki in 1994
–          Design Principles of Wiki: How can so little do so much?
–          Wrote the first wiki to support the design patterns community. They were a community that had an email list. Within weeks, he knew that he did something good. And within a year, it was obvious that it was a success. He wanted to look back at the success that he had and understand it.
–          Big Impact. Small System. Eleven Principles.
o       “200 line program” with amazing impact
–          People build elaborate sites with special purpose sharing tools (i.e. a certain company in Redmund), yet those sites are dead. Yet a wiki is evidently alive. How can that be?
o       Eleven Principles
–          Wiki Definition:
o       Encarta: 11 words: Server software that allows people to modify web pages.
o       Brittanica: 608 words, only 60 shown without paying
o       Wikipedia: 3126 words
§         Wiki means quick in Hawaiian. WikiWiki means very quick, Ward too a bus in Hawaii.
§         Wikipedia page on Wikipedia gets 500 edits a year, with a lively discussion. It’s clearly “alive”.
§         Page appears in 90 languages.
–          Wiki versus Blogs
o       A wiki is a work made by a community. People try to come together to make things fit.
o       The blogosphere is a community made by its works. Each corner of the blogosphere has its own feel.
o       An individual wiki contributor can come and go without changing the identify of the wiki.
o       Wikis vs. blogs on Google search trends: blogs got the early start, but by 2006, wiki searches outpaced blog searches.
–          Q: question about wiki in education system
o       A: A key part of teaching kids to write is teaching them that there is value in what they write. What greater evidence of that would be to have them make contributions so well written that they contribute to a wiki?
–          History of wiki
o       C2 Wiki in 1994, wiki online March 25th 1995.
o       Wikipedia 2000
o       AboutUs 2008 (finally earning a living remotely associated with wiki)
§         A page for every domain name on the internet. Allows people to express what they are about.
§         The first Wednesday of every month they host a get together called Wiki Wednesday. Starts around 5:30pm. Have a beer with them.
o       C2 Wiki
§         Served off a little PC under his desk, connected to the internet over a 14.4 modem. Designed to be only text.
§         This one site has grown to over 30,000 pages about software programming.
§         The whole agile programming methodology got its start on C2.
§         Like AgileProgramming has over 100 pages specific to some variation of Agile, and 280 pages on variations of programming.
§         This site fueled a discussion about an experiential view of what programming was, rather than an argument about what programming ought to be.
§         People who are busy doing, don’t have time to write a textbook. But they do have time to write a paragraph.
§         Now 3 international conferences on programming based on C2, and 2 international conferences on wiki itself.
o       Agile development corrects dysfunctional behavior resulting from decades of misunderstood risk.
§         People misunderstood risk and attempted to defer programming as long as possible. The correction is that programming needs to start as early as possible.
o       Cool slide showing matrix about Agile, wiki, open source across the top, with correction, barrier, team, serves on the left side. Reproduced below.
This is a comparison of Agile as a movement to wiki as a movement to open source as a movement.
Agile
Wiki
Open source
Correction
Risk
Knowledge
Property
Barrier
Plan
Privledge
License
Team
Location
Attention
(people contribute for the attention that it gets.)
Merit
(team is pulled together across the internet because of mutual respect and trust)
Serves
Customer
Reader
Developer
–          How small is wiki?
o       SigWik: 4 lines, 222 chars of Perl
o       RikiWiki: 40 lines of Ruby
o       C2 wiki: ~200 lines of code.
o       It’s the “Hello World” of application servers.
–          11 Design Principles
o       Open: Should be a page be found to be incomplete or poorly organized, any reader can edit it as they see fit.
o       Incremental: It must be both possible and useful to cite unwritten pages. (This was pretty revolutionary from an information perspective. Before that, it was considered unreasonable to publish something hyperlinked unless the links went somewhere. So all the information had to be “complete” before it could be published.)
§         Cool story about building hypercard system on Mac that embodied this principle, an early predecessor of wiki.
§         “Being able to point to the empty spot on the table is necessary” for the creativity of design.
o       Organic: The structure of the site is expected to grow and change with the community that uses it. It’s always the right size for the community (co-evolution).
o       Mundane: A small number of conventions provide all necessary formatting.
§         People focus on their ideas and words, rather than the formatting. This was the problem with the folks in Redmund: you could put Word documents in there, and people couldn’t help themselves from using too much functionality.
§         Someone once asked “These wikis are useful, but do they need to be so ugly?” – Ward said yes, because he wanted people to believe they just needed to be literate to contribute, not an artist.
§         Wikipedia has demonstrated that there is a whole lot more markup that is needed for encylopedias, like for doing citations and mathematical formulas. The key is to keep it as simple as possible given what needs to be expressed.
o       Universal Principle: The mechanisms of editing and organization are the same as those of writing so that any writer can is automatically an editor and organizer.
o       Overt: The formatted and printed output will suggest the input required to produce it.
§         This only works if things are very simple. This is lost with Wikipedia.
o       Unified Principle: Page names will be drawn from a flat name space so that no additional context is required to interpret them.
§         Want everyone in the community to be able to use the words in their every day conversations, so the words themselves are useful. No hierarchy, no prefixes, no suffixes. If you have a word on the C2 site, everyone knows what it means.
§         This taught a whole generation of programmers new vocabulary, and over time even unified the vocabulary, so that over time only a single term would refer to a single concept. This is vocabulary construction.
o       Precise Principle: Pages will be titled with sufficient precision to avoid most name clashes, typically by forming noun phrases.
§         To make a link, you have to have two words.
§         Many connections are happy accidents. Where some might see a name clash, others would see a happy accident: a connection between two similar concepts.
o       Tolerant Principle: All input will produce output even when the output is not likely to be that which was desired.
§         I will not output error messages. Instead, the output is shown immediately as a feedback loop.
o       Observable Principles: Activity within the site can be watched and reviewed by any visitor.
§         This came from reading Wabi-Sabi, and also Edwin Schlossberg on interaction excellence.
§         RecentChanges is what gives that visibility. (And this came from the hypercard system.)
o       Convergent Principle: Ambiguity and duplication can be removed by finding and citing similar related content.
§         This is re-factoring.
§         It reflects the emerging evolution of ideas – what is in the system may be ambiguous because what is in peoples heads is ambiguous.
–          Wikipedia’s goal is to have neutral point of view – they are historians.
–          For C2, they were activists: this is the way the world really works. Their goal is not to be historians, but to evolve the thinking in that space.
–          There was a brief discussion of ThreadMode versus DocumentMode – the former is early in the lifecycle of a topic, when its all active discussion, the latter comes when the discussion starts boiling down to the consensus of the group.
–          Wiki Nature: wiki as a meme vector
o       People knew what wiki nature was, because it was wiki like.
o       It couldn’t be described, except by experiencing what it was it.
o       The C2 wiki become a destination for understanding wiki
–          Three things have to come together to have a winning combination:
o       Methodology: How we will learn? à (Piecemeal growth)
o       Community: People come together to help each other learn it. à (RecentChanges)
o       Technology: some small piece of technology to enable it. à (Hypertext)
–          How can so little do so much?
o       Sweet spot of new technology
o       Assemble, guide and transform community
o       Leave room for other’s innovation
–          Question: Was the design goal really transforming/manipulating the community or reflecting what the community was doing into the virtual world?
o       A: It wasn’t so much manipulative, it was bringing the disparate parts of the community together to have a discussion. They were proponents of Agile methodology, and the goal was to transform the naysayers, to explain the agile methodology, to try it, to explain how it works and how it addressed risk, it transformed the people who came to the community.
o       Comment: The community transformed itself.
–          There was a cool discussion of the theoretical influences, and discussion of the role of metaphors, but I was unfortunately fading by that point.
–          Ward had to dispel a notion of computer programmers as anti-social loners. When they were programming, they had a hard time discussing without fighting.
After the presentation, a small group went back to the AboutUs offices, where we continued the conversation over beers. As Hunter S. Thompson wrote in Fear and Loathing, this is where my notes become disjoint and confusing.
I asked about the feasibility of, or current activity in, creating a wiki that is a hybrid: it contains elements of explicit user feedback in the form of content, but depends on collective intelligence algorithms and implicit user feedback (clickstreams, rating of topics) on site organization and navigation. Is this still a wiki? Is it feasible? Does it violate any wiki principles.
Ward generally thought that it was still a wiki. He said that AboutUs was doing some similar things – where they once were asking users to write the content for a specific domain, now they are aggregating some of that. What he described sounded like what Derek Powazek described as “smallifying the task” in his Wisdom of the Crowds talk.
We also discussed how the concept of what a wiki is has changed as the public has become aware of wikis in general, and wikipedia in particular. Earlier, wiki really was the set of design patterns, and each person created their own wiki engine that embodied the design principles but whose implementation was customized to the particular needs of their community. (Hence MediaWiki is different than the C2 wiki, which is different from TWiki, etc.) Over time, the concept of wiki has solidified, so that people think primarily of community contributed encylopedia type knowledge in a MediaWiki environment. This can make it challenging to discuss novel implementations of wiki that embody the design principles but look and feel different than a traditional wiki. 
For Portlanders, there is a monthly Wiki Wednesday meetup at AboutUs on the first Wednesday of every month.

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I attended the Portland chapter of the Social Media Club today for a presentation by Kelly Feller of Intel on Social Media and business. It was titled “Careers in Social Media”, but it really addressed many different questions from gaining alignment within an organization to the different kinds of resources and people needed for a social media campaign. I thought it was a good session, and I especially liked that questions were taken through the presentation and addressed on the spot.

I did want to address one question that came up during the session that perhaps Kelly misunderstood. I think the question was “What do I do if my customers don’t participate in social media?” The particular situation cited involved customers who were engineers. Although my experience is that most engineers are in fact interested in social media (many are highly dependent on blogs and forums to research engineering questions), there are of course some groups of customers that, for one reason or another (cultural, age, region, background) that may just be resistant to social media. 
If this is truly the case, then instead of looking at social media that requires explicit contributions (such as forums, blogs, or wikis), look instead at what you can do with implicit feedback. For example, Amazon, Netflix, and Google Search are all examples of what you can do with implicit feedback or minimal explicit feedback. These sites harvest the behavior of users to recommend products, movies, or search results. They deliver stunningly good results. In many cases, adding this kind of wisdom of the crowds can be enough to differentiate one business from another. Check out my notes on Derek Powazek’s SXSW talk on Designing for the Wisdom of the Crowds. At HP, one of the the innovations we’ve introduced are recommendations on our support web site: “Other customers who viewed this document were ultimately helped by one of these documents…”. This implicit customer feedback capability is implemented by analyzing the patterns of how previous customers accessed support documents. It makes it easier for subsequent customers to find relevant content.
My full notes from the session Kelly Feller’s talk are below. 
Social Media Club PDX #smcpdx
Innotech: eMarketing Summit – Social Media Awards http://eMarketingSummit.com
April 22nd, 23rd
Social media marketing summit conference
Kelly Ripley Feller
Intel Social Media
Center of Excellence
  • “What Do You Hope To Get Out of Tonight?”
    • Let’s hear about Intel Social Media team
    • A job
    • How does an idea get sold when it first gets started
    • How do roles get defined, in a larger organization
    • The future of social media: “just five years out”
    • How does your ROI get measured?
    • What tools do you use?
    • How do you create a job?
    • What are the key resume indicators you are looking for?
  • Just a few years ago didn’t know anything about social media
    • Started as a second life blogger
    • “I just jumped in”
    • Stop worrying, obsessing, thinking, and just start doing
  • New:
    • New capabilities out there (blogging, twitter, wikis, etc.) and way many new tools out there (big slide of tool logos)
    • Go toward what you are interested in. You’ll never master it all.
    • New customer expectations: 85% of americas wants companies to be present in social media. 51% of consumers want companies to interact with them as needed or by request. 43% of consumers want companies to demonstrate customer service via social media. 90% of people get their purchasing and product information via social media.
    • New roles: writer, video editor, community mgr, social media strategist, social campaign mgr., research/data expert, privacy and security experts, lawyer, bloggers, social web UI experts, public relations, software application developer. Online customer service.
      • Data is key. Without data, you don’t have ROI, you don’t know how it affects the brand, the bottom line.
      • Online customer service is one of the most important roles. No one would have thought this just a few years ago. Now it is the centerpiece. Examples: Intel is doing this, Dell is doing this. Intel talks a lot with Dell about this.
    • Organic Word of Mouth versus Amplified Word of Mouth: Slide from the Word of Mouth Marketing Association.
What you do to increase activity for organic word of mouth is different than amplified word of mouth. E.g. Focus on customer satisfaction versus create an online community.
Organic activities: Focus on customer satisfaction, improve product quality and usability, listen to consumers, respond to concerns and criticism, open a dialog
Amplified: Create an online community, develop tools that enable customer feedback, start a conversation, motivate activities to promote a product
Roles to help:
Organic: Social Strategist, Customer Service, Social Operations
Amplified/Social Media: Marketing Campaign Mgr, Community Mgr, Web Developers/Designers
  • Examples of Social Roles
    • Strategist: Social media guidelines, training, internal social media evangalist, social media practitioner (blogs, twitters, etc.)
      • Go to intel.com and read the social media guidelines to see an example. You want people to stay on message, not put your brand at risk. You create a path for people to share online without having to go through PR/legal in order to publish.
    • Campaign Mgr: Integrate social components into marketing campaigns, often social media practitions, large corps; develop agency relationships
    • PR: Cultivate relationships with influencers, bloggers, media; Help define guidelines for engagement, social media practitioner
    • Operations: Develop social assets & infrastructure like websites, communities, etc.; Lgeal, privacy & security expertise
    • Customer Service: Respond online, track responses & coalesce metrics
    • Research/Data Expert: Define research guidelines, deep familiarity with topical and keyword analysis, metrics like Google Analytics, Omniture, WebTrends
  • Q: “How does all of this scale down to a small organization?”
    • A: “Look at getting interns.” [Will comment: Getting buy in is easier, but doing it all is harder.]
  • Q: “Should we use a 3rd party site like Twitter?”
    • A: “Meet the customer where they are.” Lots of companies try to direct the customer back to their own site, but it is totally transparent and intrusive to a certain degree.
  • Q: What kinds of tools do you use, something with natural language processing, or something with a manual process?
    • A: We’re running two simultaneous projects to evaluate two tools, one more automated and one more manual.
    • We’re evaluating a tool that identifies conversations that are happening and tracks action/participation and gives statistics. This makes it easier to show the ROI: We engaged with 50 conversations.
  • Q: Where do you find people to do it, how do you train them?
    • A: WE look for affinity, to see who is interested. You can’t go out and tell people “OK, now you are going to blog.” Then see what we have after we have the volunteers. Our tool, that identifies conversations, really helps. Because sometimes you have an engineer who has really focused knowledge, and they can share that knowledge, but they don’t want to wade through all the other stuff.
  • The FCC has ruled that participating in advertising falls under “truth in advertising” laws, and that means any time any employee writes, whether anonymously or not, they are speaking as a representative of the company.
  • Q: What about seperation between personal and work identify?
    • A: To a certain degree, I am always “on”. But my personal brand is good for Intel, and if my personal brand is helped by me talking about food in Portland, then I’ll talk about food in Portland.
  • Just Do It
    • Join the conversation.
    • Participate personally (“don’t ask people to twitter something for you.”)
    • Be authentic and be human. If you just twitter about one subject, you’ll just get one audience.
    • Q: Should you focus on just one thing, become a master of that one area?
    • A: Is that what you are drawn to? Do what you are passionate about.
  • Leave no stone unturned…
    • Facebook
    • Twitter
    • Blog – You can’t not have a blog, especially if you are in a big company
  • “I already do that, now how can I stand out?”
    • Be Free to be yourself
    • Advertise Your Doggafiddum (be yourself)
    • People have relationships with people, not companies
    • Sharing “who you are” helps humanize yourself and your company
    • Bloggers need to be authentic and transparent
    • Personality inspires trust –> trust builds loyalty
    • “How can I be more me?”
  • What is a personality moment?
    • Your goal should be to more efficiently turn every such situation into a personality moment. Brands that do this succesfully are the ones that develop personality.
    • Southwest Airlines: how their flight attendants go outside the box. Google southwest airlines rap for a video of a guy rapping the announcement.
  • Blog Post: Formal versus conversational
    • The conversational post tells a story. Kelly will post the slides
  • Resume Example: Formal versus conversations
    • “The big picture” versus “my manifesto”. The conversational one stands out, the formal one is just like every other resume ever written.
    • Q: “How do you get past the folks in HR?”
    • A: “I have two resumes.”
  • Tips for Better Conversational Writing
    • Write in the 2nd person (“you” as the subject”)
    • K.I.S.S.: keep it short, silly.
    • Write like you were describing something in a conversation
    • Use the “cocktail party rule”: you don’t just jump into a cocktail party discussion and say “hey, you want to hear about me?”
    • Fight the bull : http://www.fightthebull.com: put in the complete text of what you are going to write, and it will tell you how much bullshit is in there.
    • Structure of blog post:
      • 1st paragraph: setup (interesting anecdote, story, quote)
      • 2nd paragraph: tie to your point
      • 3rd paragraph: make your point
      • 4th paragraph: include bullets
      • 5th paragraph: summarize
  • Q: What if a small company doesn’t have the bandwidth to do social media? Can they hire out and still be authentic?
    • A: I would question that you don’t have the bandwidth. Do you have even one marketing person? What are they doing? Where are they spending their budget? Why aren’t they spending it on social media?
  • Q: What if you have to deal with engineers? They are social media laggards
    • A: They might be, but if you convince just one or two, they will become your biggest advocates.
  • Good examples of social media
    • Mattel Playground: 500 moms invited to come participate in an online community. Mattel asked the mom how to handle the recalls, now this year Mattel’s sales are up 6% despite all the recalls.
    • Intel: Mass Animation. Collaborative Animation project, 50,000 participations in Facebook community.
  • Bad Examples
    • Mars Turns Skittles.com Over to Twitter: it may have gotten them some buzz, but did it do anything for the their brand? What was the long term effect? It was a drive by marketing shot”
    • Small Things: (Intel site): Intel is giving money to certain charities, for anyone who clicks on the button. But the site didn’t include any social elements, so it really hasn’t taken off.
      • Whenever you are doing any kind of marketing campaign, look at how you can include social elements.
      • How can people share moments of their life?
      • http://SmallThingsChallenge.com
  • How can you help them (e.g. corporate management) get it?
    • Do not advocate “agency bloggers” (pretty please)
    • Do your homework (don’t advocate something the company is already doing) – it’s all online
    • Use industry tools (e.g. Forrestor POST methodology)
    • Don’t assume they don’t get it (sometimes they just gotta do what they gotta do, like get a product out, but that doesn’t mean they don’t get it)
    • Also…
    • Hand out books: Groundswell, Personality Not Included
    • Twitter: @KellyRFeller
    • Kelly.r.feller@intel.com
    • Text Kellyfeller to 50500 for text info card

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Get Satisfaction, the “people powered customer service company” is hosting a webcast on The Ten Commandments of Community Management on Wednesday, March 25th (tomorrow!). This is the first in a series of webcasts:
ALL WEBCASTS are at 10:00 am PDT
  • 25 March 2009 The 10 Commandments of Community Management
  • 8 April 2009 Reducing Customer Service Support Costs Dramatically (87%!?) by Turning to the Community
  • 22 April 2009 The “Duh” Paradox: Increasing the Connection with Your Customers Improves Retention and Extends Lifetime Loyalty
  • 6 May 2009Rome Wasn’t Built by Itself: Harnessing Product Innovation Through Online Communities

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Here are some key takeaways from the SXSWi presentation on Building Strong Online Communities.

Ken Fisher: Ars Technica
Alexis Ohanian: Mgr of Awesome, reddit.com
Drew Curtis: Fark.com
Erin Kotecki Vest: BlogHer Inc
  • Reddit: put up a wiki and told users to document their own rules of etiquette. Has worked really well, and different communities can develop their own standards.
  • BlogHer: If comments are inappropriate, they are immediately deleted. The poster is notified, and they have the opportunity to modify and report.
  • Reddit: This isn’t capital punishment we’re talking about, this is just deleting comments.
  • Ars Technica: Have a strict policy of keeping all content, not modifying or deleting. Their users feel that any deleting is censorship.
  • BlogHer: it is so rare that we delete content, it really isn’t an issue.
  • BlogHer: We had Michelle Obama blogging, Carly Fianora blogging, and there were tons of posts of people arguing their points back and forth – but in a very civilized way. It was the community guidelines that made this happen.
  • What are some of the things you’ve seen gone wrong
    • BlogHer: Not informing and involving the community in making changes to community
    • Fark: When you make changes, 20% of the users will complain loudly, and you have to discount that somewhat.
    • Reddit: The vast majority of users are the silent users, who don’t post anything, but account for the vast majority of page views. You can do surveys to talk to these people, but somewhat you have to trust your gut.
    • Ars Technica: Surveys are very useful, especially at helping to balance out the vocal minority.
  • Anonymous comments versus registered users:
    • Fark: No anonymous comments, if you can’t say something with your name attached, you shouldn’t get to post at all.
    • Reddit: Registered users increased the signal to noise ratio. It’s better to have two quality comments from registered users, than 14 comments from anonymous coward.
  • What’s next?
    • BlogHer: more social networking features.
    • Reddit: More involved in impactful change. Told story of the internet voting on whale name change – internet voted for “Mr. Splashy Pants”. Ended up stopping a whale hunting campaign from the amount of media attention.
  • What do you do with the passionate users?
    • BlogHer: “Hire them”: pay them to be your moderator (inward focused) or evangalist (outreaching)
    • Ars Technica: Give them special titles on the site. Give them some special capabilities.
    • Reddit: Talk to them. Send them an email and have a discussion about where everyone wants to go.
  • What do you think about moderating for quality?
    • Reddit: We have a really good commenting system so that the crap falls to the bottom. Just download our source code.
  • Reminding the community:
    • BlogHer: every once in a while we have the community manager go and remind the community of not only the rules, but why the rules benefit the community
  • What about big corporations: should they have forums?
    • Ars Technica: Absolutely they should, and they should be thick skinned, expect the criticism, don’t be afraid of it.
    • BlogHer: And they should also go to the existing community, then you can engage in it honestly, not as some PR flak.

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Derek Powazek spoke on Designing for Wisdom of the Crowds at SXSW Interactive 2009. He graciously posted the full slides. It also turns out that Derek works for HP’s MagCloud, a magazine publishing site. Here are my takeaways from his talk.

Wisdom of the Crowds began with Francis Galton. He observed a contest in which people had to guess the weight of a cow. Their individual guesses were off, but the average guess was 1209 pounds, and the actual weight was 1198, less than 1% off.
The question is how to apply wisdom of the crowds to create better community online. When you see web forums, you see lots of stupidity. But when you looked at the most emailed stories on a news site, what the crowd is telling you are the most interesting stories, the crowd is doing an effective job picking stories.
Elements of wise crowds are:
  • Diversity
  • Independence (avoid group think)
  • Decentralization
  • Aggregation
Elements of bringing Wisdom of Crowds online are:
  • Small simple tasks
  • Large Diverse Group
  • Design for Selfishness
  • Result Aggregation
Small simple tasks:
  • One way that things can fall apart is by making it too complicated. A black comment form invites chaos. What you want is something with a specific output value, like a rating from 1 to 10, or a thumbs up/thumbs down. 
  • Good examples of this include the T-shirt design site Threadless, and HotOrNot. (don’t visit the latter link from work.) 
  • But a bad example of this is the initial launch of Wired Magazine’s Assignment Zero. They asked people to write news stories. People were interested in the idea, but when it came time to write an article, they were like “woah, this is a lot of work”. So they changed the process mid-stream by smallying the tasks: First, ask the users who we should interview. Second, ask the users who would sign up to interview those people? Third, who would sign up to take the interview notes and write articles? Fourth, they hired editors to turn raw articles into magazine quality articles.
Large Diverse Groups
  • Bad example #1: Groupthink at NASA led to a conclusion that it was safe to launch because everyone else thought it was safe to launch. It was inconceivable to think that it wasn’t safe to launch.
  • Bad example #2: Chevy Tahoe solicited input for advertisements. The only people motivated enough to contribute were environmentalists who submitted counter-advertising. Actual Tahoe fans were motived enough.
  • Want to encourage diverse groups to participate.
Design for Selfishness
  • Large groups of people aren’t going to contribute if they get nothing out of it. Is it worth my time? What do I get out of it?
  • Threadless: get $2,500 if you submit a winning design.
  • Google PageRank: people create web site links for their own reasons, not to help Google to build a billion dollar business, but Google Pagerank is ultimately dependent on those links.
  • Flickr Tags: people don’t tag photos to help flickr, they tag to organize photos. Flickr builds on top of that so that not only can they serve up photos by tags, but they can divide into clusters that so the tag of “apple” can be identified as meaning either computers, fruit, or NYC.
Result Aggregation
  • Favrd: gets favorited tweets from twitter, aggregates them so you can see what the most favorite tweets of the previous day is.
Heisenberg Problem
  • Once we create a leaderboard,it creates a new motivation: people will try to get onto the leaderboard, regardless fo contributing in a positive way. It creates an incentive for bad behavior.
  • Example: Flickr used to show absolute ranking of interesting photos, which caused people to spam their photo into many groups. The correction was to show a random selection of interesting photos. Now there is less motivation for someone to complete/spam/game the system to get into the #1 slot, because now there is no #1 slot. (Gaming the system was a recurring discussion theme all week.)
  • Also, show results only after voting is complete. Threadless shows voting results for T-shirt designs only when the week is done and all votes are in, not at all during the week.
Popularity does not have to rule
  • Amazon.com reviews for Battlestar Galatica show most helpful favorable review and most helpful critical review. The combination of the two is more informative than just showing you the single most helpful review, because that would be unbalanced. And a histogram of reviews shows you quantitative and visually how many reviews fall into 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 stars. That gives you a good picture, again more helpful than just reading the most positive or negative or popular review.
Implicit versus Explicit Feedback
  • Explicit feedback is voting and rating. You are asking the audience to make an intentional decision. Threadless, Digg, Hot or Not, Zen, Amazon. The goal here is never to ask people to do more thinking than is necessary. If thumbs up/thumbs down will work, that’s enough. If 1 to 5 rating will work, don’t do a 1 to 10 rating.
  • Implicit feedback is pageviews, searches, velocity, interestingness, clickstream data. You can get more useful, better data when you don’t ask people a direction question.
(Personal aside: My passion is all around the implicit data…)
Design Matters: How you ask questions changes the answers you get
  • Two versions of Kvetch: the early dark version, and the latter white version.
  • The 1997 version was all dark and black. And the comments were dark, as in “I want to kill my teacher”. But the intention of the site was supposed to be funny, so what was happening?
  • The latter version of the site was white, with an open airy design. Same text. The submitted comments became funny and lighthearted.
  • Red versus blue: In a psychological test, they changed only one thing, the color of the border surrounding information. The blue group did better on tests of creative work, the red group did better on tests of recall. Not just a little better, but hugely better. We associate red with ranger and mistakes. People try to avoid mistakes. Red creates a fear response, people don’t want to mess up, so they pay attention to detail. Blue is cooler, more relaxes, and people connect to emotional content much better.
Seeing Things
  • Our brains work to create  a story in our head based on inputs. If some of those inputs are missing, the brain works twice as hard to create a story that makes sense.
  • Fighter pilots: when they undergo G-forces that starve the brain of oxygen, they undergo vivid hallucinations that comprises a tiny part of reality, but most made up.
  • In online situations, we lack most of the data we would have in the real world: facial expressions, sounds, etc, and all that is left is lines of text on the screen. So our brains work really hard to make up a story. People make up a story when they are deprived of the data.
  • They did a study: two groups of people. The “in-control” group goes into a room and answers questions and are told they are always right. The “out of control” group goes into a room and answers questions, and are told they are always wrong. Then they present a chaos picture, such as static or random clouds. When presented with the picture, the in-control group said there was nothing. The out-of-control group saw all sorts of things that weren’t there.
  • Then they did a followup. They had the out-of-control group tell them a story about their morning or something they were passionate about. Then shows the chaos pictures to those people, and the people said there was nothing there.

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While at SXSW, I picked up a copy of What Would Google Do?, the new book by Jeff Jarvis. As I usually do, I opened to a random page inside, and started reading. I laughed out loud at something on the part, and I heard someone say “I love when someone does that.” I looked up, and saw Jeff Jarvis.

We got to talking, and he asked what I did. I told him about my role at HP, and how I’m trying to expand everyone’s mindset that for customer support, we have got to look past just social media and into the realm of implicit feedback. We chatted some more, and I ended up buying the book.
Only later did I realize that it was Jeff Jervis who caused “Dell hell” by posting on his blog about Dell’s poor customer service, and which totally turned Dell around and got them heavily involved in social media. Of course I knew all about Dell’s history, I had just forgotten the name of that one key individual who started it all: Jeff Jarvis.
I highly recommend his book. I’ve got enough annotations and folded pages for few dozen blog posts. I will mention one right now. Jeff Jarvis has finally explained the term platform in the context of Web 2.0 in a way that it become very concrete for me. He writes:

Google has many platforms: Blogger for publishing content, Google Docs and Google Calendar for office collaboration, YouTube for videos, Picasa for photos, Google Analytics to track sites traffic, Google Groups for communities, AdSense for revenue. Google Maps is so good that Google could have put it on the web at maps.google.com and told us to come there to use it, and we would have. But Google also opened its maps so sites can embed them. A hotel can post a Google Map with directions. Suburbanites can embed maps on their blogs to point shoppers to garage sales. Google uses maps to enhance its own search and to serve relevant local ads; it is fast becoming the new Yellow Pages.”

Contrast this to a site like Yahoo: Yahoo creates and aggregates content to create a destination. Google doesn’t create content, it creates a platform for others to create, share, link, and network their own content. Jarvis writes, “A platform enables. It helps others build value. Any company can be a platform…. Platforms help users create products, businesses, communities and networks of their own.”

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Last year HP had the unfortunate honor of winning this “worst of the worst social media campaigns” when we paid a mother to have her children destroy competitor’s cameras in an online video. So I was keenly interested to see if HP had learned from this lesson, and see what other companies had done. 
There are four panelists, each brings three nominations of a bad social media campaign. Voting is done in three rounds. Here are the three rounds and the candidates for each round. 
Round 1: Everybody’s doing it.
  • Self described social media gurus/experts: You are going against the community. The experts are who the community says they are.
  • Viraltweets.com twitter software: Software for spamming twitter…
  • Metro Ford of Schenectady: sent out a press release bragging about their involvement in social media, when in fact they don’t do any.
  • Constellation Energy: has a restrictive multi-page policy for linking “You can’t link to any of our web pages, except our home page”
Winner Round One: Self described social media gurus/experts.
Round 2: Revenge of Blogosphere
  • Hasbro/Mattel vs. Scrabulous: forced Scrabulous off Facebook, replaced it with a bad, failing, application.
  • Skittles Twitter Compaign: Skittles homepage links to skittles search on twitter. People started taking advantage of this and putting skittles into non-related posts.
  • KFC Nation:
    • Has a game to “kill the chicken”
    • Has a link to the KFC Blog: Post is from employee who was fired from KFC. Blog post is from employee who was harassed by manager, then fired.
  • “Joe the Plumber” sign from John McCain’s campaign…
    • Unmoderated comments on his products site.
    • You could submit your own Joe The Plumber sign… with the result of one that was “I am so horny for the nude body of McCain”
    • Lesson: don’t give too much creative expression
Winner round two: KFC Nation
Round 3: revenge of the blogosphere
  • Belkin: Submitted Amazon Mechanical Turk and paid people 65 cents to positively review products on Amazon and New Egg: “Give it a 100% rating, write as though you own the product and are using it, after you submit your review, rate all negative reviews as not useful”
  • The Whopper Sacrifice: Unsocial network behavior…a facebook app that removes friends from your profile: offer was to ditch a friend, get a whopper free. (Referred by ad agencies as a very successful campaign. Burger King was very happy with result: cheap and got a lot of attention.)
  • Motorola Krave on gadget blogs: Asked employees to go post on gadget blogs. Employees identified themselves as Motorola employees, but the posts themselves still just sounded like advertisements, not worthwhile contributions.
  • Rebuild The Party: Republican party social media campaign…solicited suggestions for how to improve the party. “Truck Nutz for all: Give all Red Blooded Americans a pair of Truck Nuts for the F150s.” was the top suggested idea.
  • Pizza Hut: Paid filmmakers $25K to post on YouTube. The video shows two guys who order Pizza Hut delivered to a local pizza store.
Winner: Belkin
Final Round
  • Social Media Gurus
  • KFC
  • Belkin (winner of final round, worst of the worst)
Belkin wins worst of the worst social media campaigns.
There was considerable discussion about what makes a bad social media campaign before the final round voting. There was pretty strong agreement that some of the candidates had made errors of omission (neglecting moderation) or ignorance, and while those didn’t create a positive image for the company, it was mostly perceived as humorous by the audience. What was actually regarded as negative was when an organization would try to “game the system”. Manipulating the system destroys the trust relationships that are crucially important. Omission and ignorance might make a company look foolish, but Belkin tried to game the system, hurting everyone else, and creating some anger at them. 
Not only did Belkin undermine the credibility of the product reviews they paid for, they undermined the credibility of the authentic product reviews submitted by actually customers, and permanantly affects the believability of anything Belkin does in the future.
When HP won “worst of the worst” in 2008, it was also for gaming the system, when Cisco won for spamming Wikipedia with their phrase “the human network”, it was also gaming the system. In other words, trying to manipulate how the system works is the most grevious crime that a company can commit in the social media space.
You can stay abreast of future Suxorz activity via the Suxorz Facebook group. 

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As reported by VentureBeat, HP announced an almost unbelievable blogger campaign, in which they boosted PC sales 10% by giving away just 31 PCs to key bloggers:

HP, one of the country’s biggest computer companies, is boasting that it boosted its PC sales by 10 percent in May after it leveraged the blogging community to promote the launch of one of its computer systems.

All HP did was give away 31 new HDX Dragon computer systems to 31 influential members of the PC blogging community, so that the blogs could give them away in a competition among their readers. The bloggers went nuts. They made videos of the systems, wrote up engaging posts and cross-linked to each other — all of their own accord. The publicity this created spurred an increase in sales, according to Ballantyne. Since the bloggers were credible to their readers, and they were talking about the HP systems on their sites, the readers went out and bought systems even if they didn’t win one in the competitions.

The results?

[D]uring the blogger competitions, sales of the Dragon system shot up by 85 percent compared to the average monthly sales of the three months before hand. More impressively, overall HP PC sales grew 10 percent higher in the U.S. than the company had forecast, as HP PC systems overall got more publicity from the Dragon campaign. Visits to HP.com increased by 15 percent.

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In an article on Web 2.0 adoption, Ann All cites a few pieces of evidence that Web 2.0 adoption is slowing or even falling into disfavor:

In my post about a slowdown in IT hiring, I cited an InfoWorld item that quotes M. Victor Janulaitis, CEO at IT staffing research company Janco Associates, as saying that the sluggish economy has halted Web 2.0 investments. Demand for Web 2.0 technologies has “atrophied,” says Janulaitis, after “a slight increase in demand” earlier this year.
Indeed, Web 2.0 deployments likely fall under the discretionary spending column at most companies, and thus are prone to elimination as tech execs look to cut IT spending. As a Goldman Sachs analyst put it, execs are “searching for solutions with a high and fast ROI,” a criteria mostly lacking in Web 2.0 technologies.

Ann also writes:

But check out the Robert Half numbers of CIOs taking a pass on technologies: tagging software (67 percent), blogs (72 percent),wikis (74 percent) and virtual worlds (84 percent). ZDNet’s Dignan expresses surprise at the lack of love for wikis and speculates that maybe they are popular among in-the-trenches types such as software developers and project managers but not among CIOs.

I think that Ann and the sources she quotes are missing the elephant in the room: employees are adopting these technologies whether the CIO wants them to or not. Professional blogs and professional social networking tools are still on the rise, and don’t depend on internal IT resources. Likewise, wikis and community tools are available from hosted providers, usually for free. All it takes is one enterprising person from marketing to start a customer community, or an enterprising developer to start a wiki. 

When social media tools are hosted internally, I’ve witnessed over and over that they start as skunk works projects, below the radar of official IT. So the CIO may not endorse Web 2.0 tools, but company employees will adopting them both inside and outside the company firewall. In fact, the biggest risk that a CIO may cause by not adopting Web 2.0 technology in an appropriate and timely fashion is the exodus of implicit and explicit company confidential information outside the firewall.
And regardless of what the company may officially do, and what employees may unofficially do, of course a company’s customers can and will adopt Web 2.0 technology on their own.