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As I mentioned in my last blog post, I recently had the privilege of seeing and talking with Ward Cunningham, inventor of the wiki. In 1995 he built the first wiki as a tool for collaboration with other software developers and created the Portland Pattern Repository.
Virtually everyone is familiar with wiki at this point. It’s the web you can edit. Wiki reached its maximum reach with the creation of Wikipedia. For a wiki to work well, it is essential that there is a motivated critical mass of participants maintaining the wiki. For Ward’s original Portland Pattern Repository wiki, the motivation for users was to advance the way software was developed. For Wikipedia contributors, the motivation is to build a comprehensive encyclopedia of knowledge. Both of these goals are important to their relative population of users. Wikipedia contributors for example, may spend dozens of hours per week in unpaid work to make Wikipedia a better encyclopedia.
Why is a motivated critical mass of contributors so important? Some of the key contributions a wiki needs to thrive :

  • the contribution of original material
  • improving or correcting material
  • building linkages between topics in the wiki
  • various forms of wiki gardening that include:
    • ensuring topics conform to good style
    • correcting mistakes
    • building and improving trailheads and maintaining trails
    • filling in critical missing gaps
    • removing spam and user errors (such as when a user accidentally deletes content from a post)
    • and monitoring changes to spot when any of the of the above gardening is needed

What if you want a wiki but lack a sufficiently large, sufficiently motivated group of contributors?This is a problem I’ve been thinking about for some time. Derek Powazek says that what we need to do is “smallify the task“. In part that can be done by breaking down big tasks into smaller tasks. It can also be achieved by finding way to eliminate some of the bigger tasks.
In that case, could the gap between the minimum critical mass and motivation needed and whatever actual user population you might have, be at least partially mitigated by some kind of automation or collective intelligence? In other words, could some of the work normally done through the explicit contributions of a small group of committed users be instead done through implicit feedback and machine intelligence? Below I’ve captured my thinking in this space.
Let’s start by assuming that, at a minimum, raw contributions would still have to come from people, as would corrections to the material. But what we could simplify building linkages, improving trailheads in maintaining trails, spotting and removing bad mistakes or spam?
Automating linkages
Wiki topics are frequently characterized by many hyperlinks between the topics. In fact, the rich hyperlinking between topics is very much a part of what makes wiki is so effective. However chasing down all the right links between topics can add to the effort of writing a topic in the first place, or maintaining the wiki over time.
There is a technique that can be used to create a list of suggested topics that are related in some way to the topic a user is currently viewing. This technique relies on observing the behavior of previous users to determine what topics those users viewed, and in what order. For example, even if there isn’t a rich set of hyperlinks, a small subset of users will be motivated enough by their need for information to seek out other topics. They might do this by using search, the recent changes page on a wiki, or by navigating a convoluted set of hyperlinks to get to an ultimately useful destination.
The analysis then consists of using the clickstream data of these visitors to determine, for any given page A, what other pages also seem useful, considering for example, the amount of time spent on each page, and the order in which they were visited. For example, if I view the clickstream data, I may see a number of users who visit topic A, then go on to visit some intermediate topics very briefly, and then spends a significant amount of time reading topics D and G. I may then conclude that for other visitors who read topic A, they may also be interested in topics D and G.
We would need to user interface of the wiki to support presenting a list of recommended topics. Then when any visitor views the topic A page, the wiki can present recommended links for topics D and G. This makes it more likely that subsequent users are able to find related topics without going through search, recent changes, or long navigation paths. The net effect is pretty similar to the effect achieved in good wiki gardening when topics are appropriately hyperlinked together. But since this technique can be automated, it becomes possible to increase the usefulness of the wiki, while decreasing the effort needed to maintain it.
Automating Trailheads
A similar technique can be used to create and improve trailheads. The term trailhead as used for wikis comes from the trailheads associated with hiking trails. Typically there may be a large, interlinked network of hiking trails. A hiking trailhead is a place to enter the network of hiking trails. In a hiking trailhead there is frequently has a map indicating what trails exist and how they connect. A wiki trailhead performs a similar role. For someone coming to the wiki from the greater Internet, the wiki trailhead helps them orient themselves to the organization of information on the wiki and decide where and how to start reading through the wiki based on their interests.
Increasingly, people get to destination websites from search engines such as Google. While Google is frankly amazing at matching search terms to useful webpages, it can sometimes drop you into the middle of the website experience. That is, while the destination page may be the one with the content that most closely matches the search term, there may be very useful and relevant information on other pages that are related to the current page. And it may not be obvious how to navigation to those other pages. This is very similar to the related topic analysis I described above.
However in this context, we have additional information that can be used to better predict what other pages or topics the user will be interested in. When Google, or another search engine, sends a visitor to our site, the referral field will tell us the URL that the user came from. For search engines, this referrer URL will include the search term the user was searching for. This means that when we do click stream analysis and analyze how users visit the pages on our site, we can determine not just that readers of topic A are likely to be interested in topics D and G, but that if a reader of topic A comes to our site from a search engine having searched for a given term S, that then they are most likely to be interested in topic G, but not D. This adds a level of refinement to our basic predictive algorithm and create a better experience for users who come to our website from search engines.
Automating Weeding
We can also borrow a technique from sites such as Engadget, Gizmodo, and Slashdot to make spotting and removing bad content or spam much easier. The comments on Engadget and Gizmodo can be rated by viewers with +, -, or !. The plus means the comment is good, the minus means the comment is bad, and the exclamation point means the reader wants to “report the comment”, such as for bad language or spam. Many other sites utilize similar techniques for comments, and discussion threads. Highly rated comments either float to the top, or get represented in bold, or otherwise stand out. Low rated comments float to the bottom, get grayed out, or otherwise are diminished in importance. Reported comments may vanish from the site entirely. All of this happens with no manual intervention. Instead, it relies on minimal input from many users.
A similar technique could be used on a wiki. If we allow users to rate a topic, or even sections within a topic, with a plus, minus, or to report it, then we can again apply some automated analysis to determine what to do. Topics that are “reported” by a certain percentage of viewers should relatively quickly go away (with repeated occurences by the same contributor ultimately resulting in banning the contributor altogether). Topics that are rated down by a certain percentage of viewers should diminish in importance-which could be indicated by: the way the topic is displayed (perhaps with grayed out text), eliminating incoming links to the topic, or removing the topic entirely. Or perhaps, if there is another similar topic that is highly rated, perhaps the highly rated topic replaces the lowly rated topic.
Automating Good Style
Another area that gardeners of a wiki spent considerable time on is ensuring that pages conform to good style. Good style may vary by wiki and by group of collaborators, but essentially it is the conventions that ensure a certain degree of uniformity, usefulness, and accessibility of the information contained in wiki topics. It varies by group because different groups have different goals: Wikipedia’s contributors are historians, and they seek to document things from a neutral point of view. The Portland Pattern Repository’s contributors were software developers who were activists for a software development methodology, and they sought discorse and understanding.
A form of template, or gentle guidance, could help ensure that pages conform to good style without manual intervention. For example, a wiki that contains troubleshooting information might guide the user contributing a new topic towards organizing their information as a problem statement, and then series of solutions steps. Subsequent contributors for the topic might be guided to add comments on a section, add solutions to a problem, or qualify a solution step with the particular set of problem conditions.
The trick would be to balance this guidance with the necessary freedom to ensure that users are not too constricted in their options. Systems that are too constricted would likely suffer from several problems. One problem is that the site would not appear alive in the way that wikis frequently appear alive. (By comparison, Sharepoint sites are highly constricted in what information can be place where, and they never display the sense of liveness that a wiki does.) Another problem is that contributors may feel stifled by the restrictions placed on them and choose either not to contribute at all, or not to contribute with their full creativity and passion. I can’t quite envision exactly how this guidance would work, but if it could be figured out, it would go a long way to further reducing the maintenance workload of the wiki.
In summary, what I’m trying to envision is a next-generation wiki that combines the editable webpage aspect of any other wiki, with collective intelligence heuristics that build upon the implicit feedback of many users to replace much of the heavy lifting required in the maintenance of most wikis. This will be useful anytime the intended users of a given wiki are not likely to have a critical mass of motivated contributors. It will not substitute for having no contributors, and it will not work in the case of the wiki with very few users (such as a wiki used by a single workgroup inside a closed environment). But it may help those groups that are on the borderline of having a critical mass of contributors, and have a sufficient mass of readers.
I’m very interested in hearing reactions to this concept, and of learning of any efforts in this direction with wikis currently.
*Note: This post was updated 4/9/2009 in response to feedback. It is largely the same content with some additional clarifications. — Will Hertling

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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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A friend passed along these notes from the panel discussion on quitting your perfectly good job to do your own thing. Some useful tips and takeaways in there.

  • Bryan Mason
    • Left Adaptive Path in August
    • Put on full day conference on quitting your job
    • Worked for Twitter for a while, when their payment check cleared, he went to work on his own stuff.
  • Ryan Freitas
    • Worked for Adaptive Path
    • Quit and went to work for Plinkey
    • Quit and started his own company
  • Chris Sacca
    • Worked for Google, head of special projects initiative
    • Quit and went to work for lowercase capital
  • Laura Mayes
    • PR
    • Two years ago founded Kirsty (digg for chicks)
  • Unemployment at 10% in california, 8% in NY
  • Things to do to quit
    • You have to resign – you have to write a letter, and sign it.
      • Otherwise, you can’t do stuff like cobra.
    • Get copies of all your agreements
      • Invention Assignment (your company owns everything you did)
      • No Poach
      • Non-compete
      • Confidentiality
      • Equity Agreements
    • Finishing Strong
      • People only remember the last few things you did. So for good references, make sure you are doing well before you leave.
      • Leave on a good note, good vibes. They may be giving you business later, you may need the relationships later.
    • Define your own happiness. Don’t let other people define it with their expectations of you. For Chris Sacca, everyone else thought he had the best job in America. And he listened to them, and let their expectations cause him to stay in a job he didn’t like.
    • Setting a price: you need to define what you need. Is it a year’s salary? Do you have a backup plan? Do you have a backup for your backup for your backup?
  • Do you own your own ideas? Code? Design?
    • If you did it on your own equipment, own email, own time, you should be OK. (This is not legal advice.)
  • What is your definition of success? What do you want to achieve?
  • Do you need a full business plan or do I just jump in?
    • Sometimes people do a full business plan, and it all goes out the window as soon as they launch.
    • Sometimes people get to a year, and it’s not really going anywhere, and then it is time to reevaluation where you get to.
  • People spend little time on thinking about vision up front and too much time on thinking about tactics.
  • People talk, talk, talk, and they need to just do, do, do. There is such a cost of inaction. Don’t write a document, just write the code. You can have an idea on Friday, and build a prototype over the weekend.
  • Lowering your personal burn as low as possible. It gives you more choices. “The best thing I ever did was move from a house to a loft. In a loft all your shit is visible, and you think oh shit, how did I get all this shit.” sell your car, don’t buy shit, and you will have more choices. You need to plan more when you are financially constrained and don’t have as many choices.
  • Sometimes main job and side job are complementary, and sometimes totally separate, and both have pros and cons. Neither one is always better.
  • You need to have play time. If you are working at home, maybe you make the difference by changing your clothes.
  • “Your inbox is a todo list in which anyone else can add an item and steal your time” –> stop living out of your inbox, and live out of your todo list.
  • Starting With Others
    • Write everything down
    • Plan for a) Failure, b) Success, c)Mediocrity
    • Have a clear exit plan if one o fyou wants to leave
    • Find a lawyer, a CPA, an advisor (who knows stuff you don’t), and a bank. (Chris Sacca says put all this out of your mind. Good products get built when you can focus on a good product. Figure this out later.)
      • If you are looking for a small amount of capital, the people you talk to, whose interests will probably closely align with your own, will happily introduce you to their network of providers.
  • If you need money, ask for advice. If you need advice, ask for money. If you need a job, ask for coffee.
  • When do you need some kind of entity…
    • Having a company adds legitimacy. Instead of being judged based on one individual and their resume, it is taking more seriously.
    • But you can just do a doing business as (DBA), you don’t need to form a corporation…if it is just one person. But can have value when there are multiple people.

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This session was Guy Kawasaki interviewing Chris Anderson, Wired Editor and author of The Long Tail, on the economics of FREE!, Anderson’s new book.
It was Chris Anderson’s first book, The Long Tail, that got me started down the path of how to tackle providing customer technical support using Web 2.0 principles, and I have no doubt that FREE! will be similarly influence. (I also had the privledge of interviewing Chris Anderson in 2007 on how The Long Tail relates to the printing industry.)
Pardon the raw notes format. I needed to get these notes online before my next trip.
  • Two big questions: How would Twitter create a business model? How would Chris fix the NY Times?
  • Twitter
    • The old way was: advertising, raising more money, exit strategy
    • The new way is to make money now
    • Is it going to be consumers who pay for Twitter, or advertisers who pay?
    • Pay for visibility…
    • Twitter has decided to be open, and let other companies create value added clients, which means those other companies are monetizing Twitter, but twitter doesn’t.
    • Free and premium product?
      • You don’t want to cripple the free product too much
      • You don’t want to charge too much for premium
      • 5% will become premium users
      • How do you create that premium version of the product without crippling the free one?
      • It’s hard to do this free/premium when there are lots of competitors: Facebook would love to steal microblogging away from Twitter.
  • If you could redo anything about Wired, how would you do it over?
    • Wired was launched in 1993
    • The question at the time was “if you are so wired, why is this magazine on paper”
    • Paper can sometimes add value. For long form, well design formats, the print medium adds value. There is an online version for instant access.
    • Books have value
    • Guy: Are you going to have a free version of your book FREE?
    • So many versions…web version of book, ebook, audio book (unabridged and abridged), the paper book (hardcover and softcover). Stuff with no marginal cost should be free: the digital versions. The stuff with marginal cost, costs something.
      • So you give away the digital stuff for free, to increase your reach.
      • Some percentage of the people who love the free one will buy the paper one, because the paper one adds value.
    • Chris’s publisher is Hyperion, who is a subsidery of Disney. They are allowing him to publish some stuff for free.
  • Which is harder: to achieve popularity or to monetize popularity?
    • To monetize
    • Each one of us has to figure out our own way to monetize popularity.
    • If you are a speaker, you may want a speaking gig. If you are a professor, maybe you want tenure. If you are an engineer, you want to establish reputation so you can get a job.
    • The music industry is thriving in all regards except the publishing part: the selling of disks. The problem is a misalignment of what the artist and publisher needs. The artist is agnostic about where they make money.
    • Publishers want to sell books, and authors want to sell themselves. The publisher needs to be aligned with what the author needs. Could you do a 360 for book? Could the publisher represent you as a speaker, take an equity stake in any spinoffs.
  • 20th century free was the razor and the blades, the
    • The products have real cost, and you need to find a way to cover that cost
    • This is essentially a marketing gimmick
  • 21st century free is digital bits
    • There is no marginal cost. It is truly free.
    • When they introduce radio, they tried to figure out how to pay for it.
      • The British had a tax on radios to pay for the stations.
      • The U.S. ended up with advertising
    • The media advertising model is what has been extended to most of the internet: it’s google adsense.
    • Freemium is the new model: you give away 90, 95, 99% of your product, and charge for only the most premium features.
    • If you can convert 5% of your users to paid, then you can make a profit. If you get to 10%, you’re making a lot.
    • 37signals talked a lot about the benefits of charging your customer. Read what they have written. They have free products, and they have premium products. You need to start up with these two different things, not start only with the free model. If you do that, and introduce a paid version two years later, then you violate a social contract with your users.
  • What can we learn from China on capitalism. They have no intellectual property.
    • We can learn a lot from china.
    • If you do not make your product free, then piracy will.
    • Competitive markets will drive price down to marginal cost.
    • The chinese pop star will release a CD, with the expectation that it will be pirated. Piracy creates distribution and celebrity, and celebrity allows the pop star to get singing gigs, advertising gigs, etc.
    • Wall’s Drug gives away free ice water. People would go out of the way to get the free ice water.  Starbucks could potentially give away free coffee – if they could get the right conversion rate.
  • Why is free so much more powerful than one penny or 25 cents?
    • “The penny gap”
    • When we see a price, then we go through a cognitive “is it worth it?” flag. The transaction cost of the evaluation is what becomes the blocking thing. When something is free, then we don’t go through the valuation process at all.
    • In the physical world, you don’t want to waste physical resources like food or hospital beds, so you do want to charge a nickel to stop the waste. In the digital world, waste is fine, so free is good.
  • Upcoming generation…
    • A 5 year old will internalize neutonian physics when they learn how to catch a baseball.  When a 10 year old goes online, they quickly internalize the free economics: of course it is free.
  • Does anyone think less of something because it is free?
    • No one thinks less of Twitter or Facebook. They evaluate based on utility, not price.
    • But comparing Office versus Google Docs: utility comes first, and Office can do a lot that Google Docs can’t. the decision is primarily a utility one, and not a price one.
  • Are people more motivated by loosing something they have or not getting something they want?
    • People are more motived by negative things on general.
    • But what you want will loom large.
    • Marketing is all about getting you to want something, but before you can try it, you have to buy it.
    • For free, the marketing is that you’ll probably like it, so why not give it a try, and if you love it, then maybe later you can buy. And you’ll be happy paying.
  • Questions
    • We have an online survey product, it is a freemium model, and all of our competitors have freemium models. We did a survey of customers, and when they come to the site, they have a negative connotation: it is fishy that it is free.
      • You are too similar to something that people are using to paying for. So people have an expectation, and cognitive dissonance.
    • We have an economic crisis here. Do you have any suggestions for our country?
      • From a consumer perspective, when you have no money, free is a very good price.
      • It’s broken the advertising model, because CPM have dropped off. It is driving more companies toward freemium model.
      • In Latin America, they are used to companies vanishing, banks failing, governments toppling, but it isn’t threatening to them. You focus on your family, you have a house, and food, and it’s all good.
    • Luxury brands…
      • You can get Guy Kawasaki for free on Twitter, or you can pay $50,000 to get the custom talk.
        • You can’t get the high premium without the mass popularity
      • China is the largest market for pirated luxury items, and the largest market for true luxury items.
    • How can you compete with free?
      • It depends on user expectation: if they expect to pay $5,000, then free will not meet their expectations.
      • Microsoft has been competing with free for 30 years.
        • They had to convince people to pay for software in the first place.
        • They had to compete with unix, with linux, with open source.
        • They are not selling a product, they are selling support, and security, and confidence.

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For years, when asking people what they print from the web, they often say travel related items: itinerary, hotel receipt, boarding passes, maps, lists of restaurants and attractions. They might bring other pre-printed artifacts, like business cards, travel guides, and large maps. At a conference, a schedule guide might be needed.

At SXSW Interactive this year, I used none of these. 
  • I used Google Maps on my blackberry to locate businesses and restaurants, get directions, and view maps. 
  • I used the SXSW online schedule of events from my phone to plan my days at the conference and add desired events to my Google calendar. 
  • When I met someone I want to talk to in the future, I followed them on Twitter (again via my phone), and can look up their contact information later, or simply Google their name. 

Even though I had made a small travel packet before I left home, I never used anything in that travel packet except the initial boarding pass I printed.

If I am already carrying my phone, I don’t want to carry paper. Especially when the digital equivalents (like twitter, online schedules, and maps) offer so much more value in digital form.

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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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A few good notes, videos, and podcasts found this morning.