Community Guy – Jake McKee

Guest Post: There’s a Whole Lotta Crap Out There

My friend Randy Farmer recently co-authored the new book Building Web Reputation Systems. I’ve just started reading the book, and if first impressions are anything, Randy and Bryce Glass have put together one hell of a worthy read. In order to celebrate the launch (and encourage you to go buy what is almost certain to be a great read), I’ve invited Randy and Bryce to guest post here, specifically riffing off the moderation post I recently wrote.

Be sure to leave a comment – maybe they’ll come back for another guest post!

Find Randy and Bryce at: http://buildingreputation.com
You can also check out my interview with Randy back in December 2008.

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There’s a Whole Lotta Crap Out There

Sturgeon’s Law:

Ninety percent of everything is crud. — Theodore Sturgeon, author, March 1958

In Building Web Reputation Systems, we describe a number of content-moderation models specifically geared at high-volume, high-contribution web sites, but many of these same concepts scale down to lower volume sites as well.

Regardless of where your site falls along the spectrum of contribution volume, you are likely to find out that much of what’s contributed just may not be that good. Filtering and sorting the best and most relevant content is what web search engines such as Google are all about. Sorting the wheat from the chaff is a multibillion dollar industry.

Think of user-contributed content in your community as if it lies along a continuum of quality:

The great content typically is identified by reputation systems, by local site editors, or by a combination of the two, and it is often featured, promoted, highlighted, or rewarded. These contributions are the superstars of your site, and should be showcased as such. On YouTube, The Evolution of Dance was just such a breakaway hit, and Red vs. Blue is a long-standing, quality fan-favorite.

The primary goal of a social media site should be to make user-generated content of good quality constitute the bulk of what users interact with regularly. To reach that goal, user incentive reputation systems are often combined with content quality evaluation schemes. Again on YouTube, you will find thousands upon thousands of good, solid contributions. So many that good examples are hard to find in isolation: but here is a nice ukelele performance with a modest number of views and crowd response.

Like an off-color joke delivered in mixed company, seemingly inappropriate content may become high quality content when it’s presented in another context. The quality of such content may be OK, but moving or improving the content will move it up the quality scale. On an ideal social media site, community members would regularly only encounter content that is OK or better. Depending on your tastes, this video is either OK, or not. But you won’t find it highlighted on YouTube’s homepage!

Unfortunately, when a site has the minimum possible social media features-such as blog comments turned on without oversight or moderation-the result is usually a very high ratio of poor content. As user-generated content grows, content moderation of some sort is always required: typically, either employees scan every submission or the site’s operators deploy a reputation system to identify bad content. Simply removing the bad content isn’t usually good enough-most sites depend on search engine traffic, on advertising revenue, or both. To get search traffic, external sites must link to the content, and that means the quality of the content has to be high enough to earn those links. (No YouTube example provided—it’s too painful to go looking for them.)

Then there are submissions that violate the terms of service (TOS) of a social web site. Such content needs to be removed in a timely manner to avoid dragging down the average quality of content, degrading the overall value of the site.

Finally, if illegal content is posted on a site, not only must it be removed, but the site’s operators may be required to report the content to local government officials. Such content obviously must be detected and dealt with as quickly and efficiently as possible.

For sites large and small, the worst content can be quickly identified and removed by a combination of reputation systems and content moderators. But that’s not all reputations can do. They also provide a way to identify, highlight, and reward the contributors of the highest quality content, motivating them to produce their very best stuff.

Bonfire Builders Interview

Over at the Feeding the Puppy blog, John has baked up an interesting concept to describe the social stuff vs. traditional advertising: Bonfires & Fireworks.

For whatever strange reason, John has branded me a Bonfire Builder and interviewed me for his blog. Here’s a snippet.

How do you persuade others of the need to build social bonfires alongside setting off advertising fireworks?

The answer to this question is a bit different if you’re talking about being an employee of a company working inside the enterprise towards change versus working as a consultant helping those folks see change through to completion.

Looking at the work that needs to be done inside the organization (since that’s where the buck stops), I’ve always talked about the strategy of “Success by 1000 paper cuts”. Start with the smallest element you can effectively do with minimal budget, little managerial approval, and minor legal team approval.

Nothing breeds acceptance like success. Even tiny successes excite people to see more. Succeed, expand your efforts a little, succeed again, rinse and repeat. Before you know it, you’ll be launching huge programs but with far more support than if you tried to launch a big program straight away.

Check out the post for the full interview.

Monetizing Twitter

The question often comes up, “How can I monetize [our presence on] Twitter?” (or blogs, or any sort of social media tool, really)

Let’s step aside from the issue that this is usually a dumb, or at least short-sighted question. The real question is first “What’s our business objective for being on Twitter?” If the answer has something to do with finding direct revenue, you clearly don’t understand Twitter.

“Making Money” isn’t a simply conducting more core focused transactions. Saving money, making better products, improving customer experience and satisfaction, and yes, selling more products are just a few things that go into making money. If you’re on Twitter for no other reason than to push products, you’re doing it wrong.

As one example of what you can do with Twitter, look at what Gary says:

“If you don’t realise that search.twitter.com is the most important website on the internet right now, then you’re a clown.”

How social media will change in 2009

On a recent trip to Seattle, I was invited to sit down with Blake from Visible Technologies for a short interview. The video below is part of that interview, where I attempt to answer the question “How will social media change in 2009?”

Ant’s Marching: Sean talks to Visible Technologies

Check out this great interview my colleague Sean recently did with Blake from Visible Technologies.

Speaking of Podcast Interviews…

I had the pleasure of being invited by Eric over at MarketingMonger.com to talk about Social Media and Big in Japan and other assorted subjects. Eric is on a quest to interview 1000 marketing people, and I was number 79.

Check it out and if you’re interested in helping Eric drive to 1000, drop him an email and introduce yourself. He’s a great guy, and it’s a great project!