Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Change.org: a social change site review


Many sites use a combination of blogging, commenting, voting, tagging, social networking to capture user-generated content and user interest in niche markets/themes. The mix of communication to the community, and communication among and between members (directly to one another or indirectly, "in front of" an audience) drives interest and participation. I've been looking at various sites with an interest in how the mix of user contributions, news, blogging, voting, commenting etc achieve the site's goals. How do sites capture user contributions such that the end result is greater than the sum of the parts? How do sites use votes, tagging, commenting, linking and so on to produce an aggregate view of community member interests? Change.org struck me as a job well done, and in contrast to sites that organize micro-funding, or that just engage users in talking about change, Change.org adds actions and asks members to make commitments. It's got a bit of 43Thingsand a bit of Yelp.com. Members identify their change interests, and find others they agree with. They compliment each other by voting in agreement with other members' commitments to change. Those compliments become complementary; like-minded members create momentum for change. But there's a risk to organizing the site around affirmations. Read on...

  • Change.org has done a good job at offering this combination, and might be considered a reference standard among change-oriented sites

  • Change.org also asks members to submit an action, and to relate it to a change

  • Changes on change.org increase or decrease in value based on their tags velocity (number of users plus recency)

  • Yet change.org still asks members to describe what they do

  • And the connections that change.org makes among actions members are engaged in, and changes supported by members, are based on member votes on acts as well as member commitments to changes.

  • In other words, if members express the same interest in doing something, either in an action, or by committing to a change, they can then easily find each other

  • We might assume that in time, it will be possible to find people in one’s neighborhood who are into recycling, planting trees in urban areas, and riding bikes

  • It seems that the thrust of change.org is to capture like-mindedness on the basis of shared interests

  • What is traded among members is common interests

  • What is captured by the site are opinions, perspectives, and to the extent that we can trust the integrity of digg-like votes, momentum

  • The risk in this kind of social engine is of course that it intentionally blurs the difference between interest in a change and interest in other members

  • Members will commit to changes and will vote on actions for social reasons—to be doing what others are doing, to be visible within the site, and popular within the community, etc.

  • If members distinguish themselves on the basis of their change commitment and actions, their proximate motivation (the one that gets us to click) might in fact betray their principles and big picture interests

  • Again, it pays to be nice online, and it pays to affirm online


Insofar as this site is user-centric, that is, based on the interests of members and not on, say, fundable overseas development projects, it takes a very local approach. I’ll be interested to see how it does.

Sunday, February 11, 2007

Social Media: It's all Talk

Getting the talk right on social media sites is essential to success. And the range of tools and post types (blog, comment, discuss, video, etc) and messaging types available on social software sites has never been greater. Social media sites are "talk systems," built to facilitate and encourage talk among members. Each is designed to structure talk among users *about* a theme or topic.

On MySpace.com, we engage in a kind of social conversation centered on our interests, friends, activities and so on. The topic on MySpace is us. We are the subject of talk, and in talking to our friends on MySpace we're still talking about ourselves, really. What we talk about maintains our relationships with friends. The talk on MySpace is autobiographical.

On Yelp.com we talk about restaurants, bars, places we visit and like. But while we talk about our favorite coffee shops and hangouts, we're telling about ourselves. We're revealing what *we* are like by revealing *what* we like. Yelp is not built around social networking but of course creates thin social networks by making it easy to find people who like things that we like. Yelp, like MySpace, involves a high degree of personal disclosure; only it's captured through reviews of something else. The talk on Yelp is topical.

LinkedIn.com, which used to engage members in direct communication (contacting, making or getting introduced directly to members), now offers LinkedIn Answers. Unlike the direct communication that passed among members without creating visible talk on the site, Answers now allows members to demonstrate their expertise in front of the LinkedIn audience/community. By asking questions or providing answers, members not only draw attention to themselves—they reveal what they are interested in currently, or what they know something about, as well as how they approach it. Members are able to reveal the depth of their expertise and disclose some of their personality in ways that eluded the resume/bio that structures member profiles on Linkedin. The talk in Answers is autobiographical.

There are three central challenges to any social software site. Organizing what members talk about, and to whom, and why. And to solve each, we need only think about what we do in everyday talk. We talk to people we enjoy talking to. We talk about ourselves to attract interest and because we simply need to. We talk about what we like to disclose our interests. We talk about why we like it, or do it, or find it interesting in order to flesh out character, our motivations and goals. We talk about it in ways that disclose our passions, our curiosities, and our fears and trepidations. We reveal our competencies and expertise in how we talk: by proclaiming, declaring, challenging, making references, and so on. We create credibility in how we talk about things. We project authority also, in what we say and how we say it. We solicit advice, allegiance and respect in how we talk, and to whom we talk.

If talk is what social software organizes, we get engaged either by *talking to or at* other members, or by *telling* about ourselves. Blogs are well-suited to telling. We tell our readers (and ourselves) what we think. Blogging is highly self-reflective and self-referential. Sitting and writing a blog post is not about interaction but is a form of speech nonetheless. I'm doing it right now. Commenting is directed at a person or his/her contribution, so it's much more a kind of talk. It's direct because it is a response to somebody; but it's public also. Either the person commented on or somebody else in the audience may respond with a further comment. Tagging, digging, hot-listing and so on are all very small forms of talk, insofar as they are topical (to digg is to affirm a piece of content, in short, to "agree" with it or "like" it). These are small gestures of affirmation, agreement, preference, interest, and so on. The genius in keeping these simple is to create some amount of ambiguity.

All talk is ambiguous, there's no knowing with any certainty what another person is truly thinking. Social software not only thrives on our human interest and tolerance for ambiguity, it generates *extra* ambiguity to keep things going. Gestural forms of talk, such as the many icons and actions offered on sites for sending a wink, compliment, thumbs up, kudo, etc. are each a non-verbal expression built entirely around the ambiguity of communicating through cliche: the recipient knows what "it" means but not what "I" mean...

Flirting and dating underlie any healthy social media site. What makes elevators such a pregnant encounter is exactly what works for social media. Though it's impolite to talk in an elevator, it's equally impolite to acknowledge people in close proximity. The elevator ride can create tension or discomfort so easily because it places its riders in a double bind: don't ignore them, but don't talk to them, and don't show more interest than would be appropriate, even though the longer this elevator ride is, the more you have to "contain" yourself in front of others that by this time you really ought to be acknowledging more substantially! Thought experiment: how many floors would it take before its riders simply had to start talking? (We'll leave Aerosmith out of this ride!)

Social media are like the opposite of an elevator ride: people dispersed all over the place, able to talk or communicate but having little to go on and no sense of how involved others are, or for how long, or why. Talking is the only way through those ambiguities. But getting people to talk, about themselves as well as about topical interests, to others on the site, and capturing, storing, organizing and presenting what they talk about is the challenge of social interaction design. There are many ways to motivate talk. It can be anchored on attention getting; on autobiographical disclosure; on demonstrating expertise; on creating affinities; on producing attitudes (YouTube excels at generating attitudes and dispositions); and so on. But the biggest mistake social software site owners make is thinking that users want to talk about them, their service, or what they have built. We build for talk, and must hand it over when we're done so that our users can talk about themselves with others. To expect them to talk about what we've made for them, or even to ask them to talk about what we find interesting, won't work at all.

Related: I cover this in depth in a recent white paper on Review sites (Yelp.com), as well as in other white papers and in reading notes on my site.



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Thursday, February 08, 2007

Getting into social video

I've been poking about the social video space of late and absorbing as many moving pixels as can be safely beamed at a pair of analog eye sockets without producing tissue damage, seizures, or abnormalities of the brain. It's an interesting space less for what companies are doing than for what it suggests they might do, but the signs are there. In terms of content, well I'm inspired to yank a line out of Hunter S Thompson's Fear and Loathing... "eyes glazed insanely behind tiny gold-rimmed greaser shades, screaming gibberish." That's Hunter at a traffic light in a state of mind. But it seems to apply to the cumulative experience of watching short video clips online at social video sites.

I've said before that I think YouTube is a social system in failure mode. That in a way, the video is a substitute for the blog post, presenting something about its poster that's neither expository nor opinion, but is in some way reveals the poster's personality and taste. That the video is in a way an "utterance." That's the only way it makes sense to think of YouTube as a talk system (to me, at least). But I really do think that's what makes it interesting. Short videos can function as a kind of sign system, or symbolic language perhaps. They're identifying, moreso than Flickr pics for example, because they use content as a reference. In the case of videos shot of the person posting, and by the person posting, they're obviously even more of an "utterance." Where blogging requires a person to say something interesting, the video says it for us. It's faster, its more easily consumed (perhaps), it's often more easily liked, and as a "linguistic" phrase it is is easily accepted. (How would you reject a person on the basis of their videos?)

If YouTube is social because it creates visibility for posters and involves a communication system in which videos are member contributions, statements or messages through which members identify themselves, then the similarities among different kinds of videos provide a quick route to group identities... The social on YouTube can then differentiate itself: videos have styles, contents, references, and so on. The popularity of comedy, music videos, and TV shows us that YouTube samples popular culture, and that members identify themselves through pop culture clips. We speak TV on YouTube.

What comes next then is where things will get interesting. As video players become richer, and as they embed chat, commenting, rating, lists, and forms of gestural communication and action within themselves (Joost, Click.tv, Clipsync are a few in this space; Jumpcut as an editor system, is communicative but not in the way I'm thinking about at the moment), the challenges of communicating through video, about video, and to other viewers (friends or anonymous) quickly complicates the user experience.

What social practices await us on the other side of video clips, channels, ratings, tags, and lists? Will we use our camphones to create group videos that we then annotate for group memories and video scrapbooks? Will we finally see what really happens in Vegas? Will we send each other video postcards? Will dating profiles link to clips of our stupid human tricks on YouTube? Or will new video intimacies and confessionals provide us with a much richer view of each other (Is that what we even want? Most online daters prefer to pique curiosity by telling about themselves in text form; video is too revealing, and is a direct and less-flattering way to present ourselves than the text profile, over which we have much more control!) What kinds of games will we play with each other through video?

Will social marketers be able to extract good preference data from our social video use? How will we solve the challenges of getting meta data from chats (which are notoriously poor at revealing what it is they are about, given as they are to directing attention among chatters, not what is chatted about)? Will users get together for synchronous video viewing, or does that just fly in the face of the time-shifting benefits of the medium in the first place? How will live social video allow members to manage their presence availability (as any IM tool does today)? How deeply can we become engaged in video content, and between typing, talking, pressing buttons, and turning on our own webcams, which mode or combination will win?

Interesting developments are certainly just around the corner. I would like to think that this time, the moving image might realize some of its educational potential (TV was hailed for its potential in democratizing and distributing knowledge -- think Marshall McLuhan or Ed Murrow in Goodnight and Good Luck). If content is king, the king this time is us.

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