As you may remember, last week I opened up discussions on how to measure participation inequality in social networks.
I also enlisted the community at SEOmoz to generate their thoughts on the topic.
Wanna hear some wisdom from the crowd? Read on!
1) Jill wondered at what point humans step into the process of evaluating participation -- my thoughts were that we setup our platform to initially reward 'points' for participation, which we can weight by the method of participation (add a comment, get one point, write a review, get three points, etc.) but the value of that participation should also be judged by the community -- a particularly well thought out article may receive many nods or thumbs up by the community -- that way, the community self-moderates, positive behaviors get positive rewards, and all without us stepping in and taking the reins away from the community.
2) Robert Franklin saw my level of detail as what is produced as a system matures, or at the Fortune 500 level and went on to point out "Not to say that is not useful but it is devoid of passion." Part of me really agrees with Robert - we have to tap in to our passion in order to foster a startup community, sorry, let me say that again, because it's very often the difference between a successful community and a dead zone -- "we have to tap in to our passion in order to foster a startup community" -- and from my experience, many Fortune 500 companies forsake passion for process. But that's a false choice. Passion and process can cohabitate. Everything we do has an inherit process to it -- companies make the mistake of enforcing artificial processes or rigid hierarchical structures on top of a very efficient natural process ... That's what makes us cringe before opening Outlook and it's that type of process that gets in the way of us truly connecting with our passion. Robert, I think this is a great topic for follow-up, and I know it's been a hot issue lately with Fortune 500's having a harder time retaining quality employees and smaller companies gaining competitive ground.
3) KatFrench and I discussed allowing for a "probationary" or lurking period in the algorithm -- because most of us look around before we finally decide to start participating -- and most communities, especially forums, ask that you peruse the content before submitting a question or post. We thought that this could be done by finding the average length of time from first visiting the site, then registering, then participating. And hey, looky there, we have a whole new metric to track. Let's call it "Participation Momentum." Whenever I go to a forum and see the big text telling me to read before I think of posting, I understand why, so the forum doesn't end up with a bunch of duplicate questions or posts -- but it's totally backwards. Technology can allow you to pair similar content while the user is submitting content (like Digg does when you submit a new story, it gives you a list of 10 similar stories, and asks you to make sure your story is unique) -- we don't need to dissuade users from jumping in. Our job is to champion participation.
4) SiteMost brought up a really interesting point -- what about different levels of membership? How do we measure how users move from one to another, especially if one is free and the others are paid? We could measure the average conversion from free to paid (some say it's usually 1%-3%), we could look at it from the perspective of time -- how long do users wait before upgrading? Or we could also look at new content offerings. Take SEOmoz for example, they routinely create a new whitepaper or resource document available only to premium members -- we could measure the effectiveness of those marketing pushes to find out how many users upgraded just for that content.
5) Dick, our VP of Metrics likes playing with numbers just as much as anyone else, but felt ultimately, we're judged by hard business conversions. I agree that our contract is probably renewed based upon that number, but with initiating a conversation, we’re really approaching customers in much more of a tangential way, which both complicates our ability to understand their actions but provides a wealth of new data that we need to learn to mine. We have to get users to convert, but we have to understand them before we can expect to push them through a purchasing funnel. My goal isn't to sway our focus from these hard conversions -- actually, my goal is to provide a richer context to support them.
Thanks to everybody for participating (doesn't it feel good?), and if you feel like I left something out you said, or didn't get your point, or if anyone else wants to jump in on the conversation, please add a comment below.
Bud,
I totally agree with you that passion and process can cohabitate. I have definitely taken note that successful start-ups not only have tons of passion but also are very well informed on their metrics and using them to empower their community.
I think keeping the balance between passion and process in big companies is a very challenging endeavor, too many cooks in the kitchen. Recently, I have been reading about Agile Development Processes and Scrum, I see this process as a possible way to empower teams and inspire creativity/ownership/passion within smaller teams within a larger organization. Having worked in large corporations I see self-empowerment as a great way to get corporations out of their own way in the effort to inspire their workforce to help create the next big thing.
Posted by: Robert Franklin | August 29, 2007 at 03:01 PM