Category: Four pillars

When I looked at some of the myths related to social software, I received some very interesting comments, comments that I’m still working on. For some serendipitous reason, one particular aspect of my research grew faster than the others, so I thought I’d start the snowball rolling.

The issue in question is the independence of the blogger.

First, I came across a story in the Sunday Times headlined Glowing online reviews by hotels and restaurants dupe public, which then led to a longer article in their Focus section, A Five-Star Scam. [Thank you Sunday Times for ensuring there’s no paywall in between].

Then, as I moved from print over breakfast to my Netvibes, I saw a snippet by Doc Searls which then led to a fascinating longer article in Linux Journal, headlined Follow The Lack of Money.

And while mulling over these two, I went through yet another ritual of mine, checking incoming links to this blog. [I tend to use WordPress Admin through to Technorati for this, and occasionally I go direct to Technorati. Is there a better way?] One of the more recent links was from the unusual Insanity Creek. Besides taking me to a crazy Finnish Complainers Chorus on YouTube that you can view here, Michael of Insanity also took me on a journey to ReviewMe.

And all this started me thinking. The Sunday Times article was looking at how some people were writing rave reviews of their own stuff, and thereby conning potential customers about the quality of their particular poison. The article looked at the explosive growth of online reviews, and how this was driving various print guides out of business. It went on to describe the way the blogosphere was being gamed in this respect, with sponsored reviews, spammed e-mails and self-published paeans of praise.

Balderdash and piffle. Have we not had advertorials in MSM for years, with disclosure so subtle you were hard put to find it? Have we not had paid reviews in MSM for years, with little opportunity for criticism of the review in question? Don’t we still have the lobby system in place in much of the West, with all its attendant corruptions and cash-for-conscience trades? The blogosphere is not being gamed. Reputation is earned not bought. Given enough eyeballs all corruptions become shallow as well. And, as I stated in my earlier post, the corrections to the blogosphere appear where the corrections need to appear. Either in the text or next to it, either as amendment or as comment. This does not happen in MSM.

Doc made some fascinating points while commenting on Jeff Jarvis’s post The Stewardship of Journalism’s Future. Read both the posts, they’re well worth it. Some examples:

Jeff on the future of the newspaper industry:

• And so I thought about the newspaper business. If these new, successful, innovative, smart, large media companies can’t invent, how can we expect for a second that the existing newspaper industry can invent its future? It can’t. Full stop.

And he continues:

• The old players can’t do it. We need more new players to take hold of the future of news — not just journalists but entrepreneurs and managers and investors and inventors. It’s there for the taking.

While Doc comments:

• Frankly, it’ll be a long time before newspapers fail, if they ever do. And magazines remain a healthy, if not a high-growth, business. Papers like the L.A. Times are actually quite profitable. They’re just not profitable enough to satisfy Wall Street.
• That’s why I’m beginning to think that fixing big-J journalism (that is, fixing newspapers) with Yet Another Business is like fixing Catholicism with Protestantism, or fixing Windows with MacOS.

And he goes on with:

• Computing gets better all the time because the operating systems business is being steadily replaced by building materials (mostly Linux) and practices (FOSS) that grow wild in human nature — and are hardly businesses at all. Yet they’re extraordinarily good for business, because they create a solid infrastructure on top of which all kinds of “solutions” can be built.
• The same thing needs to happen in journalism.

Doc ends with a plea for inventors. I guess that’s how I see what we’re doing where I work, inventing new infrastructures that let both old as well as new participants, in sectors like journalism and entertainment as well as more traditional business, play on level playing fields with greater freedoms and lower costs of entry.

ReviewMe intrigued me in a strange kind of way, I had this feeling of revulsion coupled with mild interest. Told you I was confused. I felt that writing a paid review like that was a bit like putting up an article on myself in Technorati. Something not quite right.

I guess it could work, if there was useful collaborative filtering and adequate critical mass. But offhand I can’t be sure. There are many things I play with, many I lurk around in , and even a few I participate actively in. I could be wrong, but my jury’s still out on ReviewMe. Haven’t quite got it yet. I read reviews written by people I trust, and that trust is earned over relationship and time and some modicum of common perspective. I’m not sure how quickly I can get those via ReviewMe. But I’m going to watch it, there’s no point having a closed mind on anything like this.

So with all these serendipitous reads, what do I think?

• I think the blogosphere can’t be gamed. Not over time, and time in the blogosphere is measured in small quantities.
  I think it’s OK to be paid to write things on the blogosphere. Even if I don’t think I ever will. There’s only one proviso, make it very clear you were paid to write whatever it is you wrote. Very very clear.
• I think the blogosphere has an independence that can’t be taken away. Too late for that. Whatever gets shut down, something far more powerful will replace it.
• I think MySpace and Bebo and even FaceBook and Flickr and YouTube are really blogs for younger people, covering different age groups. They all represent participative journalism and fiction and reportage and comment and and and. I have a FaceBook and Flickr and YouTube and Second Life account, just to try and understand what’s happening. No different from trying out eBay or Amazon a decade ago, or Mosaic or Netscape before that. You have to try things out.
• I think, as Doc and Jeff aver, there is a need for entrepreneurs and managers and investors and inventors, to take all this to the next stage. Particularly inventors. Particularly independent-thinking inventors. Particularly infrastructure-focused inventors.

People used to say, in a gold rush sell spades.

I prefer the Chinese proverb When You’re in a Hurricane, Build Windmills.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how using opensource makes you responsible; one of the tragedies I’ve seen regularly in large institutions is the willingness of service departments to hand off blame to the “vendor”, and I’ve often wondered why people abdicate responsibility that willingly.

The customer does not care about your sourcing strategy. The customer cares about what he/she experiences. That’s what we have to design for, that’s what we have to test for, and that’s what our sourcing and partnering strategies need to underpin.

As we move towards realms where more and more things get commoditised, and more quickly at that, it is reasonable to assume that the only aspect of a service offer that differentiates one firm from another is the quality of the customer experience.  And one of the things that intrigues me about all this is how to get better at designing for customer experience, and its cater-cousin, testing for customer experience.

While researching this, I came across a transcript of Danah Boyd’s talk at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego earlier this year, via Kathy Sierra’s post on ultra-fast release cycles.

The entire talk is a must-read. Examples:
[Talking about MySpace, Flickr and Craigslist]

These three sites have many attributes in common. They all grew organically. They each have public personalities that early adopters feel connected to. The early adopters really felt as though they were participating in and creating an intimate community, even as the community grew to millions. Users are passionate. Designers are passionate. They feel a responsibility to it and are deeply invested in making users happy. Character was not boiled out of the site; the text on the system is natural and goofy, reflecting the personality quirks of the developers rather than the formal speech of a corporation. Each site has a unique culture that was born early on and evolved through years of use and growth. The culture evolves with the designers and users working in tandem.

Customer service is not a segregated group who simply answers questions of a finalized product. They are completely integrated into the design system and the senior people are the most deeply embedded in user culture. There is a strong commitment to the needs and desires of the users.

While the creators have visions of what they think would be cool, they do not construct unmovable roadmaps well into the future. They are constantly reacting to what’s going on, adding new features as needed. The code on these sites changes constantly, not just once a quarter. The designers try out features and watch how they get used. If no one is interested, that’s fine – they’ll just make something new. They are all deeply in touch with what people are actually doing, why and how it manifests itself on the site.

[Talking about how the creators of these sites use embedded observation]

The designers of these systems are engaged in embedded observation. They are living in the culture that they are helping to frame. They are aware of the others living in that culture and constantly engaging with them to really understand the emergent behaviors. They recognize their power as designers and try to use it to benefit the collective rather than their own personal goals. Their design process is stemming from this embedded observation, producing a state of “flow” to use Cziksentmihalyi’s term. The designers love what they are doing and infuse their passion into the systems. This is a very powerful way of doing design.

What they’re doing methodologically is very unique in software development and is not yet part of the standard practices for developing social software, although it should be. Embedded observation allows developers to understand culture. They are doing a form of ethnography, the method used by those seeking to understand culture. They understand culture by living amidst the cultural natives, trying to understand practices from the perspective of the people engaged in them. They are trying to make sense of how the symbols came to be and how the culture is maintained. They are doing so in order to understand culture and to help shape the architecture to support the culture.

Embedded observation takes into account the cultural forces that can not be systematically tested or modeled. As a result, the designers are aware of social problems when they materialize and can work immediately to try to influence change. Their efforts at understanding culture and evolving the design alongside it create a meaningful bond between the users and the designers.

[As part of a set of guidelines at the end of the talk]

Make sure designers and customer support are engaged with one another. Customer support should help designers know what is going on with users; designers should work to understand what customer support is seeing. This probably means they need to be seated near each other, have an opportunity to socialize together, etc. Oh, and for good measure, have your designers drop into the support queues every once in a while.

None of this is rocket science; as Danah so eloquently explains, many of the more recent successful companies live and breathe this stuff.

I think there’s something that’s really important, something fundamental, that Danah captures well. As IT professionals, we’ve been good at listening to a lot of people. We used to be good at listening to ourselves, to the detriment of evweryone else. But we learnt from that, and we got better at listening to the “customer”. And quite often that meant the person who paid the piper. The front office. The sales channel. The product marketer. Whatever.

But we never really listened to customer service reps. And if we want to improve the customer experience, it’s a good place to start.
We need to get better at involving our customer service staff in the design process; we need to get better at getting them to articulate the scenarios they would like to have improvements made to; we need to get better at understanding what it really feels like at the customer service coalface.

More later. I’m interested in comments from people who have done this, what they’ve learnt, what worked for them, what didn’t work.