Description: What are the most significant trends and opportunities looking forward?
Introductory comments: David Forrest / Motley Fool
Talk about “what, so what, and now what?”
Encourage you to focus on the behaviors you are trying to change.
Super-Nova of Social media
- Build the platform
- Allow for reputation to be built
- Provide sustainable incentive
- Solve a problem.
Ebay and Linked in are the biggest examples of this. Motely fool uses linked in as their #1 recruiting tool.
Motley Fool Caps: Crowdsourcing – Go in and rate 7 stocks that will outperform the market.
- They ask up or down.
- If you succeed the algorithm will weight the smarter stock pickers more over time.
- Ratings based on players and stocks.
- 6k stocks rated now
- So far so good… one year down. In the first year the four and 5 star stocks outperformed the market.
Spent a lot of time on this business goal because other community stuff is just noise.
Observations
- Will the novelty of contribution wear off? In 6 years what happens if someone stops updating wikipedia. Worry about mass contribution.
- Your networks will have to be geared towards goal oriented things.
- Implicit collaboration is set to explode (Editor note: I think it will find a happy merger with explicate… the best systems balance the both.)
- iLike, Amazon, etc
Calls to Action
Use what we are learning
- Experiment with what you learned here about goal setting and changing mails.
- Investigate how to use mechanical turk.
Always answer both questions: **
- Is this good for the customer
- Is this good for the community.
Book Recommendation: Elements of User Experience building.
Introductory comments: Bill Johnston / Forum One Communications
What we are hearing: Dimensions of value
- User engagement
- Page views
- time spent on site
- Influencer activity
- Call avoidance was “Somewhat valuable” – Near bottom of the stack
What are you charging For?
- Contact members
- expert access
- Augmentation to the experience ala storage
What we are hearing with corporate communities?
- ROI expected soon… not just waving hands.
In 2008 most of you will be expected to produce some complex models.
- The community team is in flux
Roles, who funds is, where it lives changes year to year.
- Companies struggling with strategy is.
Need to really understand your corporate goals and mission
- The corporate web site is no longer the static brochure-wear site is less valuable year to year.
- Attention is very saturated so you get a thin sliver of attention from online constituents.
Discussion… What are you taking away?
Comment: The nature of participation and incentive will evolve.
Comment: People are getting utility out of the services they are using. youtube for bandwidth and storage. But you still have to have people there to find what you are producing.
Comment: Is participation just a novelty.
Comment: Since the cost is zero isn’t it worth the distribution?
Comment: Like to say that 2008 will be the year of the mobile community, but the breakout sort of showed there are still some device and bandwidth limitations that won’t made it happen.
Comment: It’s also free to leverage in other places like facebook so why not enable the multiple touch points for your community?
Comment: If there is one trend over the next two years is the arrival of marketers into this arena. Many of us who started in this space have a chance to impact their arrival.
Question: Do you see a role for using qualitative methods to understand the relationship people have with brands?
Aggressively pursuing a net-promoter score. Organizations starting to tie compensation to the net promoter scores.
Comment: Didn’t see as much facebook talk as expected. Are we going back with incentive in our orgs to start staffing up people that pay attention to sites that aren’t ours.
- 1st party sites come first.
- Other groups actively go 3rd party first.
Observation: See more people wearing more hats as people with the money start to invest quickly in the social media space.
Comment: There is no discussion going on in the groups in facebook. It’s too early to go too far down the facebook private path.
Reply: this is true about facebook… it’s not a discussion platform. It is a great event medium. Organize events on facebook and people go.
Comment: Maybe organizations should just think about how they get facebook people to wave their flag and that’s good enough.