This interested me because its a good example of digital communication bringing together a large disparate group of people with a common cause and harnessing their time, energy and skills. All of the people contributing and taking part have offered their services for no direct or even obvious reward. By working together they are able to build something much greater than the sum of their individual parts, but there is no guarantee that their efforts will effect any change or even get noticed.

The student protests in London

There are other good examples of this behaviour – both the open source software movement and Wikipedia spring to mind – but it’s interesting to follow one which owes so much to social media communities and their increasing connection to mobile devices.

Few brands (except perhaps for Apple) could ever hope to get that much support from their customers. However, it is possible for your brand to harness a fraction of the goodwill and effort that individuals are willing to spend online, promoting, building and sharing the things they really care about. You wouldn’t just have consumers and purchasers at the end of your chain, but instead you would have actual advocates and enthusiasts who freely choose to recommend your brand and talk about it to other individuals.

At Neoco we work hard to identify who the key influencers and players from specific audience clusters, so we can find the best people to engage with for the maximum results and reach. We invest in long-term relationships with these individuals, encouraging open dialogue and mutual benefit.

It is generally agreed that when we potter over to Google, hunting for enormously exciting topics to read about, we want it to return the best results possible for a search. But who or what should decide what those “best” results are? Option one – is a machine. Since its conception in 1998, Google has based results on its Page Rank™ algorithm. A method of measuring a page’s importance based on its incoming links, which – it is generally accepted – was Google’s major unique selling point. One of the keys to Page Rank’s success was its pure objectivity. All pages were born equal in Google’s eyes, and had to “earn” their rank by other pages “voting” for them via an incoming link. Google’s – or anyone else’s – personal opinion of a given page was effectively irrelevant.

However there are problems with this which first started to surface a few years ago. Google appeared to be struggling. With the Internet growing at a rate of 10 million pages per day, they appeared to be struggling to find a relevant page for all those obscure topics out there. The tiny amount of relevant content was slowly getting lost in all of the rubbish (and porn).

Option two – is a human. The best current example of a large human created information resource is Wikipedia. Written and reviewed by humans, Wikipedia is a collection of over 9.1 million pages covering almost all topics of interest. Because Wikipedia is peer reviewed so closely, you can almost guarantee a relevant page is returned, whether you’re searching for “Aabenraa”, “Zaafaraniyeh” or “Basil Brush” – the lovable anthropomorphic fox. But there are obvious problems with this. A human created resource is subject to bias. Even when reviewed by large numbers of people, cultural bias still exists.

So why is this relevant? Well – in my opinion – Google has hit a wall (again) when it comes to returning relevant content using purely machine learning. With the Internet now containing more than 1 trillion (that’s 1,000,000,000,000) pages, Google’s job in finding those top 10 relevant pages for a given term is now harder than ever. At the end of the day – for now at least – a computer cannot fully comprehend all of the possible variations a given search term could mean, and the relevance (if any) that those variations can have with each other.

One option Google has is to start applying human editorial judgement to their search results. This however would surely go against Google’s founding principle. Then again, there are signs that Google are starting to consider just that. Their Terms and Conditions used to state that “Google’s indices are indexed by Google’s automated machinery and computers”, but this disclaimer has now been removed. Perhaps the most interesting development to this effect is Google’s recent interface change. When you now perform a search on Google whilst signed in, you are graciously supplied with additional controls relating to their “SearchWiki”. As you can see from the image below, we are now given the options to “Promote” or “Remove” a URL (using the icons to the right of the page’s title).

Now initially, using these options only affects what you (you being the person currently signed into Google) see. However Marissa Meyer (Vice President of Search Product and User Experience at Google) has stated that “in the future it’s likely Google will use the data to at least make obvious changes”. Now this comment, made at Le Web conference in Paris last December, is enormously significant. This is – for the first time – Google admitting that they are going to use human generated information to affect their search results.

So what are the ramifications of this? Well I could go on for quite a while about these, but let’s just stick to the key factors. First, this is going to affect the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) industry. At present SEO “experts” can go about their task with the sure knowledge that Google will treat the site they’re working on with the pure, unemotional objectivity as every other site online. However once human subjectivity is added into the mixing bowl, all this changes. At this point it doesn’t matter if you have the perfect keywords in just the right positions around your site, if enough users don’t agree that your site matches the search term, then that alone could send it tumbling down the search results.

The other key factor is trust from the perspective of objectivity. One of the reasons for Google’s mass popularity is that when you enter a term to search for, you can be sure that the results returned are not there due to any bias, be it political, religious, cultural etc. However if Google do decide to go down this path, then it’s quite likely that we will start to see a bias on the side of those who choose to use tools such as the SearchWiki. This might not only affect our faith in Google, but more importantly – from Google’s perspective at least – advertisers’ trust in Google. After all, nobody is going to want to advertise with a company who appears to be favouring a competitor.

So what would you rather? An objective search engine run by a machine that returns ok results, or a subjective search engine run by humans that gives “better” results (assuming you side with the bias)?

The TV ads that get us talking?

I set out to write a blog post singing the virtues of a recent TV ad; the Barclaycard “Waterslide” advert. The problem with writing about this sort of things is always finding an angle; do I actually have anything interesting to say on this?  It’s harder than it sounds. I started off this post with the thought “what makes a great TV advert?” A quick search on Google rapidly changed the direction into “what makes a rubbish website?”

The truth is, I’m not 100% sure what makes a good TV advert. So, what do other people think? Typing “what makes a good tv advert” into Google brings up wiki.answers.com as the first entry. Its suggestion is (in its entirety; I haven’t cut anything):

“It has to be eye-catching and snappy. It could use slogans, logos, music and motos.”

So much for an answer. I particularly like the use of the word “could”.  I could write a worse answer than this, but it’s hard work:

“It has to be good. It may involve moving pictures and sound.”

And suddenly I forget why I’m even looking for an answer to the question, so incensed am I by the utter pointlessness of this “wiki” answer site.  The problem with the Internet at the moment is the sheer volume of rubbish generated by people, seemingly for the point of saying “something” (I think you can unfortunately take this blog post as a second example!) Rubbish websites, it seems, are more prevalent, and easier to spot, than excellent TV ads!

So getting back to the original point; the Barclaycard advert is good. Possibly because it’s eye-catching and snappy, and uses slogans, logos, music and motos! See for yourself.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQ1PeXPNCrM]

Proof that people involved in global online communities are much happier.

Online communities are not social networks. Social networks are not online communities. Bold statement. Let’s break it down a little further to explain. Everyone would accept Facebook as an example of a strong social network. Looking at Facebook, we can see it is all about ‘me’. Facebook for me is about my details, my friends, my activity (the feed), comments relating to me (the wall), my groups, events I’m attending… well, you get the idea. So where social networks are about ‘me’, online communities are about ‘us’. A good example of an online community is Wikipedia. Wikipedia is created and maintained by contributions from lots of people. Contributions that do not directly relate to themselves; unless I’m Bill Gates or similar, I’m not going to have a profile presence on Wikipedia. Even if I was Bill Gates, I would be using Wikipedia different to how I use Facebook. So two separate entities that use very similar tools (online user generated content) to create and communicate their content.

An analogy of the above is gardening… let’s imagine that a social network is the same as your own little garden. You are free to plant what flowers you want, put up a nice white picket fence, maybe one of those horrible water features. Whatever you do, the garden is yours and your friends can only come in to the garden and look at your work. An online community is like a communal garden. Using the same gardening tools, the community plant flowers, dig holes, put up fences, but no-one can claim ownership over the garden or any piece of it. The garden as a whole is the creation of the community.

Interesting fact:
If the UK population of adults all set about the task of rewriting everything on Wikipedia…
it would take less than five minutes

Another good example of an online community is Trip Advisor. Most people have used it at some point or another to help with their travel plans or check out a hotel review. Trip Advisor shows that for an online community to grow it cannot be owned by the brand. The brand must be part of the community. This is not to say Trip Advisor is at the whim of it’s own population but that the brand must respect the community and what they deliver. The brand must realise it is part of a larger whole. Recent stats show over 100 users spending over 40 hours a week updating Trip Advisor – more hours than most people work in a week! These are unpaid people who do this because they want to make Trip Advisor the number one travel website – the same goal as the brand itself. They do not do this because they want to generate Expedia more money! (Expedia own Trip Advisor). This shows how it is easier (and I use that term loosely) to engage online communities than social networks, as on social networks people are there for themselves. In the community, people want to contribute and basic community practice is to associate a ‘credit’ with their level of contributions to date.

Interesting fact:
25% of Expedia’s total turnover comes directly from Trip Advisor…
despite the fact it recommends many other travel service providers

Consumer communities are a form of marketing. It’s a different form of marketing with new rules and etiquette. It’s always best to consult marketers who have a wealth of knowledge regarding community marketing – conveniently Neoco can help. Neoco are an integrated digital marketing agency that have delivered a wealth of community and social marketing across digital channels. This article is one of the many insights we produce and deliver to our clients on a regular basis. Let us know if this was helpful or if you have any questions.

Wikipedia has just received a $3 million donation from Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. If you haven’t heard of the Sloan Foundation, you can check it out on Wikipedia!

Wikipedia will receive the donation in three $1 million payments (one per year for 3 years). The money will mainly be used to increase the credibility of the content on Wikipedia via Flagged Revisions.  But itt will also be used for some offline promotion including a DVDs and/or books. And something called the “Wikipedia Academy” is also in the pipeline – it’s an initiative to teach targeted groups such as academics and senior citizens how to get involved with Wikipedia.