If you saw the previous post detailing the features of our latest release you might find it moderately interesting, but are probably thinking so what? What is an application for all this new stuff? Well there are many, but one I find most interesting given the current political climate is the town hall.
The town hall has been a fixture of politics longer than we’ve been a country. It was the way things were discussed in the original Massachusetts Bay Colony. Since then technology has evolved a bit and the country has become somewhat larger, but the town hall has changed very little.
Occasionally there’s a new spin, like featuring YouTube questions, or the very popular BlogTalkRadio. As much as these are interesting, they are not designed to handle the biggest problems with the town hall today. Problem like managing much larger groups or engaging people who are unwilling or unable to show up at the venue and don’t find a conference call the ideal way to participate.
What we really need is a way to have thousands of people ask their questions online and let them get answered by the politicians hosting the event. But that will attract all kinds of loonies you say? Well, sure, but their voices would be drowned out by the more sane amongst us. Based on the recent Health Care Town Halls, it seems like live participation caters more to the extremists then even a poorly designed forum might. At least no one will be showing up with guns.
A recent town hall in Everett had to be moved to a stadium to accomodate the crowd. Nice that people showed up, but having a live conversation with a couple of thousand people is tricky to say the least. And perhaps worst of all, the questions that get asked and answered are essentially random. The rest of the crowd can’t voice their opinion on whether the question is of interest to them and obviously can’t ask their own.
We’re still evolving the ideas, but in essence you can now host a town hall online. You feature the main guest(s) be they politicians or experts in some field. The community can ask questions and vote on their favorites. The featured guest can answer them at a specific time or at his/her won convenience. It can be a short event or an ongoing forum.
It’s no problem to host an event for thousands of people who don’t have the time or inclination to get off their chair. People can subscribe to the event in a feed reader or Twitter and just listen in on the stream of answers.
We hope it will be a medium more suitable to the size of our communities and the technology available to them.
Featured Only Answers: Site setting that only allows featured contributors to answer questions. Supports implementations that will take questions from the entire community but only want specific people to answer them. See Electionland for an example.
Require sign-in to vote: Site setting that requires people to be signed-in to vote on questions and answers.
Turn off targeted questions: Allows users to turn off the ability for others to ask them direct questions from their profile page.
Featured posts added to reputation: Now a user’s reputation score will increase for every question or answer that is featured by the moderator.
BUG FIXES & MINOR IMPROVEMENTS
Automatically convert URL’s to hyperlinks in user bio and site description fields.
Fixes the “greatest” sort algorithm. Now questions and answers are sorted purely by vote counts. Up votes – Down votes with # of answers breaking the tie (in questions) and # of comments breaking the tie (in answers)
Here’s a great send up of Yahoo Answers. It’s what happens when you do Q&A for everyone rather than a specific community on a specific topic. It’s a quick fun watch. Enjoy (care of kibbies on Questionland).
Social media is an ever growing opportunity and challenge for most companies. They need to figure out how to generate a stream of Twitter content, how to keep their Facebook page relevant, and how to engage users on their website. It’s not so so much that it’s a lot of content, it’s that it’s a lot of instances of less content (tweets, status updates, etc) and because it is social it has to have a very different tone.
As we’ve heard repeatedly for years now: the market is a conversation. And the conversation has to be conducted in an human voice. You can’t fake it. Marketing departments sound about as human as text-to-speech. It may the right words, but we know it isn’t human and therefore we probably neither like it, nor trust it.
Community Q&A can help to change that.
By letting your visitors ask and answer questions, with you doing the same, you are having a genuine conversation. It’s pretty easy to answer a question in a human voice because you generally are more focused and not trying to appeal to everyone – you’re just answering a question. You visitors are part of your voice and they all sound different and have interesting things to ask and contribute. If you have this facility on your site then you are having a conversation on your site. So much for step 1.
How does that become social?
The nice thing about Q&A is that it is a discrete and enclosed entity. It can be sent out into the social ecosystem and be of interest to followers – because it is their voice and yours combined. So you can tweet it or send it to you Facebook page and it doesn’t seem out of place.
Now that you and your community are having a conversation and radiating it out in the social media, you can enhance each of the those streams with whatever platform relevant content you want. But the one thing you can count on is a steady stream of communication that is conversational and human. And that’s what social media is all about.
The Stranger has just launched Electionland. Their SLOG post is here. The purpose of Electionland is to let the people ask questions of the candidates directly, without the media middle(wo)men. You can ask a question or vote up/down the questions already asked. This latter capabilty may be familiar to some of you because Google offers a similar product, the difference here is that the questions can actually be directed at specific candidates and they can answer them.
The Stranger is starting with Mike McGinn who they endorsed in the Mayoral primary race. They will be inviting other candidates from all the races to participate as the election process continues.
The Stranger continues to break new ground and invent different ways to provide information and entertainment for their community. The result has been one of the most cohesive communities you will ever see associated with a newspaper. An incredible accomplishment in times of seemingly endless social media and struggling news media. At this rate The Stranger may really end up being what their tag line says: “Seattle’s Only Newspaper”.
The Stranger licenses Questionland and now Electionland to other papers but limits licenses to one per city. If you’re interested in licensing Questionland or Electionland email us at YouSaidIt and we’ll help make it happen.
I imagine that everyone reading this is familiar with the Cluetrain Manifesto. If by chance you are not then you must go read it now. It will tell you more about how to tweet, follow, friend and blog than all the myriad advice columns combined. This is true despite the fact that it is ten years old and when it was written most of those things didn’t exist or were of little relevance. Incredible really.
Here’s a quote from the very beginning:
“… markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can’t be faked.
Most corporations, on the other hand, only know how to talk in the soothing, humorless monotone of the mission statement, marketing brochure, and your-call-is-important-to-us busy signal. Same old tone, same old lies. No wonder networked markets have no respect for companies unable or unwilling to speak as they do.
But learning to speak in a human voice is not some trick, nor will corporations convince us they are human with lip service about “listening to customers.” They will only sound human when they empower real human beings to speak on their behalf.”
Ten years later it’s still not obvious how a company accomplishes that. It wants to project an image with a certain consistency and polish. How do they do this while letting the many voices that are the company speak in their “true voice”.
There’s no simple answer other than to convene your various employees, customers, prospects, partners, stockholders, and whoever else and let them talk. One thing you learn from Cluetrain is that you better be part of the conversation.
Digg is perhaps one of the most social of all companies and one of the pioneers of the social web and crowdsourcing. They have relied entirely on their customers as the social component to submit and consume great content.
Not long ago they added a new component to their mix (forgive the competitor pun) by adding expert content in the form of interviews. In their interviews a Kevin Rose (their CEO) or famed interviewer would be invited to interview a celebrity of some note. This is seemingly the exact opposite of what Digg is all about – 2 famous people/opinions rather than those of the crowd.
But Digg changed the equation by allowing the “audience” (community) to both choose who gets interviewed and choose what questions they were asked. The Digg Interview was born and while the results are not in, it is a new spin on journalism and new way for a company to be social.
Should all companies allow their senior executives to be interviewed by their employees, customers and prospects? Or at least should their senior executives interview people of interest in their field with questions provided by the customer base?
That’s really the question most companies interested in social media are trying to answer: can we learn to be social?
We all know that people buy products based on the recommendations of other people. These “other people” don’t have to be their friends or even have gained any level of trust, although I assume that would help. You are more likely to buy a car based on what your neighbor says than the comprehensive and unbiased studies of consumer reports (assuming you’re the average person).
Companies want to figure out how to get in on this social phenomenon since it might be the most powerful selling tool in history. But beyond even selling, it has proven to be useful for getting feedback to design new products, provide support and retain customers, and the list goes on. Incredible!
So what does it mean for a company to be social? How do they get all these benefits? That will be the more pointed subject of this blog going forward. I’ll try and pass on the different ways that companies are being social and how they do it.
The last thing I’ll say in this post is that a company has three assets for being social:
1. It’s employees
2. It’s customers
3. It’s prospective customers
A company cannot be social, only it’s people can be social and companies that try to be social as a corporate entity are likely to run into major roadblocks.
Digg is perhaps one of the most social of all companies and one of the pioneers of the social web and crowdsourcing. They have relied entirely on their customers as the social component to submit and consume great content.
That’s really the question most companies interested in social media are trying to answer: can we learn to be social?
