You Can’t Trust Your Friends?

This is one of those stories that is so dripping with irony, you can’t help but love the social aspects of the web. Here’s how it started…

I’ve been researching trust as part of an ongoing effort to figure out how news/journalism can avoid becoming a commodity. Trust is a big part of that story, but a complex one when it comes to the web. It ranges from understanding domain authority, page rank, reviews, word-of-mouth, and so on.

The Start: People Don’t Trust Their Friends?

In my research I happened upon this headline story: In Age of Friending, Consumers Trust Their Friends Less. That was intriguing to say the least. Even better was the fact that it reflected recent research. The results were shocking:it seems that only 25% of people said they had credible friends and that number was down 45% in one year.

Twist: Can I Trust The Research?

The results were so surprising, that anyone would question them. And this is the wild, wild, web (www) so a bit of healthy skepticism is a necessary ingredient to any research. My first question was who did the research. It was Edelman. A well known firm, but not one that I personally know well. How did they do the research and were the raw questions/results available. No. Trust barometer (as they call it) was falling fast…

Turn: What Did The Readers Have To Say?

I noticed there were a lot of comments and was curious about their opinion on the research. Their opinion was all over the place: some not even surprised, some explained that our definition of “friend” had changed with the idea of “following” and “friending”, but what was most interesting was the discovery that Edelman were the people behind the Walmart Blogging Scam. Other readers pointed out other issues with the firms manipulative past.

Twist: Do I Trust The Readers?

Of course I couldn’t know if these comments were motivated by ill will towards the firm, so I had to check if what they were saying was true. I looked up the claims about the manipulative past and felt they were somewhat overstated, but on the whole quite accurate.

(Where To) Turn: I Don’t Know Who To Trust

One reader pointed to a recent study conducted by Nielsen that said the exact opposite: Consumers Trust Real Friends and Virtual Strangers the Most. In fact, 90 percent “trusted completely or somewhat recommendations from people they know”. Hold on a sec – “somewhat”? Is that trust?

Lesson: Be Careful Who You Trust

I’m still researching trust as a way to avoid being commoditized. I do believe it is important and I do have some concrete evidence that supports that belief. I’ve discovered some interesting things along the way and I’m still trying to figure out whether the decreasing trust in The New York Times is responsible for some of their current problems. But I’ve become even more skeptical of research, reports and claims by just about everyone.

The Happy Ending: The Social Aspects of the Web Can Build Trust

It didn’t take me long to figure out whether I could trust what these corporate researchers were saying. I had the readers to guide me. And while I couldn’t trust any one of them individually, together they raised the right questions and guided me to other sources to help me make a judgment. And we all lived happily ever after in the cloud.

Google acquires Aardvark

This acquisition has been rumored for some time now, but RWW says they got confirmation today. The price is still unknown but the guesses seem to be at around $50M, up from the earlier $30M.

This is a great move on Google’s part. Now they have an innovative approach to Q&A which gives them a whole different kind of search. Given that Aardvark only had about 100k users in 10/09 it shows how strategic the investment is.

But it’s not the only sign that Google is focusing more on Q&A. As I posted earlier, they are also testing Q&A specific search in their search options.

Why This Focus on Q&A?

At the risk of repeating myself, it’s because Q&A has been, is, and will be one the primary forms of content/communication on the Internet. It has traditionally been buried in forums where it has been the “dark matter” of the Internet – i.e. there’s more of it than anything else, but it’s hard to find. Now we here about a new Q&A site almost every day. Instead of the haphazard unstructured forum, we now have a highly structured, easy to discover, easy to navigate Q&A structure.

There’s Nothing More Social than a Question

Social media is all the rage now, but how much of it is really social. Isn’t Twitter largely the new RSS? I follow people and read their mini-soapbox commentary on their likes and dislikes. Is talking non-stop really social? Most things we call social are really just opinion broadcasting.

People who are really social do two things:

1. They actually interact with other people (beyond repeating what they just said as an RT)

2. They ask questions. They tease out the opinions of others.

So, when it comes to being social, Q&A is unique. It begins with a question and people who offer their opinions or facts as answers are helping. There are no unsolicited opinions in Q&A.

So, good for Google. They are exploring avenues that are truly social while sticking to the thing they do best – getting answers for people.

Is There a Q&A Bubble?

Q&A has been in the news a lot recently (see below), so much so that one has to wonder: Is there a Q&A bubble? How many Q&A sites can there be?

The truth is that Q&A is, and always has been, one of the primary forms of communication on the web. It’s just that Q&A has been buried in forums.  I often refer to forums as “the dark matter of the Internet” because they contain so much valuable information that is buried in so much junk that it is endlessly frustrating trying to find that diamond in the rough, even when you’re sure it’s there.

What is just starting to happen is that this great content is at last coming to light in Q&A sites. Q&A sites have great SEO and thus are very discoverable but most importantly they are structured such that you are actually taken to the answer(s) you are looking for. Q&A products remove the “soapbox” so that unsolicited opinions and random drivel are not part of the dialog.

All the content from structured Q&A sites combined is still a mere speck in comparison to the content buried in forums. We haven’t even begun to see the true explosion of Q&A. As the content of forums comes out of the dark Q&A will become an essential component of any site that wants to foster community. While the attention is largely going to the “massive Q&A sites” for now, we will soon see that the best Q&A sites are those that exist within the context of a given community rather than trying to cater to the Internet as if it were an audience.

So Q&A is not a bubble, it is just emerging from the dark.

As always, if you want Q&A for your site go to YouSaidIt.

Q&A Sites in The News

• Quora is in private beta (founded by ex-CTO of Facebook)
• Aardvark is the Twitter-like Q&A
• StackExchange allows people to create their own StackOverflow style of Q&A
• WikiAnswers is nicely profitable based on it’s multi-million uniques
• Hunch allows users to create decision-trees to help people arrive at answers

2 Manifestos: From Martin Luther To Cluetrain

500 Years of Social Media

Summary of a presentation at a social media event:

A 5 minute journey from Martin Luther and his 95 theses that resulted in Protestantism (1517); to the Cluetrain Manifesto and their 95 theses that defined modern social media (1999).

Martin Luther demanded that the Catholic Church stop selling religion and Cluetrain demanded that companies stop selling their message. The story of two manifestos with the same message: stop trying to profit from being an intermediary and be honest.

The presenters will be chosen by voting on a Facebook poll. If you’d like to vote for it you can do so here.  It will take a little patience because it is a Facebook app and therefore [insert acceptably uncensored word here]. Thanks for taking the trouble.

Using Q&A to drive your social media

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.

Can a company be social?

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.

Get a personal book recommendation from an expert

Paul Constant, famed book critic of The Stranger, has said that he will happily give people personal book recommendations. Tell him what you like (and don’t) and he will tell you what to get next. He spent a lot of time doing this in his previous bookstore career so he’s a veteran. Summer reading time is upon us… enjoy.

Ask him and/or the Questionland community at The Stranger.

Is Twitter Just A Live Advertising Billboard on My Desktop?

It seems like Twitter has just become a running list of advertisements that popup in growl as I’m working on other things.

It’s like having an ever-changing billboard on my information highway.

I’m still a fan of Twitter because I think this is just a phase for me as a user and my followers change. But it seems like this could be a general problem for Twitter if it becomes the norm.

New Rules: Let customers talk to each other!

Here’s the simple truth, if customers talk to each other they may say bad things about your company and they may say good things about your company. If you don’t know what they’ll say then it is risky. It’s scary. Traditionally it’s closely managed by the company. Find the fans, get testimonials and case studies and publish them on the web. Of course they are quite effective, but they are never in the voice of the customer because they have been varnished by a paid copywriter.

It turns out the best thing you can do if you want to be successful in the marketing world of today and tomorrow is engage in a conversation with your customers, and let them talk to one another too. It has to a be a real conversation with real voices from real people. If you do this you will create an advocacy group, you will get huge returns as they spread the word through their networks and you will create better products and service.

Simple. That’s why nobody does it.

What? Why don’ they do it? You tell me. You can go to my company and let me know. I will be grateful that you did.

Verizon adds reviews – risky or rewarding?

Techcrunch thinks that adding phone reviews to their sites is probably a bad move. They think people will be more likely to complain than anything else. I checked out the site and it seemed that every phone said “be the first to review this phone”. I can imagine they will get some flack around the Blackberry Storm, but will that tell anyone anything they don’t already know?

Of course Verizon should allow their users to play a role in their marketing. If their products and services aren’t up to that test then they aren’t long for this world anyway. Ultimately it is the social network that will assess and sell your products (whether they are networked or not). Bring them in.

Given my inherent bias refined by experience, I would suggest they go further than reviews. let’s face it, a review is an answer to a question you never asked. Why not let the users ask questions and get answers relevant to their specific situation.

I think this is a wise move on Verizon’s part. It is in their interest for their users to get the best phones to leverage their big network.