Trust — what it means for adoption of YOUR social computing tools

I’ve been working with a client who is looking to implement social computing tools throughout its website. It realises the significance of the shift in market focus from the web as a single-direction channel for communications to one where individuals are involved in an intimate two-way relationship. The client realises that it needs to implement these tools, get its audience involved in what it does, seek user-driven reviews and comments, but I feel it doesn’t know how to do it.

The situation feels a lot like some of the posts I’ve written before, where companies realise that Enterprise 2.0 is the way to go, but all they want to do is throw blogs, wikis and tagging at their website in hopes to join in on this latest fad. I also fear that this client will want to give these tools to its members only as a privileged of membership.

Here’s my advice to them:

• Its’s about Trust: Members trust your brand, so you need to get non-members to trust as well. This means starting to include them in what you do, the same as if they were actually members, because involvement means getting personal, and getting personal means group-identification, and with that comes the readiness to formalise group-membership.
• It’s about Involvement: Get non-members involved in the brand by giving them as many social computing-type tools as possible. Where there is a review or a thought-piece, give everyone the ability to contribute through comments, polls, and user-reviews. With involvement will come group-identification.
• It’s about being Personal: Social computing is ultimately about people and their meeting social needs. Get users involved with individuals from the organisation. Let them see who these internal authors and reviews are. Put a human face to what you’re doing and encourage them to interact with users.
• It’s about Identification: Psychologically speaking, all these things together will mean users will identify with the brand, its staff, and the others who are involved in this community. With identification comes group-behaviour, group-think, and normalisation of individual behaviour toward group-norms. It also means trust of the group and distrust of those not in the group.

For my client, this last point is critical. How do you turn non-members into members in order to generate more revenue? With the plethora of free review sites out there, how do you ensure people come to you and not the competition? I’m sure addressing these issues, facilitating these social issues, rather than just throwing technology it, will help them achieve their goals.

M

Australia gets a Broadband Minister

I stumbled across an interesting bit of news from ZDnet this morning. Not only will Australia get a new Prime Minister, but he also comes with a Broadband Minister.

I always thought that having Communications, Information Technology and Arts lumped together as a portfolio was rather wierd. But now, arts has been dropped and the importance of broadband infrastructure reinforced. This will be a good thing for Australia, given the numerous reports suggesting we’re falling behind world standards, most likely due to Telstra’s monopoly over infrastructure stifling the market.

“AUSTRALIA remains in 17th place among developed countries in the proportion of broadband internet users, as critics claim it risks falling behind if plans are not made to encourage more investment” – The Age. July, 2006.

Maybe now, we’ll see this previous resource given the attention it needs. Only time will tell.

M

Are we running away from Facebook?

Cory Doctorow, columnist for InformationWeek has suggested that Facebook has built-in self-destructs:

“they make it easy for you to be found by the people you’re looking to avoid”

This is because you used to be able to run away from the school bully, silently pass the clique of blonde cheerleaders in the corridor, but now they can all come back to haunt you because social computing tools make you overtly identify those groups and individuals with whom identify and call friend and those you do not. What’s more, people get a handy search button so they can easily find you.

Doctorow suggests that this is why we’ve seen people run from SixDegrees, to Friendster, to MySpace and now to Facebook. He suggests that these systems are subject to a Brook’s-law parallel:

“Adding more users to a social network increases the probability that it will put you in an awkward social circumstance.”

Anne Zelenka suggests that this is because that even while these tools are designed to facilitate social interaction online, “they’re actually unable to intelligently and completely, and in a unified way, represent [actual] social relationships and social interaction”.

In the real world, we don’t articulate our social networks. I love the way Doctorow paints a picture of wandering into a co-worker’s cubicle only to discover that the wall is covered with tiny photos of everyone in the office, ranked by “friend” and “foe,” with the top eight friends elevated to a small shrine decorated with Post-It roses and hearts.

Is this the actual problem with social computing sites? I disagree. Sites like LinkedIn work very well because they are able to quantify and contextualise the relationships you have with groups and people. It allows the articulation of who your circle of friends actually are and keeps that circle hidden from those who are not its members. This more closely approximates the actual way individuals conceive of their relationships. If LinkedIn permitted you to dissect that relationship bubble further, describe the relationships a little more clearly — my personal friends, my work friends, my drinking friends, etc — and keep these groups separate and distinct from each other, then it would actually represent our actual social relationships and interactions in an intelligent and unified way.

What do we need to get there? Facebook could follow LinkedIn’s use of a closed trusted network open only to its members. Maybe we just need to see it implemented before our ex-girlfriends or ex-boyfriends finally catch up with us there.

M