A Journey In Social Media: Too Much Information

Well, we're starting to have what I'd call a "good" problem -- too much information being generated on our internal platform.

Our users are telling us that there's so much going on that they don't know where to direct their attention.

And, as a result, we're thinking through different ways to help mitigate the "problem".

A Bit Of Context

We're now north of 3,000 active users on our internal platorm, and a nice subset of these people are very vocal and communicative.

That's something like 1,000 "talkers" at a party, each with something interesting and valuable to say.

But if you're "listening" to that cacaphony -- no matter how intelligent, etc. -- you start look at ways to focus your attention on what's interesting.

We Hoped We'd Have This Problem

Simply put, this is a very good problem to have.

We knew that we'd see some "community affinity", where people would focus most of their attention on a small number of communities of interest, which might be more manageable.

Sad to say, we've got many users who like seeing what everyone else is doing. And, from what I can tell, interesting comments can pop up in any community at any time -- the discussion is moving along, and -- bang!! -- all of the sudden it takes an interesting turn.

We thought that RSS feeds might help. Well, people are so interested in what everyone else is saying or doing, that they're not filtering out anything -- so they've got RSS spam as a result.

But, technically, the Clearspace platform allows you to "turn off" community chatter that you don't find interesting. I've filtered out a few noisy communities, but it's still an oceanic roar of voices.

And, like everyone else, I don't want to miss anything.

Proposals Being Considered

There's still a few people who insist that if we just had a reasonable taxonomy, there wouldn't be any problem.

I don't know if you remember, but we had a big taxonomy debate early on, and I forced my views on the group, because I thought it was important.

I argued vehemently that taxonomies were in the eye of the beholder, and there was no useful taxonomy that would help people find interesting stuff, given that (a) many of our interesting discussions span multiple traditional topics, and (b) the communities themselves morph over time.

So, I've decided to leave it an open challenge -- anyone is free to try and propose a taxonomy, and I'll take a look at it. No proposal has lasted longer than a 5 minute discussion, though.

If Not Taxonomies, Then What?

One thing that we definitely think we need is a "most active" view on the overall platform. That would include -- at a minimum -- most active discussions, most active wikis, etc. I think there's a separate category for "most viewed" as well.

The distinction between "most active" and "most viewed" is important, in my mind. Since any such platform will have more than its fair share of lurkers (vs. participants), they'll look at the world differently.

So, I can imagine on our Clearspace home page a widget that shows "Top 5 Most Active Discussions", "Top 5 Most Active Communities", "Top 5 Most Viewed Documents" and so on. It won't be one or two things, it'll probably be a list of lists.

If I could get more people to rank content, I suppose we could do a "Top 5" there as well, but -- alas -- we're still waiting for that particular social media behavior to catch on.

But What About People?

Part of me looks at the above proposal, and thinks "how Web 1.0!" Shouldn't we be identifying the people who have something to say, and pointing others to where they're saying it?

That leads to a distinctly different "Top 5" approach -- identifying the Top 5 most active (or valued) participants on the platform, and sharing with others where they're going.

Our internal team has begun down this path by offering up an internal contest to identify the most popular people or content.

They've called their prize "The ONEsie Award" -- since the platform is called EMC|ONE, it makes sense -- and will try soliciting nominations from the community in categories like "Neurons Firing" (most interesting contributor) or "Best Blog" or "Most Active Community" and so on.

Users will vote on their favorites, and winners get recognized by being able to use a cool icon on their posts, blogs, emails, etc. identifying them (or their community) as the best of the best.

Now, I'm not sure if all of this will work out, becuase -- mostly -- it doesn't matter whether it does or doesn't -- but it's an interesting experiment to see if our community has become mature enough to recognize and reward itself.

Back to the previous discussion -- having recognized authorities gives us another angle at pointing people to interesting stuff.

And There Are Other Potential Approaches As Well

There's no reason why their couldn't be a periodic newsletter covering what's new and interesting on the platform in terms of discussion. Just like there are bloggers who summarize other bloggers, that same concept could work here.

I'm sure we'll try a few of these, and see what happens. An ideal world will be when one or more members 'volunteer" to cover the news, so to speak, on behalf of others. Maybe we'll even have a list of these "platform journalists" over time.

There's No Easy Answer, Is There?

Sure, it's a growing problem, and a good problem to have, but the question of directing people's attention to what's interesting is a difficult problem with no easy answer.

Part of the answer lies in directing people to what others have found interesting, or directing them to recognized authorities and sharing what these luminaries are interested in.

But, like most things with social media, we're going to have to try a bunch of different things, and see what works.

My guess is that we'll find a few of our approaches work well, and some don't -- and, over time -- the community itself will get better at pointing out the interesting bits -- so we won't have to!

Just as long as I don't have to sit through yet another toxonomy proposal ... ;-)

Comments

This is fascinating.

Are there many other large organizations doing this sort of thing?

Posted by: Mark Dykeman | March 03, 2008 at 07:13 PM

I haven't heard of any .. yet!

Posted by: Chuck Hollis | March 03, 2008 at 09:24 PM

Chuck, thanks for your post. Have you spoken with the team at Attensa? My sense is that they can help you based on implicit attention analytics rather than explicit content rating.

Posted by: Michael Sampson | March 03, 2008 at 11:04 PM

hi Chuck,

If you haven't gotten a demo already, you should see the stuff we've put together for Clearspace 2.0 (which should be out in a couple weeks), especially around personalized homepages.

Cheers,

Posted by: AJ | March 03, 2008 at 11:58 PM

Just my 2 cents, but did you think about what they've been doing at Jive, i.e. use a mix of RSSAide, Yahoo! Pipes, and Netvibes to help them agregate RSS feeds, then filter them to get the most valuable info, and then displaying it?

I read a post on that on Jive's blog about 2-3 weeks ago, I think ....

Posted by: Xavier | March 04, 2008 at 02:21 AM

hi Chuck

You're not the only company experiencing the challenge of social network scaling.

Attensa's intelligent prioritization is designed to help organizations deal with the information flow from successful collaboration projects.

Our feed readers use attention technology that notices your reading behaviors and patterns and matches these to content cues in the posts your are reading. In a very short time, Attensa learns what's important to you and gives you a view of your feeds and post that automatically drives the most relevant content to the top.

Attensa is a big fan of Jive Clearspace and I'd love to show you how we are using the combination of Attensa's managed RSS platform with Jive Clearspace. Shoot me an email is you're interested.

http://www.attensa.com/blogs/attensa/2007/09/attensa_at_office_20_conferenc_1.php

sniesen [at] attensa dot com

Posted by: Scott Niesen | March 04, 2008 at 01:18 PM