Publishing is abuzz with talk of social networks and communities, but how exactly do commercial publishers grapple with this new frontier of the web? The Association of Online Publishers held a forum on this yesterday where CNET and Yahoo! both gave case studies on building communities around content.
Everyone present works in online publishing and wants to understand out how to develop social networking and community tools for their publications. The thinking is that where you have more engagement you have more loyalty and that, at some point, translates into more revenue. Web purists would say that whole idea goes against the more philanthropic side of web culture, but hey, I don't make the rules.
Suzie Daniels, head of business media at CNET Networks, quite sensibly opens by saying that she really doesn't know all the answers but she does know enough to compile damn good bullet points, which is a start.
Daniels outlined CNET's move towards what Tim O'Reilly (the Web 2.0 guy) described as architected participation. [Update: See CNET's community site.] She said CNET's core mission was to interpret and filter content and that that will remain the same, but that the public have different expectations about the media they use and expect to be able to find and use their voice to participate in the community around it.
Her visual representation of CNET's proposition was typically bold: a triangle represents the audience base with CNET as a circle covering the top third of that group. The circle omitted the highest point of the triangle, which Daniels described as the "true freaks" of the audience - those that live, breathe and sleep tech are maybe a bit too obsessive to be useful. I wonder if we have those on Organ Grinder?
Attracting "thought leaders"
Talking about that top third audience, Daniels said: "It may not necessarily be that many people but what they say is incredibly valuable. We want to enable those thought-leading people to engage with the site and give them a platform equal with our editorial team. And if we can get our thought leaders to contribute, the lurkers will benefit more."
Daniels was referring to CNET's new-ish "My CNET" type feature, where users can set up their own profile page, add comments to stories, write their own blog and so on. The most frequent contributors can even get their byline on the front page - which CNET's own journalists can't.
Sometimes the editorial staff mutter about P45s being handed out, she said, because the readers are "taking over the site". Members' blogs currently account for about 10% of content on the site.
Professional networking
She described the site's community as social and professional networking, given the professional IT and computing industry readership of the sites. The trick, she said, is not to bolt on the community's content but to integrate it with the editorial "centre of gravity".
"We want to find and draw in passionate, high-value users who are respected by their peers for their knowledge. We want to solicit their knowledge in a way that complements our core mission, and that is what readers expect from our brand."
CNET has to reward and promote those high-value users to encourage them to contribute more, and also translate and contextualise their contributions to make them relevant and accessible for the wider audience.
For the site's journalists, it means working with users in a different way - as a seeder of ideas rather than a de facto resource for every idea on a certain subject.
And the advertisers?
She added that although CNET has not monetised these very lively community areas and would not want to risk upsetting them just yet, these are very attractive environments for advertisers and in preliminary talks, they have seen the long-term benefit for their brands.
"These are our most valued users and we don't want to piss them off. On the flip side, we know just about everything about these users and that has a benefit in the way we sell the site."
Cultural change
Many of these changes require a broader cultural change among CNET's management and the biggest of those changes are among the editorial team - even though CNET only publishes online and hasn't had to make the cultural adjustments of, say, a title adapting its print product for the web.
Those complaints about the users taking over and "the end of journalism as we know it" may well be true, she said. But though it might be the end of journalism as we know it, it's not the end of journalism. We just need to think a bit differently.
Daniel's impression is that editorial staff have often been "a bit snotty" about the idea of meeting or talking to readers. These new environments mean that journalists have to let go of that prejudice and get involved. CNET's journalists are expected to answer every question that comes in through the blogs and reader comments, and get involved in every debate that has legs.
Blogging journalists mustn't hide behind a brand
Every journalist has their own blog and are not allowed to "hide behind a brand", she said. They must use their real name because users nowadays expect transparency, honesty and authenticity. Where the authority of editors used to be in being in charge, it is now in participating and building a relationship and credibility with users in a more direct way. The life of a journalist, she said, looks very different now and is as much about responding and blogging as reporting.
"The more that you demonstrate your trust, the more users will input into the community. If you want to steer the conversation, even invisibly, you have to be in it and it is incumbent for journalists to be part of that."
And Yahoo!'s answer to social search?
Steven Taylor looks after Yahoo!'s social media products, amongst others things, in his role as regional vice president of Yahoo! Europe. He managed to last nearly the entire session without mentioning Google, but it slipped out right at the end when he was explaining why he thought Yahoo!'s Answers product had succeeded where Google's had failed.
Until now, he explained, search has been about core quality, relevance, freshness and the right algorithms that help you find what you want. That has broadened into vertical, localised searches, image and video search and now areas like mobile search.
"We see search in a particular way because we are also a publisher," he said. "Perhaps more so than our competitor, who is extremely good at the thinking about algorithms and speed, but we have branched into content and people."
350 trillion pages of human knowledge
Yahoo! believes that he next stage for search is in making searches more human.
"If you take a view about what we all know, and that we all have opinions, observations, experiences at different points in time over a lifetime."
Taylor reckoned that if all of us potentially hold 20 billion "pages" of knowledge and information, that's a total of 350 trillion potential pages.
350 trillion pages? Quite how he came to that figure, or how you could ever calculate that, I don't know. But Yahoo! thinks the answer is social search, and Yahoo! Answers is their stab at that.
Taylor demonstrated the point by searching for "Arsenal FC" - that produced 7.9m results. But searching for "everything Steven knows about Arsenal FC" produced nothing - yet he has years of photos, memories and experience of following the team.
Yahoo! Answers invites users to ask those fuller, more natural questions and instead of answering them with algorithms, asks other users to answer them. The thought is that over time this will create a vast bank of knowledge covering all sorts of subjects.
Yahoo! launched this service in Taiwan first and Taylor said the combination of algorithmic and social search has dramatically changed Yahoo!'s share of the search query market. His figures put Yahoo! at 71% share with Google on 26% and he predicts a similar impact on the European market.
So why should this work?
"It's about trust and the way people engage with each other. The most common question is how do you trust the answer? In two ways: you get multiple answers, so you are given context, and you use reputation management systems so the power answerers rise to the top".
Nope, I'm not sure "answerers" is a word either, but it is in Yahoo! world. "Reputation management systems" means ratings for answers and for users. Taylor also described those "power answerers" as knowledge partners, many of whom have their own blogs. They contribute their time and expertise to Answers, and Yahoo! provides a platform for publicising them.
"What started with a search hat on has become something that is about our audience becoming publishers in their own right. And in our role as publishers we are now managers and facilitators of lots of people's content as opposed to just providers and aggregators. This is where Yahoo! sees the future."
