Striking a balance: How many guide proposals?

This the article I wrote on how many guides have been contacted so far. You can find the link here

You might have heard of our Mediamatic Travel Project. If that is not the case, take a look here. The project in a nutshell: A platform which enables cultural professionals around the world to introduce the underground scene which otherwise would remain invisible or inaccessible. These cultural professionals are called guides that can be contacted by visitors of our website for a real-life guidance in their city. The project has now been in the air for approximately three months and we think it's time to strike a balance: How many guides have actually been contacted by visitors? How many guide-proposals have been made?

First some statistically interesting facts: We now have 74 guides and 27 guides-in-making. In total they've added around 1246 contributions to the website, which means, around 1246 secret things, things that you can't even google most of the time, have been made accessible! So how many of these guides have been contacted? Most of the guides did receive some questions online about their city. Practical questions like; 'In which part of town should I look for an apartment', but also more intimate ones like; 'Are you single?'. Furthermore guides are being praised for their extensive work online promoting the cultural underground of the city. Still none of the guides that replied to my question did actually receive visitors. Except for one guy from Beirut: Rani. Rani received five visitors and is still counting.

So, I asked myself: How is this possible? Why did Rani receive five visitors, while the rest of the guides is getting none? Last week Rani was in Amsterdam and of course I was eager to have an interview with him to find out more. Rani told me he's not only dependent on the website for promotion. He makes sure everybody interested in Beirut or him, is redirected to his guide-page. In that way people who might know someone, who is the friend of someone who's going to Beirut is being informed about Rani, the guide. Put in less confusing words: He has created a broad reach of his guidepage.

The interview was very enlightening for me and made me think about things we need to improve in the Travel project. Guides should be able to broaden their reach, promote themselves. This can be done in different ways, but for now it's up to the guides themselves. I would recommend guides to do the same as Rani: Let people know you're a guide and redirect them to your page, even if they aren't going to your city. Let's hope the next balance will be more in balance.

How many guide proposals?

Tomorrow I'll send a mail to all our guides asking them:

1. Are you still active as a guide?

2. Have you been contacted by any visitors? Have you received comments/mails from members?

In my post after new years I will strike a balance. See you next year.

Sense of community: What would bring people closer together at Mediamatic Travel?

One of the key features a successful online community is the sense of community: The users in the community need to feel like they belong to something all together. In most cases the sense of community is created by itself, by the shared interest of a number of users, who then, take up the conversation elsewhere to share more of their interest. Of course they can disagree, the point is that they all have a shared passion for something, which could be anything. To create a sense of community, one needs to ask the question: What could bring people together?

Take a look at tripadvisor. It's commercial website that gathers information about hotels and restaurant from all over the world and provides a platform for users to back that information up with their own experience. Tripadvisor has also developed a Facebook application that allows you to mark a map with all the places you've been. This map will also mark all the places your friends have been. So if you're planning on going somewhere, Tripadvisor will show you who of all your Facebook friends has already been there, and at the same time notiy those friends that you'll be going there. This is how a shared interest/link between you and your friend is created, for you'll be happy to inform your friend about that place. Automatically this information goes to Tripadvisor to use it for their own administration, analysis and marketing. In the end you'll be happy to participate in the network of Tripadvisor, not because Tripadvisor wants you to, but because it offers a sense of community with your friends. 

Another interesting travel website that is successfully bringing travelers together is travbuddy.com. This  website works somewhat like a dating website; you set up an account, enter your travel plans and preferences, and then just wait until someone wants to join you on your trip. Travelers who participate the most within the network can win awards. There's a award for writing, for photographing, for the best community leader and so on. Basically they bring people together who enjoy sharing their travel stories and pictures with each other. Basically the conversation is continuing; even if you're done traveling in real life, you can still travel online.

Both examples are stacked with advertising, which doesn't make them seem trustworthy. It's hard establishing a sense of community within a highly advertised environment, because it distracts from theshared experience/interest/link. Thank god, Mediamatic travel is about the actual experience of traveling, meeting people and their culture and more specifically; about bringing visitors in contact with guides. This will probably be happening privately ( by e-mail).

How are the visiotr and the guide linked to each other in Mediamatic? Should they be linked based upon the city? Or a particular event/ organisation/ place? Should the focus be a particular art scene or possible collaboration? Looking at the options we've got, I see future in 'events'. An event is something that is going to happen, so people can gather around it, discuss it in advance and afterwards. An event could also become more personal ( like the starting date of someone's journey). There can be multiple entry-points for a visitor, but the focus of our website should be one feature that is communicated very clearly: What do we want people to do? What do people want to do? I'll talk about this more profoundly in my net post.

Rethinking the travel website

Christmas-time is coming, but there's still a lot of work to do.

These two weeks I'll me rethinking how to increase the usability of the mm travel website. We also have to do that for the general Mediamatic website, but my focus for now will be on the Travel site. I'll keep you updated as much as I can. 

The Online Participation Factor Presentation at Kom Je Ook? 3

The slides of my presentation at Kom Je Ook?3

To see the text that goes along the presentation, click here.

The Online Participation Factor

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Short text that goes along with my presentation for Kom Je Ook? 3

Here you'll find a summary about what I presented at the third Kom Je Ook? Public as Programmer. 

Basically I begin my presentation by stating that although a lot of organisations are interested in having an online community, just a few actually have platforms in which interaction is taking place.

This means the problem is not creating an online community or a platform. The problem is the participation of members. If it's such a great platform, why are people not contributing and participating?

In order to answer that question, I demonstrate some examples of websites in which people are participating like crazy. Mind that these websites all are commercial or made by the public. This is for I couldn't find ANY website of a cultural organisation in which the members are interacting at a certain level that is worth mentioning.

The commercial organisations make use of a rewarding system. Yunomi offers prices for participating and earning 'noni's'. Starbucks promises to put the ideas with the highest rating in action. Current.tv gives the option of becoming a group leader of a certain subject of video's/comments/articles. In that way the group leader of the subject is responsible for the participation of others: motivating them to contribute worthy articles/video's etc. to his subject.

Looking at examples of YouTube, Flickr, Facebook and MySpace, I could see the rewarding system doesn't apply. People participate because the initiator of the website/blog is participating regularly/personally. Moreover the website is made by the public, which automatically lowers the barriers for entry. People don't trust the big media online. There's a great consensus their trust will be used for commercial goals. This especially applies to young people.

So what can we conclude: It doesn't matter what kind of rewarding-system you implement on your website. The rewards also don't seem to be the issue, whether they're prices, or popularity, it all comes down to one thing:

People love to participate if they are free to do that. So make sure the communication is open (not hierarchical), keep it personal and reward them with your own participation (at least write a comment saying:'thank you for your contribution, appreciate that').

Keep in mind people spend their well-earned free-time on your website. They should at least be treated well, like they were in your own home. Welcome them inside, make them a drink, make them feel comfortable. Before you know it, people will be gathering around each other, chatting up, the party will be pumping and they'll be making plans for the next time.

Speech at Kom Je OOk? 3

A long time ago (about one month) we were in a meeting on Mediamatic Travel. We have those meetings every Friday. Their purpose is basically discussing ways how we could improve the website, what has been done, what still needs to be fixed etc..

So in this particular meeting we were discussing ways on how to motivate people to participate. And since this is the main concern in my research, Willem ( a.k.a. the boss) asked me to give a presentation about 'online participation' on the event Kom Je Ook?.

First I thought he was kidding, then I hoped he was kidding, but he wasn't... I do think it's a nice opportunity for me to share my thoughts on online participation, but this also meant I would absolutely have to know everything about it. This is something I agreed on with myself.

Now I've already done the presentation. And though it didn't turn out the way I wanted, still I'm pleased I didn't have a nervous breakdown. Actually everybody who has been working at Kom Je Ook? is pleased with that. Thanks, everyone for the excellent breathing exercises, psychological tricks and coaching, it really worked!

After the presentation some people came up to me and asked for more specific information about online participation in the cultural sector. And this was actually the best part of my Kom Je Ook? experience: Having a discussion instead of a monologue.

You see, it really made me feel like I was doing something useful; Being able to share my opinion/ information is one thing, but listening to people that are working in the business and trying to understand their worries and arguments is another.

The whole experience of being an intern is pushing me more and more towards research. I have so many questions about social media and online communities, and there is just no general answer.

I also discovered that the kind of research I think is most suited to examine 'social media' is qualitative research. And by research I mean: research on online interaction and participation. In qualitative research a nuance isn't lost and it's focusing on meaning in stead of numbers. This gives me a better picture on how people are using social media and why.

Flap Slide

From 'Doe iets' to 'Koop Tickets| Meer Acties'. This is a short slide illustrating the transformation the flap has been going through.

Flap Slide

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Total Flap Makeover.

Good news: we have made a lot of progress in making the 'flap' fabulous. The flap is actually a button on the website that contains all kinds of interactions (guide me, become a fan etc.). This posts will be about the flap: Next I'll describe what we did, how we did it and why.

The first flap we've made, you can check out here. Nevertheless nobody clicked or hoovered over the title. So the flap did never appear. A logical next step would be: make the flap fixed and that's what we did. You can see the result on the mediamatic website:

Still the people weren't clicking on the flap after making it fixed. Now what? We tested and tested and came to the conclusion: It doesn't look clickable, and the text doesn't invite to 'do something' ("Do What?"), certainly not clicking on it. So the next thing we did was make the flap clickable and second, change the text into something that will give more information about its functionality. My next post will contain a slide that will illustrate the change the 'flap' has been going through.

Everybody is really pleased with the final proposal. The tests show around a half of the people tend to click the flap for more actions. In case they don't click on the upper button, we have placed a flap that is already showing all the actions at the bottom. For older people and digibeten tend to look for a button at the bottom of the page.

What does an online community need?

People will participate anyway, but how to make them participate on your online platform for a long period of time?

There are million ways of implementing social network tools for online communities. In most cases they simply don't work. Why?

You need tools and technical infrastructure to make online communication possible and support the online community's interactions with the world. Mind that I'm not talking about high-tech tools or beautiful designs. I'm just saying it should fit the community's needs and wants.

The second aspect you need is social behaviour, which will sustain the community over time. This aspect we can divide into four kinds of social behaviour the online community needs at least to survive.

• People have to manage the tools they are using. Technical management.
• People have to socially manage their online platform to ensure it's safety, peacefulness and open communication.
• People have to exert some kind of external promotion in order to attract new members. 22% of members drop-out of online platforms annually. Butler recommends a annual growth of at least double the drop-out rate in order to sustain an online platform.
• People have to create content and consume it. Attending to and reading messages is a prerequisite for others to provide them. This last social behaviour lies in the heart of active participation.

Thus, you need social behavior and a technical infrastructure on a platform that suits the community. How should this be implemented in a particular platform? That's what my next blogpost is about.

The one percent rule

One more thing. I just heared of the one percent rule of online partiicpation (for me a reason not to force participation right now). For every comment put online and visible, there are 99 views... so you don't need to force people to comment, it's more effective to get more members.

How to motivate people?

A lot of theories about motivating people are out there. A lot.

Let me first start with a vlog (video blog) from YouTube I absolutely love:



If you look at the vlog really carefully, you'll see the content is not really special, nor the camera techniques. Yes, it's funny, but not too much. Why then is this girl from Australia the most subscribed ever?

I think it's got to do everything with the interaction she has with her audience. What she does is actually dropping a topic, discussing it, joking about it, visualizing it and then comes the important part. She asks the audience to discuss it themselves, share their experiences, jokes, visuals. And that's not all. In her next vlog, she gives feedback on the best comments.

Let's go back to motivation theories to place this vlog in a framework. According to Peter Collock there are four overlapping motives for people to participate in a online community. These are:

1. Anticipated reciprocity: People expect something in return for their contribution/participation. This something could be information, a reply or subscribers.
2. Increased recognition: People want their contributions to be recognized. They want to have a reputation/ particular identity. They want people to acknowledge their level of participation.
3. Sense of efficacy. People need to have the sense they do have impact on their environment.
4. Sense of community: The whole interaction needs to feel like a real human community. For example: You put something online, you get a response. Other people rate those responses. Again others are influenced by the ratings and responding.. and so on...

So why does Nataly have almost half a million subscribers? Nataly is a leader (or a so-called YouTube celebrity) that keeps participating without monetary gain. Let's go back to the motives.

1. Expected reciprocity. She's getting a lot of comments/video comments in return. People are suggesting new topics, asking her advice, subscribing and linking things to her.
2. Increased recognition. Nataly is the most subscribed of all in Australia. She's a celebrity in real life already (notice the pictures with fans at the end of the vlog).
3. Sense of efficacy. She definitely has the sense she's having impact on her environment. She's letting others rethink their experience and comment/vlog on her. In a former post she calls upon everybody to be at a certain point in Sidney and a lot of people do.
4. Sense of community. I don't think I even have to explain this one. People are commenting a lot, but she only submits comments in her next vlog that are worth it. So people are participating in a community that she created just to fit in. Later they will also receive responses, get recognized and at last as well feel a sense of efficacy and community. And so the circle goes round.

Putting YouTube aside, it should be noted that the vlog of Nataly has very low barriers. Although she does have a particular crowd, the crowd hasn't been selected by herself, but by the people in the crowd themselves. So if you make a website and you start implementing restrictions, people will browse away. If you do your thing, let the whole community to be open, people interested (the best crowd you can have) will feel the need to participate.

Don't hate if you can't participate

The next few blogs will all have the same subject: participation.

Like I mentioned the last time. We need a sort of participation-rewarding system in order to motivate people to participate.

Now I know from my final paper on YouTube, that the result or reward of participation is being able to share/evaluate/change the prominent norms and values within the community. It's actually the same in the offline counterpart. You can imagine that you can't just change the 'rules of the game' by entering a community: you don't have the right since you don't know the people, you don't understand the rules of conduct and values of the community. Put in other words: You have to be a player, to change the rules of the game. The more you are a player, the more legitimacy you have to do that (though the legitimacy is never NEVER absolute, the greatest thing about web 2.0 ;) ).

That doesn't mean it's hard to become a member and it shouldn't be. As a new member of the community, or newbie, you're absolutely welcome and people within the online community are happy to explain you everything, that is, if you show them you're interested and willing. Everybody had to go through that stage of being new, so they do understand.

A website should always allow for different stages of participation. Lave and Wenger suggest five types of trajectories amongst a community:

Peripheral (or Lurker) – An outside, unstructured participation
Inbound (or Novice) – Newcomer is invested in the community and heading towards full participation
Insider (or Regular) – Full committed community participant
Boundary (or Leader) – A leader, sustains membership participation and interactions
Outbound (or Elder) – Process of leaving the community due to new relationships, new positions, new outlooks

The problem in the MM travel website lies that leaders were created without them really participating. The result now is that we have a lot of leaders on the website that didn't create a specific culture online. Real leaders are the ones motivated to contribute to the community by interaction, updating their profile and so on. Our leaders we have to motivate ourselves!

Now we have a lot of leaders and no MM travel culture. So people that are new ( lurkers and novices) they are not obliged to participate, since there IS NO MM travel CULTURE online. They don't feel the urge to interact, since there will be no change in the culture by participating. They assume they are the same as the leaders (which is actually absolutely correct) since they are not participating either. I hope I've made myself clear.

On the other hand: what else could we have done? It's true that most online communities grow slowly at first, due in part to the fact that the strength of motivation for contributing is usually proportional to the size of the community. As the size of the potential audience increases, so does the attraction of writing and contributing. This, coupled with the fact that culture isn't created overnight, means creators can expect slow progress at first with a new virtual community. As more people begin to participate, however, the motivations will increase, creating a virtuous cycle in which more participation leads to more participation.

Still it's frustrating. Especially seeing more people getting involved in the website without ever feeling the urge to interact. They forget they will also feel bored online if nobody interacts with them and recognizes their contribution...

Results!

So, what are the results saying?

People absolutely love the idea of the MM travel website. They react with a lot of enthusiasm.. that is: until they bump into a lot of navigation problems which are very related to each other. I'll set out the main issues we discovered and what we're going to do to fix them.

De flap.

The appearing drop-down menu that I was talking about earlier, doesn't stand out. People don't notice it and don't understand why important functions (like 'be my guide') are put in there. They DO like the box when we make them aware of it. So the easiest solution is: don't make the 'flap' appear anymore, just make it something always visible, make it fixed. This is how the flap looks right now:

Next we're gonna add new functions to the flap, making it like an interaction-information-easy-to-navigate-thingy. New functions people asked for:

-Review guide/testimonials/ rating: at least something that would make the guide credible

-Ask a question: People want to be able to see someone else's questions and make them themselves, without having to go into the private e-mail-area.

-Stories: They want to add their stories, and read others.

-Profile guide: Of course it would be nice to check someone's personal profile before contacting them.

-Share this.

-Flag this.

Mouse over.

The next main issue is the mouse over. You can only distinguish between an image or a guide if you mouse over the images. Still the participants tend to not mouse over anything at all! And if they do, it's too short of a time to really notice a change in the image or functionality. Can you imagine people using laptops mousing over items? No. So we made a guide page more obvious by allowing for the item to have -GUIDE- displayed.

A Map!

People in the guides page looking for a guide in a particular destination, give up after searching and scrolling all the way down. I can't blame them. It's not clear where the guide is from, you have to mouse over the item to discover that. After that you have to search for your particular city by mousing over and reading all the guide-items. No wonder they go back to the cities page and try too find their guide there (which they don't..).

Any solution? Yes, a map with all the guides over the world. In that way you can find your guide(s) in a wink of an eye. Looking for a guide in South-Africa? Or just Buenos Aires: it's all clear and traceable.

Time to wrap up. O, just one last thing. While discussing a minimum number of items a guide should create in order to become guide-worthy, we started thinking about a participation-reward system. So that people will get more involved and motivated in the network. I'll come back on that one the next time. For now we have to make sure the site has a good base. With that I mean: a clear navigation, profile and interaction functions.

Testing, one two three

Tomorrow Saro and I are going to do some research on the MM travel website. We've got the assignment to test the usability of the website and in particular the new 'flap' that we are using now for contacting guides and becoming a fan or a hater.

I want to make sure that you understand that this is a pre-test, a quickie. My big research is coming up in two months. What we're going to do now is letting people browse the website while using an eye-tracking device in order to find out what people are looking at the first time they enter the site. Also we're going to give them things to do in order to find out if they're doing a good job. The main goals of such a test are finding out which functions the site still lacks and to discover faults in design.

So what is usability? When does a site have a high usability ( because that's what you want, right?). Well first of all it should be efficient. The user should accomplish his/her goals quickly. People really don't want to wait or put too much effort in finding out how things work, especially sitting behind the computer.

Second the thing the user wants to do, should be easy to learn and to remember. If a website requires a manual, there's something very wrong. People don't want to do a whole study before getting started. They want to go and get creative, mess with it. They want to make mistakes and learn quickly how to make them undone. That's basically how every (fun) learning process works: by trial and error.

And last but not least, it should give the user some sense of satisfaction. This can include all kinds of things, but I like to think of it as something that has got to do with expectation. If you expect something to happen and it happens just the way you want it, it gives you a satisfying feeling, making you feel in control. If not? It could make you feel frustrating, lacking motivation to go on, insecure about what you're doing and so on. People don't want to feel incompetent. Especially not if they're spending their free time doing it. They really want it to be satisfying, efficient and easy to learn, or else they will leave.

Tomorrow I'll let the results speak for themselves...

Genesis

I probably should have started this blog earlier. Now I feel like I've got to write a lot of history before cutting to the chase. So, how did this all start?

Two weeks ago I started my internship @ Mediamatic Travel. Since then I've been helping change/build and destroy the website. Let me start by saying it's very dynamic and interesting work, very challenging. I'll explain why.

First of all you're dealing with two sides and sometimes even three sides of the Mediamatic foundation. On the one hand we have developers, designers and computergenii. These are the technical staff. They want a nice design and cutting edge technology. On the other hand we have the communication and pr people, they want the website to look cool, appealing and representative. Third, and most important maybe, we have the people, the mass, the buyers. They want everything the first two want without spending a lot of time nor money on it. What they want is efficiency & satisfaction: usability.

Having a balance between these three groups means a lovely website in the future.

Now our website has a few challenges that make this balance hard to establish. I'll cite an ex-co-worker, Michele Champagne, when we were discussing the website. She said:

"We're dealing here with a four-headed beast. The first head consists of the old members, who are used to providing info, not participating on the website. Also we helped them a lot building their site. They have had to deal with the ever-changing concept of the website, because of that lacking faith in the project.

The second head of the beast is the new member. He's to participate and go figure it out himself. We're not building his website, just coaching him through the process. Still this member isn't familiar with the website and lacks motivation to improve it.

The third and fourth head of the beast is the difference between being a participant or a consumer. Some people really want to get involved, being an active member or a guide. Others just want to browse the site. How to make it for both of them an equally interesting website to visit by letting them apply their own level of participation? Do we actually allow that to happen?"

That's a very important thing to think about: Do we allow for 'newbies' to go and make errors, not be motivated and make 'crapsites' and in the meantime have an open network for everybody? Or do we want a small elite of people that have got high involvement and make beautiful sites, but in that way making it a closed network with less people and high barriers for entry?

As you can see there is still a lot to work on