Today I had an interesting chat with Robert Kluijver, one of our Mediamatic Travel guides. He's going to Skopje in March to do a creative city workshop.
We discussed what would be the most appropriate way to communicate Skopje's creativity on our Mediamatic Travel website and came to the conclusion that not only guides, but also people with a profile that would just like to add pictures or texts, should be able to participate. In this scenario the guide will become a cultural manager in the process than the sole contributor and contact person of the city's underground.
Robert was very pleased with this idea. It also made his job easier, as he only needs to contact one person who's fit to be the guide of Skopje. Subsequently the guide will invite the whole artistic network of Skopje to start contributing.
Next week I'll be focussing on the 'invite friend'-button to ease the proces of inviting a person to contribute.
While I'm theorizing what the communication-tools should look like and how we could improve the interactivity and participation on our travel website, the technical staff has alread implemented some improvements I mentioned in my earlier posts. Hura x3!
A quick update: The open-CI people are removed from the city pages. In other words; every person page that accidentally appeared in the citypage, is now removed. Also the images that were showing twice in the citypages are removed. The page now looks neat!
We also gave the guide-section a nice title and introduction, so people know in what kind of page they are. Still there's some work to be done here.
We are going to implement the new 'action-dialogue' or 'flap' soon. This will be a mayor revolution in the look of our website.
My assignment for this week is to create a way of communicating the main function of our website on the homepage. Willem suggested communicating Mediamatic Travel's main function in a cartoon. So, I've sent everybody I know that is equiped with mad illustration skills an invitation to participate in making a comic. The best contribution will be used on the homepage.
I've noticed that my latest posts are more or less about the appearance of the Travel-profile. What should the guidepage or profile page look like? Drawing from my former posts, I can only conclude one thing: Remove the guidepage and use the principles of dating to match profiles with one another.
Why dating you may ask. Although the travel-site is not a dating site, some very important similarities can be found. In both cases the aim is eventually to meet each other in real-life. In both cases the members have the same goal, the same interest or need something only the other can provide. I've been participating in the Mediamatic Datingsite now for a while and noticed that strangers are continuously contacting each other, and interacting with each other; online as well as offline. We can learn from that.
So, how does a dating site link people with each other? A dating site requires members to answer fixed questions, so that important features and interests are covered. Fixed questions will thus give us the possibility of linking people with each other based on their interests and demographics. They also provide visitors with relevant information about others. Moreover from the user's point of view it's much easier to answer questions than to find inspiration to write something yourself: The profile looks instantly full.
The questionnaire should have a fill-in form, be relevant, fun and quickly to complete. We should maybe even enable visitors to draw a map where they're going or at least have a question that is concerned with their travel plans. The dating aspect will also enable visitors to get in touch with eachother and link themselves to an event/organisation/place/location. This way guides will be able to see who matches to what they've got to offer. The guides will see who prospect visitors are, instead of waiting for someone to contact them. This two-way of communication helps constructing asense of community I spoke about in my earlier posts.
By using dating features in our Mediamatic Travel project we'll help people find others that can mean something to them and lower the barrier of contacting each other. Whether adding dating features to our project will elicit these results, is something we'll have to test.
This is an e-mail I received this morning that triggered me to write this post...which proves I'm a bit slow since I received about a ton of similar e-mails that didn't ring a bell. Shame on me. Here's the email. I've made the important things bold.
"Hi Emina,
First of all I wish you a fantastic 2010!
I'm sorry my answer took so long. After our last contact a couple of months ago, I have added more info to the page of [City] and intend to go further with it, as soon as I get some free time.
I would also love to become a travel guide. The only problem is, that I live in Amsterdam, and could be of assistance to travelers on location in [City] only for a limited time period, say a month or two per year.
However, I told some friends in [City] about it and they were very enthusiastic about taking part in making the page of [City] more attractive and becoming guides.
Of course I will keep you up to date and I hope I can turn to you, if necessary, for help.
Regards,
[Guide]"
This letter really shows what has been asked from me the ultimate three months of being an editor at Mediamatic Travel. First of all people want to add their favorite things to a city, not to their guidepage! It indicates that having your page with your favorite things isn't that important to guides at all. What's important is that your favorites are added to the city page.
Second, people don't mind to share their guiding. I think we thought guides would be very competitive to attract the most visitors. However this is not the case, they are actually happy to share the guiding with their network.
Once again I have to conclude that the guidepage should be removed and becoming a guide should be made much easier. Also we have to find a way to communicate the inactivity of guides. Guides now just finish their guidepage and then quit participating. There has to be a way of communicating this o potential visitors/ viewers of the guidepage.
Sociability works in a slightly different way online than in real life. Of course there's a greater focus on textuality and online features ( images, personal information and a particular presentation). Right now I'm referring to sociability as a process of 'getting to know someone'.
Let me give you an example. Facebook does a great job with this. It offers the possibility to track people. Not only is it a great feature for you to get into contact with old buddies, but it's also a very important feature for people to track you (where did you work, for how long, who do you know who works there as well?). Facebook is also a great networking tool to link yourself to interesting parties. These appealing features assure the networks growth and the constant flow of personal information added.
Furthermore the status-feature in Facebook can be used a s a personal diary. You can basically track the status-changes of a contact to see what he or she's been up to the last few days (even if you weren't online during that period). Facebook provides outside parties with a particular narrative of an user, with the story of a particular period in time.
The more I think of it, the more I agree with what already has been said about online interaction. To form a trustworthy personality online, a person needs to interact online. Only by linking yourself with different projects, jobs, people, etc.. and by having interaction with those things, will it give your interaction online a real, a human feel. This is probably why online social networking is so fun to do in the first place. Interaction online thus requires easy tools for linking yourself to others and expressing enough to have a human and real feel to it. Within the Travel Project these communication tools for interaction are even more important since the whole reliability/personality of the guides depends on their personal presentation online.
Needless to say, we need more interaction features. But what kind? I think linking is a very good one, and it's actually one of the specialities of Mediamatic..but what kind of linking do we need? Links based on what?
This is just a quick heads up on the results that came out of the questionnaire I've sent out to all guides in the Mediamatic Travel project.
- It seems to be that friends and family play a big part in informing guides about the Mediamatic Travel project. Internet is the second player in the promotion of the Travel-site. To me, this information stresses the importance of inviting your network. It also shows we are not doing enough to promote the travel-site by Mediamatic.net, the magazine, the media or work.
- The most important reasons for guides to keep participating are 'promoting my own projects' and 'informing people about the underground culture'. There are guides that would rather promote their project and not necessarily guide others.
- Everybody would like to have the contributions 'Place' and 'Cafe' added. Also almost everybody has difficulties adding the location to their contributions. - Guides are specifically asking for more communication tools. They want a visible comment bar in their guidepage, some sort of feedback section and tools for promoting themselves.
- Finally I could distinguish between 4 types of users: spectators, visitors, contributors and guides. For a profound explanation of the four types, please check out my final paper in About.
Mind that these results are preliminary result. To see the actual questionnaire, clickhere.
People act according to the expectations that they have of particular contexts. When most users visit this site, particular schemata in their brains are activated that will signal them that this site is probably a blog. The typical interface of a blog contains comments on the bottom of each post, extra information or other posts on the left or right and some sort of navigation-menu. Of course blogs can vary in their presentation, but most of them stick to this basic format. The reason why this format works is simple; people instantly know where to look for information and wether this information is relevant to them. Nobody wants to waste time trying to figure things out that are supposed to be easy.
The expectations users have of our website is that it's a social travel network. Meet people working in the arts around the world, find treasures hidden in the underground. You can even become a guide yourself and guide others in the rural scenes of your city.
However becoming a guide is extremely difficult. It's almost impossible to do without instructions of the editors. I discovered that it's easy for users to set up a profile and add contributions to their city. The trouble begins when I make them aware that they have to set up a guidepage and put all those contributions inside, as well as more information of them being a guide (usually this information has already been put in their profile) to become a guide. This is the point where it all goes wrong, they loose interest and stop contributing. It's just too much.
So why was the guidepage introduced in the first place? Because of the open-CI with Mediamatic. The first guides that joined the project already had a profile at Mediamatic, so the open-CI issue had to be solved. The project however is growing and growing with each new member registering a Travel-profile. It doesn't make sense anymore to have the guidepages linked to a Mediamatic profile.
Discovering hidden places of the underground is also a very time-consuming task. The problem here is that all the contributions that need to show up in the city-page are randomly displayed. Moreover the citypage can only show approximately 30 contributions which results in guides asking me why their contribution doesn't show up in the citypage. The reason is that we just have too much contributions and while it's great having a large number of contributions, it doesn't really come in handy if you can't guarantee visibility and find-ability of the content. On the other hand, if we let all the contributions appear, you'd have to scroll all the way down to see all the contributions and that's just as invisible.
Contacting guides has been made very easy though with the introduction of the 'flap'. Just click the 'guide me' button ;)
We need to work on the expectations users have about our website. It's kind of an indication of the success of our project, because all the problems we are experiencing right now how to do with the growth of the network and the content. The questions we need to address are concerned with how to handle such data. The website is growing and we need to rethink what kind of tools and applications are necessary to keep up with the growth.
I'll launch a questionnaire soon addressed at the guides of our project in which they can express their preferences and what they think of the project so far. I will especially try to get an answer to my main concern: Do we really need a guidepage? Isn't it easier/more fun to contribute to your city (along with co-guides)? We'll find an answer to that question next week.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 KomJeOok?.
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 KomJeOok? 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 KomJeOok? 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Collockthere 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.
