Web 2.0: World Domination Via Collaboration

Attending Web 2.0 Summit here in San Francisco serves a twofold importance for me. First, covering it from the perspective of a journalist/critic. And secondly, as a content provider. With that in mind, like everyone else in media, I'm concerned about how new developments in consumer behavior have affected media overall. Especially of interest is the YouTube phenomenon, which I discussed earlier today. But equally of interest is the growth of social networking and whether it works as a business model.

So I attended a session hosted by BlogHer called, "BlogHer Presents...World Domination via Collaboration," to learn whether there are answers to any of these questions that the collective media has about its own future.

Here's what I learned in terms of building community and social networking..

Speakers included:

Jory Des Jardins, Co-founder, BlogHer LLC
Caterina Fake, Co-founder, Flickr
Jessica Hardwick, Founder and CEO, SwapThing.com
Lisa Stone, Co-founder, BlogHer
Jenna Woodul, Executive Vice President and Chief Community Officer, LiveWorld

Jory: What about if you're brand new?

Caterina: You may want to invite them in to moderate. Communities tend to take on the characteristics of the founders. Managing diversity in communities is an incredibly difficult thing to do. One of the things we found with Flickr, we had Muslim women who were showing their midriff and it was not acceptable to other Muslims. It lead to a lot of product changes on our part. We had to build certain product features that enabled certain levels of privacy and terms about the level of nudity.

Q from audience: Jessica you mentioned reputation and partnering with someone to do that. How important is building reputation on your site?

Jessica: It's a multilevel question. Reputation is the single most important factor on our site. People will not feel it's safe to swap without reputation. We don't allow anyone under 18 to swap because we can not protect them. Our users wanted to pull over their ebay reputaion, but ebay doesn't allow it and we couldn't prove they were linking to their own reputation anyway. Users should own their own reputation. We partnered with Rapleaf. It allows users to own reputation. It's been one of the best partnerships.

Q from Caterina: You can be an axe murderer on ebay, but if you ship on time you can have a great reputation?

Jessica: Raplef takes in from sites you've bought and sold on, and referral from friends and family.

Q from audience: How do you feel about sites that pay people to moderate or contribute?

Jenna: If you're transparent with community about what you're trying to accomplish, it's a good thing.

Jessica: Any reputation gained from swap circle, we're willing to do revenue share. We don't pay them to do the job of having swap circle.

Jory: We have found that certain people bubble to the top with BlogHer. So making people feel involved and valuing their input.

Q from audience: Now that the field is becoming saturated how do you distinguish and grow your own community?

Caterina: When we first started we couldn't take credit card payment. We didn't give everyone access to pro accounts. Invite five friends and you will have access to pro accounts. It was beneficial to us and to users. the more you can make your users seem like they are generous to the people they are inviting it pays off in the long run. After we were acquired by Yahoo! what we decided is that we would give pro users a year free and give away two pro accounts, because with Yahoo! we were charging less for pro accounts than we had on our own. It was good for our user base.

Lisa: How are you going to be a niche buster? Go to the people, the enthusiasts who think that what you're doing is the best. Get them invested in helping you dominate the niche.

Jessica: Be your own best advertiser. I don't go anywhere without wearing a Swap T-shirt. I met a DJ at a club and got to talking and then posted on a DJ site, and they are still a large part of Swap today.

Jory: When you get really big, how do you scale and manage the community? I can't imagine you touching every person in your community every day.

Jenna: The old timers and the new comers are at odds. You have to change your strategy. Hopefully you have a set of leaders who can move people off into different areas. Then you can continue to welcome the newbies. Let people have a stake and give them ways to separate themselves off and pursue separate interests.

Q from audience: Is it a good idea to give people special designations if they prove to be valuable leaders?

Jenna: It depends on the nature of the community. Who knows the ropes?

Lisa: One thing we worried about with contributing editors was traditional approach. We opened community editorships on volunteer basis. When we did this we created a situation where community leaders were performing service for members. They would report to the community what was happening. It created a horizontal feel. Figuring out a way to tame the Internet. We have 62 contributors.

Q from audience: Flickr using a community game that worked very well. How did that work?

Caterina: We started as a game company. It was a social multiplayer game. We built new product. Massive online photo sharing. We created all of these groups without understanding how they would be used. Systems were there to encourage and enable community.

Jory: How do you deal with spammers and flamers?

Jessica: We don't have the wherewithal so we turned it over to the users. Lifetime on the site for spam is 41 minutes and dwindling.

Lisa: Our guidelines forbid spam. Our editors are empowered to mark spam. We have a huge directory of blogs by women. A human looks at those.

Jessica: We didn't have tools where people could kill it themselves. They mark it, a human looks at it, it's killed.

Q from audience: What tools would you recommend to start your community?

Caterina: A cookie cutter community never works.

Jenna: It's about what you're trying to accomplish. If you have a bunch of people in a community trying to talk to one another. You need boundaries. People are more creative with boundaries and props. You have to answer what you want your users to do before you decide on the tools.

Caterina: Start small so there are other people hanging out in the same room where you are.

Q from audience: Closed community .vs open for Flickr. Are there different requirements?

Caterina: Typical use case is that you'll see someone's photos except photos of their children. The number of public to private groups is 80 - 20. It's really dependent upon the user. You can form a group for only invitees. You can have a public group that is for invitees as well. It's very varied. the publicness is what makes Flickr Flickr.

Q from audience: The role of the lurker in communities -- is there a way to reach out? There are lot of people who don't post.

Lisa: There are studies that for every one posting there are 10 interested who aren't saying anything. That's why we have so many topics. We try to obtain a very diverse group of voices.

Jenna: Integrate community into content of site so everyone doesn't have to feel like they are doing community. Some people are nervous about being involved in community, so keep some things on the content level where they can engage.

Q from audience: Does an offline component enable the online component?

Caterina: Slashdot is excellent, but it doesn't have a meetup. There is no where on the site designated for that. Successful communities have been able to bridge the offline and online worlds.

Jessica: It's a huge part of our business. Many of our users deliver in person.

Lisa: It's been essential. We started offline. Now it's a huge viral marketing congo line that we're having a challenge trying to quantify.

Q from audience: Can you talk more about business models? Integrating advertising into your community.

Caterina: We don't have ad on individual photo pages. Advertising does not work on individual entries. It can be a bad experience. Serving ads against the content. But you can serve against aggregate content. As you're searching for content, to get ads that relate it's appropriate. But on individual user pages it's obtrusive.

Lisa. We've had a very different experience. We introduced an advertising network to begin paying our contributors a small stipend.

Jory: we asked bloggers to identify advertisers that they don't want to see on their sites. We go through and do a review of the blogs that advertisers will be on. The issues that advertisers have is that they want to control the conversation. I have yet to see a blogger rag on an advertiser.

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