Bait and Validate: Congregating Online Communities Around Content

How do you congregate crowds around your website’s content? To congregate means to gather together an assembly for a purpose.

To achieve that, I think you first need a hook and live bait. Something that squirms persistently in the web surfers’ minds and make them crave for more. It could be a burning wish to stake a position across a culturally divisive issue; or pursue narrow but popular interests like how to cope and where to find the best deals during a recession; or search for a multi-use play space that provides current events, cultural criticism, resources and referrals, and conversations around global or local community concerns, much like what websites of major newspapers provide.

The website content’s purpose is to meet the needs of the intended audience. And the site is live because that content is just-in-time, and directly relevant to what people are looking for as those needs evolve.

In our textbook’s terms, this relates to the importance of having a vision statement and preparing a marketing research document that is based on capturing accurately the consumers’ feature requirements.

Meeting those criteria is challenging enough. But does it stop there?

Something that seems to be missing from our textbook is that beyond baiting, there is an ever harder challenge, which is to validate. That means to confirm, to “bless” that one’s entry into the website is justified and worth the effort, and that staying around to ask for more is legitimate.

How do you validate? Through interactivity. By allowing users to contribute a thought, add a dissenting opinion, ask a dumb question, and be connected to everyone else to give, take and interrelate.

In our textbook, this refers to the design stage and technical features of a web-based multimedia project. It is not enough to catch the crowds through a good hook. It is perhaps even more important to sanction their venturing in by designing the website to allow user ownership of its interactive features.

In short, bait them so they come, but also validate their participation so they return in big crowds because they belong.

From Workshops to Markets: A Proposed Multimedia Project

I would like to pitch a multimedia project that would achieve community-building and provide a social service focused on empowering women-entrepreneurs through business opportunities, within a developing country context.

Vision. As its vision statement, the website will be a forum to help women-entrepreneurs from rural areas in finding buyers for their products, thereby giving them employment and increasing their incomes.

Platform. This forum will be a link (like Politico 44) within an already-existing website, thus avoiding the large establishment and start-up costs of starting a brand new one. Thus, a key assumption is that the women-entrepreneurs have access to small loans and have already started their businesses. Consequently, the parent website will probably be one that is involved in microfinance.

Customer requirement. The main feature requirement is that—though this website—women-entrepreneurs should be able to obtain up-to-date information on which retail outlet stores in urban cities require deliveries of three product categories that they produce, namely, clothing, footwear and bags (specifically ladies’ handbags and grocery shopping bags). Perishable foodstuffs are excluded. Urban buyers and rural sellers are both target clients for the website.

Measurement. All the components above should be quantifiable: market information should not be more than one week old. It should include when the deliveries will be required, how much, and what the going prices are in various other areas for comparative purposes. Women-entrepreneurs should own profitable, family-sized businesses located in rural areas. The products they want to sell should meet minimum quality standards and be photographed for posting on the website. Other qualifications will be required, such as compliance with national laws and regulations, etc.

Teams. A requirements team (including a strong research sub-team) and a design team will be needed, since interactivity and speed of information access will be very important to make this site a dynamic forum. Buyers and sellers should be able to “converse” through the website, compare market data, and bid. A technical team will also be needed, but the focus is not so much the web platform itself (since an existing site will be used), but rather the complements to the Internet that will need to be harnessed. In many developing countries, this will be cell phones for text messaging as well as short video clips (especially personal testimonies of business success). There should also be a campaign of lectures to prospective clients at Internet Cafes in rural areas, where television sets should be set up for showing longer instructional videos.

Schedule. The research sub-team will need to do its work first. Do the markets exist? Will there be a demand for market information from women-entrepreneurs? Are there barriers and how significant are they? The findings of the research sub-team will feed into the preparation of a Marketing Requirements Document (MRD), which is a must. About 50% of the project period will be for fleshing out feature requirements and meeting customer satisfaction alone. Design and technical aspects will share 25% and testing/tweaking will comprise 25% of the project period. This project should be deliverable within 6 months.

I would pitch this multimedia project idea to private philanthropic foundations, bilateral aid organizations (like USAID or the Peace Corps), and numerous international organizations providing microfinance.

Deconstructing Politico 44: Diary, yes. Living? Think again.

Clay Shirky says: “Here’s Comes Everybody!” To which Scott Berkun seems to answer: “OK, but who do you call in from the street, who gets through the door, and how do you make the guests stay?”

In other words, multimedia is an open but managed experience.

I sympathize. Deconstructing Politico 44 by using the concepts outlined in Berkun’s Chapter Three has shown me how to figure out what to do when faced with a multimedia project. What is Politico 44’s vision? It says so in the banner: to provide “a living diary of the Obama Presidency.” What were the requirements: why was this site done? who wants it? for what purpose?

Meeting the requirements requires planning from three angles. First and most important is the customer perspective. Did readers ask for or complain about some things, or did Politico’s creators think readers would want and should have this site? Second is the technology perspective, which in the case of Politico 44 adopted the “aesthetic” of the main Politico website (and was evidently covered by its budget).

Third is the business perspective, where I started to have some issues with how Politico went about designing this site. I assume that Politico’s marketing team conducted surveys, focus groups or direct market research to find out what will motivate readers to use Politico 44 if it were provided, and whether there already are competitors (Table 3.2 of Berkun’s book).

Guess what? There is a very powerful competitor, and it’s no less than the White House website itself, where I searched for “President’s Schedule” and found Streaming Today, which covers the daily schedule at the White House. The White House site provides live streaming and video archives, while Politico 44’s link on “Obama in Video” provides video archives only. Interactivity in Politico 44 and the home website is also low, since the Multimedia link mainly features posted videos and slideshows. The White House site allows users to get regular updates by email, and Politico 44 provides for email alerts, but the White House site gives the impression of greater promise and ability to deliver.

Is one better than the other? Politico 44 has a useful Whiteboard and a Speedread that updates headlines about every 2 hours. But how different is that from regular updates in mainstream news websites, or even the front pages of Yahoo and AOL? Not much. The schedule on the right side also did not change much during the hours that I observed the site, over a few days. Normally, it shouldn’t, since official schedules are locked in advance. Thus, “Minute by Minute” as bannered in the Home Page created unmet expectations.

I was curious over lunch today whether this carried through to Politico's hard copy. In the June 10, 2009 issue, Politico 44 is bannered on page 3, but it had a seamless look with the rest of the Politico paper. And the long articles it contained (like Obama's approval of the pay-as-you-go plan) certainly did not have the urgent feel to it of minute-to-minute news, since I read about it in the Washington Post and New York Times at breakfast.

I do like Politico 44 but while deconstructing it, I sense that if its Venn diagram were drawn (Figure 3.2 of Berkun’s book), there would be a generous overlap between business and technology considerations, but at the possible expense of meeting customer needs. If I could actually deconstruct the process that created Politico 44, I would be most interested in studying the feature statements from potential users, which according to Berkun could be the most difficult part of planning a multimedia project. The "minute by minute"-ness of the site needs a burning issue, a hook, but that is not clear from the random content, and the "Obama Presidency" concept is too vast to be one.

Misunderstanding the customer need not be a fatal flaw, but it could certainly weaken you against the competition. And with the Obama machinery’s proven effectiveness in digital campaigns, the competition is formidable.

Two Good Websites on Good Governance and Social Responsibility

In my first blog dated May 24, 2009, I presented some ideas about a possible multimedia project focused on good governance and anti-corruption. I asked whether others are doing it already. Here are two such websites that I liked, both generated from the Philippines.

The first is the Affiliated Network for Social Accountability (ANSA) based at the Ateneo University’s School of Government in Manila. If I were to do my own website, I would most likely model it after ANSA’s. I liked it because its design is geared to serious users with specific objectives in mind for going into the website, namely, to become engaged in social causes. That calls for uncluttered space, well-organized news and resources, plus easy to use videos, event calendars and membership forms – which the website delivers effectively. The top right corner has two very simple messages for the use: what is ANSA all about and how do I join? The blogs have the right mix of being pointed about the issues without being unnecessarily provocative or conflictive, although I am sure some more aggressive activists would find the blogs tame and perhaps a bit too redacted. I would rank this website highly on have the right mix of multimedia tools and user-friendliness. More is not necessarily better.

Another Filipino social responsibility website is Akomismo, which means "I myself". If you skip the Intro, the next page asks you to write in and submit your personal commitment to address the huge social and economic ills of the Philippines, or simply to improve everyday lives. I especially like the scrolling Wall of Commitments where the personal commitments of (presumably selected) members are posted. Nearly all the posts are in the Philippine language, but some examples include:

I myself … will steer youth away from drugs.
I myself … will lead against corruption.
I myself … will pick up garbage in front of the school.
I myself … will eat vegetables.

But I have to study this website further. It advertises regularly during prime time on national television, and I sense a commercial intent behind the social façade. Where does that all that advertising money come from? There may be nothing wrong with that, but it would be interesting to explore a possible case study of building upon public social consciousness to do Web crowd-gathering for profit-making objectives.