The Modern Journalist

Book Review: Groundswell (Part 2)

Note: Groundswell is a wonderful road map for how — and why — you should implement social technologies. This review both pulls out some pertinent facts that I find relevant and has stories specific to newspapers that I think would be helpful for those working in online news operations. To get the full scope of this, though, you really need to read the whole book.

Part 1 of my review is here.

Listening and Responding Means You’re Going to Hear Things You Don’t Like; Shut Up, Fix It and Thank Your Customers:

Every company has stupid products, policies, and organizational quirks. These corporate elements persist because a top executive is biased toward them, or because they’re baked into corporate processes and systems, or just because of tradition…When customers can complain, bitterly and accurately, about the way you do business and you can measure and quantify their complaints, it’s hard to deny your own flaws. (pp97-98)

The authors spend a great deal of time in Section 2 discussing the ways in which you can listen and quantify what is a problem and what isn’t. In essense it boils down to what it’s always boiled down to: someone identifies a problem, the community needs some mechanism to vote yea or nea on the issue, reputation systems track who is saying what and the company must then communicate to its base that it understands the issue and articulate what it is doing to fix the problem.

Marketing Is Different Now: A running theme in the book — and this will anger my friend Krista who has years in the marketing field — is that traditional marketing doesn’t work online; in fact, the best marketing online is simply providing a forum (not a forum proper, but a metaphorical forum) for customers to gather and communicate.

Of course, the marketing department can still reach its customers. But one-to-many doesn’t work, and the successful companies have found a way to seed, cultivate and then step aside from communities.

And yet, blogging — that one-to-many approach — can still be effective if you are using it not to do traditional marketing, but instead to become transparent with your customers. In other words, talk to them like humans. Don’t talk to them like you’re marketing a product. (pp99-118)

Don’t Abandon the Community: This is a major theme running through all the chapters. All I can tell you is this: if you start something, you better be in it for the long haul or you’ve lost your base online.

Stats from the book: one in six online customers blog, upload video or run a website; one in four respond with comments; and one in two read, watch and listen to what happens online. (p131)

Think like the Hulk. You wouldn’t like them when they’re angry, particularly if you shut down a community and no longer engage them. You haven’t solved the probem because that conversation is going to keep on happening.

Make It Easy to Comment and Don’t Worry About Negative Reviews (p138): Negative comments — which should be outnumbered by positive comments if you’re doing a good job — actually add credibility to a site; with no negative feedback, the “gut” feeling is that a company is marketing to  you.

That’s bad.

My friends at Gannett’s Cincinnati Enquirer harp on me for being too harsh on them. They are oftentimes held up as a progressive online operation, but in truth they have — like much of the rest of the newspaper industry — gone about their online strategy as a newspaper and not like an online operation.

But I’ve made those same mistakes. In deference to them, here’s a big blunder we made at Technology Review.

We did a very, very cosmetic relaunch at Technology Review less than two months after I’d been there — and when we did, our comments section was much better. One of the first posts we received was a derogatory and offensive (but not obscene) post about MIT’s president Susan Hockfield, who I think was the first women presidents of the school.

Our publisher and editor (two different people at the time) demanded that I take the post down immediately. Which I refused to do until they could explain a few things to me: how did it violate the Terms of Service (I don’t think it did) and what would we put up in its place.

The initial reaction was to shut the comments down (and that wasn’t going to happen while I had a job there). Once that subsided, the next demand was to remove the post. Ultimately, my bosses told me to remove the post. I decided to write an explanation on my own.

The response was tepid (we had almost no readers at that time), but it felt wrong. Very wrong. We’d invited comments and then told people they commented wrong. But that was our fault for not building a “yea/nea” system for comments, creating a way for the community to police itself and having no reputation system in place to track particular commenters.

Ultimately we didn’t stop that discussion. We simply moved it away from where we could monitor and  respond to it; and in my estimation, we damaged our reliability and credibility as an information source.

Don’t Build What’s Already Out There:

Remember, community is about people’s needs to connect, not your need to control, so if they’re already out there (meaning, if communities exist online), respect that.(p145)

Communities Form Around Ideas Communities Want, Not What You Want: I’ve long advocated adding social components to news sites, but a great case study in the book explains how P&G created a social network for young girls who are about to have their first period.

The study points out something very important. You can’t have a tampon community, at least not a very successful one. Instead, you must look at the broader issue of what is happening in the lives of those girls — and help them find a way to gather and talk. If you help them — and along the way you can ask for their participation in your products — they will become loyal to you. (p149)

This is such a subtle point it took me near the whole book to really understand what that means for newspapers because the entire business model for the media is that we’re going to market to you what we think is the best thing for you.

It’s the antithesis of the Web.

This book offers the most compelling, fact-based account of why open-source journalism can work; how communities can be put into place to track reputations and comments; how editors can tell what stories are working and which ones aren’t; how editors can use these technologies to find out what stories they should be working on; what tools they should be using; what their paper is missing; and how to allow citizens to contribute not just to the process of journalism, but also to the culture of journalism.

Let me repeat that last point: the book’s theme, if extrapolated to newspapers specifically, is that engaging in the Groundswell allows people to not only contribute, but also become a part of the culture.

Repeatedly, Customers Will Engage and Create for Free if They Are Treated Like Partners (pp153-177): The most important section of the book.

• 28 percent of all online customers participate in forums (p 172)
• 67 percent  of those people contribute to those forums (p172)
• Anywhere from 1-10 percent of your customers will engage if you implement social technologies in a Web-native way

This is happening whether you are engaged or not.

5 Rules for What You Should Do — start small, engage active customers, market the community, create reputation systems, and don’t hamstring the community (pp174-176)

Quantify Your Feedback (184): I’ve been wrestling with this notion since I finished Crowds since it’s one of the main ideas of that book. It’s not enough to gather people, you have to quantify it as well.

The answer seems simple. Use technologies (the authors mention Crispy News) that engage the audience, allow for the community to vote, reputations to be tracked for those who have positive and negatives thoughts AND reviews — have a blog or some mechanism to discuss and coordinate those findings and communicate them to the community — and then explain the implementation to your community.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

The takeaways:

1. These conversations are happening, you can’t control them
2. Marketing doesn’t work, but understanding your users allows you to build tools for them and listen
3. Tracking, Reputation and Transparency are key
4. You can’t make your company do this; until executives buy in, don’t move forward
5. Once you start, don’t stop
6. Listen and respond