Meg Pickard at Women, Business and Blogging

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The first speaker at the Women Business & Blogging conference at DMU on Friday (8th June) was Meg Pickard, Head of Communities and User Experience for Guardian Unlimited. She spoke about “Whose Web is it anyway”.

Meg introduced us to the levels of a user’s interactions with the internet starting with the easiest:

  • consumption: users now can consume content without even visiting the site it comes from

  • interaction: basic interaction involves comments & conversation hosted by the creator – when it comes to commenting and interaction it’s “not always polite and genteel – can be rowdy but is still your turf, i.e. ‘my gaff, my rules’.” Then people start responding to your content in their own spaces can’t control it – may not eve know about it! Invisible interaction includes – attention data – using a feed reader – user/view count

  • curation: a new way of people being creative by involvement in creation and aggregation like feed readers. New technologies make it easier to do this – e.g., folksonomy, delicious, recommendations like digg. Squidoo – people creating lenses about things – bring in sites etc. – adding metadata. Other people can be creative with your content! Examples : Mashups – eg Yahoo pipes, remixing feeds and open data sources across the web for new purposes

  • creation: Content creation – contribution – e.g., photos on BBC website, youtube, flickr – user-generated content: the user has the control.

Meg went on to look at what makes a community.

Communities are good for users because they:

  • increase relevancy
  • increase emotional connection to the online experience
  • increase social connection to each other
  • add depth to conversations

Communities are useful to publishers and businesses because they:

  • make experiences more relevant and human
  • improve the quality of content
  • increase usage
  • increase revenue

Meg’s “Holy Trinity” of community management include:

  1. Human solutions – moderators, policies, processes, consistency of approach
  2. Technical solutions – moderation platform, profiles, user management tools, ratings, etc.
  3. Editorial solutions (the one people forget) – proposition, framing of debate, tone of voice, reward, interaction

Personally I’d put the human and editorial solutions in together as all those things in editorial solutions are, for me, part of moderating, but it’s true that many who start communities think of the technical aspects, sometimes think of the human aspects but miss out on the editorial aspects and the resources that need to be put into it.

Meg pointed out that the user engagement cycle of

casual – > connected – > committed – > catalyst

visiting registering engaging identifying/evangelist

could be mapped on the user engagement cycle.

http://www.meish.org/

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