Glossophobia and Million Dollar Ideas

In last week’s blog I wrote about a municipality’s proposal to use Facebook as a mechanism to attempt to instill the fear of embarrassment and public ridicule in repeat drunk driving offenders.  This week I’d like to talk about a different aspect of social fear: not as a mechanism to encourage good behavior but social fear as a demotivating or dampening factor inherent in social networks and some of the different forms it can take.

You probably know what glossophobia is, and if you are like most people you’ve probably even experienced it to one degree or another at some point.  Glossophobia is the fear of public speaking, perhaps one of *the* most common fears out there (and as those who know me would be quick to point out, clearly not one from which I suffer).  If you have this fear your body actually starts to produce adrenaline when you are in a public speaking situation (the flight or fight hormone, or in this case “speak” or flight) resulting in physical symptoms: sweaty palms, heart palpitations, dry mouth and even nausea.  In some people this phobia is so intense that they go out of their way to avoid situations that could potentially cause them to have to speak in public.

The reasons behind glossophobia are complex and certainly have strong psychological components, but I have to think that deep down they probably also have a fundamental genetic component as well: human beings have limited survival skills as individuals, so early humans who had a genetic bias to hang around and work in groups had a far better chance of survival. 

Certainly a big factor in social fear as an impediment to participation in social networks is related to glossophobia: when presented with a new social network a potential member must overcome the fear of contributing in a way that would lead to public embarrassment.  No one wants to post something that others in the community will ridicule or revile, so successful social networks try to reduce this barrier by giving potential users control over their privacy settings (who is allowed to see or comment on what I post) and interaction settings (who is allowed to send me messages or see if I’m online).  Effective and timely moderation is also a method of reducing social fear; users can see that abusive or offensive material is quickly removed and repeat offenders banned.

But there are other elements of social fear besides embarrassment that act as barriers to participation.  There is the fear that a social network will use your participation to try to sell you things you don’t need or want, or the fear that a site might be using your participation for other more sinister purposes (elements I’ve written about previously).

There is another social fear that I haven’t yet touched on in any of my earlier blogs that I’d like to bring up here.  Anytime a social networking community attempts to do ideation—the generation and improvement of ideas by a group of community members—the community must overcome the fear of intellectual property theft.  If, for instance, I visit a site that asks me to submit an idea (or improve upon one that’s already been submitted), how do I know that my idea won’t be appropriated and used by others without compensating me for my contribution?  How confident am I that if I post a great idea, someone else won’t steal it (or take credit for it)?

Protection of ideas online is an interesting problem, and one that may not have clear cut solutions.  People submitting ideas might hold certain details back from the submission with the hope that a potential idea thief wouldn’t appropriate it.  But that might defeat the purpose of submitting the idea in the first place, if the reason for submitting it is to get suggested improvements or interest potential investors (a la Kickstarter.com).  To be successful, ideation sites must offer value for value: if you expect members to contribute content that is valuable to your organization, you must offer something of value in return. But how do you offer value to a member for contributing a million dollar idea?

Readers who have ideas on how to overcome this issue are cordially invited to submit them in the comments below.

(You see what I just did there…)

Using Facebook as a Wall of Shame

You’ve probably read in the news this week about the city of Huntington Beach, CA.  A city councilman there proposed that pictures of repeat drunk drivers be posted on the city’s Facebook page in the hopes that “public shaming” would discourage people from driving under the influence.

To be sure, the city has historically had a big problem with people driving under the influence.  According to the AP the city was “ranked top out of 56 California cities of similar size for the number of alcohol-related traffic fatalities” with 1,687 DUI arrests and 195 people killed or injured in 2009.  Perhaps wisely, the city council shot down the idea when it was proposed, recognizing that it was the wrong solution to the problem.  The city council concluded that it wouldn’t prevent DUI’s, but would instead serve to further embarrass family members of alcoholics, who probably have enough problems to deal with as it is.  And further, the information is already publicly available on the police department’s website.
 

The idea of government using fear and embarrassment to influence behavior is not new: public shaming goes back a long, long way (What? An adulterer? Let’s put a big red “A” on her forehead and lock her in the stocks in the town square!).  What is new is the idea of government using a popular social networking site like Facebook—which is in no way, shape, or form affiliated with the government—to drive behavior among its members. 

It is an interesting, though flawed, concept:  Since lots of people use Facebook (over 600 million at last count), that means that a large percentage of potential drunk drivers and their “friends” are probably members.  Threatening to use Facebook to publicly humiliate someone for illegal or socially undesirable behavior is a form of blackmail: behave the way we want you to or we will “out” you in front of your friends and family (same old story, new venue). To propose that governments leverage this type of influence is a chilling thought and one we’ve moved away from as a society.  In fact we have a term for individuals who engage in this type of behavior:  We call them bullies, and are curiously enough starting to pass regulations prohibiting online versions of it.

It is one thing for government to have a presence on a social networking site in order to interact with its constituents.  To have government use the social networking site as a mechanism to publicly humiliate is quite another. 

Resolutions for 2011

Here it is almost two weeks deep into the new year and I haven’t blogged about my 2011 resolutions. After careful consideration, I’ve resolved the following for the coming year.

• Never call out a number of ways to do something in my blog title, such as “7 Ways to do X in Social Media.”  It’s an annoying trend I noticed last year, especially in social media blogs.  Why 7? Does the author perhaps think I’ll be less interested in the subject if they only write about 6 ways to do “x”? Or maybe the author thinks that if I see that there are only 7 ways to do “x” that I’ll look at my watch and say to myself “Ok, I have time to read this.”  In either case, the title would be far better without the number.
• Write more about the architecture of successful social networking solutions. As my background is in software development methodologies, it should come as no surprise that I’m interested in methods for ‘engineering’ successful online communities.  At their heart, social networks are leveraging technology to facilitate the communication between members of a community that have always taken place. They have the capacity to bring together geographically dispersed members in ways that could never be done without technology: interested in collecting green ceramic soap dispensers but don’t know of any other people that share your passion? No problem: create an online community to trade them. There is real science behind successful social networks, and I’ll be writing more about it this year.
• Use fewer parenthetical comments in my blogs. (A nice resolution, but ‘fewer’ is a relative term.) The habit is probably a vestige from writing paper books and articles where I would use a footnote to offer a more in-depth explanation than seemed warranted in the paragraph, but footnotes in a blog seem…anachronistic.
• Track my predictions for 2011. Unlike some authors who throw out predictions and then hope you don’t remember them, I’m planning on tracking the predictions I made a few weeks ago and following up on them periodically.  They all relate to initiatives I find interesting (well, the serious ones anyway (darn, and not one paragraph ago I resolved to do fewer of these)) so I’ll update my predictions as major events unfold.
• Tweet more often. I find compressing a compelling thought down to 140 characters a frustrating experience.  If you want me to kick out 500 words on a subject, I can sit down and do that in a heartbeat: If you want me to condense the concept down to a dozen or so words, I have to think about it for a while.  And often fail to find the right dozen or so words (I suppose I could just do multiple connected tweets, but that seems like cheating (and so much for that previous resolution)).

By the way if you want to follow me on Twitter, it’s @davehiggins1—but then most of you already knew that, since the only reason you are here reading this blog is that I posted a link to it on Twitter.

Crafty Content Curation

Every new industry seems to invent their own terms for things other people have done for a long time.  One example from social networking: Over a decade ago, I ran a site called www.duh-2000.com—a monthly contest to collect the stupidest things being said about the Y2K problem (don’t bother going there now…the site has been gone since the odometer flipped over to 2000…but if you are interested you can browse an archive of it on my personal website).  Each month, readers would send in nominations for silly, dumb, uninformed or just plain clueless statements being made about the problem (or the lack thereof).  I would usually make some snarky remark about the comment (what, me snarky?) and include a link to the content.  As incentive, we offered a small prize to the person that submitted the best entry for the month. (Interestingly enough, when we first started the contest we offered to give the award to the person who said the stupid thing, not the person who submitted the link: we quickly discovered that strategy didn’t generate very many submissions.)

Of course, we didn’t call it this back then, but the process of collecting the “best of” content and making it available as a collection is today often called curation (from the word curator) and is an important tool in social networking.

It is no accident that some of the most popular sites on the web such as Engadget, Gizmodo, Boing Boing, and Ars Technica are curated sites.  Editors at these sites search out content that may be of interest to their demographic, write something about it, and then provide a link for people to see the content first-hand.  In the last couple of years, some sites have achieved massive popularity by crowdsourcing the curation (Digg and Reddit, for example). Members (instead of moderators) comment on the content and vote on which content should make it to the front page. (To be fair, neither Digg nor Reddit are purely crowdsourced: both employ algorithms and human moderators that influence which popular content goes to the front page and ensure that the content changes regularly.)

Curation is just one aspect of Community Management, which also includes moderation, administration, and a lot of other activities needed to make a social network successful.  It is a powerful tool in driving traffic to a community for two reasons.  First, it allows the community to function as a centralized aggregation site. Community members interested in a given topic don’t have to search the web for new content each time they want to see “news” related to the community.  Second (done correctly) it can drive membership.  Members become interested in gaining recognition from the community for submitting interesting content.  Given the right conditions, members will actively compete with one another for recognition points, resulting in more timely and higher quality submissions, which in turn drives more readers to the site and so on. 

If you have a social media site that isn’t achieving the traffic numbers that you want, one thing you should try is some level of curation. Decide what the members of your community are interested in and have moderators make certain that links to relevant and timely content appears in a prominent spot.

Snarky comments are optional.