Exploring social business strategy

I spend a lot of time reading the comments section in numerous articles, for one reason and one reason only – it’s kind of part of my job. I generally hate it, and find it a waste of time – as they are often riddled with inarticulate responses that have not been well thought out, and the tone is often so mean / combative. But every once in a while I find a comment section that really sings – and almost every time it’s on a relatively small site, with relatively few loyal, knowledgeable contributors.

So that got me thinking that conversations just don’t scale very well – and while I know some people will argue otherwise, I don’t think they ever will. Too many people simply leads to too much noise. But I started thinking about this again when Denise Shiffman pointed me towards the Newspaper economics action plan, as I challenged myself to come up with an “experiment” for them that might have a reasonable chance of making money.

One idea  I settled on was that there might be potential in having a “VIP room” for conversations that people just might pay to “eavesdrop” on – with the “velvet rope” merely being value that comes from filtering. Then I realized VIP room analogy doesn’t REALLY work, as in the model I’m proposing they’re kind of wandering through the crowd on the main site, but if you pay for the VIP room they’re the only people you see. I know that sounds confusing. Let me explain what I mean.

On a given topic, I really don’t have interest (or time) for what lots of people have to say – but I do have interest in what a select group of thoughtful experts on that topic have to say, and I particularly like it if they debate. So what if a (say) newspaper had a “VIP status” for certain commenters (say, starting with their top journalists and other related experts), and I could pay $X to have the option of only those comments being viewable to me? When I login in, those are all the comments I see – though I can always switch back to seeing ALL of the comments if I choose. If they were good enough, that might be something I find worth paying for. And what I like about it is that the value provided by the service actually increases the more people are on the site – as more and more people comment, the more I might want to pay to weed out only the best stuff. So it kind of helps with the scale problem – the more popular you get, the more valuable your filtering service is.

And then you could take it another step and add a prosumer angle. What if the “editor” for a given topic area was tasked with monitoring the “open” conversations, and if someone proved their worth over time they could be invited into the VIP room? And what if you took it to the next level and included voting mechanisms from the community on particular comments (weighted in some way, kind of like Digg does), to help make this determination?

And what if a reward structure was actually brought into this? Where not only the “experts” had some variable compensation based a mixture of the quality of their “original” stories, on the ratings of their comments on other stories, etc.? And what if the prosumers invited in got to share in the same rewards in some way? That would surely act as a great incentive to make the comments section more valuable, wouldn’t it?

At minimum, I think it’s an experiment worth trying. So I guess my big questions are:

1. Does it make sense?

2. Is anyone trying it already?