The proper metrics for social media have always been difficult to pin down, but I think there’s been an interesting cycle that’s emerged over the last few years. Before twitter exploded in popularity, comment counts on blogs were often used as a crude measure of community engagement  – the number of people willing to take the time to add something to a given discussion – augmenting simple view counts and link backs on the metrics sheet. As twitter has exploded in popularity, RT’s (re-tweets) and @replies have emerged as new indicators – the former having some similar properties to the “recommend to a friend” question so popular on consumer surveys, and the latter being somewhat similar to engaging in a conversation / making a comment.

One interesting piece of this in the very nature of community / engagement metrics shift a little bit – from being something within the “corporate boundaries” (i.e. on your site), versus out there in the Twittersphere (or some other ecosystem). But the big question I have – and I’d love to hear if anyone has some potential metrics on this – is simple: Does the rise of Twitter lead to more or less comments on people’s blogs?

I think a compelling argument can be made either way. On one hand, twitter makes it so easy to share information that those linking to a particular article should be able to find a wider audience. In turn, a wider audience should lead to more comments, everything else being equal. That argument would make sense to me.

On the other, there’s the time issue. If you assume for that everybody has a limited amount of time to spend each day absorbing and sharing information, an increase in one activity should lead to a decrease in something else. So one might argue that if someone is suddenly spending a ton of time reading and responding through Twitter, they might not have as much time as before to put in comments on blog posts. That argument would make sense to me.

Of course, both arguments can’t make sense. Twitter can’t lead to both an increase and decrease in comments on blogs, obviously. So which is it?

My best guess is that a pyramid structure is likely in play. Those that post the best content – say the top 1% overall, or in a given area – may be enjoying an increase in comments thanks to Twitter, as their message seeps out to a wider audience through viral promotion, etc. Everyone else may be experiencing a decrease in comments, as with so much noise out there and competition for time and attention, people just aren’t going to bother. For example, if you only *sort of* like something, for example, a quick RT with some extra characters thrown might be OK, while the time you might have put into commenting before gets diverted to other activity.

One of my main reasons for this is built on the idea philosopher Joey Tribbiani once presented on Friends – there’s no such thing as an unselfish gesture. If people are looking at ways to build their networks and influence in social media right now, I’d bet dollars to donuts that they can get more bang for their buck from a decent tweet than a detailed comment right now, thus that is where people’s attention is drifting.

But it’s just that – a guess. If anyone has any thoughts /insights into this I’d love to hear about it – in the comments, via twitter, via email, or otherwise. Not that I’m counting, of course .

Last week I wrote about the Motrin Mom fiasco, and then spent a fair bit of time thinking about the best way for a company to respond to the backlash that can so quickly emerge in the blogosphere (My favorite idea was a “You think you have a headache? You should see what we’ve had to deal with over the last week…” video response). Then at 2:24 on Friday afternoon I received an email from a reader that stated he’d seen Ryan Holiday’s post about me about a few days ago, and nicely indicated that he found it really rude and quite off-base (before sharing a really neat story I hope to write about this week).

After reaching for a Motrin myself, I decided to check out what he was talking about. The article he was referring to was this one- The Worst Thing About Blogs. In the post, Ryan lumped my recent story about Starbucks’ wikinomics-enabled marketing success story with other posts from the likes of Guy Kawaski, Hugh Macleod, Steve Rubel, and Michael Arrington, with the lead-in sentence of (The Worst Thing About Blogs) is that they never let reality get in the way of a good post. Ryan then concluded his post with the following:

If we can deduce anything from the blogs above, it also makes you 1) Sound like an idiot 2) Act like an asshole 3) Always get it wrong

So it’s fair to say he wasn’t a fan of the post. As I read through the comments (some in support of his POV, others defending the posts including my own), Ryan again highlighted my post as particularly egregious, and for good measure pointed out again that it sucked. The reason he gave is that we don’t live in a vacuum – I can’t / shouldn’t be writing about only the Starbucks marketing story when there is another huge thing going on (Starbucks’ recent report of a 97% drop in profits).

So at that point, I had to decide what to do. In turn, I thought I’d share my thought process, and what came of it, since it might be helpful for other people and companies dealing with similar situations. You can see my first comment on his post (last I checked it was 4th from the bottom).

1. Decide whether to engage or not. The blogosphere, and particularly the comment sections, is notorious for maliciousness. As a general rule, if a writer starts dropping insults like “idiot” and the aforementioned a-bomb, I tend to prefer to just stay away. But this seemed like a special case. Ryan seemed like a fairly intelligent person, who’s job appears to be in relation to PR and social media, so I was intrigued by not only the message he chose to send, but how he chose to send it. And whether I liked it or not, based on the volume of comments it seemed like a fair number of people were reading it – so there could be direct benefit from engaging in the conversation.

2. Timeliness versus “Coolheadedness”. As another general rule, I tend to prefer to “sleep on” such issues, in order to avoid a hasty response that I might later regret. However, in this situation I was also dealing with a timeliness issue – popular blog posts can fade away quite quickly, and as I mentioned it was already Friday afternoon. I knew I had neither the time nor inclination to look at this on the weekend, and a Monday response might be a little too late, so I opted for an immediate response. Always dangerous.

3. Cede the point versus defend myself. All of us make mistakes. When faced with a criticism, it is of course important to decide whether you think the complaint is valid and cede the point, or instead defend your POV – noting that sometimes you can do a little of both and find some common ground. In this case, I felt Ryan was quite off base, and decided to actively defend my POV.

4. Choose the tone of the response. When someone is directly saying you sound like an idiot and act like an asshole, it is quite easy to fall into the trap of responding in a similar manner (hence, my “sleep on it” rule of thumb). I wanted to ensure my tone was different – a little more thoughtful and respectful. However, I did start my response with “As the idiotic a-hole who wrote the blog post on wikinomics, I thought I should respond to your criticisms”, so I didn’t fully succeed on this front. But if you read the rest of my comment, I think you’ll find it fair, reasonable, and respectful.

5. Respond directly to the criticism. In this case, I re-articulated what I understood his exact complaint to be, and responded directly to that. This helps to keep the response directly on-topic, instead of meandering into a variety of other tangential subjects, and helps make sure there is a common understanding of the “topic” both people can refer to. In other words, if I misunderstood, my misunderstanding would be clear and he could respond in kind.

6. Demonstrate knowledge in the area (if applicable). In this case it was fairly easy – in a former life I worked for one of Starbucks’ prime competitors in Canada (Second Cup), know a lot about their strategy and business model, and can talk at length about them on demand. I felt that briefly demonstrating I had this knowledge helped set-up my argument for why I chose not to share it in this particular situation.

7. Ask the critic to back himself up. In this case, it was again easy. Ryan was making a direct complaint about what others wrote in their blogs, on his blog. In turn, I asked a simple question – “if you scan through you last 20 blog posts, do you believe they stand up to the bar you have set for others here? Does each one represent high-level thinking, and provide full perspective on all the issues at play?” You can tell from the question what I think the answer is, but the bigger point is that a well phrased question, on-topic, can be valuable to the response. If Ryan can’t defend his POV by using his own posts, he’s clearly got another issue to deal with here.

8. Get a peer review. This one is self-explanatory, and is particularly valuable if you pass on the “sleep on it” option. However, in this case I didn’t go through a peer review process.

I think that covers most of it. So how did it work out? Well, it’s hard to say. After I posted my response the comments section on his post was basically dead, but I can’t necessarily claim responsibility for that – the post was now several days old, and we were heading into the weekend. But it is perhaps notable that of the two comments that followed, one was from a person admitting they didn’t understand most of the blogs he referenced, and the other (perhaps picking up on my question) indicated Ryan’s post should be added to the list of posts Ryan was complaining about.

Ryan himself didn’t respond to my comment on his blog. He did, however, send me an email. This message was notable on several fronts. Perhaps most importantly, there was an absence of inflammatory terms, which either indicates a subtle shift in his thinking, or that it’s more difficult to say such things to someone directly than when referring to someone you’ve never met on a blog. He also re-affirmed being a fan of the book itself.

Ryan also generally stuck to his POV, and re-articulated it in a slightly different / better way. Notable inclusions were that my post was kind of like enthusiastically writing about Nero playing the lyre while fires raged in Rome, and that my not acknowledging the strategic decay of the company within my Starbucks story was almost negligent.

In my mind, this puts us in a much better space. I’m fine with relatively cordial disagreements and differing POVs, and even noted in my response to Ryan that based on what I can piece together about his story Don might be interested in talking to him (think Wikinomics meets Grown Up Digital). However, my POV has not changed, and to sum up this now exceedingly long post I will share three points I made as to why I felt it was not important to put the other strategic issues in perspective in my piece. If you disagree, feel free to share below – but please keep the swearing to a minimum .

The first is an issue we have to deal with regularly in our research. Often times the best examples on the “bleeding edge” of innovation are being done by companies (start-ups and old alike) that have fundamental and fatal flaws in other respects. Some of our best research comes when the rest of the world is focusing on how Rome is burning, but we manage to find a “Nero playing the lyre” that not only other companies can learn from, but they might otherwise not hear about (because everyone is focused on the fire). The challenge for the reader is then to triangulate that information with everything else they know about the situation to draw their own conclusions.

Second, it’s important to remember the context in which a particular piece is being presented. We have heard complaints from readers if/when we stray off-topic on our site – the brand “wikinomics” indicates what type of information they expect. When we write about particular companies, it is perspective on the “wikinomics” part of their strategy and initiatives that people want to hear about. If they want to read about the other aspects of (for example) Starbucks, there are literally hundreds upon hundreds of stories covering 97% drop in profits and associated issues in Google News. If I search for Starbucks Lexicon, there are three hits, and none of them are on topic. It is by telling that wikinomics-related story few others are talking about that we create value for readers and keep them coming back.

Finally, space constraints are an important consideration. The piece I wrote was a little over 300 words. When you write short pieces, as I’m sure you well know the blogosphere demands, it is generally crucial to maintain a laser focus on a fairly narrow topic – every word giving context or providing background is a word that’s not being used to describe the issue at hand. Not everything is supposed to, or can, present the “big picture”… or it would be like boiling the ocean every time you want to make a pot of spaghetti.

I love it when my work and personal life serendipitously collide – as has happened today in a very interesting way.

I’m blessed with having a wonderful 7-month old daughter at home, and her equally wonderful mother taking care of her. The latter has some very strong opinions on parenting, and in particular when companies try to send messages that dissuade mothers from doing certain things that, say, thousands of years of history and an extraordinary number of experts indicate are good things to do. In turn, I don’t really have to imagine how she might have reacted to the growing Motrin Mom controversy. (Editor’s note: Said mom has since read this post and viewed the video, and the words “pissed off” were prominently featured in her response).

For those that might have missed it, the video ad (which can be seen on YouTube) presents the following text (bold added by me): Wearing your baby seems to be in fashion. I mean, in theory it’s a great idea. There’s a (whole bunch of different types of carriers), and who knows what else they will come up with. Supposedly, it’s a real bonding experience. They say that babies carried close to the body cry less that others, BUT what about me?  Do mom’s that wear their babies cry more than those who don’t?  I sure do. These things put a ton of strain on your back, your neck, and your shoulders. Did I mention your back? I mean I’ll put up with the pain because it’s a good kind of pain. It’s for my kid. Plus, it totally makes me look like an official mom. So if I look tired and crazy, people will understand why.

Motrin, of course, is pain medication. The message above is not-so subtly trying to indicate that carrying babies is a “fashionable”, badge-of-honor type sacrifice to make – perhaps like drinking a Starbucks Vente latte, but with, er, sacrifice. As referenced, I know at least one person that’s VERY well educated on this subject that would probably object to this message (two if you include me) – let’s just say we’d drop things like “supposedly” out of the sentences above. Based on the brewing reaction described in articles like this one, we are hardly alone. After a big PR disaster, the commercial has since been pulled from broadcasts, apologies have been issued, etc. Rather cutely, on the Motrin site the ad has been replaced with the message “we have heard you.”

If you read my posts over the last few months, the intersection with my work here is obvious – I’m keenly interested in how the world of social media is affecting advertising, and the role of particularly important “N-Fluencers” in driving community action. I also wrote about an AdAge story earlier today, and I was happy to find AdAge also has the best account of how a few influential bloggers and twitters suddenly galvanized to bring this ad down – amazing details of how the message and uproar spread, and interestingly quite a long time after the initial ad was launched. And the following quote from story speaks directly to the media question I was asking earlier:

“You don’t have to have thousands of followers to start something like this. Many people with small networks have just as much influence as a few people with large networks.”

I suppose I should also note that I first stumbled upon this story reading something called a “newspaper” over lunch – I’m telling you this thing was coming at me from all angles!

So I agree with all the articles and commentators who are noting that this is a great example of the power of social media, and how it’s becoming increasingly impossible for companies to ignore. Though I do find one other thing to be interesting here. In truth, we’ve been through a ton of different baby carriers at our house, that we both use all the time. In truth, a lot of them (but not all) actually do cause my back to hurt a bit, and I think the realities of strapping a 21 pound and growing person to my stomach and carting her around for hours will lead to a little more pain now and again. In turn, why on earth would a company promoting pain medicine want to run a sequence trying to position baby carrying as a “fashionable” thing you should “supposedly” do (i.e. stop doing it)?

Me thinks the mistakes on this campaign run quite deep, and a fair bit of damage has been done. But how much I wonder? And does a company that presents a poorly thought out ad, but retracts it and apologizes after a storm of responses (i.e. shows they are actually listening), end up better or worse off than before?

It seems that hardly a day passes without a journalist trashing the blogosphere – and for some reason it tends to happen most often when someone is writing about sports. Christie Blatchford is among the most recent – see “I’m not blogging this, mark my words” on the Globe and Mail website. While I’ve written about this topic fairly extensively before (see here, here, and here in particular), a few of her points – all centered around the negative effect blogs are having on journalism – made me want to dig into the subject a little more. Notably:

And journalism wasn’t meant to be a conversation, anyway. It was maybe a monologue, at its most democratic a carefully constructed dialogue. If readers didn’t like or agree with the monologues in paper A, they bought paper B. What was most important about their opinions was that they thought enough to spend the coin.

I agree with the start of this to a point – while I believe there is certainly a role for “conversations” in journalism, what I’m most interested in from great journalists tends to be their monologue. In short, depending on the topic area, I want great insights, great entertainment, or both. But what I wanted to focus on here was the paper A versus paper B idea – and how the blogosphere is been blamed for a few things it might not be responsible for.

Ignoring blogs all together, one of the great things about the web has been individuals don’t have to pick between only a handful of newspapers for perspectives on a given topic (i.e. A vs. B), but rather select from among thousands. My sense is what a lot of journalists are experiencing is that they grew comfortable working for paper A and competing against B, but now find themselves competing with B through ZXTRQ. They then blame the blogs, whether they are the real problem or not.

Christine’s article is written from the Olympics, which is a particularly poignant case in point. While she focuses on Dimanno trying to report on Phelps 8th gold medal with less than 5 minutes to craft her story, that’s mainly a time zone issue (needing to meet the print deadlines). But let’s look at what she was up against, now that a few days have passed.

When I typed “Phelps eighth gold” into Google News, I had 9,155 hits – and almost all of them seemed to be associated with “traditional” newspapers. I scrolled through the first 30 pages of links or so, and I found literally hundreds of different journalists that had written a story about it. It was really, really hard to tell one story from another – and MAYBE one or two stood out. This isn’t the blogosphere’s fault, it’s the Internet’s “fault” – journalists now have to compete with many more of their counterparts, and truth be told many of them don’t seem to have a differentiated point of view.

This is the democratization wrought by the Web, and if it has actually helped open up closed societies such as China’s, in the West its chief effect, at least upon journalism, is to diminish whatever craft, and there is some, is left in the business… It is not true that anyone can write. It is not true that anyone can write on deadline. It is not true that anyone can do an interview….

This is a very good articulation of the most common journalist complaint that I come across – that because anyone can blog now, the craft of journalism has been diminished by the belief “anyone” can write. However, I think it misses the key point that the vast, vast majority of us “common folks” would greatly prefer to read a well-written, thoughtful piece than some random gibberish on a random blog. I would also argue that the vast, vast majority of us don’t have time to be searching through the millions of blogs out there, and are comfortable returning to a particular site (or paper) regularly if the content is compelling enough.

But how have many journalists reacted? As referenced in the article in the story of Matt Sekeres, they are “… committing (their) most idle thoughts and mundane observations if not to paper, then to its modern equivalent, a blog.” I see this all the time – give a journalist a page with “blog” at the top, and the quality of content diminishes rapidly.

I don’t get it, and I’ve never gotten it – the “blog” is simply a new form of publishing tool, but for some reason many thoughtful and insightful writers have decided that instead of approaching it the same way they would an article for print media (i.e. create something compelling), they replicate the worst of the blogosphere, mashing together a collection of random thoughts, then occasionally stopping to complain about it.

I could go on, but I realize I’m now making one of the “cardinal sins” of blogging – writing a post that’s too long. However, I want to end by mentioning one of my favorites sites to get people thinking more positively about the blogosphere, Sports Guy’s World. I wrote about his site awhile back (see here), but one of the more interesting things to do on his site is read the articles that are only on the website, and those that are published in the ESPN Magazine. From my experience the former are almost always better than the latter – notably because they are unbounded by word constraints associated with print media, and I believe the editors give him a little more leeway.

It should be noted that The Sports Guy actually represents what many journalists hate – he doesn’t so much report stories as offer his rather entertaining opinion – but I’d be interested to see what would happen if a few more journalists actually tried to use the web, or dare I say blogosphere, to create better content than they do when bounded by things like print constraints and fixed deadlines. I would imagine many would flame out, given my sense is that many of them just aren’t good enough – but the best of the best might just find a very loyal audience.

Very observant readers may note that this post has some striking similarities to what I wrote about three months ago – the collaborative experience economy. What I tried to do then was connect the “four forms of theater” idea from Pine & Gilmore’s “The Experience Economy” with the principles of wikinomics – hence the name of the post. For whatever reason I didn’t get a lot of traction with it, but I’m still intrigued by the underlying ideas, so I wanted to re-frame the idea directly in relation to social media. More to the point, I’d like to hear from wikinomics readers as to whether it’s a useful framework for thinking about the use of social media in relation to creating experiences both for and with customers.

In the previous post I walked through the examples provided in the book, which took a “day in the life” approach by focusing on a fictional executive named Linda. The basis for understanding the argument starts with platform theater – where one “scripts in advance every line and every gesture, practicing each over and over again until she can confidently give a performance so accomplished that it comes off as fresh and spontaneous.”

Platform theater represents the way many companies operate, from the most basic call center designs right through to the experience created for customers. It’s a comfortable way for many companies to operate, and relatively low-risk as well thanks to the controlled environment. But as anyone who’s taken Investing 101, it is through taking calculated risks that rewards are achieved.

So now let’s take a look at the definitions of more “evolved” forms of theater:

matching theater – where “disparate facts and events (are pieced) together (into) a unified whole, much like a film editor or director.”

street theater – where “small, atomic units of activity are called on demand to construct a performance.”

improv theater – where “surprising” problems must be handled immediately, and where Linda had to draw on “the reservoir of managerial techniques she has stored up from past experience.” The chapter notes that “Improv requires systematic and deliberate methods of originating creative ideas, fresh expressions, and new ways of addressing old problems.”

I would argue that various social media applications be be used to help move from “platform theater” to each of the other options. The most involved, of course, is “improv theater” – and here is where I think we could really dig into the opportunities that social media tools can create for companies. How much better could those “systematic and deliberate” methods be if wikis, blogs, social networks, reputation profiles, ranking systems, and the like where fully capitalized on? I also like the idea of taking improv theater to the next logical step – pulling customers on stage to participate in the experience directly (see: prosumerism).

So what do wikinomics readers think – would this be a useful framework to develop in relation to social media and customer experiences, and if so how might you go about expanding on it?

A little while ago I wrote a two-part series called “Looking into the blogosphere through a sporting lens” (part 2 is here). The purpose of the series was to look at some questions underlying a Costas Now program, which itself was supposed to be an insightful look at the role of the blogosphere in relation sports reporting. While the video itself devolved into something far less thoughtful then it could have been, the questions it raised about the role and value of comments in the blogosphere continue to be quite interesting to me.

What leads me to bring this up again is blatant self-promotion are two very interesting posts, with wildly divergent perspectives on the comments issue. The first is from social media expert Chris Brogan, entitled “Musicians play for tips – The importance of comments“. In the post Chris reminds readers that comments are important, presents his rough calculations on the percentage of readers who comment (roughly 1/4 of 1%), and admits that his own personal commenting habits are roughly in the same ballpark.

Chris then goes on to list some other ways readers can leverage social media to help share and promote blog posts that they like – things like Stumbleupon and Digg – but the underlying message is that comments are a critical component of a successful blog post. Chris also mentions Seth Godin, who writes a very interesting blog for those interested in marketing and social media, who just so happens to have his comment tool disabled.

Helping to make his case, the comments section adds a lot to Chris’ post, as many people made thoughtful contributions (and I’m not just saying that because I am one of the contributors). Seth was among the respondents, stating that he can tell that he’s written a good post when readers send him thoughtful emails – though he doesn’t know what he’d do if he got as many emails as Chris gets comments. I’d be quite interested to hear why, exactly, Seth has disabled comments, but no explanation was included.

Regardless, this provides a nice segue into the other post that caught my eye – Jason McCabe announcing his retirement from blogging. Jason has been an enormously popular blogger, but now he’s decided to focus his efforts on publishing through a “new” medium – email lists. He’s also going to cap this list at 1,000 people or so, in the hopes of developing deeper relationships and stimulating more thoughtful conversations.

Many people are saying that Jason’s announcement rhymes with mull chit, and are calling it a publicity stunt – which it may well be. However, Jason raises some very interesting points about how blogging is now “simply too big, too impersonal, and lacks the intimacy that drew (him) to it”, and he goes on to talk about link baiting become such a big focus in blogs these days. This site was then nice enough to post Jason’s first email to his “exclusive” list, which includes the following tidbits (think: Jason = Buzz):

This is much different than you posting to my comments section and subjecting yourself to the trolls and haters who have taken up residency there. Why should we all build our homes and give residence to the trolls under them? Comments on blogs inevitably implode, and we all accept it under the belief that “open is better!” Open is not better. Running a blog is like letting a virtuoso play for 90 minutes are Carnegie Hall, and then seconds after their performance you run to the back Alley and grab the most inebriated homeless person drag them on stage and ask them what they think of the performance they overheard in the Alley. They then take a piss on the stage and say “F-you” to the people who just had a wonderful experience for 90 or 92 minutes. That’s openness for you… my how far we’ve come! We’ve put the wisdom of the deranged on the same level as the wisdom of the wise.

He also adds:

There are so many folks involved in blogging to today, and it’s moving at a much quicker pace thanks to “social accelerants” like TechMeme, digg, Friendfeed and Twitter. Folks are so desperate to be heard–and we all want to be heard that’s why we blog–that the effort put into being heard has eclipsed the actual hearing.

Suffice to say, these are two very different opinions – either comments are valuable additions to a good post, or they represent the ramblings of an inebriated homeless person. Why (again, putting the publicity argument to the side) might the perspectives be so different, having many of the same undertones of the Will Leitch vs. Buzz Bissinger argument? While we naturally lean a little more towards the “wisdom of crowds” perspective than the “wisdom of the deranged” argument around here, there is certainly a grain of truth in Jason’s argument.

I’m beginning to think that the value of comments is a function of topic area and scale. Chris Brogan is a social media guy, and in turn I would assume most of his readers are quite interested in social media, thus they want to represent themselves well – which naturally leads to better contributions and conversations. In other words, conversational media is great topic area for conversational media. Topics like sports, however, may not to be. Regardless of topic, blogs can become a victim of their own success – as readership increases not only are “bad” comments more likely, it becomes harder and harder to continue a real conversation and cultivate real relationships. Might there be an argument that blogging is best for those firmly cemented in the long tail?

I also find the different contexts that the social media tools are mentioned in interesting. On one hand, they’re helpful tools for people to promote writers and bloggers they like (a.k.a. the message from Chris); on the other, so many bloggers are focused on gaming the tools, and the sheer volume of blogs on the web makes it so hard to be found, that more effort is being put into distribution than quality content creation (a.k.a the message from Jason).

So what do you think? Please let me know in the comments, after you have Dugg, Reddit’d, and Stumbleupon’d my post, while tagging it on Delicious and emailing it to all your friends – unless you are the inebriated homeless guy .

I had the pleasure of being on a blogger panel with Sean Moffitt last week, who (among other things) is the author of the always insightful Buzz Canuck blog – a must read for people interested in word of mouth marketing and developing “wiki brands”. I think wikinomics readers might find his May 16th post particularly interesting. In it, he discusses two German terms came across in his recent research, gemeinschaft and geshellschaft, which are sociological categories that were introduced by German sociologist Fredinand Tonnies in 1887.

Gemeinschaft is used to describe associations in which the “greater good” of the collective is of equal to or greater importance than individual self interest – often translated as “community”. Geshellschaft is the opposite – where individual self interest trumps the greater good, often “lacking the same level of share mores.” Interestingly, this is often translated as “society” or “civil society”, which might just go a long way in describing a lot of the societal issues that we face today. It is also notable that, in business usage, it is often the term for “company”.

In his post, Sean goes on to point out the challenge he often comes across in business today – companies trying to build gemeinschaft into their geshellschaft structures (it just sounds uncomfortable, doesn’t it? I think that’s why I like the terms so much). The traditional response from many companies is that it can’t be done. Sean thinks it can happen, and we agree with him – but figuring how to make it work is a great challenge.

After highlighting a few companies (Harley Davidson, Apple, etc.) that seem to be making it work, Sean provides a list of apparent success drivers. While these are of value and make a lot sense, in some ways I think they distract from the main message – the fundamental challenge of strategically integrating a gemeinschaft mindset in a for-profit company, which requires very new and different ways of thinking about one’s self-interest.

To put it another way, at the end of the day, companies can only go down the gemeinschaft road if it helps them from a geshellschaft perspective – it’s called capitalism (or if you prefer, Kapitalismus). There are very hard decisions companies have to make here. Without getting too far into the details, I would bet right now there are a lot of companies that, by staying away from gemeinschaft thinking all together, are protecting their short-term geshellschaft at the expense of the long-term. I also think I’ve now confused myself eins, zwei, drei times.

There is not a single answer here that applies to all companies, and it will be far easier for some to make progress on this front than others. Also, as Sean notes in his final question, it will be interesting to see whether companies that go down this road incubate their gemeinschaft internally, or bring it in from the outside – where it may be evolving more naturally. Feel free to hit his blog and let him know what you think!

For the last couple of weeks the blogosphere has been abuzz about a little piece that was on Costas Now. On the program a professional athlete (Braylen Edwards), the creator of a Deadspin (Will Leitch, representing the blogosphere), well-respected TV sports commentator (and host) Bob Costas, and Pulitzer Prize winning writer (and creator of Friday Night Lights) Buzz Bissinger sat down to talk about the pros and cons of the blogosphere in relation to sports journalism.

It was the right group of people for a great conversation – and it is the conversation that should have been that I hope to build on in this post. Unfortunately, what made this a story was that the actual conversation did not go particularly well. The professional athlete and the representative of the blogopshere did there part by participating as articulate, thoughtful individuals; Bob Costas was also articulate, but seemed more interested in piling on during a poorly conceived attack on Will then engaging in a thoughtful conversation; and Pulitzer prize winning Buzz Bissinger came across as a raving lunatic.

(note: once the people start talking after the long intro, it only takes about a minute for this to be established. Will starts saying a few things, Bob Costas quickly expresses surprise over Will being “very palatable” in person (even likable!!), and then the Pulitzer prize winner interjects with “I feel very strongly about this. I really think you’re full of s$%$.” It does not get better after that).

If Buzzinger and Costas had sat down to do a parody of the worst of the blogosphere on a TV program, they could hardly have done a better job. I’ve watched it a few times now, and read Buzz’s thoughtful follow-up interview from last week (among other stories on the subject) – suffice to say he is suitably embarrased. It makes the product that was turned out that much more unfortunate, as there seems to be plenty of material there for some thoughtful conversations on some interesting issues.

The first, and the one I’m going to begin exploring today, is the role and the value of comments. Every blogger loves comments, and in the age of mass collaboration every company and media outlet seems to be inviting any-and-everyone to “join the conversation.” In his follow-on interview, it becomes clear that a lot of what Buzz was complaining about was in regards to the comments on blogs. To quote:

I still maintain that the majority of blogs are founded upon mockery and maliciousness. And yes, a lot of those are the comments, but the comments go hand in hand with the posts. I know the difference, and let’s face it, the more provocative the blog is, the more comments it gets, the more hits it gets, the more traffic it gets, the more chances you get of getting advertising, which is what all bloggers want.

Given that it seems everyone in the blogosphere is arguing that the comments section is the key to a successful post, it’s clear that Buzz has a point- they appear to go hand and hand. Put another way, it’s hard to say that having people “join the conversation” is one of the strengths of the blogosphere, and then turn around and argue that blogs should not be held accountable for the conversation they stimulate. So it seems valid to look at the value created by the “conversations”, and particularly whether it exceeds the “mockery and maliciousness” that comment sections seem to invite, particularly on sports-themed blogs.

Let’s begin by focusing on the word “conversation.” I know for a fact that all of my best conversations involve exactly two people. I was also at a conference last week where they reminded me that our “assignment teams” couldn’t be larger than eight people – research shows that anything more is counterproductive. Text-based online conversations may be able to handle more people than that in a “conversation”, particularly if they build slowly. I’d be just guessing what this number would be, but whatever it is, I’m quite sure it’s less than the hundreds or thousands of comments that (for example) posts on the ESPN Conversation Beta routinely get. Can you really have a valuable “conversation” with this many people trying to talk at once?

I would argue no – particularly on “hot news” topics that tend to have a short shelf life. Now the ESPN Conversation Beta (I chose it as an example because it’s one of the better ones) does appear to be reasonably moderated, so many of the malicious attacks you see on many other sites (and that Buzz complains about) aren’t neccesarily there. There also doesn’t tend to be an annoying collection of people vying to have the first post by typing in “FIRST!!” and pressing submit as soon as a story goes up (or at least they are moderated out). But just because it’s better doesn’t mean it’s valuable to me. If I read through the 5,983 comments (and counting) on stories like this one (the Patriots are cheaters!), I might find 5-10% of them insightful and interesting, several times that many somewhat offensive, and many more just annoying – in addition to all those that are simply redundant. In turn, I never, ever look at them – unless researching a post like this one. I do spend sometime wondering what incents someone to provide comment 786 or 5,786 – weird, no?

So what is the value of the comments section to the vast majority of people looking for sports stories? Probably quite small, and on many, many sites the comments section devolves into exactly what Buzz was talking about. To articulate it more clearly, conversations do not scale well. In what appears to be a bit of a paradox, the more popular a post is, the less likely the follow-on conversation is to be interesting. Moreover, when hundreds of comments flood onto a page within hours (as often happens on the sports blogs), there is no coherence to it – it reads more like random people yelling somewhat random things at each other than an actual conversation.

How might this be addressed? One simple option is for more blogs to develop “threaded conversations”, akin to traditional message boards. It’s simple really – enable people to respond to individual comments, where the reader can follow along a particular thread of interest. This allows readers to (hopefully) engage in smaller, more targeted conversations on something they find interesting -and/or start a new one with a few people if another thread gets overrun. At some level a scale issue will obviously develop again, but for all but the most popular blogs I think there is some value here – and not very many sites seem to be doing it.

Another thing that I would like to see, and what sports writers might be more interested in, is a step beyond “moderated” comments sections to (for lack of a better term) “exclusive conversations”. In this model, you’d pre-select a small group of people (say, mostly staff writers of differing opinions) to engage in a conversation with each other in response to a particular article. It’s not “mass collaboration” by any stretch of the imagination, but I know that I’d find a debate between five thoughtful writers to be a more valuable offering than current comments sections – and you could always allow threaded conversations connected to. Again, it’s an opportunity that the “blogosphere” enables that few sites seem to be taking advantage of.

Finally, right now I find the best way to proxy an interesting “conversation” on a given topic that’s been written about online is to search for other complete blog posts that either link to, or directly reference, the main article. Might some media outlets create additional value by monitoring all the related posts in the blogosphere for a given topic, and provide them as links to their readers at the bottom of articles? Some very interesting “conversations” could be generated this way, “commenters” are incented to be thoughtful rather than just quick – and if the original writer responds to certain ones, all the better. In such a case, the original creator of the content creates additional value for readers, and keeps them engaged, by not only linking directly into the “blogosphere ecosystem”, but by helping filter for them as well.

That’s just a couple of ideas, but it’s worthwhile for everyone involved in the blogosphere to think about how “conversation” might be reframed to create more value for readers. Conversations are good, but they don’t scale particularly well – and as such they could use some better structure and management to make them more valuable. Are there a few people here (hopefully not 4,200 of you ) that have some thoughts on the issue?