Harnessing Collective Intelligence - Getting Other People to Make Your Site Great

A highly effective way of adding valuable content to your site is to encourage your users to contribute to it in a productive manner.  This is achieved by creating an architecture of participation that interacts with your users either explicitly or implicitly to gather information.

Explicit participation is when a user actively contributes data to your site, a site that does this extremely well is Amazon.  At Amazon users can rate products, upload images and write reviews.  This has become a fantastic resource for amazon, as people who want to research a product end up on their site reading reviews, and half the battle for an e-commerce store is actually getting people to your store in the first place.

Explicitly gathering worthwhile data from your users can be quite a difficult affair as you actually have to get them to go out of their way to contribute, so it helps if you can give them some sort of incentive.  Incentives for submitting information can be anything from just having their name on a big sites web page to having some sort of ranking attached to them in the site.  The second example, having a ranking, is a very popular tool for forum sites where the respect of their peers is a very keenly sought after objective.

Implicitly adding value to your site is achieved at a programming level and involves gathering information on how your visitors are using your site and relaying this back to them in a worthwhile manner.  Using my earlier example of Amazon again, they track everyone that goes to their site and correlate this data in a multitude of ways.  The two most obvious of which are displaying products that other customers bought when they bought that item and products that customers who looked at that item eventually bought.  This information is invaluable from the point of view of a seller, as people end up buying things they didn’t even originally consider, and extremely helpful from the point of view of the buyer, as they end up with a more educated purchase.

When setting up a website with the aim of harnessing collective intelligence a few simple rules should be followed.

• Don’t force people to sign up just to have a look around, a visitor should be able to look around your site or at the very least access information pages about the purpose of your website.
• Make sure that collecting information doesn’t get in the way of what the user came to your site to do in the first place, if a user has to fill out a long list of forms or make a load of contributions before they can get some benefit then they will quickly give up and go elsewhere to fulfill their needs.
• Make the sign up process as simple as possible, when designing your sign up form keep it simple and only try and aim to gather actual relevant information, if you need to gather allot of information try and split the process up into a series of steps.
• Trust your users, people tend to do the right thing and contribute in a positive manner so don’t try and vet everything before it goes up but this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make sure you have the power to remove anything that isn’t suitable.

If encouraged, with an intuitive interface in place, you can successfully make your site into a hub of information for your target audience.  All this information will become a  powerful asset when it comes to improving your ranking in search engines and, of course, the more useful and full of relative information your site is the more popular it will become.

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