I had the great opportunity to sit on a panel at OMMA on Monday. The session was "Leveraging a Converging Content Ecosystem: As platform interoperability improves, it is increasingly easy to partner with other tool providers and community builders to increase the engagement level and attractiveness of your own original content. How do these partners work? What is their revenue and customer acquisition model? How does this fit with your own goals?"

I can't remember all of the questions but a couple really stuck in my head:

-1 (Paraphrasing from the moderator) How do we combat 'Application Spam'? Bill Gates made headlines when he quit Facebook (http://blogs.wsj.com/biztech/2008/02/12/bill-gates-quits-facebook/). Bill's case is extreme because of his celebrity status, but many people's news feeds are filled with what is best described as spam. Vampires and Werewolves biting. Multiple varieties of pokes and superpokes. Internet tools are easy to program to dish out messages to large numbers of people. But this curse is also a blessing, because with the proper tools one can regulate the flow of these messages. The great success of Bayesian filtering to control spam, using the social graph to determine who are your closest friends and then limiting 'application propogation' to those fewer people are a two examples where tools protect the user from abuse.

-2 (Paraphrasing an audience member's question) With the ability of users to freely submit comments and other content online in many publisher sites, how do I protect my brand when I advertise on those sites? Great question! And I believe its related to the above answer. As a brand advertiser using an online medium, you can track with moderately good precision (depending on how you do your purchases) where, when and to whom your message is being displayed. If those publishers hosting the advertisering don't have the proper editorial controls in place to block 'inappropiate comments or other user submissions' then you can easily document the issue and if you are not satified with the response remove them from future campaigns. Some publishers like Digg allow their users to moderate comments down - and from my personal experience this is a very effective technique for maintaing site quality. In other words, like above be smart in the tools you create and use to track the publisher's history of moderation, the type of user content on the site and your placement on the site.

Still on the tools theme, Popfly (http://www.popfly.com) came up a couple of times. If you haven't seen Popfly, I encourage you to take a look. It requires Silverlight, which is a quick download for Firefox, IE or Safari. Popfly is perfect example of how when you supply users with rich tools, that they can and will create rich content. Popfly is essentially a development tool with mapping, image, RSS, Display, etc. components that users can plug into each other without writing any code. Try it and your see how easy it is. If you don't want to try it, please take a look and see what others have created. The main pages has links to some featured and most popular applications that other users have shared. The creativity in this apps is a great way to get an idea of what's coming down the pipes (pun intended)!

 

-Daniel