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Google Moderator was launched yesterday as a free service created internally by Taliver Heath that gives users ability to solicit lists of questions and let people vote on their relevance to what the crowd wants to know. The voting system is pretty simple… it uses voting buttons, Digg-style, and the organizer can decide if the questions and voting can be done anonymously.

This crowdsourcing approach has promise and it will become clear where as the weeks and months pass.  But with such a simplified and accessible tool like this available for free, we may see organizations begin to use it for casual meeting organization, conferences, and who-knows-what.

So keep all of that in mind as you read my ideas for how to use Google Moderator in your business:

1. Organizing meeting agendas or committee meetings
   Why ramble about things nobody cares about? Let meeting attendees post their questions before the meeting and then rate their importance so the meeting agenda can be adjusted and made more efficient. But will those who are worse about babbling on take the time to use the tool or is it more about alpha personalities?  I love the idea of walking into a meeting and knowing that the questions that were most important to the participants will be up first.  There is no hiding from the reality of a vote like this.
2. Organizing conference sessions (duh!) or saving your ass in a presentation.
   Very similar to meetings, but for groups of people who may want to decide IF they want to attend a given session. By reviewing the session voting before choosing to attend, they can get a sense of the crowd and how the session might go. Conferences such as SXSW have been doing panel voting for a while, so this idea is well proven. If you find your presentation/agenda is going downhill, crowdsourcing “day 2″ etc. might save the day.
3. Organizing FAQs for a company, product, or service.
   Frequently asked questions about your company should truly answer questions people care about. Most FAQs are too well crafted and sound inauthentic, so Google Moderator may be a way to obtain a well sorted list to then transfer to your website later.  I think the organization may want to post the ’seed’ questions first, and let consumers add new ones in their own voice. The same can be said for creating relevant FAQs over time for products or services. The question remains if Google will put together an API that lets us embed such features into websites directly and avoiding opening a new tab, etc.
4. Deciding on product features/offerings, fleshing out concepts
   If you are considering starting up a business or creating a product, you can create a list of suggested questions and put them to the vote. “What’s more important to you…” or “When do you find yourself considering…” might be some great starter questions. While I believe one can do this with pay-per-click or other methods, this adds a new dimension to the equation. While this method has its problems, there may be something to the methodology.
5. Designing interviews or research projects
   If you have a plan to interview someone, you can pose a few suggested questions to your readership before the scheduled interview. You can then be relatively sure that you’ll hit the points that people care about while structuring the interview well. This has been done in other places before, but Google Moderator makes it pretty damn easy. If you have limited time or funds, you can use this tool to determine the questions you should answer in your outcomes (especially when you’re publicly funded or your audience reaction has a big influence on your work.)
6. Creation of how-to articles, email newsletters or videos.
   If you’ve put out a new product or service, you may not be sure which technical support or customer support questions are most important. We, as technologists often overlook the questions most important to the average user. We might think that getting the USB 2.0 interface at maximum speed matters, while the consumers just want to know where the switch is to turn off the damn sound.
7. Live Q&A for webcasts or other “distance learning” scenarios
   Google Moderator seems pretty fast, so if you’re interested in doing live Q&A for a webcast or possibly an online presentation, you can use it to gather and field questions DURING the session. The pace means very few votes will be cast for each question. I guess it remains to be seen if this will work well versus something simple like Twitter for voting. One must be careful that voting does not distract too much from the presentation as well.
8. Bonus Idea 1: Deciding on Email Newsletter Topics
   If you’re thinking of sending out a newsletter or other marketing communications to thousands of people, it might pay to let people show you what they care about before sending it, thus reducing opt-out rates and improving retention. Just make sure the target audience matches the ones who are voting.

Concerns and Other Thoughts

But how many participants and votes must you have before it is useful? Is it risky to use the tool with a

group of, say 50 people? 20? I have often wondered why systems such as LinkedIN and Yahoo Answers never allowed people to vote on questions (it would be a great idea to get rid of the riff-raff) but they must have their reasons. Tools like Amazon’s askville have voting on questions now.

Other posts on Google Moderator

Andy Beal - Google Moderator Launches, Raising the Question: “Are Google Engineers Bored With Search?”

Mashable (Stan Schroeder)

Crowd photo by James Cridland

I’ve been asked lately for some examples of link bait headlines. Well, a quick scan of WebMD’s “most popular” stories should give you a good hint about the types of headlines and articles that work. People ‘voted’ these up honestly, without an agenda… and there are insights here…

Web MD Most Popular Stories

1. 41 Ways to Flatten Your Belly
2. 6 Sex Mistakes Men Make
3. 9 Tips for Flat Abs
4. Sex Myths vs. the Facts
5. 11 Supplements to Boost Your Libido
6. Signs of Sun-Damaged Skin
7. 7 Slimming Tips From the Skinniest State
8. 5 Weight Gain Shockers
9. 25 Questions to Ask Before Getting Married
10. Salmonella Outbreak: Tomatoes Safe to Eat

As you can see the content that wins is ‘tabular’ in nature. That is, it tabulates in the form of a list or in a list of comparisons, etc.

My new friend and fellow Yahoo! Store Developer Rob Snell was invited by a director at Yahoo! Small Business to testify in front of Congress at a hearing of the US House of Representatives’ Committee on Small Business about Online Advertising. His preperation and written testimony was easy-to-read and Rob published it here at Search Engine Land. You should definitely read that first.

Now that’ he’s back and rested, with a fresh .gov link in his pocket, I thought I’d ask him a few short questions about how it went, what it was like as an experience, and what he thought it meant for search marketing’s future. (more…)

Last week we went to Eastern Kentucky to pick up our daughters who were attending an equestrian sleep-away camp. When we arrived, we noticed the other kids were calling our daughters by camp nicknames. For camp it was fun. One of my kids liked their name, while the other one didn’t care for it.

It struck me that nicknames given to you by your camp-mates are much like how public perception treat brands in the age of consumer participation. Kids that are popular or well liked proudly answer to “Braveheart” or “Gypsy Queen” while unpopular kids suffer the week as “Birdlegs” or “Pigpen.” They might like to change their name, or the name might be unfair, but as soon as more than one person talks about it, it sticks. Even with a huge effort, sometimes it cannot be corrected (e.g. giving other camp mates $40 to not call you that name for the rest of the week perhaps.) It would have been much easier to befriend the leaders of the group earlier, as good interaction skills can often make up for, well, bird-legs.

The first person likely talk about you in public circles holds amazing power if they are an influencer. If you hear the name early you might prevent the nickname spreading through some reputation management. Let things get out of hand and they will tell others your name… the problem is exponential… not much you can do about the name or perception.

What nickname would your customers give you?

photo by Katherine and used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License

In 1960, Jane Goodall went to Eastern Africa (one of the first women ever to venture into an African forest, risking malaria or injury) to start what would become the most intimate and insightful collections of research ever done on chimpanzees. Her discoveries filled volumes, including:

• She found the first animals besides humans to use tools.
• She discovered that chimpanzees have wars, and that they adopt unrelated children.
• She discovered they ate meat.
• She forced us to reconsider what “man” means.

Goodall didn’t force her way into the group. She spent months sitting in a spot she called “the peak” learning by watching with her binoculars. From this distance, she noted patterns, such as the hierarchy of the community and slowly earned the trust of the skittish Gombe chimps.

One day a male chimp approached the camp, leaping, screaming, and running in circles. It was terrifying, and most of us would have either ran or taken a defensive posture. But Goodall had learned enough to see through the dramatic display and stayed calm. After a few tense moments, it became clear why it was there. The male chimp only wanted a banana that had been hanging in the camp. Goodall gave it to him, and history was made.

The rest of the community saw what the first chimp had done, and that Goodall had not harmed them, and the trust spread. Over the following years, she became the only known person to be fully accepted into a Chimpanzee community. If she and her team had been assertive, insensitive or clumsy, the community would have sounded a warning cry and a very tall wall of defense would have been erected.

The “Goodall Effect” allowed integration into the social fabric of the Gombe community, and could be a good metaphor for educating traditional brand managers about integrating into the fabric of social networks.

Listen first, learn, offer something of value, learn the culture, and never ever betray the trust.

Photo taken by user:Jeek in w:Hong Kong University, Hong Kong on 24 October 2004.

Seth Godin recently wrote about how Digg and StumbleUpon can send (boatloads of) unfocused visitors to a site, and how people should probably focus on other things rather than trying to maximize this number.

My feelings are that the number of visits (and votes) you obtain from a strong social media presence have long-term benefits that transcend the spikes and that these deserve a discussion.

Authority Influences Search Influences Increasingly Targeted Traffic Over Time.

People use search to find what they’re after 85% of the time and top search results are obtained through authority and trust. Google ranks things based on its best guess of trust and authority, as does Yahoo!, Live.com, Technorati, and del.icio.us. We want links and votes from important groups of people for their click-traffic, but also so that we rank better in the search engines.

Social media opens doors that other forms of marketing cannot.

Godin may not be considering that this unfocused traffic is just the frothy, chaotic front of a wave after which important, difficult-to-acquire links follow. To use Godin’s terminology, it’s then the “sneezers” who use social media’s ability to sift out important stuff using crowd wisdom (votes in this case.) If you have remarkable stuff, social media can float you through “the dip” of today’s river of news in a way you’d never achieve otherwise.

In Purple Cow, Godin wrote:

• Sell what people are buying
• Focus on the early adopters and sneezers
• Make it remarkable enough for them to pay attention
• Make it easy for them to spread
• Let it work its own way to the mass market.

Sneezers have established trust in their community online - at varying levels - in sort of a steep tail. They resist marketing efforts to influence their words and protect their reputations. Words and Links from these people usually cannot be bought at any price, and they’ve probably forgotten what a press release looks like. They have earned, through authority granted by others, a place in the search engines’ hearts.

So take a fictional moderately popular Digg post that brings traffic to your site…

• Short term Digg Visits: 5000
• Short Term Exit Rate: 90%
• Short term Conversions: 0 (dry those tears, it gets better)
• Rank for your favored keyword on Google before: 40
• Short term Influencer Visits: 200
• Influencer links: 5
• Subsequent sub-influencer links: 50
• Visits (over time) via the influencer links: 5000 targeted visitors.
• Visits (over time) via increased search rank: 5000 somewhat targeted visitors.
• Digg who?

Okay, you can beat up my numbers but the point I want to make is that this traffic is a means to an end, not the end itself. By the time you’re seeing the effects of your work on social media, you have long fallen off of the front page of Digg, and your Stumbleupon traffic may be in the dumpster. The beat goes on.

To sum up…A popular Digg/Stumble/Reddit post has these effects:

• A often dramatic spike in traffic - with a high bounce rate. Noisy.
• Attention granted by influencers who use Digg/Stumble votes as a filter on what’s important.
• Improved search rank due to persistent authority linkages from relevant conversations elsewhere.
• A sustained increase in relevant, high quality traffic through the direct-click traffic of the new links found in the long-tail of referrals from influencers.
• A slow increase in trust for your site as an authority by the influencers (they may look more closely at your next post / product / idea. Darren Rowse calls this a “Digging Culture”
• Increased attention via RSS and newsletter subscriptions.

Anytime someone mentions “Digg” and “Conversions” in the same paragraph, I get nervous. So let me know what you think about this explanation.

So Seth, from a big fan, I say to you that silly traffic might not be that silly after all.

Illustration by geishaboy500 used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License