Collective Intelligence: For Users and Producers
I’ve been reading a book by Satnam Alag called Collective Intelligence In Action. It’s an interesting read on, among other things, how to use information provided by users (their “collective intelligence”) to improve the quality of the user experience on a web site.
You’ve all seen this in practice; it’s even used right here on a blog. By providing your comments, you’re augmenting the information that the author writes and hopefully enriching the informational content for future readers. Comments such as “your a retard lol”, of course, notwithstanding. (And yes, ‘your’ was an intentional mis-use!)
Other examples include thumbs up/thumbs down on Digg, ratings on Netflix or Amazon, and communal editing of a Wiki.
All of this information is useful to collect and does indeed enrich the user experience. Even though I jokingly referred to un-helpful comments earlier, they do come along, but in general the ratio of signal to noise will favor the beneficial.
In the case of eCommerce and Online Marketing, a side goal of “enriching the user experience” is driving sales. Comments and ratings help people make choices about what products and services to buy and what products and services not to buy. The information contained in these comments and ratings, in-turn, provide valuable feedback to those who offer the product or service.
A side benefit to product and solution providers should be the volume of unsolicited feedback that can be gleaned from scouring the collective intelligence gathered by the online faces for their products.
Before the explosion of the online market, feedback after a product launch would be provided either by focus groups, or listening to people who were so passionate one way or another that they bothered to write a letter or make a phone call. Never before have product and solution providers been able to actually keep an eye on the word of “mouth” buzz they’re generating. As the internet becomes more and more omnipresent, this is a reasonable estimation of what actual word-of-mouth sentiment is. Dare we call it “Word of Net?”
This insight into what a plain-old-consumer - and as an average, the collective - thinks shouldn’t be ignored.
There’s a good Wikipedia entry on Collective Intelligence if you’d like to read more.