Giving users a private, individual reason to contribute to social media can be a powerful incentive to induce contributions. Del.icio.us motivates users to create bookmarks by making them available on the Internet from anywhere and by helping users to organize their bookmarks with tags. These bookmarks are then shared with other users as a side effect.
However, making this work isn’t quite as easy as it sounds. You need to make sure that the information users contribute is actually useful for other people. Take del.icio.us, again, as an example. Users contribute “tags” or keywords by associating them with specific bookmarks. I bookmark the NYTimes website, and then I can associate tags like “news” and “newspaper” and “reporting” with it. But these words aren’t really that useful to other people. If I search on “newspaper”, I get almost 150,000 hits, and the whole first page is news stories about newspapers and not newspapers themselves. The tag “news” is even worse, it has over 2.5 million hits, most of which are links to actual news stories. These tags are a really bad way to find news sites.
The reason these tags don’t work can be explained by looking at how these tags are contributed in the first place. Users choose tags to help themselves organize their own bookmarks. When I am bookmarking a website, I try to come up with words that help me organize my bookmarks; but I don’t care about anyone else’s bookmarks or tags. This means that when I chose to use the word “newspaper” for the NYTimes, I didn’t care if I was using it in the same way as other people, or if my using it added clutter for other people who are using that tag. I just wanted to be able to re-find my favoriate newspaper in the future. In short, I have no reason to choose tags in a way that helps other people.
Bookmarks, on the other hand, are different. When I choose to create a bookmark on del.icio.us, I do think about clutter problems. I try not to bookmark too many websites because each new bookmark makes it harder for me to my old ones. If I bookmark too much, things get cluttered and I can’t find anything. Tags help, but only if I use them consistently and sparingly. But this means that if you share an interest with me, you can go to my bookmarks and they will be useful to you. Right now, most of my bookmarks recently have been about social computing research, so if you are interested in that, head over to my bookmarks and you’ll find a relatively clutter-free set of links.
Bookmarks on del.icio.us are an example of incentive alignment. Del.icio.us induces me to contribute information (bookmarks) in a way that the resulting contributes are actually useful to others. Looking at any single person’s bookmarks is usually a good way of finding links to websites on topics related to that person’s interest. Each user tries to limit the clutter in his or her own bookmarks, and that helps other users make use of those bookmarks. Tags on del.icio.us represent an incentive mis-alignment. The structure of del.icio.us gets me to contribute tags, but the tags that I contribute are almost useless to other users because I don’t take into account the additional clutter my use causes for other users.
When designing a social computing system, giving users a private, individual reason to contribute can be a powerful motivator. And making those contributions public as a side effect can provide lots of value to the other users on the system. But, when doing this, be careful to make sure that the incentives are aligned; that users contribute information in a form that is actually useful to others. Make sure that concerns like clutter that are important to the users of the information are considered by the contributors when making their contributions.
Rick Wash and Emilee Rader. “Public Bookmarks and Private Benefits: An Analysis of Incentives in Social Computing.” In American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) Annual Meeting (2007).
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