I’ve been watching the development of reputation management capabilities within online communities for about a year now, ever since I read Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, September 5, 1999: Reputation Managers are Happening
I took a close look at Slashdot and over the winter, watched the Motley Fool add some reputation mgmt features to their message boards.
This summer the WSJ ran a piece titled, New ‘Reputation Managers’ Earn Trust in Cyberspace and then less than a month ago, Real Communities announced their intent to include reputation management into their platform. I spoke on the phone to CEO Cynthia Typaldos and she cautioned that message boards are generally a weak component for building reputations because talking is a lot easier than doing.
I wrote her back agreeing, but that I thought there were a lot of little things that people can DO in an online community that’s primarily a message board environment:
* Providing raw participation data gives an indication of how long and how intense someone’s involvement in the community has been:
- Date first joined
- Number of posts
- Number of new topics initiated
- Number of visits
* Providing recommendation data gives an indication of someone’s popularity
- Number of people who list the user in their profile as one of their ‘favorites’
- Number of times a person’s posts have been recommended
* Tracking participation in other activities offers more info on a person’s
involvement:
-
Completing suggestion forms
- Participating in surveys
- Taking/creating polls
- Participating in testing
- Participating in guest forums/chats (like this one!)
- Mentoring newcomers
- Hosting/moderating
- Promoting the community to others
and it all could add up to a significant foundation for one’s reputation.
I’d also like to have the reputation manager have personalization/collaborative filtering ability so that it could optionally guide people, for example: “members who chose Joe as their favorite also commonly listed Moe as a favorite.”
Lastly, I’d like the reputation manager to have a wide range of admin ability to fiddle with the awarding/removal of privileges, both software related and social. This area is fraught with the possibility of unintended consequences. What I might cook up as a social reward might wreak havoc among the members.
For example, I’d like for members of the community at high level of reputation be able to bring friends into the community at a higher level than an unknown stranger comes in. That might be cool but it might cause resentment. Also, some of this should be able to be automated, eg, like Slashdot, members who’ve posted at least X posts for at least a month’s duration then automatically are given the ability to create new topics and rate the posts of others.