Google Tests Crowdsourcing Search Result Quality

February 19, 2011 by

Did news of J.C. Penney successfully gaming Google to deliver its website No. 1 search results disgust you? How about news of the New York eyewear merchant who used cyberbullying to get top Google rankings and more business?

Now you—and the wisdom of the crowd—can take matters into your own hands to stop content farms and websites using shady black-hat search engine optimization (SEO) methods from appearing high in Google search results. Thanks to an experimental Google Chrome browser extension called Personal Blocklist (available in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish), you can block sites you don’t want showing up in your results. Your blocklist will be sent to Google, which will use it to adjust its search algorithm and potentially rank the offending sites lower.

As a blogger, I really hope Google’s crowdsourcing experiment proves effective in down ranking content farms and black-hat SEO-optimized websites.  As of today,  eVentures in Cyberland: Through the Web 2.0 Looking Glass, and What Communicators Found There! has received 2,302 spammy comments (almost all stopped by anti-spammy comments software). Many of them link to other sites having nothing to do with communications.

According to the New York Times, this type of spam, a shady black-hat SEO practice, is what helped J.C. Penney deliver its website  No. 1 search results from everything from “dresses” to “bedding”:

“Someone paid to have thousands of links placed on hundreds of sites scattered around the Web, all of which lead directly to JCPenney.com. … Some of the 2,015 pages are on sites related, at least nominally, to clothing. But most are not. The phrase “black dresses” and a Penney link were tacked to the bottom of a site called nuclear.engineeringaddict.com. “Evening dresses” appeared on a site called casino-focus.com. “Cocktail dresses” showed up on bulgariapropertyportal.com. ”Casual dresses” was on a site called elistofbanks.com. “Semi-formal dresses” was pasted, rather incongruously, on usclettermen.org.”

Since some of the 2,302 spammy comments left on my site lead to content farms and mirror sites (as shown in the screen shot, which you can click on to enlarge), I suspect many of them also engage in black-hat SEO too. Content farms produce tons of shallow or low-quality articles to maximize search engine traffic, while mirror sites copy and paste whole articles from reputable sites into ad-happy pages.

Their extreme savvy at gaming Google’s search results will make watching Google’s crowdsourcing experiment interesting. After all, what’s to stop content farms and black-hat SEO firms from employing hordes of web searchers to install the test extension and go out into the web blocklisting the competition? Only time will tell.

For now, if you’re a tech-savvy Chrome user, please download and start using the Personal Blocklist extension today.

What is your experience with comment spam? Do you think Google’s crowdsourcing experiment will work? Please share your thoughts in the comments section.

Filed Under: Technology Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Egypt and the Rise of the Social Media ‘Swarm’

February 11, 2011 by

Last May I wrote that “we are on the verge of a massive shift in the way we communicate and inspire action.” As I watch jubilant Egyptians in the video below celebrating the resignation of their 82-year-old former president, I think I can safely say that paradigm shift has arrived.

The leaderless Revolution 2.0 in Egypt, and earlier in Tunisia, illustrate how powerfully social media can be used to galvanize real action in the real world. Social media contributed to–if not fueled–the two-week protest in Cairo’s Tahrir Square and enabled millions of observers, pundits, and supporters around the world to observe in what Caroline McCarthy of CNET News called a “leaderless digital watchdog.”

“Social media makes this all happen in a public forum with the rest of the world watching, something that made it possible for Egypt to be in the middle of a massive international spotlight, emotionally empowering those on the ground and strengthening the pressure on Mubarak’s regime with a force that came not from world leaders but from the sheer size of the crowd,” she wrote.

What we’re witnessing is ideas buzzing into swarms in patterns similar to those of bees. Bees use their “humming” to instinctively move in synchronous swarms when they are building a new nest or hive. These self-organized swarms use a bottom-up approach where very simple interactions between individuals develop into complex group movements.

Mobile technology combined with real-time web applications, such as Twitter, Facebook, and Foursquare, creates a buzz similar to the humming of these swarms. This buzz empowers people to align around a common interest, become inspired, and take action—nearly instantaneously and in unison without prior planning or forethought.

In Egypt and Tunisia, Twitter was used to coordinate logistics. Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube were used to broadcast pictures and videos of the protests. Without social media’s swarming effect, Egyptians would have just watched television or listened to the radio feeling isolated, alone, and afraid to act. The rest of the world, of course, would not have spent much time thinking about them.

Where this new paradigm will lead us remains to be seen. Let’s hope it ushers in a new world order where the “wisdom of the crowd,” as with bees, results in clever compromises acceptable to all, except perhaps dictators.

What do you think? Do you think social media “swarms” are exciting or scary? Let us hear from you.

Filed Under: Communications, Relief & Development Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

Using Social Media for Emergency Response

February 5, 2011 by

You’ve got to check out this fascinating video of Craig Fugate, Administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), explaining why his agency plans to engage the public more in disaster response via mobile phones and social media.

“A government-centric abroad to solving disaster problems will fail in a catastrophic disaster,” he says. “It is a brittle system that does not have the resiliency that we have when we can incorporate the rest of the team: the public, the volunteers and NGOs, and the private sector.”

Fugate says the public and crowdsourced websites are putting out better situational awareness than many agencies can. He calls for government and relief agencies to figure out how to have two-way conversations that use the public as a resource.  Specifically, he is pushing more open data feeds and geospatial data and mapping applications.

What do you think about using social media in an emergency response? Please share your comments.

 

Filed Under: Relief & Development Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

HOW TO: Top 10 Social Media Tips for Online Success

February 5, 2011 by

Today’s reality is that your organization needs to be on social media. You can no longer rely on issuing press releases and keeping your website up to date to get your message out. You must proactively lead conversations and participate in stories using Internet- and mobile-based social platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube.

To successfully start and maintain your social media presence, however, you need to know what works and what doesn’t. More importantly, you need to understand the “social” side of social media and how not to act like a feed robot. Below are my top 10 social media tips for online success:

1. Listen to your audience. To avoid having staff members talk at people about your brand, product or service (and turn them off), you need to get a feel for what your online audience wants to hear about. Be sure to identify the online social spaces where your audience is already communicating. Then monitor the conversations that happen there and gather intelligence to help you develop content your audience is interested in. Sometimes, it’s also useful to talk to your audience directly. Ask for feedback and suggestions and then act on that feedback.

2. Provide great service and conversations. Always remember social media is more than just a platform to push your our brand, product, or service. It’s a “social” community. It’s critical to engage your online audience in conversations and spend time asking and answering questions. Your audience will value these interactions if they get the feeling you truly care.

3. Give them something to talk about. Make sure you mix up content about your brand, product, or service with interesting videos and links from around the web (i.e., don’t just use your own content). Have some fun from time to time too. Try posting a photo of the week or month, asking trivia questions, or issuing challenges.

4. Ask for content. Appealing to your online audience’s creative side can provide fresh and informative content to your social platforms. It also can help your audience become an invaluable source of news and information when people at the scene of an event feed you content.

5. Post regularly. An out-of-date social media presence is ineffective. Your online audience will lose interest quickly and stop coming by to check your content. Worse yet, audience members may “unlike” you or stop following you.

6. Focus on quality, not quantity. Having a large following on social platforms is nice but not necessarily a measure of success. What you need is a following that is active in spreading the word about your brand, product, or service. Focus on growing active participants, not sheer numbers.

7. When bad news hits, post cleared information as it comes in. We’ve all learned that good news travels fast online, but bad news travels faster. In a crisis, you need to get ahead of the story and post information as soon as management clears it. Don’t wait for a press release. If you don’t act fast, an information void can quickly fill with rumors. And in the world of social media, the perception of truth can be just as powerful as the truth itself.

8. Promote your social media presence. Social media doesn’t work like the Field of Dreams: “if you build it, they will come.” You need to tell your audience how to find you. Place links on your website, put them in your e-mail signature, and highlight them in marketing materials and press releases.

9. Customize the experience.Don’t simply use the default settings of social platforms. Deviating from the defaults makes your profiles appear to be more professional and allows you to create a cohesive look and feel in synch with your brand across social platforms.

10. Measure results.Be sure to measure your online effectiveness against measures (e.g., community participation, earned mentions, sales, donations, etc.) appropriate to your organization’s communications objectives.  Continuously evaluate these metrics so adjustments can be made for the future.

If you have any tips from your own experience establishing and maintaining a social media presence, please share them in the comments section.

Filed Under: Communications, How to Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Video Clip of the Month: Creating a New Narrative

February 1, 2011 by

My February 2011 video clip of the month features the founders of the nonprofit Ushahidi (Swahili for “testimony” or “witness”) discussing the revolutionary free and open source software they created for crowdsourcing and democratising information. If you haven’t been following Ushahidi and crisis mapping, you’ve got to check the video out. The Ushahidi story is amazing.

Ushahidi collects eyewitness reports sent in by e-mail and SMS/cellphone, allowing “everyone to create the narrative,” and places them on an interactive Google map to create a temporal and geospatial pattern of events. Originally developed to map reports of violence in the aftermath of Kenya’s disputed 2007 presidential election, it has since been used in disaster relief in Pakistan and Haiti, and other scenarios from the London Tube strike to election monitoring to mapping snow cleanup in Washington, D.C.

As Clay Shirky wrote in Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in A Connected Age:

“Like all good stories, the story of Ushahidi holds several different lessons: People want to do something to make the world a better place. They will help when they are invited to. Access to cheap, flexible tools removes many of the barriers to trying new things. You don’t need fancy computers to harness cognitive surplus; simple phones are enough. But one of the most important lessons is this: once you’ve figured out how to tap the surplus in a way that people care about, others can replicate your technique, over and over, around the world.”

Enjoy the video below and imagine all the possibilities.

What do you think the most exciting use of Ushahidi is? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Filed Under: Miscellaneous, Relief & Development Tagged With: , , , , ,