Really? Views, Comments, Links, and Shares, That’s It?
Let’s face it. Behaviors online are pretty limited – you can click a link or two, view a page, write some text. It all translates into interaction. But interaction alone doesn’t increase sales, drive down costs, or improve your customer satisfaction ratings.
Behaviors are exactly what we want to drive with web technology, though, as the web matures. As an example, let’s say that personalized recommendations can increase the final value of what’s put into an online shopping cart. That personalization directly affected a behavior that wasn’t just a view, comment, link, or share. It was a purchase.
Community and social behaviors go beyond just what you can monitor through web tools, though. Reciprocity, for example, cannot be measured just in link for link, comment for comment counting. Community members helping other community members may be evaluated in terms of response times, the number of trusted relationships formed, and the tightness of the interlinks between members. Interactions with each other should be studied differently from interactions with web content, like comments, links, photos, videos, and so on.
I’m confident that web content and social content have a happy relationship in their future, whether their blending is bold and contradictory like chocolate and peanut butter or delicate and harmonious like vanilla and almond. We’re working on the right blend, and we think it’s pretty sweet.
We won’t lose sight of the humor of trying to fit human behavior into web forms and links. If Facebook was in real life, and an old “friend” really came to your door and poked you, well, it might go a little like this. Enjoy!
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