Online Community Leaderboards – A Competitive Edge or Disincentive?

I just finished reading an entry on Leaderboards Considered Harmful on the Building Web 2.0 Reputation Systems: The Blog by Randy Farmer and Bryce Glass. As positioned, the authors are correct in saying that the overemphasis on competitive measures can actually harm a community rather than enhance the experience. The major assumption in the article is that leaderboards must be a fixed, cumulative measure of activity that do not measure quality only quantity. But as a community leader, you can move beyond that simple use of leaderboards to truly recognize quality if you want to do so.

As part of a recent client engagement, we surveyed more than 30 B2B community sites to uncover how leaderboards and recognition features were being used to build loyalty and reward members for the quality of participation. We were shocked to find that almost all of the communities awarded icons based upon quantity only with no recognition for quality. These communities were using software from all the major vendors including Telligent, Lithium, Mzinga, KickApps, Jive, Small World Labs, Leverage Software, and others. Even where the software allowed some additional quality measures, most communities were not using the feature or if they were, they were not actively promoting its use.

While most leaderboards are set up poorly, it is due to the software more than to a lack of creative thinking. For example, we helped the Intel Software Network a few years back on a project to recreate their reputation/loyalty program for their community. In the course of our analysis and recommendations, we strongly recommended flexible leaderboards which could be updated to show members from all strata of membership, from long term members to newbies to those who selectively participate with excellent content. The response from their software vendor… “We can only do that if you pay X thousand dollars to allow us to develop this as a feature for our roadmap.” A poor answer if their ever was one… this software company for a modest investment could have developed flexible leaderboards into its product and sold it as an upgrade for its client base, making money for itself while helping its clients. Instead it wanted its client to pay for all development costs upfront, then be able to sell it to its clients. Needless to say, Intel backed away.

We manage the Cisco Networking Professionals community (NetPro). We’ve been involved for more than eight years in one way or another. In that time, we’ve seen our leaderboards grow with members who have dedicated their time to the community for several years and been awarded the member recognition points for their efforts. A new member today might be intimidated to try and get on the leaderboard recognizing that it would take years to even crack the top twenty. But that’s why we offer a second leaderboard that shows our top NetPros for the month. We even go one step further and rank each NetPro on quality. We do this by giving the original member asking a question or starting a thread the power to add a check mark to the response which solves or best answers the original post. These red check marks are the quality measure for all NetPros. By viewing a member with thousands of points, you see activity. By viewing a member with hundreds of check marks, you see quality.

One of the software packages on the market today that is moving in this direction is Jive’s Clearspace platform. By allowing members to award points for correct or helpful answers, Jive’s platform promotes the leaderboard approach. But since it also allows a check mark system to recognize a successful interaction, it measures quality as well.

So, in short, don’t let the leaderboard issue trip you up in your community management strategy. Leaderboards are a good tactic when used properly. Flexibility is the key, make the scoring useful to members rather than simply a competition for members. (And don’t be afraid to push your software company to develop more flexible approaches to this feature, it benefits everyone.)

If you’d like to learn more about community strategies and tactics for recognizing and rewarding members, please contact us. We’re happy to help.

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WSJ: The Secrets of Marketing In a Web 2.0 World

Great article in Monday’s Wall Street Journal (12/6/08) on social media by Salvatore Parise, Patricia J. Guinan, and Bruce D. Weinberg. The authors are academics rather than practitioners, but do a very nice job summarizing a lot of the benefits of using social media in your marketing efforts. While some of the comments on the article and posts in the WSJ forum state that this is old information, from our perspective it is still relevant for marketers to read and understand.

References to the use of Second Life’s virtual world not withstanding, the article is strongly rooted in many of the best practices needed to succeed in social media. This includes the correct structure for your team as well as the need for a ‘marketing technopologist‘ who brings the necessary marketing, technology, and social media skills together to drive the project.

We’ve been helping large organizations like Cisco, SAP, AARP, NetApp with their online community (now called social media) efforts and measurements for five years now. Prior to that we ran a company in Web 1.0 that grew to be the largest outsourced provider of community management services when community was usually greeted with a “what’s that?” look…

The evolution of online marketing using user-generated content and conversations has been nothing short of amazing to us. In the business-to-business world, we conducted surveys of our client’s community members and found that over the past nine years one client’s members’ customer satisfaction rates, intention to recommend the company’s products, and the influence of other members’ content in influencing purchase decisions all rose significantly. From our standpoint, this evolution as tracked by our data proves that marketers in the B2B world must move towards online engagement. Yet many fear the potential attacks on their brands so much that they cannot see a way to move forward.

That’s where the article is absolutely correct in recommending a professional moderator and team. Our firm, Impact Interactions provides these services in addition to our consulting practice. We know that without a well trained team and executive sponsorship within the company that most social media efforts fail to deliver results. We have managed communities for companies that realized over 100% return on investment ratios. We have also seen many dead offerings that whithered on the vine due to poor management. Key finding is that if you build it, they won’t come.

The idea of moderators is really one of facilitators. When someone (or a team) takes an interest in helping members with their experience online, the community flourishes. It’s not about being defensive and removing content. That doesn’t take any skill. The skill is in handling member requests, criticisms, needs, and ideas in a professional way that reflects the brand being discussed. This applies to blogs, communities, twitter, wikis, social networks, and virtual worlds.

The movement towards marketing using social media will only grow larger, especially as budgets are reduced since online marketing is so much less expensive than traditional marketing tactics. Developing a core set of processes for using social media that includes professionally trained facilitators will help increase the probability of success while maximizing the ROI for the effort.

If would like to learn more about communities, we have a large amount of free presentations covering many different aspects of social media that you can download from our site.

If you have questions about how to structure, manage, or measure your social media marketing efforts please contact us for a free consultation.

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Beware the 90%-9%-1% Myth of Community Participation

Over the past year or two, it has been very fashionable for social media consultants to push the 90%-9%-1% community participation breakdown as the benchmark for all communities to reach or surpass. We’ve seen this statement be presented at the Community2.0 conferences, Forum One’s community conferences, in blogs, and now in a new site 90-9-1.com. While we do not doubt the sincerity of our competition in trying to develop a benchmark that is easy to remember and use, we do have an issue with this one.

Let’s start with the generalization across all communities and social media. Do active blogs and wikis really have 1% superusers and 9% active users who are adding content? I doubt it. Take out the company sponsor/employee who is employed to maintain the blog or wiki and the numbers drop in a big way. Most of the blogs we’ve seen metrics on in the B2B space have a ratio closer to 99-.9-.1. That’s a lot less than the ‘benchmark’ being touted as the industry standard. Go to any of the major blogs whose audiences are the high users of social media like AllThingsD or TechCrunch to see how low these ratios actually are. I don’t have the metrics, but a casual glance reveals that even at TechCrunch, the ratio is closer to the 99-.9-.1 than 90-9-1.

What about online communities? There again, the ratios are dependent upon the purpose of the community. With most community consultants failing to distinguish between a B2B and a B2C community, most advice provided is based upon B2C communities. But that is a major mistake. B2B communities are very different than B2C in terms of function, objectives, members, and participation. In our experience managing and measuring many B2B communities, the participation results are all over the map. One client offers an open B2B technology community with a ratio of 70-25-5. A previous client offers a closed B2B support community that achieved a ratio of 60-30-10. Another B2B client had a ratio of 98-1.9-.1.

Even the B2C communities we’ve managed have a different ratio based upon their targeted audience. AARP’s online community (that we are managing) currently has a ratio closer to 99.9-.07-.03. Using the myth of 90-9-1, this community would be considered a failure. But with a membership of over 800,000 new members in the past year and the demonstrated success in meeting the organization’s online goals, it is far from a failure.

Why is there a difference between what we are seeing and the myth of 90-9-1? Our experience has proven to us that there is no magic number to reach for when building and managing your community. Rather, the results are dependent upon several factors:

1. What are the demographics of your audience? Older audiences read more, participate less (with the exception of political communities and blogs). Male dominated audiences tend to participate at higher rates than female dominated audiences with the caveat that men usually try to dominate the participation in mixed audiences. Audiences who are more comfortable with technology will usually have higher participation rates than non-technology audiences.
2. What is the focus of your community? Support communities have much higher participation rates than any other type of community we’ve measured. General entertainment communities without a purpose usually spike, but then show declines in participation as they age (usually due to dominant members who use the community as their bully pulpit).
3. Are you B2B focused or B2C focused? B2B communities should have higher participation levels because members come to find information and build relationships with the company offering the community. If they find what they want, they return. A well run, facilitated B2B community will bring members back again and again.
4. What level of outreach and marketing are you performing? Unless your community becomes the next viral success, your participation rates are directly related to the amount of success you have in marketing your community.
5. How engaged is your organization in the community? In B2B communities, the higher the engagement of your employees, the more members will participate. In B2C communities, the moderators must be visible, yet not play in the community as members. They are the referees. When B2C moderators become too friendly with members in a community, new members see favoritism not balance. They then have a disincentive to participate.
6. How much content is available? Without content, there isn’t much to discuss.
7. Does your organization practice the “If we build it, they will come” method for managing communities? If so, your participation rates are doomed to be low (as will your conversion and other engagement rates). You must actively manage your community. We recommend personas as well as employees to demonstrate desired community norms and to establish the member to member interactions model for the community.

If you’ve read down this far, hopefully you’ll agree that the 90-9-1 ratio is a myth not reality. Where is your community with regards to this ratio? Does it matter? Not really.

What does matter is what are the measurable results for your community or social media offering. Are members getting what they need? Is that successful interaction benefiting your organization? These are the questions that are important, not a ratio.

We’ve helped many organizations achieve stronger results with their social media projects than they thought possible. We have created the best practices for B2B and B2C efforts that can help meet both the needs of your audience and your organization. We’d be happy to help your organization move beyond basic social media tactics to a more strategic method to engage members and achieve business results. To learn more, please contact us.

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Online Community – Be Careful With Incentives

We hear many newer community teams at clients and prospects who hold the opinion that to get members engaged, you should provide an incentive. We listen respectfully to their ideas and then give them several examples of how this process has actually worked against communities.

In one community we managed, an incentive was provided that tied into a huge global event the client was sponsoring. Despite having the best intentions, the incentive process went horribly off target. The incentive was a co-branded item worth about $15.00 plus shipping. To earn the item, the member had to actively participate in the community and perform certain actions. This lead to extreme gaming of the system during the global event. Instead of giving away a couple of hundred of items, the client gave away thousands. Why? Because in certain parts of the world, the news spread that you could get this item for free. So, the contest expanded virally across the globe. While that should be a good thing, it wasn’t. The new members drove the utility of the community down significantly because they weren’t the true target audience. Their comments and behaviors drove valuable targeted members to complain or leave. In the end, we ended up removing the incentives and reward program in order to maintain order and trust among our valuable members.

Here is another view on why incentives are not such a good idea for growing your community, courtesy of Dan Ariely of MIT using behavioral economics to describe the pitfall:

In short, incentives should be used sparingly and randomly in order to have the desired effect on your community. A formalized program can be gamed no matter how hard you try to prevent it.

Remember that it’s EGO that drives the participation of your top members. They crave recognition for their efforts, not trinkets.

Want to learn more about avoiding the mistakes that many companies make when building or managing their online communities? Contact us with your questions or leave a comment below.

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American Chemical Society Selects Impact Interactions for Online Community Consulting Project

We’re proud to announce that the American Chemical Society (ACS.org) selected Impact Interactions for a comprehensive strategy engagement to help build out their online community activities. The American Chemical Society is the world’s largest scientific association.

Our work was broken down into three phases:

1. Creation of an online strategy road map to meet multiple stakeholder and member audience needs
2. Technology selection and recommendation to consolidate a multitude of offerings into a unified standard offering with strong measurement capabilities
3. Community Management processes document based upon our best practices

The full press release is available on our site in the Impact Interactions News & Recent Presentations area on our home page. It will also be released by PRWeb on October 30th.

Look for additional press releases regarding our newest clients in the coming weeks. We continue to guide the top enterprise level organizations entering the social media world. We’ve also helped many organizations who’ve launched communities and social networks but who’ve been disappointed with their results to realign their offerings to realize stronger returns on their investments. Please contact us if you’d like to learn more about how we can help you get the most out of your social media offerings and investments.

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Online Community: Best Practices in Moderation Techniques

There is an interesting entry on Jeremiah’s blog about “Job Hazards of the Community Manager” which is generating a lot of comments from newer, less experienced community managers. What is fascinating is that what Jeremiah is blogging about never has to happen, nor should it.

Specifically, the entry is about the ‘cyber-stalking’ of community managers outside of their own community on places like Facebook and MySpace (and for you B2B folks, LinkedIn). Many community managers are shocked to learn that members assume that the relationship extends outside of the community. When these relationships are good, it’s not so bad. But when relationships are bad, it’s really bad.

In our nine years of managing online communities and social networks for clients, we’ve seen all types of reactions by members towards community managers. A strong, sometimes intense relationship can occur in active communities and should not be discounted. These relationships can be extremely tight and formed over years. But they should never go outside the existing community ecosystem. Here is why this is true and it might surprise you because there are two sides to this…

1. When a community manager or moderator can be located outside the community, too much personal information can be found which may reflect poorly on your brand. For example, we know of several community managers using their own names in B2C communities who had information on Facebook that was not appropriate. That information was used against them in the community. Similarly, in one of the communities we currently manage, we have a disgruntled member searching all over the net for anyone who has ever been associated with the community within the client’s team and sending threatening emails. Do you want these people to find you and drag you into their soap opera?

2. When a community manager is known personally (Tom Smith), what do you as an organization when that person leaves? We’ve seen former community managers who were let go by companies, blog complaints about their treatment. And guess what? The community members found the blogs and then brought the subject up in the community and fired off angry emails to corporate legal departments. This tied up all kinds of resources unnecessarily for several weeks.

So, here is the best practice for companies launching communities and for community managers:

NEVER USE YOUR REAL NAME IN A COMMUNITY!

Seems simple right? But in the misguided thinking of building relationships that are true and honest with the community members, too many community managers are using their real names & pictures in their community. And the sponsoring companies aren’t thinking about what could go wrong and impact their brand online. Everyone needs to remember that there are bad guys out there too… not everyone buys into the uptopian experience of community as detailed in many of the leading community management ‘theory’ books and articles. So beware the false best practices being pitched by many consultants and focus on those best practices that make sense in the long run.

We recommend that community managers use a name that is ‘generic’ such as Community Host, HostTom (instead of Tom Smith), etc. That way the privacy of the individual acting as a community manager is protected, while allowing the company to replace the community manager if needed without stirring up the community too much. When you are building out your strategy and processes, you need to think long term with a bias towards protecting your brand against unnecessary attacks in the future.

Want to learn more about our best practices and how our real world tested methodology can help your organization sift through the misperceptions about running a community? Contact us, we can help you build a stronger community or social network based on our nine years’ of experience.

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Online Community – B2B Return on Investment (ROI) During Recessions

As we move through a downward business cycle, smart companies are moving counter intuitively to engage more with their customers rather than decreasing their online community efforts. The slide below from a presentation during the height of the Dot Com implosion in 2003 shows that even in a recession, online communities still deliver impressive returns on their investments:

What is interesting about these quotes is that the communities referenced were launched in the 1998 to 2000 time frame when online community was a new offering on the web. To gain these results, our clients had to change the behavior of their potential members to include online communities in their work routines. While it seems old fashioned today when everyone knows what an online community is, these results demonstrate one of our best practices:

Too often organizations buy into the idea that the offering itself will be enough. The “build it and they will come” idea has been proven to fail almost every time. And yet, we see organizations thinking about cutting their community investment or launching a community and letting the community run itself. That is a recipe for failure as well. It also reflects the thinking that online communities and social networks are a ‘soft’ application (meaning that they cannot prove their value quantitatively). It is for this reason that many managers move to cut online community budgets dramatically during downturns. This is exactly the wrong time to cut, this is the time to build.

In times of economic uncertainty, your customers and prospects will perform more due diligence than ever prior to buying your product or service. Online communities and social networks are valuable tools in that process. Will a community without a strong company presence be able to influence the purchase decision? Probably not. This reinforces a second best practice:

So how does this tie into the ROI argument? Simple… if your organization is not prepared to engage with the community members by answering their questions, providing documentation, linking them with content, and asking their opinions your community will wither away during the downturn. If your organization is ready to engage with your community, you will build additional brand loyalty among members. Your community will be vibrant in comparison with your competitors who are pulling back. You will be demonstrating the value of working with your organization over the competition. By providing correct information rather than partially correct information (community managers facilitating conversations do this part), you help your prospects learn more about your products/services/company and build confidence in them that you’ll be there to help.

Remember that in most B2B communities, the ratio for those visitors who read versus those who add content is roughly 25 to 1. This means that every successful interaction potentially influences another 25 visitors on average. Depending upon the product or service, it can be much higher. Influence is correlated with purchase intent. When your community is functioning properly and is well managed, the influence it wields is tremendous.

By mining your registration database against your customer database, you’ll be able to prove the value of your online community. By using a proxy of 2-5% of sales made to community members were influenced by the community, you’ll be able to calculate a basic ROI. To refine the proxy, survey your members about the influence the community has had on their purchase decisions. You’ll be surprised how large a percentage of community members have been influenced by something they read or received from the community. But if you are not investing in your community, you will not get the growth needed to generate a positive ROI.

And that’s just the sales/marketing ROI. For those B2B communities engaged in self-service customer support, the cost avoidance equation is easier to figure out and measure.

Want to learn more? Visit our website (Impact Interactions) to download our free presentations on online community best practices.

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Can Community Members Police Themselves?

The criticism question or fear is always the 1,000 pound gorilla in the room when discussing communities with new clients and prospects. The idea of someone bashing your product or brand in public is still a very uncomfortable idea for many executives. Unfortunately, too many of our competitors whether they are consultants or software companies, answer that the criticism will be answered by members, so don’t worry about it so much. But that is entirely the wrong answer.

In our nine years experience in working with online communities and social networks, we’ve developed the slide below to help organizations understand the stages of the community lifecycle from a moderation/facilitation/member contributions standpoint:

 

The trouble with most community advice being given today is that it assumes that most communities are starting at the higher end of the Middle Maturity level or in some cases at the High Maturity level. In our experience, this has never been the case. All communities launch at the Low Maturity level. It is up to the organization offering the community to understand the needs of the community and get involved early to help the community mature. If you sit back, the community will never get to the High Maturity level shown above.Regarding criticism in the community, our experiences vary. But in short, if you rely on your community members to police themselves and respond to criticism you will be disappointed.

In nine years of working with over 40 online communities and social networks, we’ve seen very few communities that had reached the stage of maturity where they could police themselves. Here is what we’ve learned about this from surveying multiple communities about the idea of members policing the site:

• The majority of members in most communities will not report violations. Sure a couple of your top members might, but members believe it is the hosting company’s responsibility to keep the community clean and working.
• The overwhelming reason why members won’t report issues is the fear of being labelled a ‘tattletale’ or company employee or company shill by other members ruining their credibility online.
• While members have an affinity for your brand, they don’t have a responsibility to defend your brand and many will wait to see how you respond as an organization before jumping on board to support.
• Members in B2C communities actually enjoy a good flame war from time to time. They want to see the community management in action to reassure them that the organization cares about the conduct within the community and that the management is aware of the member needs. Because of this, in many B2C communities, members will not step up to prevent or stop a flame war, but rather actively participate in it. This is especially true of your most devoted members.

One example we have where a member stood up against a trolling competitor in a B2B community was with a large technology community back in 2002. In this case, a competitor trashed the product being looked at by a member of the community. Our moderation process was to leave the criticism up and respond after 2 business days. Within a day, we saw a member respond with a long comparision of the products mentioned which clearly showed the benefits of our client’s products over the competition’s. But this was a single instance out of many… and in a community that was already moving towards High Maturity, not in a new community.

In the B2C communities that we are moderating, we see that roughly 85% of all violations of the terms of service are found by our moderation team. Even worse, 50% of the violations reported by members are not violations but rather cases where they disagree with the member’s point of view (so we restore the content). When members of the community criticize the organization, they ridicule members who support the organization. After several of these discussions, members stop coming to the aid of the organization.

So what should you do? You must leave the criticism up if it’s valid and respond. Just don’t expect your members to do it for you. Part of running a community is getting into the mix and interacting with members…. too many companies are being told by consultants to sit back and let the members dictate the community’s operation. That’s just poor advice. Process and moderation/facilitation are very necessary in any community. Letting members dictate everything ends up in chaos which does not result in achieving any significant objectives for the organization offering the community.

Want to learn more about moderating and facilitating in your online community? Visit our web site to download our free presentations and contact us with your questions.

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Will Social Media Survive the Recession?

What constitutes a bubble? What constitutes a true business tool?

This was the type of question that those of us running Web 1.0 businesses in 2001-2003 were asking ourselves as we evaluated our prospects for the not to distant future. In our case, it was all about online communities and their ability to help both B2B and B2C companies increase sales, build brand loyalty, and market their products and services more efficiently. We had case studies that showed that online community members on average purchased more frequently, bought more items, and generated more profits than non-community members. We proved that online community could produce a return on investment of more than 100% (in some cases higher than 200%).

Yet for all the research and our expertise, many companies pulled the plug on their communities. The list is long: Transora (Multiple CPG companies), OurHouse (Ace Hardware), MuniGroup (Goldman Sachs), Quote.com, SoapCity (Sony), and many others.

Each company had its own reasons, but in the autopsies we performed several issues came out over and over. They were:

1. Budget taken away from community projects due to over staffing on the client side
2. Executive sponsorship changed due to layoffs
3. Software company providing hosting and platform went out of business
4. Movement of marketing dollars to “proven” traditional marketing methods like direct mail

Remember this was back in the day when for chat clients used eShare or iChat, for message boards they used Web Crossing or eShare, blogs were not widely accepted, wikis were non-existent, video was not used online except for B2B, and most community members were using dial-up connections. The overall conclusion that came back time and time again was that while communities were cool, they were a ‘soft’ application in the eyes of senior executives. These executives did not see value in kids chatting about irrelevant issues or fans cheering on their favorite television show or prospects engaging with customers independently.

Now shift to today.

Look at our social media space. We have seen blogs go mainstream, social networks competing with online communities (yes they are very different), broadband adoption bringing video and photos to the masses. Yet we also have the feeling of a bubble again as the world enters another recession. The movement towards cool applications like Twitter, FriendFeed, MySpace & Facebook widgets, and others are viewed as fun to use. However, in practical terms they are all in danger of the same fate that hit many online communities in 2002-2003.

As budgets tighten, will money dry up for experimenting with social media? It’s possible. Remember that many of the same decision makers who turned off communities are still in the position to do so again. If you are running a community or social network, you need to start building a case for why your project must remain funded.

In a member survey completed in June of 2008, the online community research network published that 57% of all respondents stated that their communities contributed no revenues, less than 2% of revenues, or did not know how much the community contributed. 33% of respondents had budgets for community projects in excess of $100,000 per year (18% over $500,000). The average number of staff working on the community was 6.6 FTEs! But here is the astonishing fact from the report: 67% reported that they had no strategy for their online communities.

Will these communities survive a budget cut? Probably not. The respondents did not know how to prove the value as Alan Warms used to preach. The issue of ROI becomes much more important as the economy gets tighter. While we all know that intuitively communities help the hosting organization, intuition doesn’t get funded.

Community and social network management teams must get comfortable with metrics and with building an ROI Case for their project. Hard data is difficult to deny… soft data of conversations is easy to dismiss…

Want to learn more about how to prove the value of your community or social network? Learn more about our consulting services, experience, and then contact us with your questions. Or leave us a comment.

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Has Viacom Gone Too Far?

Very interesting take on the recent court decision regarding Viacom’s request for user records from Google/YouTube by the District Court for Southern New York Judge Louis Stanton. In his article “Viacom Has Gone Too Far” author Lance Ulanoff gets a bit upset by what he sees are the implications for users of YouTube. Among his chief complaints? Viacom will now probably go after millions of members to try and get them to pay for the copyrighted videos they viewed on YouTube because they are greedy. Well, he says Billionaire Sumner Redstone is greedy…

Read some of these blurbs from the story:

“Once Google delivers the terabytes worth of data, you and your minions can pour over it looking for copyrighted content and those who watched it. Oh, I know you say you just want to understand if people watch more illegal content than legal—like it’s all some academic exercise—but I say there’s more to it than that. You want to go after the viewers. You want to find people who consume too much Colbert Report and MTV on YouTube and find a way to levy a fine on them. “

“With those logs in hand, though, Mr. Redstone, Viacom has the will and means to do all sorts of nasty things. It will learn what copyrighted videos still exist, whether or not people still watch them, and who the watchers are. A witch hunt could ensue.”

What a bunch of nonsense. What did Viacom get the judgement to obtain? User records which can identify which users uploaded the copyrighted videos. Google can and probably will appeal the ruling. Why? Certainly not because they are interesting in protecting their members. Rather they will appeal because once they provide that information, it will no longer be cool to upload videos on YouTube and they will lose advertising revenues. Viewers are only attracted if the content is good….lose the content and you lose the viewers, the ad clicks, and their associated revenue streams.

But the bigger question remains in the author’s mind… “When will they go after the viewers?” Answer: Probably never.

Why? It’s not going to be cost effective nor is there any legal reason to do so. The DMCA is all about those who upload or transfer copyrighted materials, not those who only watch. User data including the transactional metrics for users is very valuable information to have when pursuing a copyright infringement case using the DMCA.

But not because of the information on the viewers separated from the videos uploaded…

The reason to get this information is to isolate the members who uploaded the most copyrighted materials, then build the trail of users who viewed them in order to have metrics backing up the amount that Google/YouTube owes you for the copyrighted content. Secondary reason is that if you lose this suit and Google/YouTube is found to be protected under the Safe Harbor Provision of the DMCA, then you have the data through discovery to go after the individuals who are now responsible for the lost revenues. (Not that they will collect the money, but it will send a strong message.)

We continue to hear so many people say that there is no harm in letting the members of a social network or community upload what they want and control the norms of the site. It’s the Internet for goodness sake! But unfortunately, these folks have had a bit too much of the internet communist Kool-Aid. This case is proving that these people (and many of them are consultants in the online community/social networking world) are on the wrong side and mis-informed. We hope that this case continues to move towards a judgement rather than a settlement in order to provide clarity for any organization that offers its members the opportunity to upload content to their site.

Looking for a better way to deal with all of these issues? Contact us. We’re not lawyers, although we have slept at Holiday Inns from time to time….

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