The Science of Communicating & Marketing Your Business

This post deals with contributors to wikis. The wikis monitored in our system are mostly internal and corporate, in many cases the companies asking NextStage to monitor their inhouse wikis are exploring the use of wikis along with other new media methods of B2E interactions. This report covers a seven day cycle, 27 Sept - 4 Oct 07. Visitors, Truth, False Information and Personal Information, Part 1 provided a report for a general B2B sampling of sites NextStage monitors for clients. Part 2 dealt with B2C sites and Part 3 with blogs. Part 4 dealt with a glom of sites and provided a general overview of visitor honesty on several sites in our system. Part 5 dealt with online insurance providers and Part 6 with online medical and pharma sites. Part 7 dealt with high end vacation sites in the NextStage system.

I think an appropriate subtitle -- at least something businesses wanted to know -- is whether or not wiki contributors really knew what they were writing about when entering information into a corporate wiki.

I need to clarify at this point that NextStage's tools don't know if someone is telling objective truth or not. Our tools can only identify if the person entering the information believes the information is true or not. This is subjective truth. In other words, this tool can determine if someone is intentionally fabricating information. This is a similar problem that criminal investigators and forensics experts deal with routinely; the witness believes what they're redacting is accurate even if there's massive contrary information available.

Subjective truth is a valuable tool in a lot of instances. For example, one of the greatest problems facing lots of industries today has to do with whether or not their knowledge-base will be maintained as workers retire, move on, etc. This concern is one reason many corporations are studying wikis as tools for collecting, categorizing and distributing knowledge before it walks out the door and is lost forever.

This NextStage tool allows wiki monitors to note that a given individual strongly believes the information they're providing is accurate and actionable (a good combination in most instances).

All that offered, this chart indicates that across all wiki sites NextStage is monitoring contributors believe they are either telling the complete truth with their entries or are unsure. Nobody is fabricating information (also a very good thing to know when dealing with a corporate knowledge-base).

And now to recapitulate the explanation of how to read these charts:

Deceitful behavior is both a boundary and defense mechanism. Think of a cat poofing its tale, a dog bristling it's back, things like that. These mechanisms engage to make the animal appear larger than it is. It is, in a sense, being deceitful, making itself appear larger than it is, to protect itself or its territory. Thus, when there are no forms to fill out, et cetera, and ET is picking up fabricational behavior it is an indication site visitors are uncomfortable with the website they're navigating. Similarly, truthful behavior is an indication visitors are comfortable with the website they're navigating.

Please contact NextStage for information regarding presentations and trainings on this and other topics.

Links for this post:

• The NextStage Reports arc
• The Visitors, Truth, False Information and Personal Information arc

• Society for New Communications Research Annual Research Symposium & Awards Gala on 5-6 Dec 07 in Boston.