We are increasingly in a landscape where media is global, social, ubiquitous and cheap.

While news from Iran streams to the world, Clay Shirky shows how Facebook, Twitter and TXTs help citizens in repressive regimes to report on real news, bypassing censors (however briefly). The end of top-down control of news is changing the nature of politics

The revolution in expressive capability

1. The printing press – turned Europe  upside down starting in the middle of the 1400’s
2. The telegraph and then the telephone – about 200 hundred years ago
3. Photos, recorded sounds, movies - about 150 years ago
4. Radio and Television - about 100 years ago

This was the media landscape as we knew it in the 20th century.

The big change

The internet is the first medium in history that has native support for groups and conversation at the same time. The second big change, the internet also becomes the motive carriage for all other media – phone calls, movies, photos etc. The third big change, members of the former audience can now become producers and not just consumers.

Today, we face a different question than we have ever had before: How can we make best use of this media – even though it means changing the way we’ve always done?

About the author: Clay Shirky believes that new technologies enabling loose ­collaboration — and taking advantage of “spare” brainpower — will change the way society works.

Shirky is one of the handful of people with justifiable claim to the digerati moniker. He’s become a consistently prescient voice on networks, social software, and technology’s effects on society. – WIRED

Jay Goldman explains the finer points of replying to people on Twitter. It may not sound like a complicated topic, but there’s a lot more than meets the eye when you hit the Reply button. With these tips, you’ll be a master of the Twitter reply in no time flat.

Jon and Tracy organized a Facebook Campaign which attracted nearly 1 million followers and helped launched Rage against the Machine’s 1992 hit, Killing in the Name, to the No.1 Christmas song in the U.K. They used Facebook to capitalize on young people’s growing unhappiness with cookie cutter pop, with which Cowell has become synonymous. Cowell’s new act, Joe McElderry, was heavily favored to reach the number 1 spot but was defeated thanks to Jon and Tracy’s campaign.

How perfect is this? Rage Against the Machine, the iconic anti-establishment group, defeating the pop establishment. (Some hardcore Rage fans may think it’s a little ironic that it was because of Facebook that this happened, but hey, I’m not going there). This is a great example of how tools like Facebook and Twitter can be used to make the voice of the people heard. These are tools which bring together like-minded people to share their opinions and have their voices heard. And, as seen here, they can actually cause change.

Must be something to do with this time of year — all the giving and such — because this post almost has a bit of Marxism to it. This may not be the proletariat rising up and over throwing the bourgeoisie, but hey, I’m sure Marx would be happy to not have to listen to Simon Cowell’s brand of music over the holidays.

Happy Holidays!

To that end, we’ve been doing some preliminary A/B testing. A/B testing allows us to test and play with different variations in our language, layouts, images and colors. One A/B test we ran was for language. We tested the “Give Feedback” call to action vs. the “Respond Now” call to action in the notification email that advisers receive when their feedback is requested.

The result:

“Respond Now” resulted in 13% higher click through than ‘Give Feedback’ with a 99% confidence level.

The more direct language was inspired in part by Dustin’s awesome findings in trying to get people to follow him on Twitter. Dustin found that by going to a command such as “You should follow me on Twitter here” vs. a statement such as “I’m on Twitter” resulted in a 173% increase in click through.

In both cases, more direct language yielded better results. In our case, “Now” creates a sense of urgency in the mind of the responder, and encourages action immediately. “Give Feedback” does not instill the same sense of urgency and is more easily ignored. (It would be interesting to see the results of a test between “Respond Now” and “Give Feedback Now”)

While our results are not as dramatic as Dustin’s, we’re quickly iterating and have been experimenting with multi-variable testing (which we’ll elaborate on in a future post) to more quickly get the results you want. As we continue to do A/B tests on messaging and features throughout the product, we’ll report back on some of the interesting findings.

Got Feedback? You should give it to me here.

Tim did some performance reviews recently and was struck by how much more clear, direct, and productive it would be if they were limited to 140 characters, like Twitter.

I believe I’ve uncovered the manager’s dream!  140 character Performance Review – 30 seconds and you’re out.   What an increase to productivity, to clarity – I mean how could you not be clear and concise in 140 characters.

We couldn’t agree more Tim!   Limiting characters forces people to be clear and concise. No fluff, just direct actionable feedback.

That’s why we built Rypple.  It takes your core insight of easy to create and concise feedback and builds on it to create a useful solution for improving insight, productivity, and performance.  And, like Twitter – it’s fun!

It takes seconds to give useful Rypple feedback.   And, because its so quick, people get more feedback, continuously, which helps people to develop.

We love it when smart people reaffirm why we built Rypple.  Thanks Tim!

Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.

Armed with such guidance from illustrious entrepreneurs, we set out to provide Rypple users with frequent, insightful, and actionable feedback.

Lukewarm Acceptance

We believed (and still do!) that asking concise questions to a select group of advisers who would then respond anonymously would be the ideal means of achieving that goal. We started with market research, ethnography, and observations of existing social behavior like Twitter, SMS, and IM, concluding that adviser’s responses should be limited to 140 characters (research shows that 160 is usually enough and we wanted to reserve a 20-character buffer for special characters).

We then implemented our first response box that prevented users from typing in more than 140 characters with a so-called ‘hard limit’, stopping them at 140 and not allowing the form to be submitted. Everything indicated that this was a smart decision that would drive high response rates, since users would find it obvious that a simple short response was required (and that they should dispense with pleasantries in order to be direct). With that design in place, we set out to conquer the world.

Lo and behold, we encountered lukewarm acceptance and some very vocal and disapproving users.

Lukewarm acceptance is more bewildering than outright rejection. — Martin Luther King, Jr

Back to the Drawing Board

This is the point at which failure might have tricked us into abandoning our cause. Mere mortals might have shrugged and walked away, falsely assuming that there was no solution. Fortunately for the growing population of Rypplers everywhere, we’re infected with startupitis, which carries with it a certain blunt stubborn refusal to accept failure (see our previous post about Rudyard Kipling: “if you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs…”). We had expected that not everyone would accept these limits on their communication, but we were confident in our ethnographic research that had lead us to targeting Gen Y users with our alpha prototype, a cohort well familiar with the restrictions of SMS and used to conveying their thoughts in short, focused blocks. Still, some users truly struggled to provide a single response. What to do when all signs pointed to our assumptions being wrong?

Turn to the power of Agile and the ability to release early and fail often. It was obvious that releasing a working prototype and observing real usage was more rewarding than isolated academic research and analysis translated into software requirements. Our weekly iteration cycle let us focus on implementing one change at a time, measuring its impact, and then reflecting and making adjustments to our hypotheses. This scientific method introduced rigor that would serve us well in our battle for delivering a usable response box that would empower responders to give quick high quality feedback more often.

Modeling Cognitive Models

User observation showed us that people were used to brainstorming ideas and then pairing them down to get the message essence across. So our second iteration of the response box allowed responders to type in more than 140 characters but did not let them submit until they edited it to 140 characters in length at most. This was our first step to a softer limit, still restricting the length before submission but better modeling users’ creative process (raw creation mode followed by structured edit mode).

Overcoming the Blank Slate

This lead to people spending less time on writing a response and increased response rates of return responders. Progress! The next thing we observed, however, got us worried. Much like the dreaded blank sheet of paper, we realized that some users got stuck staring at the empty response box. We started experimenting with showing users great questions and responses, hoping to seed their creative process with inspiration. We showed them inline or in the sidebar or even as example text in the response box. We varied the help text based on tags used to describe the questions.

Expert Opinions

Our response rate increased as people overcame their response writer’s block, jumping by 5% over the previous condition. But now we noticed that the quality of questions and answers was dropping. We measure quality as the ratio of helpful to unhelpful feedback, as reported by Rypple askers. The amount of unhelpful feedback increased by 30% after the change. Grrr! Progress on one front was causing a regression on another.

Luckily, Rypple has attracted the attention of professional feedback coaches like Jamie Resker, Jennifer Stillings, and Cheryl Sylvester (to name only a small sample of our awesome community). Based on their advice, we added some help text to the form to provide guidance to advisers on giving better feedback, and we helped advisers by explaining what type of feedback was requested (whether it was a free form advice or a guided feedback response on what was done well and on what needed to be improved).

Sometimes Quantity is Quality

This helped us get back on track with feedback quality and kept the response rate high but we still had many vocal users telling us about how limiting 140 characters were. We then started experimenting with different lengths, sizing of response boxes, font size and text copy on the page. Allowing longer responses did not necessarily lead to higher response rates or to higher quality (which supported our original hypotheses about directness and brevity). A session with our friends and users at Mozilla helped lead us to the answer: the feeling of freedom from suddenly having more characters to use enabled users to provide feedback in shorter periods of time.

Our response length analysis actually showed that 200 characters were enough in the vast majority of cases. Only some types of questions warranted longer responses. Speaking to our users, deep diving into our data to look for trends, and iterating quickly allowed us to confidently increase response lengths up to 400 characters and quickly try several soft limits between 140 and 200 characters. We ultimately settled on a maximum length of 400 characters, but with the character counter starting at 200 and going to -200 before the form blocked submitting. We also added a series of short prompts that appear in increasingly darker shades of gray, providing feedback about how your response will be perceived by the asker (e.g.: “A concise response will be more helpful to Tihomir.”, “Your response is now longer than average.”, “70% of responses are more concise than this.”, etc.).

Empowering Advisers

This helped us with responses rates but we still had users complaining that some of the feedback did not make sense. Up until this point, we had been working under the assumption that it made sense for the asker to determine the type of feedback they wanted to receive. James Wu, our User Experience Guru, observed that face-to-face feedback doesn’t work that way: I ask you a question and then you decide how to structure your response. We ran this by our feedback coaches and partners who agreed, and went a step further by showing us the power of providing feedback using the coaching metaphor (e.g. what the asker needs to stop, what he/she needs to start, and what he/she needs to continue doing to be successful). We made a final change (so far!) by switching to giving advisers a choice of the type of feedback they wanted to give, choosing from ‘Freeform’ (a single field), ‘Like/Improve’ (two fields, 400 characters each), or ‘Start/Stop/Continue’ (three fields, 400 characters each).

Getting Better!

This brings us to how Rypple’s box for responding to feedback requests looks now. Switching to a soft landing for character limits and moving the decision about feedback types to the adviser has increased our overall response rate by over 15% and kept feedback quality steady. This is by no means the end of the road as we clearly see room for improvement and refinement. We’ll continue to use your invaluable insight and work together with you and the rest of the Rypple community on creating a useful and delightful feedback tool.

Social Media is Gutenberg’s printing press of our times. Think about it. With the creation of the printing press humans were able to connect through the written word, no longer having to meet face-to-face to share knowledge. Instead of the individual having to travel, the written word went on the journey. Masses of people could be organized around ideas and beliefs, people could be mobilized around calls to action. It helped bring about the scientific revolution and the renaissance, shifting the balance of power and influence away from the church. It had a major impact on improving the lives of people

Now I don’t know if social media will bring about revolutionary changes like the printing press brought about when Gutenberg first set type around 1440. But it is already having some major impacts. Twitter has emerged as a major information source, and organizational tool for protesters in Iran. It has allowed thousands of people to mobilize and make sure their voices are heard around the globe. Who knows? It may help bring about true democracy in Iran.

Facebook groups allow like minded people to unite, and share their interests. You can become ‘friends’ with someone you have never met, and have a real relationship, even if you never do meet. In short, social media is making the world a smaller place, connecting people from different corners of the world, increasing free speech, and uniting the world as Gutenberg’s press did centuries ago.

A comment we sometimes encounter at Rypple is “I like to give my feedback face-to-face so I’m not going to use Rypple”. I always found this to be an interesting concern. If you think about what Rypple really is, it’s a tool designed to help people help people. The internet, the printing press, social media are never going to replace face-to-face interaction, but are simply tools to make communicating easier. Any tool that introduces profound sociological change starts off by creating fear of that change in everyone but the earliest adopters. We expect the same for Rypple, since we’re shaking up the world of feedback and challenging many of the long held assumptions about the role it plays in productivity, interpersonal relationships, and the workplace.

“… the realm of the technical, as thus defined, is not to be considered as evil in itself; if we think of it in itself … a technique is rather something good, since it amounts to nothing more than a specific instance of our general application of our gift of reason to reality.” – Gabriel Marcel “Man Against Mass Society”

2. Are you what’s known as a long form Twitterer ? (that is, someone who often hits the 140 character limit in your tweets and spends way too long cutting them back)?

3. Do the replies you get to your emails frequently include the phrase “Hey, I didn’t need your whole life story!”

Well, if you answered yes to one or more of these questions, then you (like me) may suffer from Long Email Syndrome (or L.E.S.)! I was first diagnosed with L.E.S. back in the mid-90’s during my undergrad years. I believe the diagnosis came in the form of a polite nudge from my girlfriend at the time, and I’ve been hopeless ever since (Note: that girlfriend is now my lovely wife, who to this day, reminds me of my problem, except no longer politely).

Oh sure, I and others like me justify our condition by saying things like, “…but I just want people to fully understand my point” or “I don’t want people to feel that I just blasted off a note without thinking,” but at the end of the day these are all simply excuses (not unlike the all too familiar: “I’m just a social drinker” and “I only have a cigarette after watching MacGyver“).

The good news though is that I’m not alone! I know there are many of you who have confronted your problem and have undertaken a series of resolutions, challenges, and strategies to deal with it.

The other good news is that in my professional life heading up the Product team at Rypple, I am literally forced to confront the realities of brief and focused human interactions on a daily basis. As many of you know, much like the Twitter paradigm, when using Rypple to request or provide feedback, the service forces you to keep all you content under 100 and 200 characters respectively. Now, if I had a nickle for every time a user asked why we can’t allow 300 or 500 characters to provide this same content, I’d probably have about $1.35.

Surely something as important as feedback is worth more than 200 characters?!?, they say.

But I couldn’t possible convey all the details of the feedback I’m after with only 100 characters…that’s INSANE!

Why do people feel they need all that space? That, my friends, will be the topic of an upcoming blog by Mr. Debow. But to tell you the truth, many times I’m quite tempted to throw down my mouse and stand in solidarity with my brothers and sisters with L.E.S.! However, after composing myself and having a daily group hug with the Rypple crew (boy do I love those group hugs!), I am reminded of that famous ancient Chinese proverb:

No one has either the time or the patience to read your junk!

[loosely translated I'm sure]

I recently read a great self-help book called You Inc: The Art of Selling Yourself where the authors remarked; “If you want to know how to write the very best 500 word article, write the very best 1000 word article and cut half of it out!“, and “If you want to know how to craft the very best 10 minute speech, write the very best 20 minute speech, and cut half of it out!” Brilliant I say!

By the same token, two of the reasons people tell us Rypple works so well at getting them such valuable and actionable feedback, is that in contrast to email or surveys, Rypple’s character limitations:

a) force the asker to focus their question with such laser-sharp precision, there is no doubt as to the insights being requested and
b) the expectation of a large time commitment on the part of those you engage is totally negated (in fact, 2 minutes of their time is all you’re asking for).

(Note: If I had a nickle for every time a user told me how truly amazed they were at the value of the feedback they were able to get with Rypple, I’d have WAY more than $1.35. But don’t take my word for it…check out the buzz for yourself!)

So there you have it. My name is David, and I suffer from L.E.S.

While I know I don’t suffer alone, hopefully Rypple, and services like it, will keep all of us on the wagon a little bit longer.

Absolutely!

Sunday morning hockey games, reading bedtime stories with the kids, and grabbing lunch at our food court are a few activities I find especially joyous. But the development team here at Rypple disagrees with me.

After countless work hours and a “healthy glow” that one can only attain from sitting in front of 450 square inches of LCD goodness, they insist the road to true happiness is paved with thousands of happy users getting the frequent and valuable feedback they crave (no, the developers don’t get out much!)

I must admit though that one of my biggest professional joys comes from interacting with our users and listening to all their great ideas for how we can make Rypple an even better service.

In the interest of bringing all these great ideas to life, Rypple operates under an agile development methodology with weekly iterations (geek-speak translation: we focus on building the features that deliver the most value to our users and roll them out weekly). This means that one week I could be Twittering with Rick Mans and Ryan Graves or reading a blog by Tammy Erickson or Don Tapscott, and the next week a new crop of related features could be deployed in the live product (a seemingly herculean feat based on my many years in enterprise software).

While my new year’s resolution is to blog about these great features and interactions on a more regular basis, what better way to celebrate the festive season than by formally introducing you to some of these great new features, born out of the fruits of our collective labors:

These are just a few of the features we’ve recently rolled out.  I didn’t even mention our new Instant Messenger integration  (well, I did now).  In the coming weeks and months we’ll be pumping out many more features, but alas I need to leave some sense of mystique and intrigue so, a) you’ll on come check out the service and more importantly, b) so I save some content for the next post!

In the mean time, happy holidays and keep that feedback coming!

…now, my only question is whether or not the Thai place in the food court still has that special on cashew chicken going on?