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What’s a Crowdsourced CMS?

Posted on 18. Mar, 2010 by Toby in How-To's

Team Grogger just wrapped up a great trip to SXSW. It was a great time to catch up with friends and contacts from the industry. It was particularly great to see all of the conversation and chatter about crowdsourcing and new publishing / media modules. We had many of those conversations ourselves. Here’s a tweet we received following along a SXSW conversation:

Great question. Grogger is building a new model around a crowdsourced CMS, and we need to explain the key differences in how it operates relative to a traditional CMS. Crowdsourced publishing involves two key dynamics that don’t operate in traditional, limited-number-of-contributor publishing:

• attracting content: getting in as much content as possible around the topic that you are trying to cover
• filtering content: filtering that content down to the highest-quality, most-relevant content for your audience

The above two dynamics are our obession at Grogger. Allow me to explain how we’re approaching each.

Attracting Content

Users won’t spend time producing a good blog post unless there is something in it for them. The most successful crowdsourced sites motivate their users through recognition. Users are eager to invest in submitting a good post if they feel they have a good chance in earning recognition among the community / audience in return. It follows that a crowdsourced CMS must give particularly high recognition to contributors in order to win their content. And thus in Grogger wherever you see content, you’ll see the creator of that content given nearly equally high prominence, way more that a traditional CMS would.

All of these user thumbnails link back to a user profile page. In a traditional CMS, this link at best is to an archive page simply listing all of the posts by that author. In Grogger, the profile page can be customized by each user to display information about them and feature whatever post they choose. It also displays information around that user’s badges, followers, etc. In short, contributors are given the opportunity to develop their identity within the grog community, which is the key to motivating them to contribute in the first place.

Then, as the posts flow in, Grogs turbo-charge user contribution through gaming dynamics. Users earn different badges for different accomplishments. Leaderboards at the global level (on home page) and on a topic-by-topic level get the competitive juices flowing among contributors.

And we are just at the beginning around gaming mechanics. Expect much more coming soon.

Lastly, to attract all of the content around a topic, to convert regular users / consumers-of-content into profilic contributors, the experience of submitting content must be as easy as possible. Facebook is really the model here, and we try to have all users actions have Facebook-level ease-of-use. We begin with an in-line publisher, which is very different than a traditional CMS, but says loud and clear to users: “We want you to contribute! And it’s easy to do so—do it right here!”

Then, when a user wants to submit a more elaborate post, what do we do? Well, a traditional CMS would take a user to some back-end admin page. That works for a pro blogger or someone who owns a blog. But a regular user would hit an admin screen, say “WTF? Where am I?” and likely abort the post. What does Facebook do? They keep a user in their familiar context and given them a pop-up right in the page. We do the same:

That pop-up includes a number of features to further ease the posting process for crowdsourced users, for example: adding images via a page URL (and then scraping the page very the images available on the page); adding tags through a hierarchy of buttons and drop-downs (instead of an open text field that leads to multiple spellings—and thus miscategorizations—of the same topic; think: “The Rolling Stones,” “rolling stones,” “the stones,” etc.).

Lastly many of the contributors that a grogger would want to involve in their grog might have a blog or a twitter account already. So what then does that user need to do? Shut down their own blog? Copy posts from their old blog and paste it in their new? Good luck. But to attract all of the content in a crowdsourced model, you have to be able to bring in that content. So we make it really easy for users to import their content from their existing blog:

Filtering Content

OK. So you’ve successfully attracted all of the content from the community around your topic. Hooray! But unfortunately, in just doing that, you’ve got a train wreck. Yeah, you’ve got some good content in, but you’ve gotten lots of weak content in too, and some content that’s good enough for a particular topic page but not right on your home page. The problem is that all of this content—the good and the bad—is unsorted and unfiltered, and you’re audience is not going to pour through it all to find the diamonds in the rough. The solution to this is the second major function of a Grog—filtering—and yet again it is an area that is not applicable and thus is not part of a traditional CMS.

The filters begin with tiers. Anyone can post into a grog, but when they do, it goes into the lowest tier, “the most recent.” This is below the fold in a less prominent position. Then the community can begin to filter the posts by liking them and they start to climb through the “most liked” feed.

Lastly then what editors like is featured in the featured feed or in “stickies” atop the feed. These filters work as a pyramid, like this:

The result of this pyramid? All posts come in, but users who come to consume content only get the best of what’s been contributed through the filtering system.

As posts are submitted, they are tagged with topics. This same “pyramid” process is recreated on each topic page. In another layer of filtering personalized to each user, users can choose to follow topics and users and having the posts from those followed appear in their MyFeed.

Editors can further direct the contributions of the community by assigning tasks. For example, the editor of a “movies grog” could assign tasks for users to write up profiles of the various Best Actor nominees.

There are more tools, more features, but what we’ve reviewed here covers the main stuff (though we’re going to get better and better with your feedback!). The point is this: all that we do at Grogger around attracting content and filtering content, it is unique to our crowdsourced CMS. So if you want to crowdsource your content, sign up and start groggin’!