Grupthink
From Missoula Bar Camp
Current social experiment is Grupthink.com
Next, offering branded/skinned private (or public) feedback to communities. One large customer so far, seeking funding to accelerate growth.
NOTES FROM THE SESSION
These are notes taken by Harold Shinsato for this well attended session presented by John Masterson and Steven Sundheim. Nearly all the BarCamper's attended this event.
GrupThink past, present, future
Since there were so many web hosting companies, ModWest decided they needed another project.
Steven thought of a web 2.0 poll system about viral marketing to friends and passing it further to more friends.
Steven has some experience hosting communities. He hosted hitmanforum.com, the dominant fan site for that game. He learned a few things from these forums. People will work for free if they have passion. Every week people asked if they could be a moderator. Lots of problem solving in free form discussion areas. They interviewed some of the developers - they want to get at this information too. Largely due to the chaos - lots of redundancy - with the same topics and the same answers. There are people bickering in threads - it's not the fault of the people, the problem is the free for all structure of the environment.
What if we take all the great things about free form discussion areas - let people be demonstrative and creative, and structure it in a way that you can drop into a conversation and see which opinions are shared by the most people. We're on the path to doing that. Take away the redundancy. Post a topic - match existing topics, and recommend that people go to those topics.
The most popular topics on grupthink is "who is the sexiest woman alive". There is no reason to have Angelina Jolie 10 times. People are prompted to use the same answer.
They try to keep topics lumped together.
Topics have to be relevant over time. Theoretically you can see what people are thinking today versus what they were thinking three years ago. The noise factor is separated through UI and conversation. Last year Steven was invited to speak at MIT where they found their first client, General Mills. They are taking the platform and applying it to a consumer advisory panel.
Let's say we have a predictive question - who is going to be president in 2010. It would be nice to have a deadline for predictive questions. Grupthink needs to have different types of question. Another is a wish list - how would you improve grupthink? That is a popular survey on Grupthink. At some point we end up implementing the answers.
As soon as they implement the features, they take the answer off the topic. You can see all the wishes that were granted, so they are not retiring the answer.
In the global warming conversation in the U.S., major activity from the environmental groups, gradual transition out of fossile fuels, no - we have to make the cuts early. Find the people who are where we are. They agree with us and are ready to do something now.
The International community needs to come up with an alternative for Kyoto by 2009. One cool thing we've done, there is a similarity ranking- we do a calculation with every other member. Rate your similarity with every person. Don't allow people to see the ranks, only the most similar and most different people.
If companies can get a pulse on their product, is there a way to sell this to a company with online tools? To get a pulse for next version of your software. That idea first came to Steve -go to these websites - if it's a game that comes out every few years - what do you want to see in the next version?
There's no way to get a consensus in the forums. The developers would want that information too. Let alone bug reporting. That is some of the lowest hanging fruit.
Is there any possibility of an app exchange with SalesForce? They have a product called SalesForce ideas. They're trying to get the same information. They could probably seen as a competitor of GrupThink. Trying to fill two different niches. Not doing PR - trying to launch this in December to really take advantage. GrupThink is looking for strategic partnerships.
Anyone can ask a question and GrupThink automatically encourages submitters to groups questions together and the community also polices itself (rather vigorously!)
They have a plan to implement some natural language processing. Someone comes along and gets one vote. Grupthink allows for instant runoff. You can list the top 15 votes in order.
A rating system - job website - always sort of how could people who work for these places - as well know - lousy experiences, don't necessarily paying the money - being badly rated.
There are several options to "share" a grupthink poll on your own website or on a forum post.
GrupthinkPro is the branded GrupThink community using the grupthink platform. It will be a new business class service, they can have their own installation hosted by ModWest that has their brand, color, and logos.
What was General Mills doing before? They'be been using a few different ways to get information - a community feedback environment. It's a consultation service. 100K per year. Not fully automated. Grupthink is meant to be very low intensive management.
At 37Signals you can start using it for free.
