Sydney Social Media Club
Interesting evening attending the latest Social Media Club Sydney event at the Oxford Art Factory. Russ Weakley gave some great insight into how he dragged the Australian Museum website kicking and screaming into the wild world of web 2.0 . A little bizarre was the decision to go with a complete custom content management system which he himself admitted had backed them into a corner in terms of ongoing maintenance costs. An amazing leap forward was the management buy in to allowing comments to be posted on the website without moderation. The second was distributed content creation – he cited the example of allowing everyone from the cleaning staff to the hardcore academics at the museum being able to create and own their own content on the site. This topic wasn’t covered in much detail but I’d certainly be interested to see how this works in practice given the drivers to remove central administration of content from any organisation.
The commercial slant on this is that you should be able to allow your users (read customers) to freely comment via your website – they’re going to talk about you anyway, you might as well give them the chance to do so in plain sight. It allows your staff (and advocates) to easily correct inaccurate comments with minimum effort on your part.
Chris Betcher was next up and provided an insight into the benefit of tagging content on the web. The talk contrasted the “old fashioned” way of categorising information (such as Dewey Decimal) and how this would be impossible to manage in today’s user-centric environment.
The key take out from this for any business is that you shouldn’t focus too much on categorising information – users should be able to do this themselves. It will save you time and effort and enable your users to locate what they are looking for in a more effective manner.
