joi, 12 mai 2011

Photo of the Day: Inside the Oval Office

The White House Your Daily Snapshot for
Thursday, May 12, 2011
 

Photo of the Day

Photo of the Day

President Barack Obama meets with staff in the Oval Office, May 11, 2011. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

In Case You Missed It

Here are some of the top stories from the White House blog.

Rebuilding in the Midwest and South, Our National Responsibility
Vice President Joe Biden visits Berkeley, Missouri – a St. Louis suburb severely damaged by a recent wave of tornadoes that swept through the area.

Champions of Change: In the Classroom
Pioneer High School teacher, Tracey Van Dusen, discusses the importance of professional development opportunities and enriched curriculum to make America's students competitive in a global economy.

Reinvesting in Arts Education: Winning America’s Future Through Creative Schools
Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council Melody Barnes discusses a report which details the powerful role that arts education strategies can play in closing the achievement gap, improving student engagement, and building creativity and nurturing innovative thinking skills.

Today's Schedule 

All times are Eastern Daylight Time (EDT).

9:30 AM: The President delivers remarks at the National Hispanic Prayer Breakfast WhiteHouse.gov/live

11:00 AM: The President and the Vice President meet with the Senate Republican Caucus

12:30 PM: Press Briefing by Secretary Jay Carney WhiteHouse.gov/live

12:30 PM: The President and the Vice President meet for lunch

1:35 PM: President Obama speaks at Top Cop Ceremony WhiteHouse.gov/live

2:30 PM: The President meets with the Congressional Black Caucus

4:00 PM: The President is interviewed by Telemundo

4:25 PM: The President is interviewed by KINC Univision/Entravision Las Vegas, WLTV Univision 23 Miami and Telemundo Dallas

WhiteHouse.gov/live   Indicates events that will be live streamed on WhiteHouse.gov/Live

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miercuri, 11 mai 2011

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog


5 Tactics to Improve Your Community Balance

Posted: 10 May 2011 02:35 PM PDT

Posted by thogenhaven

With more than 100 million Americans contributing content online this year, websites are doing anything they can to attract users to contribute to their site. With the notable exception of search engines, all major websites are depending on the community to drive their growth. Imagine YouTube without user uploads; Facebook without photos and updates or Wikipedia without users writing/editing articles.

There are so many advantages of fostering and nurturing a community:

  • Lots of (almost) free content
  • Direct feedback
  • Higher conversion rates
  • Higher rankings

In addition to all that, this community-driven strategy also scales extremely well. It is a clear win-win situation that has us all looking for new ways to grow our online communities.

Consequently, companies invest many resources in community building. But it’s hard to get right – just ask Google about this (Google is now making social efforts a top priority and staff bonuses dependent on it). The hard thing about online communities is that attaining critical mass is not enough – you have to maintain it over time.

Getting users to participate over a long period of time is the key to success. you want users to spend less time with their family and friends, and more time contributing to your community for free, you better make sure the users are motivated.

Extrinsic vs. intrinsic motivation

Image credit: http://www.dailymail.co.uk

Luckily we don’t have to guess what motivate users. Decades of research in social psychology give great insights into how we can motivate users to contribute content over a long period of time. A key distinction is between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation.

Intrinsic motivation is about the joy of performing something. People are likely to be motivated if an involvement in an online community helps them reach a personal goal, if they improve their skills or if they simply are having fun. This is why people have hobbies and spend their evenings and weekends learning Ruby on Rails. For intrinsic motivation to kick in, the person must feel it’s his decision to perform a certain task. Autonomy is key.

Extrinsic motivation means that a user is driven to perform a task because it leads to something else such as rewards and benefits. This kind of motivation usually relies on tangible rewards. Classic examples of this include salary and performance bonus.

But there are many methods to reward users with tangible rewards, and several are already being applied online: Mechanical Turk rewards turkers with money for solving tasks; SEOmoz offers community members one month free software when compiling 200 mozpoints in one month; BettingExpert offers prizes and merchandise for points, and Threadless offers money for winning designs and slogans. The web is full of examples of rewarding desired behavior with tangible rewards.

The effects of tangible rewards (and why it's not sufficient)

Giving tangible rewards seems like a great way to increase desired behavior, right? Increasing the rewards will increase the desired behavior. But it is not as easy as it sounds. The challenge is that extrinsic rewards potentially erode intrinsic motivation.

For example, people often have hobbies to improve their abilities. But when someone is paid to do a hobby, it’s no longer a hobby. The person no longer does the tasks to improve his skills, and does no longer have the autonomy to perform the task exactly as he wants to. Due to this, the users are likely to stop contributing as soon as they don’t get rewards for it. Or even worse, they’ll lose interests in the rewards and then have no motivation to continue.

In other words, extrinsic rewards can give a short-term boost in motivation to participate, but is not enough to provide long time loyalty. Thus, there is a need to strike a healthy balance between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. Besides being more sustainable, intrinsic motivation is a lot cheaper than having to pay users for everything.

5 Tactics for Increasing Intrinsic Motivation in Your Community

Now that we know balance is crucial, I thought I would throw out some ways you can help nurture this balance. It is worth noting that there does not exist a strict borderline between intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, as tactics often affect both. The aim of the following tactics is to help communities rely less on “hard” extrinsic rewards such as money, and more on “softer” forms of motivation.

Image credit: ivejustquitsmoking.multiply.com

1. Commitment

Have your users make a commitment to perform the desired actions. If you run a patient network, ask the user how many questions the user thinks he’ll answer a month. If you run an ecommerce site, ask the user if he’d “ever consider helping other users by rating a product he has purchased“. If you do, this will make the user motivated to honor the commitment.

Threadless used this practice embedded in their design rating. When giving a design top rating, you can mark that “I’d buy it” either as a t-shirt or a print.

2. Social comparisons

It’s human nature to better understand where we stand compared to our competition. Allowing users to compare their abilities and opinions to others is a powerful drive for many people. Especially when comparing to similar others. One often seen implementation of this is leaderboards.

But this is not the only possibly implementation: You can send out emails in which users’ effort is compared to the median score of the community and/or similar others (e.g. other users who signed up at the same time).

A recent study on MovieLens found that “after receiving behavioral information about the median user's total number of movie ratings, users below the median demonstrate a 530 percent increase in the number of monthly movie ratings, while those above the median decrease their ratings by 62 percent”.

This indicates it would be highly effective to email the users below the median, but not those above.

3. Social learning

When users are new in a community, they often don’t know what to do. Highlighting desired behavior of successful users will make it easy for users to see what they should do. This is what Facebook does when showing that your friends are connecting to new people. You can do the same by prominently highlighting desired action whenever existing users perform these actions.

For example, Flickr wants users to upload, tag and geotag pictures. On the home page, the number of uploads, tags and geotags are highlighted. As a new (or existing user), you know which action will contribute to the community

Alternatively, ask employees to engage actively in the community and serve as role models for the community members. E.g. rate products yourself, post comments to blog posts, ask questions in the Q&A etc.

4. Praise

Despite the (flawed) assumption that people are always driven by self-interest, most people actually like to help each other. An obvious way to facilitate praise is to let users express gratitude easily and give each other rewards can help motivation.

On the SEOmoz Q&A Forum a questioner can mark an answer as “Good Answer”.

But humans are not the only ones who can give praise: so can your website. Although the effect of getting praise from a human is bigger than getting praise by a “machine”, the praise still has an effect. For example, the Mailchimp monkey is letting users know when an email has been sent out. But it could also praise users for creating a new list, sending out newsletters etc.

Don’t have a fancy mascot like Mailchimp? Don’t worry. You can just do like Tumblr: say that your user is great! It’s simple, but it works.

5. Mastery

One of the key components of intrinsic motivation is mastery. It is often hard to know if you are on the right way to mastery, so help is needed.

A good way to do this is to let the user get a sense of his progress. An effective way to do this is by letting the user compare current performance to past performance. This practice is being applied on Casey's mozpoints.com – a microsite that collects historical data on the thumbs up / thumbs down received on SEOmoz.

There are obviously many different ways to motivate people to participate online. There can be derived many different tactics from social psychology literature than those mentioned here (See for example Rand's Illustrated Guide to Cialdini's Science of Influence and Persuasion). But these can hopefully be a beginning in striking a better balance between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation.

 


Thinking of attending a conference anytime soon? You should definitely check out the Distilled Pro Seminar in Boston 16th/17th May and the SEOmoz Mozcon in Seattle July 27th - 29th.

 


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Seth's Blog : Self directed effort is the best kind

Self directed effort is the best kind

How much are you paying for a drill sergeant?

Perhaps you can burn 500 calories on the treadmill before you give up for the day. With a personal coach, though, you could do 700. The trainer gets you to exert more effort.

You wake up on a Monday morning after a long hard weekend of misbehaving. You have a splitting headache. You can easily call in sick, no one will freak out. But then you remember that there's a $500 bonus at stake if you keep your attendance perfect. You make the effort because someone else is bribing you.

On the playground, it's tempting to rip into a kid who stole the swing from you. You're about to whack him, but then you see your mom watching. With a great deal of effort, you walk away.

Effort's ephemeral, hard to measure and incredibly difficult to deliver on a regular basis. So we hire a trainer or a coach or a boss and give up our freedom and our upside for someone to whip us into shape. Obviously, you give up part of what you create to the trainer/coach/boss in exchange for their oversight.

Has it become a crutch? Are you addicted to a taskmaster, to someone else's to do list, to short term external rewards that sell your long-term plans short? If no one is watching, are you helpless, just a web surfing, time wasting couch potato? Who owns the extra work you do now that you're being directed?

There's an entire system organized around the idea that we're too weak to deliver effort without external rewards and punishment. If you only grow on demand, you're selling yourself short. If you're only as good as your current boss/trainer/sergeant, you've given over the most important thing you have to someone else.

The thing I care the most about: what do you do when no one is looking, what do you make when it's not an immediate part of your job... how many push ups do you do, just because you can?

 

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marți, 10 mai 2011

Elevating the debate on immigration


The White House, Washington


Good morning,

Today, President Obama is traveling to El Paso, Texas to discuss the need to fix our broken immigration system.  You can watch his speech live at WhiteHouse.gov/live starting at 3:30 p.m. EDT (1:30 p.m. MDT):

Our nation is the leader of the global economy in part because of the steady stream of hardworking and talented people who have come to our country in search of a better life for themselves and their families.  As we continue to strengthen our economy, we need an immigration system that demands responsibility and accountability from government, businesses and immigrants themselves.

In his speech today, the President will lay out his vision for an immigration system for America's 21st century economy and will call on Americans across the country to join a constructive conversation on this issue. We know that folks are already discussing this issue around their dinner tables, with their friends and neighbors and through social media communities like Twitter. 

Here are just a few ways you can get involved in the conversation, and tell us here at the White House what you think:

  1. Twitter. During the President's speech today, I'll have a screen up next to my TV to watch the conversation on Twitter using the #immigration hashtag, so make sure to use #immigration to share your thoughts.
  2. Advise the Advisor. Cecilia Muñoz, one of the President's senior advisors on immigration issues, just posted a new Advise the Advisor video asking for your feedback on this important issue. Visit WhiteHouse.gov/Advise to see the video and tell us what you think.
  3. Roundtable Discussions. In addition to all the ways you can join the conversation online, we're encouraging Americans to host roundtable discussions in your own communities over the next few months, and let us know what you talked about and what issues matter the most in your community. Visit WhiteHouse.gov/Immigration to get started.

Most Americans agree that our immigration system is broken: it hamstrings our economy, it hurts families who play by the rules, and it leaves millions living in the shadows without a path to get right with the law. 

We can't out-educate, out-innovate and out-build our competitors without an immigration system that works for our economy. That's why this conversation on immigration reform is so important.  We need voices from across the country to help us elevate the debate and move forward.

We're looking forward to hearing what you have to say.

Sincerely,

David Plouffe
Senior Advisor to the President




 
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Infographic: Protecting Consumers Against Rising Oil Prices

The White House Tuesday, May 10,  2011
 

 

On Friday, President Obama travelled to Indianapolis to visit Allison Transmissions – a clean energy company that manufactures hybrid vehicle transmission technology. The President spoke about his long term plan to protect consumers against rising oil prices and decrease oil imports while ensuring a cleaner, safer, and more secure energy future.

We put together an infographic to help summarize the President’s approach:

White House Highlights

Latest Awards Bring US Closer to National High-Speed Passenger Rail Network
May 9, 2011
Ray LaHood, Secretary of Transportation, announces the next steps for high speed rail in 22 carefully selected projects across the country.

Weekly Address: Clean Energy to Out-Innovate the Rest of the World
May 7, 2011
Speaking from a hybrid vehicle transmission company in Indiana, the President explains how investments in a clean energy economy are the only solution to high gas prices in the long term.

The 'America's Next Top Energy Innovator' Challenge Begins Today
May 2, 2011
Starting today and until December 15, start-up companies can apply for one of the Department of Energy's thousands of unlicensed patents for greatly reduced cost and paperwork.

Weekly Address: Ending Taxpayer Subsidies for Oil Companies
April 30, 2011
At a time of high gas prices and massive oil industry profits, the President renews his call to end the $4 billion-per-year subsidies for oil and gas companies and invest in clean energy.

Thank You Alaska! 
April 28, 2011
Watch last week’s podcast and webinar on the National Ocean Policy and what it means for the Arctic region.

Knowing Where We Stand to Save Money, Improve Efficiency, Reduce Pollution, and Eliminate Waste
April 28, 2011
This week several Federal agencies released the first-ever comprehensive Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emissions Inventory of the Federal Government’s operations in 2010.

A Clear Commitment to Clean Water for America
April 27, 2011
A multi-agency national clean water framework was released on Wednesday, emphasizing the Administration’s commitment toward protecting the health and longevity of America’s water resources.

Drawing Inspiration on Smart Grid Innovation from America’s Youth
April 27, 2011
U.S. Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra highlights how America’s youth are engaging in thoughtful discussion and innovative creation of clean energy technologies for our future.

Cultivating Seeds of Knowledge; Growing a Greener Future for our Nation
April 26, 2011
The DOE, EPA, and CEQ launch the Green Ribbon Schools Program which recognizes schools that are working toward teaching environmental literacy in the classroom and are creating ways to decrease their environmental footprint outside of the classroom.

President Obama to Congress: “I Hope We Can All Agree That, Instead of Continuing to Subsidize Yesterday’s Energy Sources, We Need to Invest in Tomorrow’s”
April 26, 2011
The President’s letter to leaders of both parties in Congress addresses the subject of tax breaks for oil companies.

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