Can business websites become more sociable?

While business websites tend to have formal, well-defined structures, social websites (built by people hanging out online) tend to have informal structures based more on hyperlinking and tags. Is the territory between these two types a barren wasteland, or a land of opportunity?

Websites by businesses

Businesses tend to have websites with well-defined structures. On the majority of these type of website, we will find that content can be located through primary and secondary menus. Using search is an option, but taxonomy and controlled vocabulary tends to be predominant.

Social websites

When online communities discovered there is life after Yahoo's forums, they promptly started to hang out at MySpace, started to publish on Flicr , YouTube and Blogger , and formed communities of interest on sites such as OnlineGroups.Net. The popularity of social content exploded .

Folksonomy and collaborative tagging by the crowds became predominant, and we now tend to follow tags to see what our peers find worthwhile, interesting, fun, or cool.

Problems with social websites

There is a downside though. When compared to traditional websites, social websites are not strong in the structured navigation department. This tend to cause problems for information hunters. For instance, how do we find blog posts about a very specific topic on Technorati ? We can use search, but how do we know that we're using the correct search terms? In other words, which terms did the crowds use when they tagged (classified) the content we're looking for? Did they tag it at all?

Search only works if you know what to search for. A while back, I looked into the options that are available to make websites which are hosted in new New Zealand faster for visitors on the other side of the globe. Searching for the phrase "website caching" got me nowhere; so I trawled through the seemingly irrelevant search results until I spotted the phrase "web acceleration" on a random forum. Searching for "web acceleration" returned results for "content delivery network". Bingo. So if you don't know what you're supposed to be searching for, you have to spend some time to work that out first.

And then there is the problem of quality vs popularity. Can we trust the recommendation of the crowds? Do the crowds know best? In his book Ambient Findability, Peter Morville cautioned that "there's a fine line between the wisdom of the crowds and the ignorance of mobs." He's got a point.

These issues, and a few others, led to a healthy debate between the proponents of taxonomy and folksonomy.

Given that social websites are so popular, what is the owner of a business website to do? Do we abandon our structured content and hand over classification to the crowds?

Sociable business-websites

Or is there a middle road that will allow us to incorporate the advantages of social websites with sacrificing our structures? The answer is yes.

Amazon did not take long to add social interaction to its online shop. Not only can clients review products, but others can comment on the reviews. Customers can tag the product. The interface tend to get a bit clucky, but the functionality and the social interaction is there. The information that we find here is so useful, that it's becoming common for shoppers in bookshops to use their smart phones to go to the Amazon site to read the reviews (and check the price!) of the books they are interested in.

This topic is currently quite popular in the blogoshere, with postings from, for example, the UIE Brainsparks and the folks at Adaptive Path .

Opportunities

There are many opportunities that open up for our business websites if we are prepared to learn from social websites. Business websites can have the best of two worlds. The trick will be to implement and maintain interfaces that enable and encourage social interaction, and then keep an eye on the social interaction, without spending too much time or resources. The businesses that can get this right, will find the territory between structured and social websites to be a land of opportunity.