Treading on Nature’s Trails
“Customers were not able to find the support articles they were looking for online,” says Darren Martin, an inside sales representative for Baynote, a California-based web-solutions company that worked with TurboTax to solve its search problem. “So they were forced to call the support center, and that was raising support costs.”
Specifically, TurboTax found that for every 100 people who typed a term into the site’s search box, only 15 percent clicked through on a result. To address this problem, TurboTax and Baynote turned to an unlikely source: nature.
Looking to the animal kingdom to solve big business problems isn’t a new phenomenon. From Velcro’s invention to cutting-edge airplane engineering, examples of nature’s inspiration—also known as biomimicry—for products and processes are both timeless and endless. The most recent adaptation of this trend is within social media. Specifically, the way ants collaborate and interact can inform how humans do the same online.
Laying the Trail
When ants work collectively to gather food or find a nest, they demonstrate a behavior known as crowd wisdom, a term coined by Arizona State University Assistant Professor Stephen Pratt, Ph.D.
Baynote adapts this behavior when it works with clients in the online space. “The way we look at it is, ants look for food, humans look for valuable information,” says Scott Brave, chief technology officer at Baynote. With ants, the process hinges on pheromone trails. While searching for food, ants lay a chemical pheromone trail. The trail becomes stronger as more ants look for food and carry it back to the nest, leaving pheromones along the way. Individually, these ants are following simple rules: follow the pheromone signals and bring food back to the nest. By doing this, the colony displays complex collective behavior that leads to the best food sources.
Similarly, humans leave a digital pheromone trail when they visit a website through their various actions, ranging from recommending or reviewing something to passively visiting. Depending on the frequency of user visits and interactions, the trail becomes stronger.
Using this theory of pheromone trails and crowd wisdom, Baynote worked with TurboTax to rework its website.
Through these changes, TurboTax raised its search click-through rate from 15 percent to 73 percent, and saved $300,000 in support costs during the 2007 tax season.
Nature’s “Like” Button
Promoting popular con-tent within the TurboTax site ensured that users would be more likely to find the information they’re looking for. In essence, they could follow the pheromone trail. However, static content won’t keep that trail intact, Brave says.
“Just the creation of that trail does not mean it will be there over time,” he says. “We are trying to tap into the natural, collective behaviors of the users, and understand them, to enable those trails to be laid.”
But why and how do trails fade? Here also, ant colonies can provide insight.
The moment ants locate a good food source and consume it, the trail to that source disappears. However, if the food continues to replenish after it’s consumed, the trail to that source remains intact.
Social media also follows the same pattern. For instance, if a Facebook update receives a number of “likes,” many people will read the update out of curiosity for why it received so many likes. If the same person continually posts updates that receive a large number of likes, people will continually go back to that person’s profile to read updates.
The act of liking or recommending a page, link, post, or product is what Pratt calls the positive feedback tool. At Arizona State University, Pratt investigates various aspects of ant colony behavior, such as trail creation and promotion. “Once an ant has found something, she advertises it to a few of her nest mates,” he says.
When ants select a nest or a look for a food source, they make collective decisions based on positive feedback to reach consensus.
“But the downside is when you have strong positive feedback and everyone gets swept into a consensus on an inferior option,” Pratt says. “There are going to be some people who will be unhappy with what consensus was reached.”
Although positive feedback draws in a crowd, accurate negative feedback can sometimes become the litmus test that leads users to the most relevant information.
“You need that negative perspective to protect yourself against the runaway positive feedback loop,” Brave says. Systems that have only positive and no negative feedback—be it a recommendation system based on clicks or views—can lead to a runaway herd mentality, Brave says. Thus, unchecked and heedless positive feedback can unleash a mirage-like herd mentality.
But when users engage in a kind of positive feedback that encompasses constructive criticism, comprehensive product review and accurate recommendation, it may lead to collective intelligence that social media can thrive upon.
Collective or swarm intelligence is the driving force—not only in an ant colony, but also in social media. And collective intelligence is a byproduct of a collective voice that Web 2.0 brought about. The unfettered ability to publish, to voice an opinion, to recommend, review and share content, took social media, and with it the Internet, to a new level.
“The Internet in itself was built to be a distributed system,” says Linda Zimmer, president and CEO of MarCom:Interactive, an Anaheim, Calif.-based media consultancy group. “And while there are a few top level protocols, the Internet is a very distributed system.”
The Internet shrunk the world. And social media took it a step further. Because of citizen journalism and crowd-sourcing through Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, blogs, and news websites, events such as the Haitian earthquake and the Iranian elections received a wider, global audience than previously possible. What augmented this phenomenon is social media’s largely decentralized, bottom-up structure.
And once again, social media reflects nature.
Ant colonies do not have a clear leader or control. Instead, they collectively decide how to behave. Similarly, social media is not
Through social media, humans seek to add value to an ongoing discussion or debate, creating new content and new linking structures along the way. And most often “those people that have the most links become the most credible because the crowd is basically voting for every link, saying, ‘this is good information,’” Zimmer says.
Information is the operative word. And good and relevant information is what people seek.
“People have a thirst for knowledge and information,” says Steve Sherron of Echelon Media, a social media consultancy. “If you create something that people want, that people like, and they find it useful, you can create that trail.”
Just as ants create and follow the trail that leads to the best nest or food, humans tread on a trail that leads them to relevant content.
“When you help the users find relevant content, they’re going to spend more time participating in various ways,” Brave says, “from contributing information to purchasing products.”
