Cafe Community
Filtering relevance from irrelevance
Current online communities have far from mastered the true art of enabling user to discover relevant content. Feed relevance is a multi-attribute & multi-dimensional challenge and a pretty interesting one.
In the truest intent to make content relevant, organizations have primarily devised relevance via one of the following cores:
a. Popularity or Likes or Upvote ranking
b. Manual curation
c. A mix of Popularity rankings and Manual Curation
Based on industry specifics and factors such as time spent, associations and few others, there would be some variance in algorithms for each community; but the core is usually built upon one of the three points mentioned above.
Each core becomes its own nemesis when the organisation sets the guns blazing for rapid growth. With multiple thousand posts being generated each day, do you pin a few select posts based on either popularity or manual curation and expect it to be relevant for each and every user ?
So how do you define ideal relevance ? Well, the following analogy might help in understanding the idea better:
a. If you are with a small group of friends in a cafe, your demeanor and connect with the folks will be quite confident, interactive and personal.
b. Now replace the small group of friends and cafe with a group of 10000 folks ( you would personally know maybe a few more than a 1000 ) and an open air theater. Suddenly the perspective changes and so does your demeanor, confidence level and connect with the audience.
So whichever core you pick, your answer lies with Personalization of content to make your users’ feed relevant. Build it like a cafe with close friends who matter, whom we feel comfortable with to discuss any topic under the sun. Discovering relevant content from irrelevant feed posts will then be a breeze.
So, get going and make your business Personal and Comfortable for your users...just like your favorite cafe☺