Online communities are a well-known foundation for creating engagement and loyalty with a large audience. While many of the methods for leveraging an online community are familiar, innovations in artificial intelligence are creating new opportunities to benefit community members, advertisers and the platforms as well. My company has been exploring and launching a range of AI-based capabilities into our community for some time, and I’m pleased to share our insights into the benefits and challenges.
Our online community and its sister site in Turkey enable our members to safely obtain personal advice, share opinions and interact with passionate yet open-minded individuals. I founded the company in 2008 with the belief that topical conversation was a unifying activity for all types of people, and that an online community could bring people closer as well as serve as a profitable business operation for a platform and its advertisers. The challenge at the time was that software was able to store and share enormous volumes of conversations, but it could not effectively interpret the contents.
The situation has changed dramatically with a form of AI known as machine learning, or ML. In essence, ML systems become more intelligent the same way that people naturally do: If you want to teach a young person what defines a car, show that person a variety of cars, and let them form their own conclusions, rather than giving them a static list of characteristics like four wheels, gasoline engine, steering column. With natural or ML-based learning, the system can adapt more easily to new situations, for example, as vehicles like Tesla Cybertruck come to market.
AI Applications To Online Communities
Machine learning works especially well as a method of natural language processing (“NLP”), inferring deeper meaning from conversations than old-fashioned, dictionary-based software.
We now are applying ML to categorize content in each of the thousands of conversations held daily on our sites. Let’s say a member were to ask, “Should I buy my new boyfriend new headphones?” Our ML system has come to understand, by interpreting the surrounding conversation, that this question is as much about relationships and budgeting as it is about audio systems. We’ve found that this nuanced interpretation of questions makes community members more satisfied and deeply engaged with the topics highlighted for them.
Content categorization, in turn, allows us to more quickly and insightfully identify trends, which is highly important for advertisers on the site. A holy grail of leading-edge advertising is to be able to adjust communications to be more relevant to topics that are trending this week, or even this hour. If a particular brand or product receives heavy attention on the site, then an advertiser can receive a report highlighting this and decide how to participate in the community conversation.
ML also applies to sentiment analysis — understanding when a member’s conversations show emotions like enthusiasm or frustration and reaching out to them where needed — and screening out inappropriate content, such as spam or uncivil speech.
Adaption Of Machine Learning To New Capabilities
The above examples highlight how ML tools, once your technology and business get acclimated to them, can easily be applied to diverse situations. While examining data from the above applications, we realized that we can identify common interests and traits among our community members. We now are exploring interest matching and launching applications that can connect our members based on these common characteristics, whether for dating, sports, travel or hobbies.
I have been waiting for nearly a decade for AI to reach this level of sophistication, as it takes our founding vision of making topical conversations valuable to another level (satisfying both the entrepreneur and inner computer engineer in me). Even ML techniques from just a few years ago could not achieve the current level of language interpretation. As a result, our team now spends much less time manually monitoring community activity and more time thinking about making the overall experience more valuable.
Staying Authentic While Applying AI
Ultimately, digital properties need to focus on “authenticity.” While this has been part of our mantra from the beginning, younger brand managers are even more attuned to authenticity than previous cohorts. This trend toward authenticity leads to several insights:
First, the best online communities have become less about communications volume and instant gratification, and more about honest and thoughtful voices and recurring interactions that lead to relationships.
Second, the more we connect community participants, the stronger the overall unit becomes. ML furthers this goal by uncovering unforeseen correlations between individuals, other people and their mutual interests that teams wouldn’t have been able to identify independently. It’s reminiscent of the Google AI system that was taught to play Go, a board game more complex than chess. After learning from thousands of games and playing against champions, the system started inventing its own moves, which weren’t recommended or even understood by humans but turned out to be winning strategies. For me, this is an example of people teaching machines, which in turn teach people how to improve further. Richer insights mean more authentic communities that can help each other even more.
Third, the power of engagement not only applies to community members but advertisers as well, who have discovered that the most effective way to build brand engagement is to participate in thoughtful conversations.
Finally, I believe AI is a powerful enabling technology to be embraced rather than feared. This same constructive attitude served society well when it came to other innovations, such as jet planes and cellphones.
At the same time, we must be mindful of AI’s potential consequences, such as the introduction of hidden biases or a shift in job skills, and proactively address them. As long as we keep asking the deeper questions, there is a promising opportunity to enhance the authenticity of the world’s digitally enhanced experience.
