What happened with the Smartwool Experiment.

… or “A lesson in low barriers to contribution.” … or “Is everyone this lazy or is it just me?”

In November I created The Smartwool Experiment, which is a online brand/science experiment using social- and multi-media tools to chart the wear and tear of four pairs of Smartwool socks.  Every morning I would click a little bookmarklet (see above) entitled “add sock,” which took me to my Smartwool dataset on Swivel.  I would add the date (by way of a keyboard shortcut so that I do not have to look it up), the sock color and shoes I was wearing and then hit enter.  It took 20 seconds.

Things were chugging along swimmingly until one day in mid-December when I logged into Swivel as the museum* to determine if there was a correlation between actual museum visits and museum web visits (there was an 87% correlation, btw).   And as I would expect it to, Swivel saved my login information as the museum, not the Smartwool Experiment.  The next time I logged into the site, I got a 404 error (as evidence by the screenshot above).

In this scenario, which is easier?

• Logout and login again.
• Do it tomorrow.

Do it tomorrow won.  Why?  First, browsers do not consistently remember passwords. Some are remembered through sessions, some through cookies, some through browser data, some never not at all.  I didn’t trust the situation to not inconvenience me and in that moment, I only wanted to devote 20 seconds to the task. Second, I overestimated my ability to remember what socks and shoes I wore on what date.

Which is easier?

• Logout, login, remember what sock/shoe/date combo I neglected to enter, enter today’s.
• Do it tomorrow.

Without any effort at all (literally!), I created a snowball of reasons to do it later.  Over a month has passed and I haven’t entered any data about my sock/shoe combos.

The point is this: When you are in a position to encourage people (inc. yourself) to contribute something (opinion, media, money, etc.), be hyper vigilant about lowering the threshold for contribution.

Something else to be considered: When we make it super easy to contribute – go look at any YouTube video with more than 1,000 views – online community management becomes increasingly important.

• ’sbeen awhile, huh? My current job is at a science museum.