Puzzler #1: How to Add Companies

Our team often bumps into interesting design dilemmas. We'd love to hear some ideas about them. Here's the first that I'll share on this blog: how to add companies to our database.

Our users have told us that they'd like to be able to add companies to the database. And we think they ought to have that power. This raises two sticky questions, however.

1) How do we maintain a clean user-generated database of companies?

Companies are always merging, changing their name, going out of business - it's a dynamic market. We'd want to avoid seeing "Exxon," "Mobil" and "ExxonMobil" as three separate companies in our database. (Exxon and Mobil merged a few years ago to become ExxonMobil.) We'd also want to avoid a plethora of duplicate entries from typos ("Exon"). These challenges could be managed by setting up a process for our community or our staff approve a newly added company before it is formally incorporated in the database. We could also try some sort of auto-fill feature when a user is entering a new company to reduce the frequency of typos.

2) How do we encourage our budding community to reach "quorum" for a given company?

We aggregate the information provided by our users into scores for each company. But we can't in good conscience post a company score that is based on only a handful of user reviews. We need a minimum number of people - a quorum - to review and rate a company's performance before we can be confident that the aggregated score is reliable. We don't know what that minimum number is yet; we'll test our model to find out.

The problem is that increasing the number of companies in the database will probably reduce the likelihood that any given company receives quorum. This is especially the case in our early years when the size and capacity of our community are limited. If five hundred users each add and review a different company, we'll end up with five hundred reviews but not a single company score that our community can use.

One way to solve this is to create incentives for community members to focus on certain companies, one industry at a time. Our users earn status through the quality of the reviews they write, culminating in a Contributor Score. We might simply offer bonus status points to users who write about a company that is part of our current "focus industry." Users would be free to add companies but encouraged to pool their efforts efficiently.

Have any brilliant solutions for us? Please share.

- Stephane