FreshNetworks Blog

This afternoon I was facilitating a session at an e-Publishing conference in London. A nice group of people for my session on combining UGC with professional content in the publishing industry and how this can help to generate loyalty. I was quite impressed with the levels of enthusiasm and experience in the group from a range of publishing firms about doing something different online.

The concerns they have about using user generated content are similar to those raised by any industry - how to ensure a quality of contributions, how to know how trustworthy people are, concerns over litigation and a significant concern about how to get people to contribute. Many had commenting facilities on their sites that were little used. This is a situation we see a lot - people create ways for people to comment on their site or add content and they just don’t. One solution came from the group itself today. One of the delegates reported having about 50 people who commented regularly on parts of their site (ten of whom were particularly vociferous).

People like this, ones who are enthusiastic about your site and content, are the best to help you manage and encourage contributions. Let them know that they are your most passionate contributors (they probably don’t know), ask them what they think about the site - what works and what doesn’t, develop some house rules with them and then get them to help enforce them for you. Make the most of their enthusiasm and you’ll be surprised by the results. I’ve seen forums where unpaid contributors actually moderate or respond to hundreds and hundreds of threads a month.

Another interesting discussion during the session was about how to use ratings. People were broadly keen on the idea of rating content - although they would want to display number of ratings as well as the score, and prefer the concept of scoring ‘relevance’ than a simple rating of how good the content is. One particularly interesting story from a delegate at a large B2B publisher was how they used these rankings to produce a league table of journalists. The more relevant users voted their content, the higher they were ranked. An interesting application of UGC - perhaps it would be good to link journalist bonuses to such ranking too…!