When people think of user-generated content they often think of the media or publishing. Videos on YouTube, spoofing TV shows or films, and content responding to and expanding upon journalistic or editorial articles abound. But UGC is certainly not limited to these areas. In fact it can work best on any topic where some individuals will have developed a specific interest in or knowledge of the area.
The medical industry is one that sees a lot of UGC. A search on YouTube finds thousands of videos of people talking about their illnesses, from cancer sufferers to people with bullemia. Support groups are flourishing and people are finding that sharing experiences and content online is sometimes easier than face-to-face. Talking about your experiences to video and uploading this to YouTube for others to respond to and comment on is probably easier than discussing it in real life. The internet and social networks probably offer access to a greater number of fellow-sufferers than even a local support group might offer.
Beyond support, people can use social media and user-generated content to help understand their illnesses. The supposed danger here is that people will self-diagnose and that this may be incorrect. At the same time, you’d expect that privacy issues would prevent any meaningful and useful exchange of ideas. But in fact, user-generated medical content is a vibrant example of how the social networking and online communities can be powerful for exchanging information.
A report by Jupiter Research in 2007 showed that 20% of Americans turn to others online for information about medical issues. They are clearly not shy of seeking or giving advice, even on more personal issues. They use sites such as OrganizedWisdom, a Wiki-style community, to share information they have and get information they need.
The concern over the accuracy of this information still stands, with worries about non-medical professionals sharing information that people use to self-diagnose. But research by the British Medical Journal in 2004 found that in the online support communities it studied only 6% of content was incorrect. If this replicated across all medical content online then it would probably be among some of the more accurate user-generated content on the internet.
User-generated medical content shows that people are willing to share and are accurate when they do so. Even in a more niche and potentially risky area such as medical advice and disgnosis, the quality and usefulness of user-generated content is high.
The New York Times launched a beta version of TimesPeople over the weekend. It’s their first step at adding a social layer onto their site - a recommendations service and mini-social network. It’s works rather simply:
Find ‘friends’ in the database or by importing contacts (currently only from gmail)
Recommend or share articles that you enjoy or that you think that your friends would enjoy.
It’s the beginnings of a social network and maybe even an online community, and it’s great to see the New York Times add a social layer like this, but I really hope it’s the first stage of a broader social media strategy.
The opportunities for publishers to leverage the power of social media and social networking is huge. Sharing and recommending articles is just one of the things that people might want to do with a publisher brand and is also something that might be better done elsewhere. I can share articles from any site with my friends on Facebook; I can recommend news and content on Digg. I don’t necessarily need to do this in a site that is controlled by just one publisher.
What I want to do as a publisher site is to make the most of the content my brand produces. Understand what people enjoy reading, get them to comment on it, gather data on them and build a real understanding of what they do and think. I want to combine my editorial content with the UGC created by my readers. Get them to contribute to my content and enter into debates with other readers and the authors. I want them to rate content and by this I can know which of my authors produce content that is of most interest to the readers.
There are some publishing firms doing really interesting things at the moment. I met a large B2B publishing firm at a conference recently who award bonuses to writers based on the ratings their articles get on the site. The BBC News site has been developing, organising content by theme, engaging readers with comments and exchanges and making it easy for people to take their content with them to other sites.
TimesPeople seems to be a simple social layer added over the New York Times’s main site. I’ll be interested to see how successful it is, and to see how it develops. Will people actually use this comment and recommendation tool, or will they continue to do this in other ways and through other networks? Will the social elements of the New York Times grow to include some of the more exciting things that publishing firms can do?
Publishing is about content and content is about opinion and debate. Social media and social networking allows publishing firms to provide the stimulus for debate and provide the online community where this debate can happen. It’s going to be exciting to watch as firms develop in this area and TimePeople could be a first step in this direction.
