User-generated content for business and e-government

— Published May 24th, 2007  |  by David Moore

The US army has even taken steps to curb use of these sites among soldiers, partly for fear of aiding the enemy - so they must be doing something right.

Social Design

What powers all three sites are their users, who contribute the vast majority of the content – photos for Flickr, video clips (of sometimes questionable legality) for YouTube, and a little bit of everything for MySpace.

The site owners provide the infrastructure and copious bandwidth requirements, while members look after the content, with myriad communities developing around different areas. Let’s call this user-generated content and community-building social design.

Not just for the kids

You might not be Flickr, but you can still find a place for this sort of activity on your own site.

User reviews for example, are now a valuable staple of many online retailers, while news sites such as the BBC and the newly-redesigned Irish Independent also encourage readers to comment on many articles – turning the normal one-to-many publishing model into something more flexible.

Many software companies offer discussion forums for users to offer tips and troubleshooting to other users.

Feel the benefits

So there are several reasons you might consider letting the great unwashed add content to your carefully-managed site.

Joshua Porter from UIE has a good breakdown of the advantages, which we’ll explore with some of our own examples:

• amplifying customer opinion - if it’s positive, so much the better, if it’s negative, you hear about it fast and have the chance to react. Amazon allows reviews on all the things it sells, but of course it doesn’t actually make them. Apple, on the other hand, allows reviews in its store, including some very negative ones (eg, the flaky MacBook Pro power adaptor).
• collecting data about your product or service - every time someone forwards an article to a friend, or rates a product, you get more information about what people like or don’t like. The feature that tracks the most-emailed article in the Irish Independent is useful for readers, but it also give editors and site managers good information on where they should be putting their focus.

• reducing support costs - if the users are helping each other, you don’t have to. A vibrant user community for the content management system Expression Engine delivers excellent support quickly. Employees also monitor the boards and answer questions, meaning that these solutions are publicly available for the next person who runs into the same problem.
• engendering trust - being open to discussion reflects well on the organization. US web hosting company Dreamhost had a disastrous time last summer when a series of problems left many customers’ websites unavailable for long periods. The company kept people up to date via its blog, and continued to allow comments on the blog articles, even when there were 476 (largely critical) replies to one post.

Money for nothing?

If it sounds like this is a great way to avoid having to look after your own site, think again.

You’ll need to design, build and maintain a potentially complex infrastructure to support the user-generated content.

And managing the quality of the content requires resources and skills (and often the diplomacy of a UN Secretary General). It’s also a long-term project – you won’t see results overnight.

E-Government use

At the UK Conservative Party conference last year, Google CEO Eric Schmidt argued that the public sector general and politicans in particular were very slow in understanding the importance of social design online.

Neither the British DirectGov site or the recently rebranded Irish Citizens Information site (previously Oasis) have any scope for user-submitted content (but you can send articles to a friend).

Public-sector sites could enjoy many of the benefits we’ve looked at, and since they’re funded by tax revenue and built expressly to help us, there’s a strong argument for letting the citizen users have their say.

Michael Geist has some good suggestions on how this could happen in Canada, but there would need to be cultural changes in many public organisations, where it’s hard enough to get even the blandest internally-produced statement approved for use online.

But whether it’s a public or a commercial site you’re involved with, being aware of the opportunities and challenges around social design will become increasingly important.