Gorm's blog

User generated content

The fear of user generated content is often stated is sentences such as:
1.    To get quality you need experts and editors.
2.    It is impossible to find quality in the enormous stream of amateur’s material.
3.    Someone might write that Hitler was a great guy.
4.    No one will write anything without getting paid for it.
5.    What if somebody writes something that is wrong?
6.    How can we know if it is right, when everybody can write on a Wiki?
7.    Who is responsible, if somebody writes something that is wrong?
8.    What if they write, that our product stinks?
9.    What if they write, that they are selling Viagra really cheap?

And the list goes on and on and on… This is a list of companies / organizations that had to face the above questions; Amazon, IMDB – internet movie database, YouTube , Flickr, Linux, Piratebay.  The list is getting a lot longer now, because now we can add most WebPages in the world. But still we find the fear of user generated content (UGC) everywhere.
The founders of Amazon and Wikipedia must have feared not the UGC, but the established companies Barnes and Noble and Britannica.  At any given moment Barnes and Noble and Britannica could have allowed for UGC, and killed off Amazon and Wikipedia before they gained the critical mass of users needed to generate the most accurate ratings of books, and the most comprehensive amount of good articles. Barnes and Noble and Britannica are now offering UGC, but they did it too late, they are undoubtedly no longer the leaders in their industry that they once were.
So let’s take a good long look the things we fear in UGC. Imagine two schools competing for pupils, the Schoogle versus the OldSchool. Schoogle offers every student a free blog, and Schoogle have a Wiki, all with no strings attached. OldSchool gives you a free e-mail, and you can sign up for a dummed down version of a blog and a Wiki.  A dummed down version is a webpage, blog or Wiki, with any number of different restrictions and strings attached.
1.    In order to make a comment you have to login, and naturally give your both email and credit card number.
2.    A large set of rules for the kind of content you can publish is given.
3.    Your content will not show up for two weeks because the webmaster has to make sure your following a set of rules.
4.    Once you upload content it is no longer going to be yours, but will be owned by the company on whose webpage you write.
5.    You can’t do the same things that you can do on any other free blog or Wiki, you are for example not allowed to change the layout of the free blog, you can’t upload pictures etc.
6.    All content is put in a password protected area, so the public can be kept out.

Worst case scenario for Schoogle is that the students are writing about how awful the school is, the students are putting Viagra up for sale and making a blog about how great Hitler is. Now I make the basic assumption that that there is no way to avoid UGC, it is out there with or without you. The content that is now on Schoogles webpage would have otherwise been spread through messenger, e-mail, facebook, other blogs and Wiki’s and just plain conversation.  The upside for Schoogle is that they can use the traffic generated by the students, they can talk to their students because they are present on the webpage. This can happen in any number of ways, but one way would be the shared canvas approach. You get a free blog on the schools web server, and a very small part of the webpage will contain a feed of news about what is going on in your school. The Schoogle is also made aware that they need to deal with students not being satisfied with their education. If a few students are discontent, then the majority of students will argue against the minority, and you could not possibly buy better marketing than that. If the majority of students are discontent, the then it is a problem that is not made any better by keeping that criticism outside of the schools webpage. Oh and Schoogle is putting up some intense classes in World War 2 history, and thinking about what to do about that Viagra thing…
Worst case scenario for OldSchool, the students are writing about how awful the school is, the students are putting Viagra up for sale and writing a blog about how great Hitler is. But phew no need to worry, because OldSchool is offering the dummed down versions of blogs and Wiki’s, the students don’t care to use the blogs and wiki’s offered by the school, so it is all happening outside of the schools WebPages. This means that the OldSchool is in blissful and complete ignorance as to what is going on, and if they need to talk to the masses they can just send them an e-mail.

There is nothing to fear, but the fear of user generated content.

References

Participation Inequality: Lurkers vs. Contributors in Internet Communities (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox). (n.d.). . Retrieved February 22, 2009, from http://www.useit.com/alertbox/participation_inequality.html.

Social Network Marketing – Guerilla Designers Wiki. (n.d.). . Retrieved February 22, 2009, from http://mmdodense.wetpaint.com/page/Social+Network+Marketing.