Posts Tagged 'ugc'

A new buzzword for you. ‘Crowdsourcing’, Heard of it? No? Let me give you the definition from Jeff Howe, the man who wrote the book:

“Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.”

Let’s simplify that, getting your audience to do your work for you! Genius.

It’s a brilliant approach to marketing strategy. Ask the audience their opinion, get them to contribute and feel part of the business. Then Utilise user generated content for new product and service ideas and new approaches to marketing your business.

It’s not a new concept either. Some classic examples include the Walkers ‘Do me a flavour’ campaign, istockphoto.com (you add your images to build their library), and of course wikipedia. There’s also an example of this on the way from Pancentric, so watch this space.

Crowdsourcing: Highly successful, highly engaging, highly recommended.

Yesterday Google announced on their blogs a new service they have in closed beta which will become a serious threat for the likes of Wikipedia and Squidoo, two other user-generated knowledge repositories.

Knol as it’s known, or unit of knowledge, allows users to share their knowledge in a very structured way. As Google say, there are a lot of people out there who know a lot of stuff. Google are providing them with the space to share that knowledge with the wider community. The difference between this and Wikipedia is that where Wikipedia is a collaborative effort – lots of people contributing to a single article, knol places the author of the piece at centre stage. So, over time a single user could virtually publish everything they know for public consumption at no cost. In fact, if what they write is popular Google will share ad revenues should the writer wish to pump some Google Ads into the page.

What’s also interesting about this is that it is open to absolutely anyone. It won’t be a pre-moderated, vetted walled garden approach. So the quality of some of the stuff will be questionable. But, and here’s where it get more interesting, there will be the usual social features of rating and commenting, as well as being able to continue the article through posing questions to the author as well as adding content. So, the good stuff should float to the top. Couple this with Google’s half decent search technology and it could be an awesome tool.

One thought though. Wikipedia often appears high up the Google rankings by the very nature of it’s widely linked pages. How are the ranking weightings going to work in the future when Wikipedia is ‘up against’ a Google-built service which will obviously be optimised for its own voodoo search algorithms?