Did you catch this eye-opening WSJ.com article (reg. req'd)?
Apparently, the UGC you're finding at places like Digg isn't from as broad and representative an audience of reviewers as you might think. According the the WSJ's analysis, "at Digg, which has 900,000 registered users, 30 people were responsible for submitting one-third of postings on the home page. At Netscape.com, a single user named "STONERS" -- in real life, computer programmer Ed Southwood of Dayton, Ohio -- was behind fully 217 stories over the two-week period, or 13% of all stories that reached the most popular list."
The Journal says this is "giving rise to an obsessive subculture of ordinary but surprisingly influential people who, usually without pay and purely for the thrill of it, are trolling cyberspace for news and ideas to share with their network."
Meet one - Henry Wang aka "dirtyfratboy:"
POSTS ON: Digg/Netscape
WHO HE IS: A high-school senior and varsity tennis player outside of Chicago
HOW HE DOES IT: In August, Mr. Wang posted a link to a new social-networking site Famster, saying, "I can't believe this site isn't widely known." The link got 1,700 votes and bumped Famster's daily visits to 50,000 in a day.
Here's another - a Reddit user known for scoping out striking images on the Web, Amardeep Sahota recently helped drive about 100,000 unique visitors to one amateur photographer's site.
Why does this matter? Well, for consumers, it's more important than ever to consider the source of a comment or recommendation. People who are posting could be getting paid, and their opinions may not be verified by others. The dark side of UGC, as Greg Verdino calls it.
For marketers: why bother communicating to a broad audience when just a few people are in control of the microphone? Just seek those people out, and woo them to pull you into their network of approved vendors and content. Pay them if you have to? That's where it gets dicey.
For me, a larger question also emerges - why, in this new world where everyone can participate, where technology enables the masses to make their opinions known, are people limiting their choices to just a few, mimicking exactly the old media model where a small number of publishers curated content for the marketplace, which bought it wholesale without evaluating or elaborating upon it?
AKA, 2 steps ahead for mankind, but then 2 steps back. Maybe people can't handle all the options, and it's just easier to look to a central guiding filter (there's ample behavioral and attitudinal data supporting this claim). This dynamic outweighs the possibilities offered by participation media.
It will be interesting to see how consumers and marketers cope with this new wrinkle in UGC.
Opinions from the peanut gallery?
Church of the Customer goddess/author Jackie Huba brought the Citizen Marketers book tour through Digitas Boston on Friday. Jackie is a super smart and thoroughly engaging tour guide through the wonders of her (and Ben McConnell's) new book about "When People Are The Message."
Reminding us that the social media world is a "different culture" and that "control is out of control" was a scary way to start the day. Jackie show highlighted what the new "1 percenters" mean in our digital world and how the first page of Google results are your brand.
