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?
Can you tell us more about why you think exchanging powerful corporate curators of content for powerful non-corporate ones would be considered two steps back?
Here's the thing: if you drink the UGC kool-aid, you believe that there's actually a meritocracy in place. In the Attention Economy, those users that are most congruent with the things people want to read are the ones that end up on the pulpit.
I don't believe that's entirely true -- or that it remains true over time -- for two reasons: first, as the disruption turns into the New Established Order, the free speech of the freelance curators becomes more entrained with "behind the scenes" influences -- and that really *is* a step back.
Second, there's two kinds of communities in the new Social Intertube -- the Big Spotlight community (BoingBoing, Digg, Slashdot), where a small group does direct the attention of a large group. But there's also the small community of people, numbered in the tens. There are lots and lots of those groups as well, and the weight that drives THOSE groups really is more distributed.
Anyhow, I do completely agree with you that as time goes by, the "ownership" of the speech becomes more and more important, and users are becoming more sophisticated at sussing out the difference between corporate-sponsored and private speech. If people stay vigilant about that, then we won't have to take both steps back, I hope :)
Posted by: John Young | February 11, 2007 at 10:01 PM