BtoB Media Business - November 2007 - (Page 30) Online Generating user content ONLINE Having Web 2.0 tools doesn’t mean your audience will automatically participate BY MARIE GRIFFIN T he latest trend in Web site design is incorporating Web 2.0 tools that allow users to comment on, recommend and rank stories; interact with bloggers; participate in forums; create personal profiles; “make friends” with other users; and post their own photos and videos. But visit many of these sites and you will find lots of zeros in the comment fields, half-empty forums and minimal activity in the sites’ versions of Facebook. In spite of the fanfare surrounding the term, user-generated content is not easily generated. Scott Raynovich is editorial director of CMP’s Contentinople.com, a b-to-b site for digital content industries—media, music, video and content delivery networks. “Usergenerated content doesn’t come about like magic,” he said. “It comes from relentless pursuit and constant proselytizing.” Raynovich added that half of his job before the site’s midyear debut was kick-starting the community with e-mails and phone calls. Seeding a site with comments and user content is critical before community features go public, agreed Dora Chomiak, senior director of product development, digital media and e-commerce at McGraw-Hill Construction. “I’ve learned the importance of the soft launch,” she said. “You need to invite people to participate and spark some dialogue before you open up the site to your general audience.” Once a community starts to sprout, someone still needs to monitor and nurture participation on an ongoing basis, Chomiak said. At the redesigned Architectural Record site, for example, a series of “galleries” are set up for users to submit photos and renderings of their work. “Our editors will call people they know and say something like, ‘You just finished that new hospital project. Would you send some photos?’ ” Chomiak added that user-generated content can be showcased in media other than online. For example, publishers can include the best online comments in their print magazines. Rex Hammock, president of Hammock Publishing and a longtime blogger and e-media enthusiast, pointed out that “others have already created community platforms online, and people are using them to create their own networks.” Because these online networks are not new, he said, “You need to find out where your readers are already expressing themselves online.” Hammock added: “You can’t create a walled garden. You need to become an aggregator for content your audience is already creating elsewhere. You can be a hub for the community conversation, no matter where it’s happening online.” Members of b-to-b audiences won’t create content for a site unless they see some value in it for themselves, said Prescott Shibles, VP at Penton Media’s New Media Group. One way to do that is to help boost a person’s credibility in the industry with a tool that allows audience members to rate one another’s posts. One of the biggest challenges in the Web 2.0 media world is engaging community members in a dialogue with one another, Shibles added. “The most important thing is to make some reader calls to feel out their needs,” he said. “You ask them, ‘What kind of information do you want to hear from your colleagues?’ Poll them for topics and people of interest. Then build the tools from there.” Content drives CMP’s new Internet Evolution site MP’s Internet Evolution (www.internetevolution.com), introduced Oct. 1, combines investigative reports from professional journalists with original blogs created by an invitation-only network of more than 60 well-known thought leaders—called the ThinkerNet. The site also offers a host of Web 2.0 tools that allows users to contribute content and enables all three groups to enter into a dialogue with each other. This variety of content is the key to Internet Evolution, said Stephen Saunders, co-founder of Light Reading and project manager for the launch. He said a content-first strategy has been the driving force behind Light Reading, a profitable online b-to-b media company founded in 2000 and acquired by CMP in 2005. Saunders joined CMP as a senior VP after the acquisition and left in February to start his own consulting business. With IBM Corp. signed on to be the sole sponsor of Internet Evolution for its first six months, Saunders said he will concentrate on building out ThinkerNet, which he expects to grow to 100 or more contributors by year’s end. The bloggers have a broad range of perspectives and C backgrounds. Among the participants are the CIOs of Boeing Co. and General Motors Corp., the creators of craigslist and Second Life, the inventor of the Domain Name System, and experts in virtualization software and online advertising, as well as many influential authors, speakers, professors, venture capitalists and activists. James Johnson, a veteran journalist with experience in multiple media platforms, joined CMP as site editor for Internet Evolution after a stint as senior editor at Success. Internet Evolution employs many established Web 2.0 technologies, including comments, forums, bookmarking, rankings and personalized user pages. But CMP is working on developing some new tools as well, Saunders said. One such innovation, due to debut this month, is a combination of two Web 2.0 terms—the wisdom of crowds and tag clouds—called the Wisdom of Clouds. Saunders explained this tool as like a tag cloud, which inflates the type size of a word tag as it is used more frequently. “This is a navigational tool that will organize thoughts,” he said, suggesting that people need to see it —M.G. to really understand it. 30 | Media Business | November 2007 | mediabusinessonline.com http://www.internetevolution.com http://mediabusinessonline.com
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