Generating new, interesting content that will bring visitors and links is one of the challenges for a website. In her article The Search-Friendly Appeal Of User-Generated Content, Robin Nobles (Robin’s blog) explains how to get users and visitors involved with a site and to encourage them to contribute content.
At first this sounds simply like a method to add content which will then generate traffic, visitors and links to a website. But it quickly becomes apparent that it’s more than just visitors and links. The article is about encouraging a community of people to make a connection to your company, people who can encourage potential customers to also make a connection to your company. They do this by not only generating content for your site, but by generating content that is of interest to a much wider audience. (Oh, wait, that’s called marketing!)
Robin’s example is a vacation hotel on an island off South Carolina and how to use the site to help artists on the island build a community of artists and patrons. She describes a variety of ways that the hotel could help the art community, publicize the hotel, and create more content and links into its website.
What if we were to apply the same concept to a technology company? What are some of the communities that could be created? And how could it be done in a way that users add content and that they create a community that attracts links and visitors to the site? Here are a few examples.
Repository of industry information – Technical markets require constant learning as technologies, products, regulation, and customer requirements change. Create a section of your site that provides this information for your particular industry. Encourage others in the industry to contribute information or to comment on material on the site. An example of this is Counterpane, a managed services security company, and Bruce Schneier’s Crypto-Gram newsletter site. Bruce is a security expert and sends out a monthly newsletter that includes his essays and also contributed comments. Although it is on a separate URL, the Crypto-Gram and Counterpane sites link to each other and anyone who reads the Crypto-Gram newsletter knows that Bruce is the CTO/Founder of Counterpane.
Calendar of events – If you are in a city that doesn’t already have a calendar of events specifically aimed at technology companies or your industry, create one. Let any user group, networking group, or company post their business and professional events.
Support local chapters of professional and technical organizations – If there is a local chapter of a professional organization that needs a place to host information about their events and activities, offer to host it for them. You could also offer to host their meetings. This creates lots of goodwill among the professionals in your region, it will also bring traffic to your site.
Developer support – Do you support a development platform, either hardware or software? Make it possible for developers to contribute to the developer portion of your website. (Example: The Filemaker Technical Network.)
Connect with educational institutions – If you provide products that could be used by engineering students, create a program to make it easy for them to get access to your products. Create an education section of your site for students to share their experience and help each other with questions.
Start a jobs site for your industry segment or profession. (Example: The job board at joelonsoftware)
Set up a knowledge exchange – This knowledge exchange would be for visitors to the site to post and answer questions on your industry or market. (Examples: The Know-How Exchange at MarketingProfs or Intuit’s online resource for Accounting and Quickbook’s practitioners.)
Discussion forum – Enable customers to answer each others support questions. (Example: The Apple Discussions in the Apple Support section.)
Alliance programs – Encourage members of your alliance or partnering program to add information about their company, their products and their customers.
Here are some guidelines for developing programs that allow for user-generated content:
- Start small and keep it as simple as possible at the beginning
- Make it visible on your website and promote the program on other sites
- Make it easy to use
- Use a light hand for what you approve goes into the site, be flexible and allow reasonable concerns to be aired.
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