Editorial control

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This component of user-generated content has been around for years, but is gaining in popularity as more sites expose content based on real user behavior or preferences. CNN shows the most read stories on its homepage, Yahoo! lists the most emailed photos, and Digg organizes its homepage based on which stories get the most user votes. The underlying philosophy is that people are interested in the same things other people like, so why not take advantage of crowd behavior and preferences when deciding what to feature on your website? Giving over some editorial control is now going mainstream: USA Today creates its list of popular stories based on user votes, and Dell’s IdeaStorm site uses voting as a customer service tool to prioritize product improvements.

Retailers have known this for years, which is why more and more ecommerce sites use collaborative filtering for cross-selling products and services. “People who looked at this item also looked at that item” not only gets users’ attention, it also tends to be more successful at merchandising, because it reveals patterns in actual user behavior.

How can you give users editorial control? Look for ways to leverage the actions of users. What are people viewing? Buying? Signing up for? Emailing? Discussing? Voting for? Understand which of these data points would be helpful for your audience and where it would be effective to use.

Next: User-generated content