Implications
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Implications
User contributions are here to stay. Users are discovering that the web has always been about participating and contributing, from photo sharing to blogs. They’re simply asking the obvious question: If personal websites are so participatory and social, why can’t commercial sites be too?
Their expectations of how they interact with you are changing. Will you change to meet them?
The big fear (and, largely, myth), is that users will contribute in a negative way that will harm rather than enhance your brand. The fact is, users are already speaking out. It might be on another site, a message board, an email list, or in a coffeehouse. Do you want that conversation happening outside of your influence, where negative messages go unanswered? Or do you want to support that dialogue where you can participate and influence the discussion? Increasingly, giving up control of your brand to users enables you to (paradoxically) have more control over the social environment in which your brand lives. With or without you, users are talking.
If you’re ready to make the leap, keep three things in mind:
- In this new world that is more user-generated, we no longer create polished and finalized user experiences. We create platforms where users create their own experiences.
- Because we’re opening our site to accommodate content that users want to contribute, we create containers for content that we cannot entirely imagine.
- This means our once-static websites become organic systems that are flexible and evolve. They grow with our users and keep us in tune with their needs.
Stay tuned for Part 2 of our tour through Web 2.0, which will focus on openness.
Steve Mulder is director of emerging interactions at Molecular. Read full bio.
Riccardo La Rosa is director of emerging interactions at Molecular. Read full bio.