How Easy Is It for YOUR Customers to Contribute to Your Web Site? To Promote YOUR Brand?

Rate yourselves! We’ve compiled a set of best practices that we’ve found among the companies that excel in “peer production”—having customers contribute their content and creations, usually via the Web. Customers who like to “strut their stuff” also like to promote your stuff (and their ideas). So this survey also includes a set of best practices for “peer promotion”—having customers promote your products and services and your brand to others. You can download and fill in the questionnaire at your leisure and compare notes with your colleagues. Most people use this as a tool to start strategic conversations. It’s a good activity to do at the start of a relevant meeting as people are getting settled in.

Soon, we’ll provide all of these core competencies in the form of online surveys so you can see how your answers stack up against those of your peers.

The Seven Best Practices in User-Generated Content

We love the insights we gained by sitting at the feet of some of the masters in soliciting customer-generated content at the Professional and Scholarly Publishers’ Conference in February. Remember that scholarly publishers have made a BUSINESS out of publishing user-generated (researchers’) content for over two hundred years. But many of the current best practices are coming from consumer publishers, like Consumer Reports, CNN, as well as communities of practice, such as Sermo—where doctors help each other with tough diagnoses. You’ll find a recap of the 10 top take-aways from that conference as well as Consumer Report’s Executive Editor, Kevin McLean’s 9 best practices here.

Customers Contribute 90% of Content at The Corporate Executive Board

Everyone talks about sharing best practices. But how do you make it really easy for people to do so, particularly when the people in question are busy executives? Ronnie Kann is the Program Director for the Compliance and Ethics Leadership Council (one of 50 role-specific councils run by the Corporate Executive Board). When his clients (compliance officers in large companies around the world) began asking for more examples of what people in other companies were doing, Ronnie responded by giving them a Wiki with a repository of contributed messages (e.g., reminders about inappropriate behavior just before Valentine’s day; Reminders about what not to talk about in public places; What to do about gift-giving, etc.). Members can search the Wiki by category. They can submit messages to be approved and posted. They can ask for messages they aren’t finding, and Ronnie’s team will either locate it for them or solicit examples from other members. This approach has proven so successful that over 90% of the content his group provides to its members is now customer-generated. Note that these customers contribute the content and find what they need on the Wiki, but they don’t post directly onto the Wiki. Instead they post their submissions via email, and the CEB staff do the actual clean up and posting. This approach gives them the benefits of contributing and easily retrieving what they need, as well as a collaborative-feeling environment, but doesn’t require them to change their work practices and/or to learn a new tool.

Eavesdrop on the two Ronni(e)’s conversation. Here’s Ronni Marshak’s interview of Ronnie Kann.