Want Customer-Contributed Content? Make It Easy for Your Customers to Multi-Post

My favorite content creation and social networking tools are the ones that save me time and kill several birds with one stone. I am more likely to post or curate content in an environment that will "automagically" syndicate that comment or posting out to several other sites. I suspect many of you feel the same way. Your insightful customers probably do too—the ones you want to encourage to contribute their thoughts, ratings, and discussions to your Web site, blog, or online community.

As I've mentioned before, I like Businessweek's Business Exchange because I can post abstracts and links of interesting articles or videos that catch my fancy on topics I care about. When I do, Business Exchange automatically posts these contributions to my Twitter and Facebook accounts.

I like the new blogging platform Posterous because it is designed to be easy to post to from email and it also automagically posts to multiple sites, including Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter.

I like the fact that anything I "tweet" automatically turns up on my Facebook page, on my blog, on my web site, and in FriendFeed.

In fact, it's so easy to set up these automatic updates among social networking sites, I resent it when the platform or site doesn't provide that functionality and I have to do it myself.

Who Wants to Be Heard/Seen? I've noticed an interesting demographic shift in blogging and social media. The first time I logged onto MySpace, I felt like an antique. Here were all these kids showing off for their friends. I couldn’t understand why they would want to bare their souls and their lives with such silly stuff. Now, I notice that the majority of people using Twitter and Facebook are over 30. The younger set couldn't be bothered. They IM and SMS each other. They don't want to broadcast the details of their thoughts and their lives. But I now have both clients and relatives who will only respond to me via Facebook, not regular email. They apparently enjoy watching my tweeted thoughts and activities via Facebook, because they often comment. Baby boomers want to share their insights with the rest of the world. The "me generation" (their kids?) seems to want to hang out with friends and family online. But current teens apparently think that this is bizarre behavior.

Why Do We Need to Strut Our Stuff? Perhaps, as we get older, we want to reflect a bit and/or pontificate about what we're observing and learning and we think that others might be interested in our thoughts. Many boomers apparently also feel the need to self-promote and to promote our passions through our blogs and other postings.

Why Do We Want to Curate Others' Stuff? Blogging is a form of curation. You cull out the things you find of value, and you exhibit them for others to appreciate. You provide a new context by collecting a set of articles, pictures, videos, etc. on a topic you care about. I use the Business Exchange site to share great articles that I think are likely to be overlooked by most people on topics that I care a lot about.

Multi-Posting Saves My Valuable Time and Amplifies My Efforts

If I can post my thoughts or curate someone else's great contribution ONCE and have that posting leveraged by showing up on a variety of Web sites and social networking environments, I am MUCH more likely to invest my time. I feel virtuous and rewarded by the leverage I get. I'm assuming that many others feel the same way. If so, it stands to reason that if you want your smartest and most insightful customers to contribute their content to your site, you should ensure that each post or comment can be automagically syndicated out to their platforms of choice.

Comments

[Patty Seybold]

Klaus-Peter,

I think we are in synch. As a poster, I want to post once, have it written everywhere.. As a reader/consumer I want to stumble upon neat and relevant stuff in the places I choose to frequent for different reasons, e.g. Facebook, Twitter/Tweetdeck, my iPhone apps, etc. So I agree with you--down with the mall/supermarket.. up with the boutiques and town squares...

[Patty Seybold]

Thanks Ernie,
I will take the time to watch the Google Wave Video.. I'm really curious.. And maybe you're right that it will be The Next Big Thing..

By the way, re: Lotus Notes "sideshow".. Lotus Notes turned out to be THE MOST PRODUCTIVE way for us to engage in dialog with our customers as a publisher around the topics they cared about WHEN they cared about them. I miss it as a general purpose interactive publishing platform.

[Klaus-Peter Speidel]

Centralizing is definately a key issue for todays web developments. And I'm just like you, Patty: I'd rather not retype my status updates, tweets etc. and I am happy I can maximize views through interconnected websites. But I sometimes wonder if users actually don't value the experience of having multiple places to go, each one being different, like different places in a city. I don't think that I would prefer that all my favourite shops, coffees and bars were in one big, unified same-looking shopping mall. The web is not only about being practical and efficient. I think people might resist loosing the different quarters of their city. If everything ends up on a central dashboard like in wave, the rewarding experience of having different places to explore will be lost. One of the future challenges could be to keep what's nice about walking the web while getting rid of the less practical aspects (like having to log in on 10 sites).

[Ernie Schell]

I completely agree, Patty. In fact, you have expressed the value of Social Media a lot more cogently and succinctly than most other commentators.

Ironically, I thought of you today in the context of a Google Wave video.
http://wave.google.com/
It's 1 hour, 20 mins (ouch!) from a conference presentation to developers, but well worth it (the first 10 mins will give you the drift). This has potential for doing exactly what your are talking about (probably more within a large corporation than in general), with the same potential for 3rd party apps that the iPhone has. Although it could be a Lotus-Notes-type sideshow, my bet is that it will actually be The Next Big Thing.