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.