There is a ‘recent’ trend in user driven content as main content for sites where you might least expect it these days. Sure, iGoogle sorta got in early on this by allowing users to customize their Google page by adding widgets for things like gmail, YouTube, RSS feeds, etc. YouTube itself is mostly a user generated site; users upload their video and other users search and watch.

Sites like Digg and del.icio.us allow users to post news links, etc. from anywhere about anything you can possibly think of and thus created a constantly updating content page for these sites. (As well as leave an unlimited amount open air comments that could either be accepted or rejected by the general user population.)

Myspace and Facebook are ‘user generated’ pages as well.  However, for this blog, I’m considering that these sites are mostly used for ‘personal use’ and to find and convey information to a mass audience. Twitter is a better example of user driven content that many “non-friend” people can see.  I can’t remember where I read this (possibly scobleizer’s blog), but just recently I also read a very interesting idea about twittering out a question and then using the responding answers to create a blog. Thus even blogging has become user/reader generated.

I’ve also recently stumbled upon a sports site http://www.rootzoo.com/ .   Here users can actually get paid for writing an article if the reach a certain readership level. Recently Skittles.com came up with the idea to have twitter / facebook takeover their landing page. As you can see, user generated content is everywhere today.

I’m sure many companies cringe at the idea of allowing users to rule their website. In many ways, the idea of allowing user generated content goes against what web analytics is used to. Sure we preach that you should make changes based off of user data, but the website ‘owner’/ designer should still have complete control over what is actually published on the site. Right?

On the other hand, if more and more companies shift toward a ‘user generated’ model will this become the norm or the bar for all other websites? What does (or would) user generated content do for your customer base?

You might have the ‘group think effect’. For example, the Digg community (no offense to you Digg’ers) is highly critical of anything that is not deemed cool by the Digg power users. Ok maybe this is a harsh observation, but you get my point. I love the idea of Digg and still get many stories and links from this site (or other similar sites). But the commentary on many stories is juvenile in my opinion. It calls into question of whether the truly good stories are being passed.

Sites will be highly subject to their users if they allow user generated content. Skittles already experienced this with the twitter version of their site and shut this down. It appears that at the time of post of this blog that they have also shut off the facebook version of their home page, however it appears they now have a YouTube version of their home page up.

If you have a very loyal customer base maybe you will have an easier time converting new customers if you have a strong user generated area on your website. I don’t have any examples of this, but would love to hear from your and your site if this has been a success.

I’ve recently seen that several analytics companies have been able to figure out a way to capture your branding terms being mentioned on platforms such as Twitter. I think this is a great first step in building a branding metric into your analytics tool. Sure there are the qualitative aggregators such as Nielson that give you a ‘poll result’ showing how recognizable your brand is. But in today’s analytics, I’d rather see a concrete number. If you could set up a report that would list out how many times a certain brand term was mentioned on a particular site, this would give you some sort of idea of your brand penetration for a particular social network. (For example: For Wednesday 3/25 “user driven change” was mentioned 140 times on Twitter, 1400 times on Facebook, and 125 times on LinkedIn). Further if you could compare this number to your competitors you’d get some sort of understanding of where your company rates in relation to a specific network.