User Generated Content != Social Media

Social media and user generated content (UGC) overlap, but they shouldn’t be confused – the former is the passive result of people living their lives online, while the latter is an explicit participation in online communities. And that difference makes a big difference.

For starters, intentional participants have an incentive to build reputations among the communities in which they participate. This is most well known in Wikipedia, the largest UGC site in the world, where contributors vie to build their reputation and eventually become an editor. By contrast, social networks are self-contained among a specific user’s network, and there is little aspirational benefit.

To date, UGC sites have been fairly limited: Wikipedia, Digg and Yahoo Answers are among the most well-known. This is largely because people need incentives to participate, and they don’t want to participate on sites that will have little lasting value (since UGC sites have notable network effects – i.e., the more people who participate on them, the more valuable they get).

It’s easy to imagine, however, a site in which customers are invested to http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifpartihttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifcipate because they want to. Dell’s IdeaStorm invites customers to contribute product development ideas, and then vote on them – with the cream presumably rising to the top. Tcho chocolate does the same with formulating new products. There is considerably more opportunity here to mine.