AnswerHero^™ - The Journey

Nearly all websites need regular, fresh content – either from a trusted sources or from users – or ideally both.

But what is good UGC? so often today you see badly typed, badly worded, sms txt style rubbish – here is an example I found of a UGC question

Q: how to work calculator design texet albert?
A: dnt no even im strugglin n ive gt my maths GCSEs nxt week

As you can see, this is pretty much useless. The bottom line is this: Users need guidance. It is no good just letting them post whatever, however… they don’t know or care why we want their content and they certainly won’t give a hoot about keyword relevance.

Good UGC should have a sprinkling of relevant keywords, ideally have few or no typos, be unique and be of suffiicient length to actually be of benefit. Sufficient length (for SEO) is subjective, if the page the UGC is on is the only “real” content appearing on the page then the page weight to code ratio will mean you need much more from one user than you would if you had lots of posts on the same page. Whatever way – aim for a tleast 25 words absolute minimum and it will be better than nothing.

So with these rules in mind, there are a few things which will help get the right UGC – we will be applying these in various ways on AnswerHero.co.uk and we will tell you all about it when we do – and if it has been a success or not:

1. Create an incentive for rewarding people – cash is not an option as it has too many tax implications but vouchers are fine. We suggest giving vouchers for “x” number of posts – we do this on CompareStorePrices and we will be running an “Answer Super Hero” sign up where users can become our paid answer experts
2. Always tell people the rules – we will be publishing simple posting rules. Some users will read them – many don’t but they do help to some extent.
3. Once a post has been made – have a word count box and when they click “Post” show an alert asking them to amend or adjust (tell them it will benefit them to make it better) but always allow a “post anyway” button unless you want to be very controlling. I think posts will drop off a cliff if you do not allow a “post anyway”
4. Have a spell checker than automatically makes changes or higlights bad words
5. Have a Tag section – again telling users why it helps for them to complete the tags fields, if you want to be really clever – have it auto-populate from a keyword suggestion tool based on what the user has typed and get the user to edit or amend. If Chris can create this function it will be neat
6. Encourage users to register – that way you can make a regular email send out requesting registered members contribute to users questions (based on topics they are interested in stated at time of registration)
7. Find a way of hitting the users hot button. Twitter is so successful because users get a feeling that people are reading and give a damn about their daily rambles.. certain show biz types are totally hooked on it as it is a new way to massage their egos (which most of us have in some form) So we need to try to find a way of pressing the ego button. That may be to enable UGC to communicate back to a network of users so that it is open and shared so when users “help” each other by answering questions, they get a warm sense of self gratification from knowing that other users have seen their handy work. Yes I am been cynical but it is basic human nature. With Answerhero we will have the perfect opportunity to create a “sharing, helping, caring, rewarding” style ego massager that, if done right, will get UGC happening. I will say this though – we have not worked out the best method for this yet but I suspect that rather than re-invent the wheel, we will look at what other big UGC sites like Twitter/Facebook et al have done and see if there is a way of taking the best parts and applying them.

There is more that can be done – its always a balance between putting the user off and boxing them in to do it “your way”. When it comes to paid experts (like AnswerSuperHeros) then the rules are cast iron and they have to conform to earn voucher points.

We will tell you how we get on and what we find to be the best way to get decent UGC as we go along – ultimately, unless we are sucessful in finding a way to hit the users hot button, it will probably come down to rewards of some type. Watch this space.

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