Peer pro­duc­tion cre­ated eBay, Wikipedia, Craigslist, Face­book, and pro­vided Net­flix with hun­dreds of thou­sands of movie reviews. Net­flix alone has user-generated con­tent worth mil­lions to the com­pany. Facebook’s com­mu­nity of super-active (hyper-active?) users has helped to push the social net­work­ing site beyond the com­pe­ti­tion, with recent val­u­a­tions as high as $15 billion.

All are exam­ples where users hap­pily do for free what com­pa­nies would oth­er­wise have to pay employ­ees to do. It’s not out­sourc­ing, it’s “crowdsourcing.”

crowdsourcing

Chris Anderson’s book The Long Tail takes a look at the power of crowd­sourc­ing. Ander­son states that “the advan­tage of crowd­sourc­ing is not just eco­nomic; cus­tomers can do a bet­ter job, too.” User gen­er­ated con­tent on review sites like Ama­zon and Net­filx is often well-informed, artic­u­late, and trusted. The trust fac­tor alone is enough rea­son to make user-submitted con­tent the focal point of your social net­work. You’re not going to cre­ate an effec­tive com­mu­nity of users by main­tain­ing a one-way stream of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. In fact, I would go so far as to say 4/5ths of all con­tent on your site should be user gen­er­ated. In the case of this “self-service” model, the work is being done by the peo­ple who care most about it, and best know their own needs.

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