My Voice is My Instrument
Television rarely inspires me. But I was watching Rockstar: Supernova on CBS last week, and the band decided to eliminate one of the singers based on the number of times she was in the bottom three. [Eric - I don't watch the show, what the heck are you even talking about?] Basically, there were 15 singers that want to front the band Supernova (they don’t have a lead singer) and every week, the singers perform. Based on those performances, the world gets to vote on who should stay and the bottom three have to perform the next night based on the votes.
Well, Patrice was eliminated because this was her fourth time in the bottom three. She survived the first three times, but the band decided that because the world (their fan base) kept putting her in the bottom three, she doesn’t have the appeal they are looking for. Off she goes.
[But Eric, I thought this blog is about Web content?] I’m glad you brought that up. Here’s where television gave me a tie back to the Web. This has been building (if you caught my session at eduWeb, you already know where I’m going with this). I’ve been talking quite a bit recently about user-generated content (UGC as it’s called by the cool kids). UGC gives your site visitors the chance to share their stories, experiences, viewpoints, pictures, words, whatever. We don’t have to go far (Flickr, Target, Newsvine) to see that visitors want to be heard. But Rockstar showed me that visitors can also determine direction and success.
We struggle so often to define how a site will be successful. We can trend log files, we can track online actions, we can ask people if the Web helped them make a decision. And of course, we conduct regular usability tests with site visitors to ensure that we are building the right thing. But now, with UGC in the right places, we can determine if the site is successful per page or per user.
Bottom line: let your site visitors speak. Whether it be page level commenting, blogs, or polls, you will pick up on their likes and dislikes pretty easily.
Oh, by the way, want to download my session from eduWeb: PowerPoint | Podcast
