Facilitating UGC For Your Site

One of the defining aspects of web 2.0 is based around User Generated Content or UGC. This is defined by "A web site owner provides facilities for site visitors to add comments or copy to existing pages create their own pages and reviews or upload their own media such as images, audio and video clips.” It is said that by 2010, UGC will account for 70% of the web’s content.

Enabling this facility on your website offers a wealth of benefits. It requires a certain amount of moderation but it means that your customers are doing your work for you. They are rating or reviewing your products, your quality of service, advocating your company to fellow users which in turn helps to both keep the site fresh for search engines and helps to retain those users as loyal customers.
On average, a loyal customer is 5 x more profitable to you than a new customer.

Enabling UGC on your site means customers are returning to the site to add content, whilst there, they may have a look around to see what else is new and what current promotions are being held.
A “sticky” site is something that every website owner strives to achieve.
Content can be provided in many different formats which can subsequently be shared via other social media tools – video files which can be uploaded to YouTube, photos which can be shared on Flickr, all linking back to your site. Once the content is taken off your site, it requires monitoring to manage your reputation. Tools such as http://www.google.com/alerts and http://www.blogpulse.com help you do this by sending you a weekly report with a round up of where your company has been mentioned on the web.
Remember that no matter how good your search engine rankings are, a static website will start to fall out of the search engine rankings unless content is regularly added to it. With so much competition, it’s up to you to ensure that this doesn’t happen.