How to Hire a Couple Thousand Content Managers for Free

The Architecture of Participation is a Web 2.0 ideal that involves creating sites that encourage user contribution. Historically, websites have been a one-way street, the user consuming information that the website provides. In the last few years, a shift has been made that encourages users to produce information for others to consume as well. Tripadvisor is a great example. The site is a collection of user-submitted travel reviews on any destination in the world. Instead of reading one editor's review from Travel magazine, you can review dozens of people's experiences. Another one of my favorite little-known user-powered sites is Angie's List, a collection of user reviews on local home service providers (electrician's, plumbers, auto mechanics). I've never been steered wrong picking a service provider based on an Angie recommendation.

There are two main types of participation architectures, implicit and explicit. Explicit participation is very straightforward. The site provides clear instructions on how a user can contribute content: Wikipedia has an edit button on the top of every page; Digg allows you to vote for articles across the internet you'd like to see on their aggregated front page; Threadless allows you to suggest a T-Shirt design that gets voted on by the user community and ultimately, manufactured.

Implicit participation is a little more incognito. This involves sites subconsciously tracking user behaviors and interactions and using that information to make their site better. Flickr does an awesome job of this with there Interestingness feature. Instead of asking users to vote on their favorite pictures, they use a proprietary algorithm that watches how long someone spends looking at a picture, how many times a picture is viewed, commented on, emailed to others, etc. They use this information to create a collection of the most interesting pictures of the week. The result is really cool. My first sip of morning coffee is usually spent looking at the interesting pictures of the day.

I heard Mike Speiser from Yahoo describe one of Yahoo's founding ideals, "Every time a user interacts with our site, it should improve the experience for the next user." I feel every company should adopt this ideal. The Enterprise is ripe with knowledge workers ready for new, more intuitive ways for sharing information. Knowledge in emails gets buried at the bottom of inboxes; putting content on the portal takes a couple weeks; Sharepoint and Lotus Notes databases are locked down and documents in them can't be viewed or edited from their Crackberry's. It's time to put in the Enterprise Wiki. They're cheap (i.e. free), easy to use, easily accessible and have the security controls in place (change control, access control, spam prevention, etc) to get passed the FUD surrounding them.

• Let your users write/answer their departmental specific frequently asked questions.
• Let your users create the online help for your various internal applications.
• Let your users create online documents to help share information/give status on projects being worked on
• Let your users create your intranet!

"We used to have over 100 group emails per day. Now it's rarely one per week, we've saved a month in a four-month project, and everyone is on the same page." - General Manager, Ziff Davis Media

Final consideration. If your company's culture isn't aligned with online knowledge sharing, it soon will be. Generation Y is about to replace the baby boomers in the workforce and they grew up using the internet as their main communication mechanism (i.e. teenagers don't talk on the phone anymore, they use IM, Facebook, MySpace and unlimited text messaging on their cell phones). Although using MySpace to trade homework assignments is now "cheating" for them, when they get to the Enterprise, it will be called "collaboration".

-J