Kirk Ouimet

One of the tracks at the Omniture Summit today focused on leveraging user generated content (UGC) to help accomplish a site’s goals. Focusing on UGC is a wise move considering some of these latest trends:

• Online spend is increasing
• More money is being allocated to social networking

Marketers will embrace social networking sites. The average social networker:

• Is 20 something with an opinion
• Is registered on several social networking sites
• Is heavily involved with friends and groups online
• Spends money and tells others what they purchase

Advertisers want:

• Credibility: UGC leads to viral campaigns based on referrals
• Targeting: UGC leads to niche social networking sites
• Frequency: UGC leads to high repeat visitation
  • Traditionally if you were lucky you would get 5-10 repeat visits from a user per month
  • Now, over 50% of adults engaged in social networks return at least once a day

All of the above trends show that UGC is something worth investigating. Some important metrics used to track UGC include:

• Number of registrations
• Number of message posts
• Number of message posts per visit
• Number of comments
• Number of ratings
• Number of ratings per visit

A valuable strategy for a web marketer is to use the above metrics to find and promote high value content. High value content includes both popular content and influential content. Popular content can be found by looking at raw page views. Influential content can be found by looking at the actions of users after they view UGC. Quality content can be promoted by making it a big deal:

• Put the most commented content on the front page
• Put the most viewed content on the front page

Omniture’s SiteCatalyst v14 has a really cool feature where you can have your site interface with the analytics API and dynamically use site statistical data to identify content that is making an impact. You can then have your site use that data to automatically promote high value UGC to the front page.

This summer I’m going to implement the things I learned today on my own site, Social Wallpapering.