At the end of 2006, Time magazine decided that its person of the year was ‘You’. If you. Everyone who creates and rates content on high-impact sites like MySpace, Wikipedia, and YouTube. The reason behind this is that there has been a change where content is no longer generated or rated by experts. Instead, it’s for ordinary people like you.
This is backed up by a recent Revolution survey that showed that within the 16-44 age group:
– 48% have been on a blog site
– 26% created their own blog
– 74% have rated or reviewed products, content or services
You and User Generated Content
User-generated content is one of the fundamental pillars of Web 2.0. (For those of you who haven’t heard the hype, Web 2.0 is a term created to define the second phase of the Internet after the dot-com crash.) One of the key foundations of Web 2.0 is new functionality that changes the content within a page based on what a user does. But back to you: After all, this article is about you!
First of all, who are you, and most importantly, how can I trust you? In fact, the same question applies to me from your perspective. Who am I, and more importantly, how do you know that everything I write is worth the HTML it’s encoded in?
There is an avalanche of new content written on the web these days. The problem is that it becomes very difficult to determine if the source is accurate and if the people looking at it know anything. So is there anything from web 1.0 that can help us?
Trust Web 1.0
In the old days (read the 1990s), trust was mainly related to electronic commerce. How can you trust a website enough to give out your personal details or credit card numbers to buy something? Subsequently, a whole set of standards was developed to ensure users trusted their website.
Some of the key points were:
– Show that there is a real organization behind your site (eg contact details, about us section)
– Explain what you are going to do with sensitive information
– Provide third-party evidence of your credibility (for example, testimonials)
– Have a professional design.
– Regularly update the site to make it look alive and fresh
– Avoid all mistakes of any kind.
But are these guidelines still relevant? Do we need other guidelines?
The problem with user generated content
In Web 2.0, the issue of trust has moved away from the people who run the site and is now starting to focus more on the people who populate it. People interact with each other on a one-on-one level in many ways, such as:
– Businesses (for example, eBay)
– Pleasure (eg MySpace, YouTube, Secondlife)
– Information (eg Wikipedia, Digg)
– Classifieds (eg Craigslist, Gumtree)
The ‘Can I trust this site?’ still exists, but the new problem, ‘Can I trust people on this?’ now it is equally important. The main difference now is that content is generated by anyone and then rated. How can you be sure that what other users write is true?
For example, there has been some controversy about the reliability of articles on Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia. Even more controversy occurred when a man solicited dates from other men posing as women on Craigslist’s personals section. He Then he published all his personal data on the web!
Yet another example is online restaurant guides. How can you trust someone’s opinion when you don’t know their tastes? Is the reviewer someone who goes out solely for the tasty food or someone who goes out for the atmosphere/occasion?
So how do we solve these problems?
Trust 2.0: Ensuring trust in Web 2.0
To ensure that site visitors continue to trust your site, you need to make sure that users are who they say they are. Ways you can accomplish this when users are signing up include:
– Send an activation link by email
– Send a text message with an activation code
– Send the activation code to a home or business address
You also can:
– Only allow site visitors access to content/functionality if recommended by a registered user (LinkedIn, the online career network, does this)
– Show people you know their IP address when they log in
– Collect users’ credit card data.
If site visitors know that you have validated the credibility of users creating content, they are much more likely to trust that content.
Other ways to increase trust in user-generated content and improve user credibility include:
– Make user profiles publicly available to everyone in the community (the profile can include likes, knowledge or experience, for example)
– Allow users to rate a person for their content, services or products (eBay does this)
– Set up a referral system to highlight respected contributors (Amazon now awards “badges” to reviewers, where they are tagged with “real name” (if the site can verify it’s their real name) or “top 500 reviewers ” (if the site feels that the person has given good reviews))
– Have face-to-face interaction in real time (eg Skype on eBay, Winebit)
Of course, you won’t need (or want) to implement all of these techniques: think about what your site is trying to achieve and the needs of your audience. Then you should be able to come up with a suitable trust strategy.
Conclution
The guidelines for ensuring trust in the terminal outside of Web 1.0 are still very valid in today’s Internet. After all, web users need to be able to trust your website and the content you’ve put there. They also need to trust content generated by other users. Follow some of the tips in this article to ensure it!