CGM - Consumer Generated Media - is Hot!

**budhi1976** · 30 January, 2009, 09:37 AM

Yes I agree. However my blog is under human moderation and contributors cannot post their designs straight away but need to send them to me for verification, then I'll post those designs my self, so there will be no room for spamming.

The question is how to encourage people to contribute in the first place? I mean of course I can always give compensation but that's for those who already contributed, am I making any sense?

Originally Posted by Ash

UGC can be quite a menace unless your site has google juice - there are tons of people who'll spam the shit out of your platform.

The key is to "sandbox" the platform first - open it to few assigned users and make them create useful content.

Once the sandboxed platform creates inherent and attains traction, open it up to the public and spam.

When your site/platform is respected - the spam is ignored - if you start something out with public UGC - best of luck!

**Will.Spencer** · 1 February, 2009, 02:58 AM

Originally Posted by budhi1976

The question is how to encourage people to contribute in the first place? I mean of course I can always give compensation but that's for those who already contributed, am I making any sense?

I think that's a question everyone has.

My new site, Top Bits, is finally "up", but it's not going to be open to the public for several months. All robots are banned from all pages by robots.txt. I am hoping to generate a very active community at that site, but I don't have a high level of confidence yet.

**budhi1976** · 3 February, 2009, 05:05 AM

ahh.. he he he... ok seems like I am asking a $1million question here... anyway goodluck with your Top Bits.

Cheers,

**Will.Spencer** · 3 February, 2009, 17:41 PM

It's a great question. I think we would all benefit from coming up with some great answers to it.

I have the book Wikinomics here and I was very disappointed to find out that it contained none of these answers.

I am a member of a web forum just for people who run web forums. I was disappointing shocked a few years ago when I discovered that no one at that forum had any great answers to the question.

This seems to be very much of a black art at this point. I haven't seen a lot of answers better than "run contests" and "it just happens because of human nature."

I'm sure we can do better.