UGC is very ugly term, isn’t it? User Gen­er­ated Con­tent. Corporate-speak for “things our cus­tomers do with the facil­i­ties we so gen­er­ously pro­vide for them”. I exag­ger­ate, but only in the ser­vice of my point. UGC is a term for the site-owners way of look­ing at what users pro­duce on a web­site — as a resource to improve their site — either in terms of traf­fic, google rank­ing or profitability.

Clay Shirky, the inter­net con­sul­tant and all-round clever chap is attempt­ing to pop­u­larise another term for it that pro­vides the other, rather more impor­tant side of the pic­ture. He calls it Indige­nous Con­tent, mean­ing “Con­tent cre­ated by users for them­selves”. I think it’s prob­a­bly worth using his term, because it’ll help avoid one of the pit­falls of UGC — think­ing about it as just another resource. It isn’t. Users cre­ate con­tent because it has value to them and their peers, and a given web­site is sim­ply the means by which they har­ness that value.

So what can a site owner do to max­imise their return on invest­ment in this area? How does a site owner make sure that they’re get­ting some ben­e­fit from the resources that they’ve put into allow­ing users to gen­er­ate con­tent on their site?

The answer sounds almost para­dox­i­cal: make it easy for users to leave.

User will gen­er­ate con­tent when they derive value from it. One of the things peo­ple value is own­er­ship. So a site should make it clear that the users own their own data, and that if they want to take it and go, the site won’t stand in their way.

Yes, a site may need to grant the site a license to use it while it’s on there, or even longer depend­ing on what the site owner intends to do with it, but the agree­ment should be as min­i­mal as pos­si­ble. The user should retain all rights to edit the con­tent, repub­lish it else­where or even remove it — ide­ally, the site should pro­vide some kind of tool that would allow the user to export all their con­tri­bu­tions into another for­mat, that they could save as they please — a basic down­load in XML or .csv for­mat would do but offer­ing an API is bet­ter still, as it can allow the user much more flex­i­bil­ity in what they do with the data while it’s still on the site, and the more a site can do to allow its users to repur­pose and repub­lish the con­tent that they gen­er­ate on that site, the more they’ll do with the site, and the more value the site will derive from it’s investment.