User Generated Content is Dead: Arise, Community Conversations
Why do we call people participating on our websites "users?"
Aren't users drug addicts?
Questions like this cames up in every panel I attended at Search Engine Strategies where social media was a topic of discussion.
The point here is that referring to your "users" and "users" will cause you to treat them as "users."
For example, it's easier to force users to watch an ad between login and the content they're trying to access than a member of your community.
It's easier to force users to put up with truncated RSS feeds than people in your community you're trying to have a conversation with.
It's a subtle difference that helps enable conversations. You don't hold conversations with users. You have conversations with community members.
Thanks you, dear Technology Evangelist user community member, for reading this. :-)
Absolutely right! As a (very) small software vendor, and although the site for my PowerPoint add-in is not 'Web 2.0', I definitely think of my customers as community members. In fact I refer to them as such in the first demo video on the homepage. The development of 'the community of Opazity users' is developing behind the scenes through my email contacts with them and the way their ideas for using the add-in is feeding back into that communication and into new demos on the site. In fact I named one of the PowerPoint slide highlighting techniques after one of them.
I'm with Stan-Kelly Bootle on this one -- always call them "lusers" and then you'll never forget that you're the one who's making their life more unpleasant than it needs to be.
1. Posted by: Judy on December 10, 2007 6:46 PM:
Glad to know I'm not a "user"! LOL