This post is inspired by the webcast of Jamse Hong at Mixergy.com. This video interview is about how James Hong and his co-founder, Jim Young, bootstrapped HOTorNOT to over $5 million in annual profits. If you are into entrepreneurship, definitely check it out. You will learn a lot from it.

During the interview, James mentioned that a lot of social networking related sites, such as Facebook, MySpace, Slide, Digg…etc, using “User-Selected Content” to increase user engagement. Not sure if James coined the term himself, but I couldn’t find much information about this topic. So I decided to do some research on it.

(Update: James told me on twitter that the term “User-Selected Content” is actually coined by him. Thanks James!)

What is User-Selected Content?

User-Selected Content basically is a feature inside a user-generated content or social networking site. Using this feature, the users don’t have to create the content themselves. They just have to choose from a library of content in order to create an event between members easily and quickly.

Benefits

It drops the bar for what it takes to generate user content for someone else to view. It encourages more interaction and conversation between users. Like James said, the easier to do, the more it’s going to happen.

Content and conversation are still two of the most important things on the web today. So if you want to grow your business, you better understand how your competitors are taking advantages of this feature.

Below are 5 examples of sites using User-Selected Content:

1. Facebook

In the early days, everyone loved to POKE each other on Facebook. You poke your friends and they will usually poke you back. Sometimes you don’t really know why you want to poke your friends but it is fun, it is an interaction and it is an easy way to get in touch with friends.

By using this feature, you don’t have to write anything to let your friends know that you are thinking about them. You don’t have to call them and you don’t have to think about what to say beforehand. Just have to click “poke’.

Later on, a lot of applications, such as SuperPoke!, Hug Me, Free Gifts…etc, and Facebook’s feature, such as Like it and Become a fan, are also using the same concept to promote activities between users on Facebook.

2. Slide

The popular Slideshow by Slide is another great example of using User-Selected Content. Members just have to choose pictures from their own computers and upload them. The site will then help you make a beautiful photo slideshow that you can showoff to your friends on Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Friendster…etc.

The users can choose from a library of preset designs or choose their own styles, themes, music, background and special effects. Just to make their photos look nicer. If you ask people to create this kind of photo slideshow in Adobe Flash? It will takes days, weeks or even worst; most people will just give up. Without these widgets, all the content you can see on MySpace will be text and static photos. You think young kids will stay on such a boring site for a long time? I don’t think so.

3. Polyvore

Polyvore may be an under the radar startup. Yet if you check out their traffic in the past few years and their management team, you will be AMAZED.

I will say their whole site is 100% based on User-Selected Content. Their users can mix & match products from their favorite stores and brands, making their pages like a scrapbook. So the community members are able to find out the latest hot trends, brands, and celebrity styles.

Their easy to use, drag and drop editor helps people create sets composed of individual images. After that member can publish and share their creative and stylish sets with friends and the Polyvore community. Just think about this, the users just have to pick from some pre-upload and pre-edited images in order to participate in the community. They don’t have to search for the product images on the web and they don’t have to edit the pictures in Photoshop. The site has already done it for them. Everyone has an equal chance to make a unique and beautiful set of images. You know how long does it take just to clear the background of a product photo? No wonder their members are so passion about this site. What a brilliant use of User-Selected Content!

4. Last.fm

Besides fashion industry, User-Selected Content can be used in the music businesses, too. Last.fm is a music service, acquired by CBS for US$280m in 2007, that lets users discover new music they like, based on the music they already listen to. In other words, the site will learn what music their users love.

Using a music recommendation software called “Scrobbler”, Last.fm builds a detailed profile of each user’s musical taste by recording every songs the user have listened to, either on the streamed radio stations, the user’s computer or portable music devices.

Therefore, this “Scrobbler” application is the core portion of their User-Selected Content feature. Scrobbling a song means that when you listen to it, the name of the song is sent to Last.fm and added to your music profile. You can shift a song’s ranking on the site just by listening to it on your own computer. Just like what you would normally do. Users never have to change their habit or preference. Moreover, that particular song will be recommended to other users and they will know that you have listened to it. As a result, the site automatically connect you to other community members who like what you like.

Simple and easy! You listen to a song, the User-Selected Content, and the site will tell you which members have similar style and musical taste. So you can easily start a conversation with them because you already know what they love.

5. Club Penguin

Believe it or not, every action on Club Penguin is User-Selected Content. That’s right. You won’t be able to send a customized message to your friends or upload any content to the site. Members have to select conversation phrases from a pre-defined list. Club Penguin calls this the “Ultimate Safe Chat” mode. In this way, the children could never reveal their personal information and there won’t be any inappropriate talk.

Despite this limitation, the company has created many communication methods so that their members can play and talk with each other with ease. For example, you can send a postcard to other members if you want to tell them they are your best friends. Or players can express their feelings with emoticons, such as a happy face, a sad face, angry face, winking…etc. If you don’t know what to say sometimes, you can simply throw a snowball to others or choose the dancing action to draw attention.

Not interested in such a site? Me neither. However, the rapid growth of Club Penguin, with over 12 million user accounts, suggests that it has already achieved considerable success. With such a targeted audience and safe environment, it’s no surprise that the company was purchased by The Walt Disney Company in August 2007 for the sum of US$350 million.

Conclusion

So do you believe in the power of User-Selected Content yet? If you want to increase user engagement, make sure you have created features that make it quick and easy to facilitate dialogue between users just by pointing and clicking. Yes, make it so easy that a cavemen could do it.

Photo source: dreaminhealey, zen, Dan Eriksson, calperniaaddams @Flickr

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We’re used to think that a long history and rich culture would be competitive advantages for a newspaper business. Yet this is not the case after the rise of the blogging and web 2.0 phenomena.

According to Google Trends, the traffic of Huffington Post, a four-year-old news aggregator and commentary blog with 43 employees, has already surpassed traditional media like, USA TODAY and CNBC. The site became popular after its heavy coverage of the 2008 presidential election. While major media anticipated its traffic would decrease dramatically after the election, the blog managed to sustain the growth and reached an all time high with 5.6 million visitors in April 2009.

At a time when a 158-year-old media giant running on fumes, how could the Huffington Post achieve such a spectacular growth in 4 years?

Know the Customers

Huffington Post called themselves a pure Internet newspaper and there are reasons for that. When traditional newspapers keep trying to make their websites look like a newspaper, Huffington Post makes their newspaper look like a blog. Their site has all the popular Web 2.0 features, like user-generated content, tagging, voting, live blogging, video blogging, YouTube videos, Google AdSense, RSS feeds…etc. They also let the readers easily submit and share their content to different social media sites, such as Digg, Facebook, Twitter, and Yahoo Buzz. Compare to other newspapers’ websites, they have a better knowledge about what their users truly want.

Community building is a major factor for online success nowadays. Not surprisingly, their users love their site A LOT. Have you ever seen a blog post with more than 88,850 comments??? It is unreal!

Marketing Savvy

Of course, knowing your customers alone won’t give you that kind of growth in 4 years. It helps when the site’s founder, Arianna Huffington, one-time candidate for governor of California, is a celebrity herself. Ms Huffington recruited professional columnists and celebrity bloggers, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Michael Moore to write for her site. With a bit of marketing savvy and buzz marketing, Huffington Post quickly became one of the most influential and popular newspapers/bogs on the web.

It seems a lot of traditional corporate giants still don’t understand well enough about the Internet market. Some of them don’t even have a well offline-to-online transition plan in place. With correct strategies and latest technologies, small startups are still able to compete with big corporations.

Do you truly understand what your customers want? Do you have the right talents to take advantage of this web evolution? Study others’ success and your competition; your company can also be the next Huffington Post.

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Have you seen this excellent animated explanation before? It is made by an educational videos production company, called “Common Craft“, based in Seattle, Washington.

In the very beginning, this company started making custom videos for companies like Google, Ford, LinkedIn and Twitter. Due to their quality works, their instructional videos, which usually paid in five figures, have generated a lot of buzz on the web. Had they continue to make videos for private clients, their business should still be doing alright.

Custom Videos vs Generic Educational Videos

But their founders saw a different picture. They believe producing custom videos is too labor intensive and difficult to scale. Similar to doctors, dentists and lawyers, when these professionals are working on a project, they just can’t take care of other potential clients at the same time unless hiring more people. Common Craft wants to remain small and still able to grow. So they changed their business model to solely focus on making educational videos for educators and corporate trainers. They have built a library of educational videos to help their customers to explain complex subjects. In this way, one particular video can be sold to different customers again and again.

So what can we learn from this story? Does your business or product allow you to scale? When you realize that scaling becomes an issue, do you have the gut to change the direction of your company in a timely manner? Your business may be doing OK right now but don’t forget to review the scalability of your business from time to time. This decision may help your business to become the leader in your field.

Video source: Common Craft

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