Time Says the Person of the Year Is 'You.' What Should Your Website Do About It?

Time magazine closed the year by naming its Person of the Year: You. The cover is a mirror. The argument is that 2006 belonged to user-generated content. YouTube, which Google bought in October for 1.6 billion dollars. MySpace. Wikipedia. Millions of blogs. Publishing power has genuinely shifted toward audiences.

Whatever you think of magazine-cover sociology, the practical effect is already visible in our meetings. Clients who spent years resisting a news page now ask about comment sections, and every board has someone wondering aloud about a ‘Web 2.0 strategy.’ Year-end is planning season, so here is the filter we are using in those conversations. Consider it a way to keep January enthusiasm from becoming June embarrassment.

Participation features are commitments, not widgets

The Web 2.0 story is usually told as a technology story. The technology is the cheap part. What successful participatory sites actually run on is sustained attention: moderation, response, editorial care, daily. That is a staffing line, not a plugin.

A comment section nobody moderates fills with spam and worse. A forum nobody staffs becomes a ghost town whose last post, dated months back, broadcasts neglect to every visitor. An abandoned blog is a public sign reading ‘we lost interest.’ These features fail loudly, in front of your audience. The absence of a feature is invisible. The corpse of one never is.

Three questions before any participation feature

• Who owns it, by name? Not a department. A person, with hours set aside weekly. If the answer is ‘we’ll share it,’ the honest translation is ‘nobody,’ and the feature should wait.

• What does your audience actually want to do? Prospective students want to hear from current ones. Donors want to see impact. B2B buyers mostly want better answers faster and have no desire to comment on anything. Fit the feature to a real appetite, not to the trend.

• What happens when it goes wrong? Criticism in your comments, off-topic arguments, a factual error spreading. Each has an answer. The time to write the moderation policy is before launch, in calm. Not during the first incident, in panic.

The 2007 experiment we’d actually recommend

For most of the organizations we serve, the right first move is not comments or community at all. It is a well-run blog. A named owner, a sustainable pace, and subject matter drawn from real expertise. Twice a month, reliably, beats daily-then-abandoned. Build the conversation on land you own. Rented crowds move on.

Think of an admissions office answering the questions every applicant family asks, or a program director explaining the work. You are reading our version of the experiment right now. Nine months in, the discipline is real and so is the return.

A blog builds the muscles participation requires at the lowest risk. It produces the fresh, focused content search engines reward. And when it works, it tells you something real about your audience’s appetite for more, which is the evidence a bigger decision should rest on anyway.

What we watched this year

Two sightings from 2006, offered as evidence. A university’s admissions office started a plainspoken blog answering common applicant questions, written by actual staff on a weekly schedule they have kept. Modest traffic at first. Then the search engines noticed that honest answers to common questions build authority, and the posts began outranking the school’s own brochure pages for exactly the searches that matter.

Meanwhile, a professional association launched member forums in the spring with more enthusiasm than staffing. By autumn the forums held forty-one posts, eleven of them spam, and the quiet removal conversation this winter was harder than the launch conversation had been.

Same year, same trend, opposite outcomes. The difference was never the software. It was a named owner with real hours versus a committee with good intentions.

The policy paragraph nobody wants to write

Whatever you launch, write the house rules before the first visitor arrives. A short, public statement of what is welcome, what gets removed, and who decides. Three honest paragraphs, not legalese.

Cover the predictable cases: off-topic promotion, personal attacks, and criticism of your own institution. The answer to that last one had better be ‘stays up if civil,’ because deleting polite criticism is the fastest way to turn a mild complaint into a story. Decide response times too. A comment answered in a day feels like conversation. Answered in three weeks, it feels like an audit.

And the social networks themselves?

The other question in every planning meeting: should we be on MySpace, or this Facebook that just opened registration beyond campuses? Our advice is unshowy. Be present where your audience demonstrably lives, at experiment size, and measure. A university ignoring these networks is ignoring where its applicants spend their evenings. A B2B manufacturer joining MySpace is playing dress-up.

Either way, keep your center of gravity on property you own: your site, your email list, your feed. The networks are outposts that point back to your site. They can change their rules whenever they like. Build on the property you own.

The trend beneath the trend

Our reading of the year: the durable shift is not any particular feature. It is that audiences now expect to talk back, somewhere, and expect institutions to show up where the talking happens. That expectation will outlast this year’s platforms, some of which will look very mortal in five years.

Organizations that build the capacity to engage, starting small and staffed honestly, will meet the expectation wherever it moves next. Organizations that install the widgets without the attention will decorate their sites with evidence of their own indifference. Start where you can sustain quality. Let the audience teach you what they want next.