or is it?
one of the things that continues to baffle others about burrp.com is how we’ve been able to maintain such a high level of integrity and quality when it comes to our user generated reviews and comments. take a long, careful look at the indian ’social’ web if you will – it ain’t pretty. mouthshut, rediff, in.com, yahoo! india are just some of the platforms that showcase a general trend towards ugc that is polluted with sms language, all caps typing, imperfect english, subtly perverted undertones, and at times, completely illogical trains of thought. there is not much you can do about the sex-starved pervs and the unruly; but there is tremendous value hidden in people that are trying their best to say something, but just don’t have the capability to do so. this entire class of ugc should never be dismissed, ignored, or worse, cast off. understand, these are people that mustered the courage to express an opinion or a thought about a particular thing, perhaps while even knowing that they lacked a handle on the english language.
this is where a qualified, dedicated middle-tier of editors becomes a boon to your platform. the ugc purists may throttle me for believing this, but when an editorial layer can elevate a review which would have been otherwise functionally useless into something legible, readable, and moreover enjoyable, that can be nothing but a good thing. our editorial team does an amazing job of sanitizing and polishing what we call raw ugc, while doing their best to maintain the tonality, voice and essence of what the user is trying to say. this is a win-win. the user is heard in the community, and we continue to amass high-quality professionalized user generated content. it goes without saying that this crowd-sourcing model can work brilliantly to derive meaningful conclusions about things when the underlying framework of content is of a high quality and integrity. of course, our community must have an incredibly high degree of trust in us to believe that we are not manipulating reviews for some beneficial outcome, and we’re happy that we have earned that degree of trust across our community.
as i look around the world of social media and user generated content, i think one of the things that unfortunately became instantly taboo was this idea of sanitizing the content in order to make it more useful. personally, i am a big believer of the simple idea, and think that it should be applied more widely across other platforms, especially when you can leverage a skilled labor arbitrage (i.e. india!). while it may not be the perfect analogy, i am reminded of comparisons drawn between hulu and youtube. while one has now surpassed television inventory rates in its advertising pricing, the other is still sucking wind trying to figure out how to earn a dime. no prizes for guessing which one is which…
Just look at one instance where ugc has created tremendous value – Wikimapia! Loads of info for India there but you just need to wade through crap like “Jagu’s home – place where my first love lives!”.. The key is to differentiate the good & the bad!
exactly – now imagine wading through the crap, as you suggested, with a few trained eyes, separating the good from the bad before it actually reaches the masses. isn’t that more valuable?
Good point Deap. Too many startups have lost it in their quest of creating order algorithmically out of the chaos that is UGC. Unless you have tons of reviews where things like “this review was helpful” votes can actually automatically differentiate good vs bad content (like on Amazon for example), it makes a lot of sense to do a human clean up of UGC. I would even go as far as to say that it makes sense to hire writers who can create quality content and not necessarily even have only “user-generated” content. You only need one or two quality reviews per entity to make your website more useful than most. Since the vast majority of your users are content consumers, making their experience amazing should be the prime goal.
Nimit
Hey Deap, here’s an idea that came to me while thinking of a UGC site that’s on the lines of Burrp but caters to a different vertical. Sine I don’t see no e-mail id think posting it here is the only option.
How about Burrp entering the retail brand review space? There’s a lot of action on that front but very few truly unique experiences.
Do you mean like reviewing a Nike store or reviewing Nike products?
Hey been a fan of burrp.com for a while now.
Love the interface.. there’s so much happening in the background to make it easy for users.
And ya..
That’s me in the burrp ad with the geek: mumbai.burrp: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0XqQmHeSJ0