Does User Generated Content mean Cash?

You bet it does. Look at how you shop online: You heard about a book that will make your job easier. But are you willing to pay full price plus shipping? What would make you 100% confident of your purchase? Feedback. Many times I read 25 comments from owners before I read the store's listing. It's funny that I trust 25 strangers opinions, and also that I trust the comments are not from the author logging in 25 times with different names!

But that is how society has always worked- word of mouth. It can drive sales and it can find that perfect employer. Place word of mouth on the internet and you have communication between users across the country like they are next door neighbors.

Technology companies have created applications for content, feedback, and context, simply known as user generated content (UGC). UGC with the power of search provides specific information and product based solely on feedback. Companies that use this technology for revenue call it social commerce.

The next wave for UGC will be the mash-up of location. How powerful is it to know where feedback is generated? Persuasion is definitely greater if content comes from someone close to home rather than many states away. Or how about the use of location analytics to see what region has the most purchases of your product or leaves the most feedback?

Who uses analytics?

Analytics have been around for many years with a stigma of overwhelming and hard to create. That stigma will be crushed in the future, and mash-up technology is going to make analytics the next technology wave.

Analytics have such a vast amount of purpose, from key metric or performance measurement to predicting future trends. Within business or enterprise organizations, analytics are created within Business Intelligence (BI) software. However for BI software to work effectively, it relies on data warehousing and ETL procedures. Some of the BI software vendors are moving into the mash-up world, but still require expensive software licensing.

Analytics are best viewed within a dashboard as a widget or gauge. These widgets display graphs, charts, maps, or any type of graphic of information about your data. My favorite metric to show performance is simply the 3 category traffic light which simply displays good (green), bad (yellow), and ugly (red). Microsoft Excel provides some of the easiest analytic widgets with its charting wizard.

Well, as you may have guessed, I am searching for the perfect analytic mash-up service. I am looking for a graphing service that allows mash-ups to personal data without programming and for free. I have found websites (I will post them at a later time) that speak of this service, calling it mashboards. The closest free service I have found so far is a company called http://www.swivel.com/. This is a neat sight, mainly as a social community site (which I will discuss later), that allows uploading data to feed automatically into charts. At this time, they do not allow RSS feeds, or mash-ups; but their site includes hints mash-up may be in the future. If you know of any other sites, please leave a comment with an URL. I will create a mash-up for the blog with my Work Request system.

An analytic application I am gaga about is Google Analytics. This is an incredible application. I can't believe how easy it is. I have seen applications such as this cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and here it is free. All the user has to do is add about 7 lines of code to each of their web pages, and instantly this SaaS program tracks:

• who is visiting your site
• where they are coming from (location!)
• how long they where on your site
• what pages are most visited
• which links are most clicked
• how they got to your site - directly, search engine, or link
• the search words used to get to your site
• the search engine, operating system, connection speed, screen resolution

All with a dashboard and widget interface. Just an amazing application. It does allow drill down to gain more facts, however, it does not allow drill down by using the graphics. The user must click the "reports" link underneath each graphic.

I have no complaints considering the price. The perfect analytics application is Google Analytics and the sourced data of your choice. Hence, a mash-up of your data to this service.

Analytics will definitely be the next wave of "must have" features for the online user to the enterprise. People are really catching on to using data to drive decisions (d3), and mash-up technology is only going to make analytics much more prominent.