Community: Businesses Still Limping Toward 2.0

Mike Madison blogged his thoughts about the Community 2.0 conference we attended earlier this week. I Twittered one of mine.

Mike says the best question he was asked was "What happens if all of these users who are kicking content into MySpace and YouTube (their own content, not content copied from Viacom) stop compensating themselves with psychic rewards and — in large numbers — start demanding money? In other words, what if they want to renegotiate the deal that they are currently being offered?" See generally Attention Trust, which just had a big event to which I need to pay more attention, and Project VRM.

The most frequent question I was asked was from the perspective of the business trying to leverage its associated communities: "How do we know/ensure we have the right to put user suggestions into effect and/or incorporate user submitted material?" My thought: there are several options, and a blend of them probably makes the most sense: 1) address it in your terms of service/use; 2) address it on a one-to-one, case-by-case basis (considering particularly the scale and scope of the suggestion and the use); and 3) remember the Hollywood approach, i.e., suggestions returned unread as a legal precaution, as a contra-example to what you're hoping to accomplish.

Finally, the simultaneously most appalling and funniest question I was asked: "You must get this all the time [!], but, has anyone ever told you how much you remind them of Ann Coulter?"

[community2.0, community 2.0, appalling]