(Annette Moser-Wellman) -- If you have a presence on the Web, your most pressing concern should be consumer engagement. How do you get people coming back again and again and remaining interested and involved? Wetpaint's Ben Elowitz has some ideas.



Consumers come to Wetpaint, a free wiki service, choose a template and build their own forums, from fan sites to hobby clubs. Since Wetpaint started in June of 2006, it has grown to host 700,000 user-generated sites. Elowitz credits the success of Wetpaint to one of the benefits of the Web 2.0 movement: microsegmentation.

Elowitz told me, "What we've found is there's a whole other category of media the Web enables which is more topic-focused. People are using technology to create a kind of replacement for the traditional magazine. They're looking at all sorts of new resources, opinion and information that they're able to share with others who care about the same topics."

Wikis deliver the consumer engagement we want because they pinpoint the passionate interests of users. Wetpaint sees its task as expanding the amount of content available about those interests through social publishing. But what's really surprising, and instructive to any media company, is that what started as a service for individuals is now delivering big value to media brands – especially in the television industry.

Wetpaint has more than 60 corporate sponsorships – companies that use Wetpaint's technology to create their own branded fan sites. These sites are hosted by Wetpaint and also embedded on corporate sites.

"Companies like Discovery Channel, American Express Publishing and Meredith want to build socially published properties around their existing published titles to encourage engagement and extend reach," he said. "Discovery Channel has a show called Mythbusters. There are only so many myths that they can test every week on one episode, so many times a year. But if they can engage their fans to start sharing what their fans know, it becomes an opportunity to build an even larger content page and extend the brand to become more powerful."

CBS is also looking outside to handle this social publishing function; a favorite is their crime show CSI. The official CSI wiki, hosted by Wetpaint, has more than 4,000 user-generated pages. That's engagement. Here fans embed their favorite clips, create their own custom episode guides and post their ideas, all in a dynamic forum.

This kind of partnership can be a double hit for a television company: no development costs to build the technology and new ways to capture incremental revenue. Within four to fourteen days, companies can partner with Wetpaint to create a wiki. Companies like Wetpaint handle everything from custom development to site moderation and search engine optimization. Partners can cross-promote within the network of Wetpaint's 700,000 user-generated sites. Interestingly 50% of the traffic on a Wetpaint wiki is generated from outside the partner's own network, Elowitz said.

Entertainment is where most of the wiki action is right now. Wetpaint's most trafficked topics are music, television and games. Halo 3 is a hot site. "People are posting everything from basic chat, to cheat codes, to their play videos and new narratives of the game," Elowitz said. This is called fan-fiction and has become an explosive area in social publishing as well.

It makes sense for a media company to ask itself, "What entertainment topics might my audience be uniquely passionate about?"


This ability to engage users around smaller segments of interest on the Internet is not new. Elowitz talked about the New York Times' investment in about.com, with 40,000 topic-focused sites that are all about microsegmented interests.

"When they bought about.com for $400 million, a huge investment, everyone thought they were crazy. Now it's worth well over $1 billion out of their roughly $5 billion market cap," he said.

What is thought-forward about Wetpaint is the ability to engage consumers more intimately in the process and provide templates to enable them to create their own sites and populate them with their own material. Wetpaint has category editors that act as ‘curators' and frame topic areas and let the audience build out the content.

Elowitz believes microsegmentation is fueled by the wide availability and popularity of bite-sized content. He notes the trend of dividing existing video content into smaller clips.

"Even folks who use Twitter are consuming teeny-tiny little snippets," he said. "The content is not as cumbersome to produce because it's smaller and can be distributed one-to-one so that if I have something valuable, it can be matched to someone who wants to find it. It's a ‘liquid distribution' market now that can match the producers and consumer of content on a micro-macro level.

"I love to think about what we do at Wetpaint as synthesis. We take all the little micro-contributions to make something bigger and that's beautiful because content is so much more valuable when it's in context."

At a recent Digital Strategies Conference at the Media Management Center, one public relations executive showcased the success of one of its microsegment sites: a place for people to post pictures of their mustaches!

So what microsegments are sitting under your nose that you've yet to serve?



What do you think? Please share your thoughts, experiences and reactions by clicking on the comment button below.

Annette Moser-Wellman is President of Firemark, Inc., an innovation consultancy, and author of "Running While The Earth Shakes: Creating An Innovation Strategy To Win In The Digital Age," published by Media Management Center. She teaches in MMC's Advanced Executive Program and Digital Strategies for Media Executives seminars.

This TechScout article is part of a new series of Moser-Wellman interviews commissioned by Media Management Center to explore opportunities and insights at the intersection of technology and the news media. Click here to view others in the TechScout series.