Any tool intended to facilitate community formation and/or user-generated content must have an eye toward flexible development goals. Youtube may have been created to host a wide variety of video content but if the mass of users slowly shift toward contributing only content on a specific topic Youtube must be willing to tune their own goals for development and growth to suit the purposes that their users hve decided are important. The usage patterns of the majority must trump even the loftiest goal of the tool creator or the tool will be abandoned in favor of one better suited to what users want.

The agility of direction is key to survival in a world where technologies come and go faster than the lastest MTV-driven fashion fads. So rather than marketing to some target demographic, smart UGC companies, ie ones who want to survive the ebb and flow of a fickle user base, must instead market and cater to the users they already have. They, in turn, will utilize the service and become your best advertising. Yes, rather than advertising to new users, I’m suggesting that these companies must instead learn to market to their existing users. But what does a user-driven company look like? How do you function, plan, and grow when your mission statement is simply to continually become whatever your users seem to think you are? Who’s in charge here?

It’s simple: your users are.

If you’re built on a model that relies on content and contribution that sources users then you can’t get lulled into the idea that crowd-sourcing means that they work for you. You work for them. And your job is in flux. You have a fickle, shifting board of directors who are dedicated to your success but only if you do what they want. If you don’t, you’re fired and they swarm toward another tool to suit their needs.

Again, it’s simple: You, your company or service, are there to serve your customers, your creators, your evangelists. Run any differently and you’re screwed.

Forget what you set out to create. Forget your need to be in control. Forget focus groups where you get to ask the questions and set the agenda. Forget talking more than listening. Forget thinking that you some how know better than your users.

Services who try to tell their content-creating customers how to use their product get shut out, bad mouthed, and dismissed as being over-controlling, bossy, and disillusioned. But this is more than reading customer-service requests, more than focus groups, more than being visible in your community. It’s humility in the face of those who have created your success. It’s putting your user’s needs above your own goals. It’s never giving some party-line response to changes in usage. But most of all, it means you never take credit for the success your users have created.

If you give them the tools to create then you have to embrace whatever they create and then grow to help them be even better at what they do.