Not the official web site...

A couple of weeks ago two male contestants were kicked off the reality TV show Australian Big Brother for putting their privates just where they should not be.

Where could you go to see a downplayed, spin added description of the event? The official site. Where could you go to find pointers to the footage that was broadcast, a discussion of the ehics of the contestants and the show and get a feel for how passionate fans felt about it. A fan site like Behind Big Brother Australia, or Australian Big Brother's Journal .

This lead me to think about whether a "not the official site" is a threat or an asset to an organization. So I've dot pointed my thoughts and Cluetrained them up a bit. Also in the style of "The user is not broken" (over at Free Range Librarian).


Why our non official web site is good for your official site:

1. You spending money on market research, focus groups and stakeholders meetings? Come to our site and see what we really think.
2. People at our site care about what you do. Passionately. We give up our free time to hang out together and talk about you.
3. Do things that please us and we will talk about it. LOUDLY
4. Do things that we think are crap we will talk about it. LOUDLY
5. We'd love to hear from you.
6. We don't own you. How you present yourself is your business.
7. You don't own us. How we present ourself is our business.
8. If we are not right for our users, they will drop away from our site and not tell us.
9. If you are not right for your users, you will hear about it here.
10. You probably don't want to send traffic to our site :) ,but we are certainly sending it to yours.
11. All publicity is good publicity.