Problem summary

The user wants to promote a specific piece of content in order to democratically help decide what content is more popular.

Solution

Let users participate in content curation by letting them promote quality content.

Use the power of your community to help curate what is more popular. Display a voting mechanism next to each candidate item. As users click, their vote is counted in favor of promoting that item. Consider providing an embeddable and stand-alone voting mechanism that third-party publishers can include on their site.

4 Mechanisms working together

This pattern consists of a number of mechanisms that work together:

• Voting mechanism. Provide a mechanism whereby users can vote for or against each item of content on your website. A user gets one vote and can change that vote at a later time. When a user casts a vote on an item, this information should be provided back to the user as feedback. Let the user see his or her prior votes and in some cases allow the user to change those votes.
• Display number of votes an item has received. This will give your visitors a clear indication of how popular an item is and allow for comparison with other items.
• Sum up popular items. Provide lists of popular content summed up on a main page.
• Favor popular items. Favor popular items in search results, when browsing tags, and showing related information.
• Content submission mechanism. You can let users submit content in several ways.

Let users submit

Provide a webpage with a submission form. The most basic and traditional way to let your users submit content is via a form on a webpage that you host. After content has been submitted, your users can freely vote on the submitted content’s quality.

Make voting embeddable

Provide a widget for the user to to place on his or her website. If the type of content your users are submitting, you can provide a widget to your users to place on their own website. This will allow third-party publishers to submit content directly from their own website. The widget is really a javascript include code, that will add the address of the webpage, if the webpage has not been added to your site yet.

Rationale

The Vote To Promote pattern promotes community participation and can potentially help pick up and promote the newest and hottest content around. By using your community to judge what is more popular, you avoid the need to hire paid professional reviewers.