Matthew Creamer at Advertising Age is reporting today that Wal-Mart has finally figured something out: The road to online retail dominance... is paved with customer content.

Proving once again that the biggest isn't necessarily the best, the fastest, or the most innovative... but that even big, slow, lumbering giants can eventually learn how to remain competitive: The company's announcement that it's allowing consumers to review and rate products on its website is a big, if belated, push by the stodgy giant into the social web, following scores of other retailers who have realized the power of crowdsourcing and co-creation.

How does this work? Can it work for you?

The reviews give Wal-Mart thousands of additional pages of content to be indexed by major search engines, which look favorably on unique content, such as reviews, compared with pages with basic product details that any retailer could have.

If you have a static web site brimming with boring, polished copy that rarely changes and no one wants to read very often, adding social media components can vastly improve your search engine ranking and results. But you have to want to take a risk... you have to let ordinary people have more or less unrestricted access to participate in the conversation. But hey, if Wal-Mart can do it, you can do it, too.