Insight Managing User Generated Content - Your Organisation in Their Hands

User generated content (UGC) is widely used by organisations to create deeper engagement with customers and other stakeholders, and to reduce content-production and marketing costs. There are also risks associated with UGC of brand damage and legal problems arising from misuse. To mitigate against these pitfalls you should plan carefully for its introduction by:

• Deciding on the best approach for taking advantage of UGC and the level of engagement needed
• Putting in place controls appropriate for your organisation
• Agreeing and publicising a simple and concise set of guidelines for posting of UGC
• Having a plan of what do to if your worst scenario happens
• Being prepared to act quickly if something untoward does occur

Introduction

The use of user generated content (UGC) by organisations is now widespread and is no longer the alien concept that it once was. However, there are clear challenges for organisations that utilise UGC and this paper will help you take advantage of the opportunities of UGC while avoiding the potential pitfalls.

What is user generated content?

User generated content (UGC) can be simply defined as content that has been produced by a non-professional. In fact Wikipedia, perhaps one of the best know repositories of UGC, says that it “refers to various kinds of media content, publicly available, that are produced by end-users”.

Levels of engagement

There is a scale of different levels of engagement needed for UGC.

UGC can be created with very little effort from the reader - merely reading an article, for example, can facilitate a “Most read” feature.

The next step up the effort scale is asking readers to undertake a very simple task, such as clicking a button saying whether they would recommend the article or product that they are looking at. Again, this information can be aggregated to create a “Most recommended” feature. Leaving comments requires a little more effort on the part of readers, but is still reasonably easy.

At the other end of the scale, many sites encourage readers or customers to contribute more extensive pieces of content. On TripAdvisor, for example, contributors can add reviews that cover a number of areas for a particular category of review including photos as well as text. In general an increase in engagement needs an increase in effort on the part of the consumer – see below.

Websites use UGC in a variety of forms which map onto the scale above:

UGC	Example use
Who’s reading what	“Most popular stories now” feature on news.bbc.co.uk
Recommend	“Recommend” feature on stories on Economist.com
Tweets/comments	Innocent Drinks wall on Facebook
Blog posts	Guest bloggers on the BMJ site
Reviews	TripAdvisor, Amazon
Photos	Flickr “pools” on sites such as Londonist
Videos	Al Jazeera encourages contributions
Wikis	Wikipedia
Discussion boards	FlyerTalk

Even if organisations do not actively engage, it is likely that their brand or content is being used in UGC of one type or another on sites that they do not control themselves, particularly for high profile brands such as airlines and consumer goods – there have been some well documented examples of successes here, such as Virgin Atlantic, as well as failures.

Opportunities

The opportunities around UGC fall into two main areas - reduced costs and better engagement and customer intelligence.

For a publisher of information the opportunity to increase the amount of content produced without the attendant costs of employing additional editorial or content creation staff is, perhaps, an obvious one. At one extreme of this is YouTube, where a high proportion of uploaded videos have been created by amateurs. At the other end of the spectrum, some organisations use guest bloggers whose motivation in writing for free is to raise their own profile on a trusted site.

Increasingly, however, marketeers are turning to customers to provide content for their advertising campaigns or even as a replacement for such overt messages. Examples are widespread with Bild, a German tabloid newspaper, asking its readers to create their own video adverts for the publication.

One of the biggest opportunities is to “own” the conversation about a particular product, brand or subject. This can often be as simple as setting up a Facebook page and inviting people to become “fans”. Some organisations have engaged with consumers in a more innovative way, such as Dell with their Ideastorm website. This invited consumers to suggest improvements that could be made to Dell products and services and allowed people to vote on them. Dell interacted with these suggestions by posting responses. As well as providing Dell with an invaluable insight into what people wanted from them, the website also generated a lot of publicity, overwhelmingly positive.

The success of the Dell example shows the benefits of interacting with what customers are saying rather than merely providing a one way broadcast of information. And UGC often costs substantially less than a traditional marketing campaign with the added benefit of the content created often being seen as more trustworthy. In fact, as Nielsen highlighted in their July 2009 Global Online Consumer Survey (see chart below) more than twice as many people listen to other consumers that they know when forming opinions on products or services. UGC, in the form of reviews or opinions posted online, are seen as equal in terms of trustworthiness to those on brand websites. This presents a great opportunity if organisations can successfully harness and nurture such opinions.

Implementation

Exploiting UGC to Generate Knowledge

The not-for-profit sector is a key sector looking to implement UGC. Many charities and membership organisations, such as the Institute of Physics, the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland and Cancer Research UK, have knowledge as a central part of their core values and one of the key reasons for people joining these organisations is to access knowledge or encourage continuing knowledge generation.

Many of these organisations are looking to use UGC generate knowledge from collaborations. The table below gives an analysis of different types of collaborations[1] (Social Media and Communities of Practice would be considered UGC):

	Purpose	Members	Adhesive	Duration
Formal work group	To deliver a product or service	Employees who reports to the group’s manager	Job requirements and org structure	Until organisational restructuring
Project team	To accomplish a task	Employees assigned by senior management	Project milestones and goals	Until project completion
Social networks / media	To collect and pass on information	Friends and acquaintances	Mutual needs and interests	As long as people have a reason to connect
Community of Practice	To develop members’ capabilities; to build and exchange knowledge	Members who select themselves	Passion, commitment and identification with the group’s expertise	As long as there is interest in maintaining the group

NB: the bottom row of the table gives a good definition of Communities of Practice.

The fundamental difference between a Community of Practice (CoP) and social media is that a CoP has a defined purpose – in this context, specifically to generate and share knowledge.

Communities of Practice vs Social Media

Communities of Practice are probably the most successful methods for generating and sharing knowledge, but the decision is not straightforward. The choice between (or perhaps, mix of) CoPs and Social Media depends on a number of factors.

The advantages of using social media are:

• Audience and traffic – the popular social media sites, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, have huge user bases and are amongst the most visited and used sites on the internet – there is now more UK traffic to social media sites than to search engines[2].
• Availability and cost – no purchase is necessary to use social media, whereas there can be costs associated with the software for CoPs on an organisation’s website (these will depend on the content management system being used). Total cost of ownership should be considered however, as there will be staff costs whichever route is taken.

The advantages of using CoPs (on an organisation’s own website) are:

• Trust – it is noticeable that social media sites like Facebook are not trusted for activities such as knowledge sharing – people are considerably less willingness to share knowledge on social media sites than on CoP sites.
• Control – social media platforms such as Facebook are more difficult to control (outside closed groups). There are reports for example of charities encountering adverse comments and even campaigns.
• Ownership – CoPs and websites have very clear ownership of the brand and content.
• Value of Membership – CoPs can sit inside a membership log-in providing a membership benefit (as long as the quality of content and conversations is sufficiently high). The potential disadvantage of this is search engines will not be able to find content behind the log-in, so care has to be taken to ensure sufficient information is available to search engines and to satisfy members of the public who have reasonable expectations of the amount of information that should be freely available without a log-in.

The choice (or blend) is therefore likely to vary between different types of organisations and across different types of communication:

• Where there are discussions on Facebook on medical conditions such as asthma or diabetes, the relevant charity will want to take part, supporting the discussions and contributing advice, generally with links back to their website.
• Twitter provides an instant communication channel that is very difficult to achieve elsewhere.
• CoPs on an organisation’s own website have the advantages of being trusted and providing a benefit to belonging to the organisation. The UGC can also be used to contribute to the organisation’s knowledge and develop it further.

Creating and Managing CoPs

Where CoPs are adopted, it is vital that they are set up properly and supported adequately. Two important factors in this are achieving critical mass and having a good facilitator.

Creating an initial “critical mass” is the starting point for a successful CoP:

• Hold an initial physical launch in which potential contributors are invited and can register
• Use facilitators to drive the CoPs (see below)
• Mix online activity with offline e.g. if no one is responding to an particular thread contact them physically (e.g. by phone) and ask them to contribute

Facilitators (different from moderators) play a crucial role in gaining and maintaining the momentum that is needed to keep a CoP going. Facilitators should be selected from the active participants and need on-going support and encouragement.

Managing Your Brand – Social Media

Where social media is used by organisations, it is vital that the engagement is appropriately managed and resourced.

Social media has changed how people behave as consumers in all senses. The advent of social media represents a marked move away from traditional marketing approaches. For example, many people will look for reviews of products before making purchases. There needs to be a focus on conversations, rather than on broadcast-type marketing campaigns – conversations are key. So, any market campaigns need to be planned as part of the overall conversation and relationship, not as standalone initiatives.

To successfully use social media it is particularly important to adopt the right tone in conversations. A number of high profile marketing campaigns have badly backfired by using the wrong tone. Part of adopting the right tone is to make sure that initiatives engage with the audience and in many cases there is a need to entertain – much of social media is about competing for attention.

The UGC Process

The key to engaging in UGC is to ensure that the process is properly initiated against business objectives, implemented and then assessed, feeding back into the start of the process[3]:

The strategy should be incremental and should include planning any media and creative input and defining the tone of voice that will be used. The implementation stage should take account of requirements for production of content and other inputs from across the organisation.

Measurement is important, feeding back into the research and business objectives. It is important though to recognise that some of the measures of success will be qualitative and judgement based.

Getting the Organisation Right for UGC

UGC and social media overturn a number of traditional marketing approaches. It is much more about aligning with the conversations your community is having, than driving a marketing agenda – engaging first and then fundraising or recruiting at the appropriate time. Resourcing conversations impacts on the organisation.

The effort and resources needed to support UGC and social media have been mentioned a number of times above, and the requirements should not be underestimated. The likelihood is that the breadth of the conversations that will take place will mean that these conversations will need to include participants from across the organisation, rather than just the marketing department. This leads to some challenges for organisations:

• To trust staff to use social media appropriately – to trust that the right people have been recruited and to ensure that they are motivated and enthusiastic
• To provide them with the support they need to ensure that they follow standard processes and comply with policies

This is something that should be recognised and implemented as it is needed to give UGC the momentum that is needed.

Challenges

As with many nascent disciplines, successfully managing UGC requires an understanding of the challenges. With this awareness potential pitfalls can be avoided or mitigated.

The pitfalls can be grouped into two related areas - brand damage and legal issues.

Careful planning is needed to put in place processes that prevent misuse. Abusive commenters (known as Trolls) can frighten other contributors off and lead to brand damage. In 2009, Mars embedded the live results of a search of Twitter for the word Skittles into a promotional website. People quickly realised that this was open to abuse and after Tweets saying that Skittles caused cancer got noticed by the company, the site was taken offline. The damage to reputation was done, however.

Even TripAdvisor, the largest site that relies almost wholly on UGC, has to deal with issues around the trustworthiness of reviews. TripAdvisor employs a team of moderators and also uses sophisticated algorithms to detect fraudulent reviews. It flags reviews that it believes try to manipulate its popularity index but this in itself probably leads to a reduction in the trustworthiness of the whole site. This sense that even a small number of reviews may be fraudulent has opened the door for Oyster, a start-up that pays journalists a proper salary to undertake reviews anonymously.

Legal Issues

Legal considerations are perhaps the most serious part of planning that needs to be carried out. "If it is illegal offline, it is illegal online." This includes websites, social media and UGC. It should also be noted that disclaimers are not necessarily the way to all avoid problems.

The use of copyrighted material, defamation and privacy are all areas that need to be considered. In February 2010, for example, three Google executives were found guilty of violation of privacy and given suspended jail sentences after YouTube hosted a video of a teenager with Down’s Syndrome.

Avoiding the pitfalls

It is essential to ensure legal issues don’t stop people contributing. Organisations should define and implement policies and ensure staff are aware of them, but then encourage and support them in engaging.

There are a number of steps that organisations can take to protect against pitfalls in the use of UGC. A good start is to create an easily understood set of concise guidelines for the posting of UGC. To reduce risk, a widely-used technique is to moderate content before publication. Employing staff to undertake this task can obviously affect the economics of using UGC.. Post-moderation, where content can be referred to a moderator by other readers, can also be effective. When extensive use of UGC is made, more sophisticated techniques to detect malicious content will be needed (for example, detecting duplicate submissions). With more developed communities, readers themselves can be used to flag inappropriate content and even moderate it. In summary, a set of controls suitable for your brand should be put in place.

Perhaps most important, though is to have a plan in place on what to do in the event that the worst happens, including how monitoring is carried out and who is potentially available to respond. In such a situation the handling of the issue will be what observers will judge your organisation on.

Conclusions

UGC is in widespread use by many types of organisations. There are clear benefits to its use through reduced costs of producing content and reduced marketing costs. Organisations can also become more involved in the conversation about their product or content and therefore better placed to influence opinions. Potential challenges include brand damage and legal problems. To mitigate against pitfalls, the use of UGC should be carefully planned for.

Recommendations

If you are considering the use of UGC you should plan carefully for its introduction by:

• Deciding on the best approach for taking advantage of UGC and the level of engagement needed
• Putting in place controls appropriate for your organisation
• Agreeing and publicising a simple and concise set of guidelines for posting of UGC
• Having a plan of what do to in the case that your worst scenario happens
• Being prepared to act quickly

 

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