This afternoon I was facilitating a session at an e-Publishing conference in London. A nice group of people for my session on combining UGC with professional content in the publishing industry and how this can help to generate loyalty. I was quite impressed with the levels of enthusiasm and experience in the group from a range of publishing firms about doing something different online.
The concerns they have about using user generated content are similar to those raised by any industry – how to ensure a quality of contributions, how to know how trustworthy people are, concerns over litigation and a significant concern about how to get people to contribute. Many had commenting facilities on their sites that were little used. This is a situation we see a lot – people create ways for people to comment on their site or add content and they just don’t. One solution came from the group itself today. One of the delegates reported having about 50 people who commented regularly on parts of their site (ten of whom were particularly vociferous).
People like this, ones who are enthusiastic about your site and content, are the best to help you manage and encourage contributions. Let them know that they are your most passionate contributors (they probably don’t know), ask them what they think about the site – what works and what doesn’t, develop some house rules with them and then get them to help enforce them for you. Make the most of their enthusiasm and you’ll be surprised by the results. I’ve seen forums where unpaid contributors actually moderate or respond to hundreds and hundreds of threads a month.
Another interesting discussion during the session was about how to use ratings. People were broadly keen on the idea of rating content – although they would want to display number of ratings as well as the score, and prefer the concept of scoring ‘relevance’ than a simple rating of how good the content is. One particularly interesting story from a delegate at a large B2B publisher was how they used these rankings to produce a league table of journalists. The more relevant users voted their content, the higher they were ranked. An interesting application of UGC – perhaps it would be good to link journalist bonuses to such ranking too…!
Thanks to Social Media Playground for a post this week about the Forrester Research Marketing Forum 2008, and in particular the discussion about engagement being the new key metric for businesses to know and understand (see post here).
Forrester put forward a model for measuring engagement based on the “Four I’s”:
Involvement: KPIs including site visitors, time spent, page views
Interaction: the volume of contributions to blogs, UGC, reviews
Intimacy: survey-based measures of consumer attitudes, perception and feeling about the brand
Influence: the weight of the consumer, how likely they are to recommend the brand or be advocates
These measures taken together can then be used to understand and assess the levels of engagement a customer has with the brand. For us, the interesting element here is the Influence measure – this seems to take the metric out of being a simple measure of how one customer engages with a brand to be a measure of the value of this engagement. A highly engaged customer who is also highly networked is of more value than one who is less well networked.
When you think of word of mouth and advocacy, this becomes a much more valuable measure!
Download an excerpt from the Forrester paper here.
I’m facilitating a session at the ePublishing conference in London next month about combining UGC with expert input, especially in the publishing industry. This is something we do at FreshNetworks, getting experts and users together to help innovate and mash-up ideas in online communities. However it would be great to pick up as many examples as possible of where this has worked (or hasn’t) on websites.
One area where this seems to be alive is in product reviews and similar sites. Jeff Zweig from web guru asia sent me a good example of this. They built a campaign Singapore Airlines which used an online ‘travellers tree’ where people could hang their stories of Singapore Airlines alongside expert content and comment.
This kind of thing is great – what I’d really like to see now is where publishing firms have successfully integrated UGC into their sites to create real and original content. Where Web 2.0 has done what many claim it will do – made us all experts and given us all the ability to let our voice heard.
Of course examples where this has gone hideously wrong also welcome!
People are talking about you? Everywhere? In public and in private? Asking questions you don’t know need answering and giving answers that may not be true.
Let’s consider one well-known brand of coffee shops. It has over 500 groups on Facebook in London alone, and Technorati lists 831 blogs specifically about is. A quick search on the web reveals:
A Facebook group discussing whether or not a certain product is Kosher. A small but very active group of people discuss what they think about this - sharing and spreading a multitude of advice and rumours, many of which are probably not true. At one stage a member of the group takes it upon themselves to email the brand to get their views and the official response is published. Group members still don’t believe this.
A blog which claims to reveal new details of product and service innovation – leaking them out before the chain would want them to be. The blog seems to be written by somebody who works for the brand but this is never confirmed and the validity of some of their claims is questioned.
A set of YouTube videos that are mock adverts for the chain made by fans (and some by critics). What’s interesting about these is that the brand itself doesn’t do any video advertising, so when you search for the brand on any video site it’s these videos that come up.
In all of these examples what’s surprising is that the brand itself is not present – if they had been informing the Facebook group then false rumours wouldn’t spread. If they had allowed people to overtly blog or indeed controlled the release of information themselves they would know what was happening when. And if they could harness the powers and energies of all these people discussing their brand then that would be even more powerful.
8th May 2008, 07:15 pm 