User Generated Content & Content Marketing

User-Generated Content & Content Marketing

User-generated content is usually information posted by members of the public, including “hearsay” and “thoughts” and is inherently valueless – except for gauging opinions and perceptions.

“As brought out in Andrew Keen’s “The Cult of the Amateur”, when everyday users are allowed to report the news anonymously and are not held accountable for anything they say, it becomes increasingly difficult to tell fact from fiction. Professional journalists and editors, even those with immense fame, can be criticized and even fired for false reporting. However, the contributing user can write anything and is never held responsible. In addition, everyone can post something online, leading to an unprecedented information overload in today’s world. – PC Magazine

There is one form of user-generated content that does have value. People trust their peers because they don’t perceive them to have any “skin in the game”. So when it comes to user-generated content, reviews, ratings, and testimonials are valuable content marketing tools and great listening devices.

Recommendations make you more persuasive because recommendations are an important filter for people online.

They need to know whom they can trust and will frequently look for somebody who has a lot of good quality recommendations.

“Research by NM Incite shows that 60 percent of social media users create reviews of products and services. In fact, consumer-created reviews/ratings are the preferred source for information about product/service value, price and product quality.” – Nielsen Social Media Report

Amazon, Apple iTunes store and Google Play stores offer particularly good examples of this type of user-generated content. Of course, this then begs the question, if a company is happy to publish positive customer or user recommendations, is it not morally obligated to provide a fair and balanced picture, by also publishing any less than positive customer reviews?

After all, if customers or users have a complaint or negative review about your business, they are probably making their views known via other channels (eg Facebook and Twitter) anyway. And let’s face it, today’s customers are smart. One could argue that including reviews from less than happy customers helps show that your brand wants to build genuine relationships with the market based on honesty, trust, and transparency. Showing humility is after all one of the ways we build genuine connections with others.

Ultimately the internet has democratized the sharing and dissemination of information. If a customer has a bad experience and shares their experience online, businesses who ignore, steamroll, or otherwise seek to discredit these customers will soon find themselves drawing a lot more attention to the problem than if they acknowledged the customer quickly, and demonstrated appropriate empathy and rectification of the problem. Such is the nature of the ever-watching “omniscient” crowd. Businesses and brands who are less than transparent will be outed sooner rather than later and it is this new paradigm that many marketers and established brands are yet to fully understand let alone embrace.