Brand managers are running scared of social networking initiatives

User-Generated Content (UGC) is an increasingly popular brand marketing tool for many large enterprises today. It provides a fantastic opportunity for businesses to connect with existing business partners and prospects with relatively little financial impact. Some brands are discouraged from incorporating UGC because of the possible threat of being associated with inappropriate, politically incorrect or even abusive content online. But steering clear of engaging in such initiatives altogether means companies could be missing a trick in terms of reaping the rewards of well managed UGC. How can businesses harness the real benefits that UGC has to offer while protecting their brand in the process?

The inclusion of UGC in the form of blogs, forums and galleries to a business’ website can bring with it many benefits. Namely, it provides a platform upon which the company can keep in touch with existing or potential business partners on a regular basis. It allows businesses to access to interactive, frank and honest feedback. Encouraging an evolving dialogue amongst business partners also creates new online content which will attract more business to your website. There is little appeal for a user to visit a static website where content rarely changes but they are likely to revisit more regularly if they are likely to see new entries. This is also an effective way of raising brand awareness and improving online visibility via increased click-through activity and higher natural search engine rankings.

A couple of examples of B2B sites that have used UGC successfully is Farmers Weekly Interactive http://www.fwi.co.uk/Home/Default.aspx and travel weekly http://www.travelweekly.co.uk/Home/Default.aspx. The websites encourage its audience to interact by posting messages and photo’s on its forum. Business to business providers can benefit by having an increased number of unique users to the website and keeping them there for longer. Not only does this strengthen affinity between the audience and the brand, it also keeps existing and potential customers away from competitors for longer.

The management of UGC is a crucial element to its effectiveness. If managed correctly, it can bring many business benefits, if not businesses could be laying themselves wide open to risk of brand damage. The key to well managed UGC is effective moderation to ensure that inappropriate content is dealt with accordingly. This means putting in place real people to read and judge submissions - people who’ve been trained to work frequently, regularly and consistently, seven days a week. These people could be in-house or from a specialist agency. Moderators will need to know the basics of the laws of defamation, contempt, copyright and for some audiences, child protection too.

Top tips for setting up a UGC initiative:

• Once you’ve settled on your objective, you’ll be well placed to choose which platform for UGC will suit you best; for example social networking profiles/comments, blogs, story comments, forums, chat rooms, picture galleries.
• Choose software that supports your budget and capabilities; perhaps hosted solutions for low budget activity and perhaps open-source based bespoke software for higher budgets and where you have access to technical competence
• Assess software not only from design and user interface perspectives, but also from data mining and moderation ones.
• Escalation procedures will need to be established early on. The ‘what if’ scenarios do occur from time to time and you need to know in advance how to handle them
• Who will judge the judges? Appointing moderators is usually important, but who will check the quantity and quality of their work?
• How prescriptive are you going to be about the content you are happy to publish on behalf of your customers and prospects? In many cases, the tighter your brief the less attractive it will prove to your audience
• Invest time early on in actively engaging with your first contributors
• Come down fairly, but swiftly and heavily, on trolls.
• It might be your party, but your guests will determine whether it’s a success or not. You must put the right infrastructure in place to encourage the kind of UGC you want.