User Generated Content

The author of this blog volunteered at our table as I had a laptop and thought it would be appropriate to make good use of the technology at hand at the Future of Media Summit and enter directly into the blog. Unfortunately, I spent a good 10 minutes getting my laptop up and running before it crashed and now must consider what is ahead of me given the blogging interest regarding Dell's Customer Service as discussed on the day!

Our table was equally devided between those belonging in the content camp and those in the advertising camp.

In respect to User Generated Content (UGC) there is the question of "to censor or not to censor". Hugh Martin noted that the BBC copped a lot of criticism over the censoring of posted content during the London tube bombing last year. This was different to the BSkyB approach of putting it all out there. A media service with a strong brand still needs to maintain a level of editorial integrity to ensure that UGC is considered appropriate for its audience.

So in the case of UGC there are, broadly, 3 options (i) uncensored (the MySpace, YouTube approach) (ii) manual filtering (resource intensive) (iii) automated content filtering - use heuristic models ("editor is an algorithm!") to filter content based on language/topic/image content etc. Or a blend of all 3.

The topic of viral marketing was discussed with ads like Carlton's Big Beer Ad and John West's bear Ad being great examples of these. The point was made that these can either win or lose an audience - a case in point being the tastefulness of the VW Polo advertisement (personal opinion... I would NEVER buy a Polo! ... current model Golf GTI is a different story! ;^)

A recent classic example of viral marketing was the tagging of AirForce One "Still Free". One estimate suggests that, at twenty-five frames per second, this video clip is worth over 3,000 words every time it's viewed given the amount that has been written about it on internet sites and newspapers around the world. 87M views in the first week alone!

From viral communications we moved onto the topic of UGC in the context of creating "mini sites" on brands and products. General consensus is that this would work for fast moving consumer goods such as beer or cars but not necessarily toothpaste. One needs to be able to engage consumers at a mainstream level. If there is general passion around a topic (where's the passion in toothpaste?!?) then there exists the opportunity to create sites on given topics with blogging/creative marketing/content aggregation on the topic from other sources. If a given audience with a specific demographic starts to build on these sites, then the opportunity exists to monetize through specific advertising. The author would suggest that knowledge of a consumer's behaviour on that site (what they search for/write about/view/purchase at the site) would provide the essential events to analyse and therefore target highly personalised advertising even to a site that attracts and extremely broad audience.

Many more interesting topics where discussed at the table, however my mind kept wandering to the Dell service challenge that confronts me and, alas, I feel I was way too distracted from the task at hand. Any others at the table that day or others that feel so inspired, I invite to you keep the thread alive!