UGC experiences – or how i learned to stop worrying and love the bomb

In my last post, I talked about the dangers of user-generated content and asked you how you felt about UGC and how we should use it. Your replies allowed me to dig deeper into this subject.

There have been quite a few sucessfull UserGeneratedContent campaigns these last few years, and the first lesson I learned is that each UGC campaign is a different experience.

In 2006, General Motors surprised everyone when they launched one of the first un-censored UGC campaigns. They gave away videos and pictures of their new Tahoe car, added an online editing tool and waited for contributions to roll in. The website was an overwhelming success, with coverage from bloggers and news site, especially after everyone realized that GM was not censoring the site and that controversial videos (pollution, etc) were intentionally left online.
Fallbacks? Excellent sales and growing market shares.

I highly encourage you to read this article from Wired magazine to learn more about this use case.

MyStarbucksIdea was launched in March 2008 and is also widely successfull: Thousands of ideas, comments and votes have been submitted by customers who are more than happy to contribute to the improvement of their local coffee house.

This use case illustrates a few “UGC” rules:

• Requiring users to log in will help self regulation of posts
• A voting system will act as an auto regulating mechanism: good ideas go up in the ranking, bad ideas get buried.
• Show your customers that you listen.

Dell is now an experienced UGC brand. Their first experience, Ideastorm is a website where users are encouraged to post their ideas on how to improve Dell products (they apply the same rules we highlighted above: login, voting, “ideas in actions”).
In march, they launched a new campaign to promote their “green-computers”. Called “Regeneration”, this operation encourages users to send drawings on the theme “What does green means to you?”

The results are impressive.

UGC of course is about content, and this content can be more than a support to marketing; it can become a key business asset. 20minutes is a free european newspaper, distributed in the streets and subway stations every morning. Their website is more than a substitute of the paper edition thanks to comments on all articles.

How do they ensure high quality content? Users are required to log in, a few moderators read the articles, but mainly users can alert 20minutes when inappropriate comments are sent.

I apologize for the self-promo (20minutes mobile services are developed by Backelite – FullSIX mobile agency). We helped them set up their latest service: a short number to which users can send pictures thru MMS. This new service is becoming very popular and today the frontpage is mostly made of pictures sent by users (protests about the olympic games)

It has been a real pleasure to investigate this topic. Please use the comments to delve deeper.