Gloves off - Loser Generated Content

Annoyingly the blog doesn't want me to leave a comment for your post Loser Generated Content James, so i'm just putting my response in another post instead.

If I’ve understood correctly you make two main points.

Firstly, that there’s a plethora of self indulgent UGC out there and because the web is an open arena there’s no quality control over what’s posted, meaning the quality of the content is often in question.

Secondly, too much choice can be a bad thing for us humans but content curation could be our saviour.

I’d love to add a third (tongue I cheek mind!) which others may have already realised and it’s that this is your first post, the first chance for us to read your own content.

I see things slightly differently; I think if there is any quality control over UGC then it will lose the very rawness that makes it so engaging and viral in nature. In the way that a narrow creative proposition will limit a creative mind, the breadth and scope offered by the web gives us wealth of creativity previously undreamt of. The brilliance of it is that you get the unexpected.

I think for brands and marketers UGC is a wonderful thing, especially if budgets are small and the resultant PR can provide much needed hype. It provides us with huge opportunities for consumer insight and of course it enables consumers to create their own content for brands of their choice. Doritos certainly caused a PR stir when they pitched airtime to consumers during the Superbowl whilst Cadillac and M&M’s amongst many others have also engineered campaigns that aimed to get consumers more involved. Maybe one of the newest examples of this is for ipod touch, for which Apple found a fan commercial created by the 18yr old student Nick Haley posted on You Tube. Apple’s marketing team got their creative agency to contact Nick to ask about working with him to use the content they’d found. This really gets to the nub of what we do; the point of ads is to talk to the user, and what better way is there to do this than get the user to talk to the user.

I could agree with you when it comes to sites and brands choosing what UGC to use themselves; they do have to ensure they pick content that’s the right TOV for their brand, carries the right message, engages with their audience and generates enough of the right kind of chat, as of course the content generator will always be generating content elsewhere. And I’m into the idea of curated consumption if it works for a particular brand or site (or even my own browsing habits) as long as it doesn’t put a rein on creativity elsewhere.

Being vegetarian choice cuts of meats don’t really do it for me, I’m more into lush, green vegetation so perhaps it’s only natural that I lean towards thinking the more raw UGC there is out there, the better.