The idea of co-opt­ing con­tent from con­sumers for mar­ket­ing pur­pos­es may ini­tial­ly be appeal­ing to brands in part because it’s a cheap way to source con­tent, par­tic­u­lar­ly when it comes to video. In the­o­ry, it also increas­es brand-con­sumer inter­ac­tion. Plus, every con­sumer with a smart­phone is a con­tent cre­ator now, which means mar­keters have a huge pool of con­tent to fish from. But there’s more to it than that.

Matthew Scott, senior vice pres­i­dent of busi­ness devel­op­ment and strat­e­gy at social influ­ence mar­ket­ing plat­form Crowd­tap, recent­ly cit­ed fig­ures from his firm that demon­strate user-gen­er­at­ed con­tent as a media chan­nel com­pris­es an increas­ing­ly sig­nif­i­cant share of time that con­sumers are spend­ing with con­tent over­all – indi­cat­ing that con­sumers are ever more recep­tive to it.

“That’s pret­ty star­tling,” he said. “There are mas­sive media brands out there, but one [out of every] three sec­onds [is spent] on con­tent from friends and family…average every­day peo­ple. That sig­nals a seis­mic shift in terms of where we’re turn­ing for infor­ma­tion and where we see trust.”

But aside from cheap and plen­ti­ful con­tent, what oth­er oppor­tu­ni­ties exist for mar­keters when it comes to har­ness­ing the pow­er of user-gen­er­at­ed con­tent? And what chal­lenges must they con­sid­er? Here’s what Scott and oth­er mar­ket­ing experts had to say dur­ing Social Media Week.

User-Generated Content Opportunities

1. Gain Business Intelligence

User-gen­er­at­ed con­tent cer­tain­ly isn’t lim­it­ed strict­ly to mar­ket­ing pur­pos­es, said Eric Chan­ning Brown, vice pres­i­dent of com­mu­ni­ca­tions at social medi­al ana­lyt­ics firm Klout and social cus­tomer expe­ri­ence man­age­ment soft­ware provider Lithi­um Tech­nolo­gies.

In fact, brands can use var­i­ous types of user-gen­er­at­ed con­tent to derive intel.

“We find it can be used for prod­uct ideation and inno­va­tion and to get com­ments back into the com­pa­ny for prod­ucts and ser­vices,” he said.

2. Cost Savings

In addi­tion, user-gen­er­at­ed con­tent can help com­pa­nies reduce ser­vice costs by com­pil­ing answers to com­mon ques­tions with­in online resources, which can help reduce calls to call cen­ters, Brown said.

“We’ve found Com­cast has saved mil­lions by using user-gen­er­at­ed con­tent from peo­ple who are techy in the com­mu­ni­ty forum to divert calls to call cen­ters,” Brown said. “Oth­er users have encoun­tered the prob­lem and post­ed a solu­tion. It’s not just about cost-effec­tive­ness, but real cost sav­ings. If they’re sav­ing mil­lions in a call cen­ter, they can put more mon­ey and mar­ket share in sign­ing [con­sumers] up.”

3. Valuable Feedback

Feed­back via user-gen­er­at­ed con­tent also helps brands under­stand what is good and bad about their prod­ucts and ser­vices and, by asso­ci­a­tion, where there might be room for improve­ment, notes David Elkins, senior direc­tor of sales at trav­el review site Tri­pAd­vi­sor.

Reviews on Tri­pAd­vi­sor, for exam­ple, have a “lev­el of con­sis­ten­cy that is sur­pris­ing.” When there is a prob­lem at a spe­cif­ic loca­tion (e.g., the WiFi doesn’t work), it pops up in mul­ti­ple reviews. A com­mu­ni­ty of con­sumers can essen­tial­ly band togeth­er and indi­rect­ly bring about change for good sim­ply by shar­ing their opin­ions.

Or, as Elkins puts it, user-gen­er­at­ed con­tent gives a bet­ter pic­ture of a brand’s actu­al prod­uct or ser­vice, which could also help mar­keters do their jobs bet­ter.

“Great jour­nal­ism is great jour­nal­ism, but one crit­ic ver­sus a world full of peo­ple review­ing con­tent [is not the same],” Elkins said. “I’m not say­ing a crit­ic can’t sway [con­sumers], but, over time, when you scale con­tent, you get the idea of the qual­i­ty of a prop­er­ty, restau­rant or hotel.”

Scott also said user-gen­er­at­ed con­tent is a good feed­back loop to brands and mar­keters.

“Hote­liers live and die by hotel reviews,” Elkins said. “Mar­keters, brands and com­pa­nies have a great oppor­tu­ni­ty to learn about what makes their busi­ness­es suc­cess­ful or unsuc­cess­ful.”

User-Generated Content Challenges

4. Checking All The Details

Brands choos­ing to incor­po­rate user-gen­er­at­ed con­tent must be incred­i­bly care­ful they get details like sourc­ing right.

Michael Sadi­cario, chief rev­enue offi­cer at social media cura­tion tool Sto­ry­ful, points to a tor­na­do in Brook­lyn a few years ago. A pho­to that made the rounds, even from major news orga­ni­za­tions, was actu­al­ly from years pri­or.

“In adver­tis­ing cas­es where peo­ple are using con­tent from oth­er users, [they have to make sure]: Was that per­son who post­ed it the orig­i­nal own­er?” he said.

Even major brands strug­gle with this. Sadi­cario uses the exam­ple of a post from Coca-Cola dur­ing the World Cup in which a trick shot video had about 500,000 views and then sud­den­ly shot up to 25 mil­lion views because P. Diddy’s team scraped it and put it in his pro­file.

“In that case, Coke doesn’t care, but anoth­er brand would,” he said.

Per Sadi­cario, at the end of the day, brands using user-gen­er­at­ed con­tent have to also respect prac­tices com­mon­ly found in jour­nal­ism.

“You need to make sure when you use it, you know every­thing about that piece of con­tent,” he said. “Using someone’s pho­to just because you tweet at them doesn’t give you legal rights.”

5. Having An Authentic Voice

Scott said brands must also make sure the voice they use with user-gen­er­at­ed con­tent remains authen­tic.

Mar­keters must also be care­ful to not post too many incen­tivized posts, Elkins said. He calls the prac­tice of hir­ing brand ambas­sadors with big social fol­low­ings a “slip­pery slope.”

“If done right, it’s accept­able, but, if not, they lose cred­i­bil­i­ty and if you’re pay­ing [some­one] for some­thing when they don’t believe in the prod­uct, it will res­onate and shine through,” Elkins said.

6. Respecting Boundaries

Like any­thing in mar­ket­ing, there’s also a time and a place for brand mes­sages with user-gen­er­at­ed con­tent.

“Think about it: the major­i­ty of con­tent [comes from] where peo­ple want brands to inter­ject and par­tic­i­pate, but there are oth­er places where they don’t,” Scott said. “It’s about under­stand­ing bound­aries and where [brands] have con­sumers’ unspo­ken per­mis­sion.”

7. Policing Content

Brands and mar­keters must also con­sid­er the issue of cen­sor­ship when deal­ing with con­tent sub­mit­ted by con­sumers.

Per Brown, it’s a com­pli­cat­ed issue when it comes to strip­ping out hate speech from con­sumer dis­course and so brands and mar­keters need to be care­ful when mon­i­tor­ing con­tent and com­ments.

“It’s all about what kind of con­ver­sa­tions do we want to have? Just because a com­menter dis­agrees with you, doesn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly mean it is hate­ful or harass­ing you,” Brown said. “So we have to make smart deci­sions about how we define those terms and what that means.”

Tom O’Brien, nation­al adver­tis­ing direc­tor at blog com­ment host­ing ser­vice Dis­qus, said brands and mar­keters don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly want to sti­fle debate by remov­ing com­ments alto­geth­er.

“You want to have an inter­est­ing dia­log and debate, but let that live and breathe and be sure you can mod­er­ate and con­trol, but let peo­ple have a con­ver­sa­tion,” he said.

Gen­er­al­ly speak­ing, com­mu­ni­ties tend to police them­selves any­way.

8. Keeping It Legal

Brands and mar­keters must also ful­ly con­sid­er all legal impli­ca­tions of using con­tent sourced via user-gen­er­at­ed con­tent.

In the case of a Time Out New York con­test that asked users to sub­mit food pho­tos, Michael Kel­ly, senior direc­tor of mar­ket­ing at Time Out North Amer­i­ca, said it was about mak­ing sure the legal lan­guage was clear and the right to use read­er pho­tos was clear­ly com­mu­ni­cat­ed to con­tent cre­ators. How­ev­er, he notes it was still a bit nerve-wreck­ing as the win­ning image was print­ed on the cov­er of the mag­a­zine, which meant once it went to print, there was no going back.

9. Storytelling Via Curation

When sourc­ing con­tent via hash­tag, Sadi­cario notes brands have no con­trol what might be post­ed, but if the brand adds restric­tions to what actu­al­ly appears, the feed is lim­it­ed and could end up just being a bunch of tweets with no pic­tures of videos, which is clear­ly less inter­est­ing.

“Try­ing to tell a sto­ry around the brand, that takes human cura­tion, which is a chal­lenge in a real-time sce­nario,” Sadi­cario said. “You have to have peo­ple who are trained about how to tell a sto­ry.”

Kel­ly agreed that there has to be some lev­el of cura­tion as well as an ongo­ing pro­gram that rewards par­tic­i­pants with some kind of cred­i­bil­i­ty or access for their efforts.

Like, for exam­ple, when Time Out is build­ing out its blog­ger net­work, it taps small food and drink blog­gers to help cre­ate con­tent.

“We can’t eat and drink our way through the city all the time,” Kel­ly said.

Successful User-Generated Content Campaigns

In the afore­men­tioned Time Out New York con­test, Kel­ly said, “It was a bit of a test about what kind of qual­i­ty we would see, but we were real­ly, real­ly pleased. We had well over 1,000 entries and they were high qual­i­ty. It was a lot of work for the edi­tors to judge.”

The brand also gen­er­at­ed buzz via Insta­gram.

“We were proud of that in our evo­lu­tion as a brand. Print is a big part of what we do and to bring it into the fold and bring in dig­i­tal and social was a real­ly nice case study for us,” Kel­ly said. “We see as the next step, bring­ing users in in a curat­ed way and com­bin­ing the plat­forms.”

Image Cred­it: Klout

For its part, Klout did a pro­gram with immer­sive video game Des­tiny in which it offered a Klout Perk to 20 con­sumers with large reach in the gam­ing indus­try to build buzz pri­or to the launch, which meant send­ing three cans of Red Bull and a copy of the game to those users so they could “get hopped up on caf­feine and see who [they could] kill,” Brown said. The pro­gram end­ed up with 177 mil­lion impres­sions and 18,000 pieces of user-gen­er­at­ed con­tent.

“It was not incred­i­bly cre­ative, but had a reach of 3 mil­lion peo­ple,” Brown said.

Image Cred­it: Dove

Final­ly, O’Brien points to Dove’s Real Beau­ty Sketch­es as anoth­er inter­est­ing exam­ple of a suc­cess­ful user-gen­er­at­ed con­tent cam­paign.

While the ini­tial pro­gram end­ed sev­er­al years ago, the con­tent was archived on a microsite – which incor­po­rates a Dis­qus fea­ture – and com­ments are still com­ing through even though the pro­gram hasn’t run in two years, O’Brien said.

“It’s an unbe­liev­able cam­paign. Those users are react­ing to the brand. Dove didn’t pay them,” he said. “It’s just tremen­dous earned media for that brand.”

What are some oth­er advan­tages or dis­ad­van­tages of user-gen­er­at­ed con­tent?