Social Media 101 for Marketers: UGC is Everything
Social media is the single best and worst thing that has happened to brand marketers in the past decade. And it’s only the beginning. World wide there are 2.3 billion active social media users and growing.
For brands that effectively embrace social media, the rewards are significant and long lasting. For brands that continue to misunderstand the customer-driven social world that we live in today, the negative impact can be felt all the way to the bottom line.
User-generated content is at the core of social media, but many brands fail to embrace this by pushing their own message through their social channels. Brands and the agencies that represent them continually fail to understand what their customers want and how to communicate this through social media. This results in a negative user experience.
If you are a brand manager, take a look at your own channels. Ask yourself, if you were a customer, would you want to only see products, ads, and overly produced posts being forced in your feed over and over again? Or, would you want to see what other people with whom you share a common bond are saying, doing, and experiencing?
Brands need to better manage their social channels and embrace ways to natively engage customers by including them in their story. They need to foster a positive two-way dialog with stakeholders and stop pumping out produced content that serves as little more than free advertisements. Brands need to better understand how to most effectively utilize their many different social channels and how each product benefits their customers. A one-way approach falls short in today’s social and highly segmented world.
I am leading a new UGC platform that fills this gap in the social sphere called Chronicle, a visual storytelling platform that crowdsources visual history. For brands, Chronicle offers a unique and powerful way to truly include customers as part of their ongoing story. Platforms such as Chronicle allow brands to market to customers by associating themselves with the very lifestyle and subject that their audience lives for. For example, with Chronicle, Billabong could be part of the history of surfing, instead of just a company that sells surfboards and shorts. Chronicle, like Reddit, is an open community that facilitates user-generated content with the ability to moderate and co-moderate for quality control. These types of unique social platforms empower the community and allow savvy brand marketers to leverage UGC vs. having to rely on one-way conversations and branded posts.
The basic principle of branding is to create an emotional connection and build a lasting bond between customer and brand. Social media, when effectively used and managed, can achieve this fundamental marketing objective and benefit the end user for years to come.
