Incorporating UGC and Bottom Up Content Strategy into Your Thought Leadership Marketing Programs - Part 2

The first question Doug White asked to the panel of social media experts that initiated a lengthy discussion was, “What was your Ah-ha moment when you realized that your brand needed to have a social media strategy/presence?”

• Lee Aase (Mayo Clinic) mentioned that the Mayo Clinic was already providing syndicated content for broadcast and 60 second radio segments. He went on to say, “A light bulb went on with web video and podcasting... you can let users access the content directly and let them find exactly what they want.” It also helped that the brand has built its reputation primarily by word of mouth over the last 100+ years.

• Rick Short (Indium) took a more philosophical top-line route with his response, “We all naturally generate content. We like to talk and type about things; it costs practically nothing to produce content - blog software, cell phone, digital camera.” He realized four years ago that, “this tidal wave was coming at me...”

• Kevin Hoffberg (Decision Street) was in the middle of writing a book on customer service in 2001 and saw the UGC-developed PowerPoint deck defaming the Doubletree hotel brand. “It got really interesting when the CEO of Hilton saw it and had to start over with customer service training.” He went on to say that consumers are afraid of making ‘wrong’ decisions and that people are desperate to be connected to professional expertise. He left the group with another question, “How do people judge credibility online? We rely on both pure conversations and brand messaging.”

• Chris Curtin (Disney) has the fortunate experience to be tied to a brand that’s been around for 5 decades and is an incredibly viral brand naturally. He mentioned that, “every mechanism associated with UGC is well underway without proactive involvement from the brand,” and moved on to another point, “the better question is how do we interact with it [UGC]?”

Kevin threw out a question to the attendees of the session asking if anyone has been burned by their involvement with UGC and social media.

• Mike Murphy (EarthLink) was quick to respond, “[EarthLink] had to pull back from leveraging UGC. The most enthusiastic customers generally are the participants. We were hoping to have customers help each other resolve issues. There aren’t a lot of enthusiastic customers about internet service providers, because it is a utility. We had concern about negative user feedback, so we didn’t see it as a benefit to the brand.”

• Leisa Glispy (Armstrong) had a great point about the difference between UGC utilization for products v. services, “It’s rare to have a user rave about service, unless it’s truly exceptional. In the case of products, you can change or fix [the product] based on the user feedback.”

White changed the direction by asking about how to overcome obstacles with teaching your internal team or executive board about the importance of UGC tactics.

• Lee, “When I signed up for Facebook and found out I already had 11,000 members in my Mayo Clinic network - that was my real Ah-ha; why not trust people to publicly communicate? It can help improve the reach of your brand when you trust that your people are doing the right thing.”

• Barb Murphy (Weyforth-Haas), “It’s been easier to introduce the customer insight piece as a point of entry to help broaden the vision; for BtoB customers you have to start with the business decision and then translate the leadership team to understand the customer perception.”

• Kevin went on to say, “From an objective standpoint, it’s not hard based on stats. At the end of the day, we are all anecdotal thinkers and influenced by stories. Show them [your executive team] the Facebook page or take them somewhere to see it first hand.” He also mentioned it is a good idea to leverage personal experiences to craft your story.
  

• Leisa had a couple of additional food for thought points, “The technology will make it a part of daily life; authenticity is one of the biggest game changers.” She also brought up an interesting idea of syndication across multiple community sites, relating it to the disconnect that can sometimes happen between your identity on Facebook v. LinkedIn v. MySpace, etc.

Best Practices/Take Aways

• Lee, “Join the Frost group on Facebook as part of your homework from this event.”

• Kevin - “Get Flock, the uber cool social media web browser, layered on the Firefox backend.” (As a side note, I’ve been using this browser since it launched - I highly recommend it to anyone reading this).

• Chris, “Make sure you fully understand your brand. Don’t chase trends. Figure out what your [brand] voice should be and bring it to all spaces.”

• Rick, “Begin at the end. Don’t jump it because it’s the topic of the day - begin with your goal.”