Marketing Mashups: Navigating Consumer-Driven Marketing
“User-generated content.” It’s become a buzzword unto itself. Internet users embrace Snakes On A Plane. Beck and Janet Jackson encourage music fans to take their music and turn it into something else. Google Maps makes itself available so that programmers can layer it over something else entirely to create something new entirely.
But what’s the motivation for users to generate all this content?
The top reason, according to session moderator Marissa Gluck, co-founder and Managing Partner of Radar Research, which investigated this exact question, is simply: for the fun of it. Rounding out the top five reasons users generate content: to hone technical skills, to create art, to amuse friends, and because they’re fans.
Which sounds like an awful lot of fun, to be sure. But what’s it all mean to marketers? John Stichweh, Director of Global Interactive Marketing for the Coca-Cola Company, asked the questions that a lot of people in the room, and countless marketers not in the room, are trying to figure out: What is the effectiveness of these executions? How do I link these tactics to actual sales? If these people are already passionate about my brand, how much incremental benefit is derived from spending resources on these tactics?
The result was a provocative discussion among panel members that also included Ian Schafer, CEO and Founder of Deep Focus, and Cory Treffiletti, VP of Media Services for Real Branding. The session (one of the best panel discussions I’ve seen at any conference) could easily have gone on for two hours, with a third for audience questions.
Cory opined that user-generated content may be less a sales vehicle and more of a reminder mechanism, as well as a knowledge mechanism: For a mature brand like Coke, it’s a way to find out what users are saying about you, as opposed to building awareness or selling product. Ian agreed that we can all agree sales is the bottom line, adding that consumer-generated media can be an important good will medium.
As moderator, Marisssa had the easy job: She was able to stand back and let the conversation flow. Toward the end, though, she asked a crucial question of the panel: “What advice would you offer a company considering sponsoring or creating fake blogs?” Cory provided a pithy response: “Don’t do it.” After all, as John added, “you can’t manufacture authenticity.”
Great advice. Ignore it at your peril.
