(I started off keeping this brief and it kinda just expanded so here goes…)
It's a term that started to hit the mainstream during 2005 and refers to online content that is produced by users of websites as opposed to traditional media producers (publishers, production companies, broadcasters etc). In a nutshell, UGC is the democratisation of content production through the availability and use of new technologies. Some now commonplace examples of this include blogging, podcasting, vodcasting and mobile phone cameras. Web users today are empowered with mobile devices and relevant applications that allow them to quickly and easily capture, create and publish text, image and video.
Websites leading this revolution include this (Blogger), Flickr, Wikipedia, MySpace and YouTube - all places where us, individuals, have a voice. In effect, we not only visit and use the site, we are the site.
There are a number of impacts of UGC to organisations such as Devotion. No longer will we solely create sites with pre-determined content and structured architectures, there will now exist the opportunity to develop frameworks and infrastructure for ‘non-media professionals’ (Wikipedia term) or ‘citizen reporters’ to publish their own opinions/pieces/work. The great thing about this is that what makes the web live is us. Our presence, is the web and brands/companies are now realising the power of giving some of the freedom they tried to control back to the user.
The hard part for marketers working in this space will be to understand what happens when user-amassed wisdom forms communities of influence. Will technology deliver the ability for massive brand backlash seen recently with Coke Zero, or will we be able to step past that?
The thing to be aware of is that this isn’t just emerging, it is here. Forrester (April 2005) states, that “nearly half of all on-line consumers say that they’ve watched streaming video in the past month… With broadband households doubling from 31 million to 64 million in the next four years, access to online video is becoming standard both at work and at home.”
Flickr (bought by Yahoo!) has a community in excess of 2.5 million users while MySpace, recently acquired by Rupert Murdoch has 65 million users. Both of these Sites are indicative of the resurgence in the new high-tech wave brought on by Web 2.0.
In April 2005 the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) established a UGC team with 3 staff. Following the July 2005 London bombings and the Buncefield oil depot fire, the team was made permanent and rapidly expanded. ‘Citizen journalists’ sent in over 5000 photos of Buncefield and broke the true scale of the London bombings on the web 10 minutes after the first bombs occurred. It took the radio and TV broadcasters over 45 mintues to actually confirm that these were indeed acts of terrorism and not ‘gas explosions’ as was first reported.
Closer to home, the September 2004 Australian Embassy bombing in Jakarta was instantly captured and the images published on Flickr by 3 different users. At the time, Flickr had only 60 000 members.
These patterns haven’t gone unnoticed and sites like the SMH have cottoned on and are now seeking audio, image and video footage from their users. The following snapshot shows a footer that now appears after most articles the SMH publish. Also note the links to del.icio.us and Digg, but that's for another time - more really cool UGC stuff... go investigate.
Websites such as Newsvine and AC Associated Content, The Peoples Media Company are now garnering huge spheres of influence. Although delivering yet more content to the web, they allow us, the user, the ability to legitimise what we read. We now have the means to pull content from many sources, commercial and free, and develop our own opinions. An example of this would be to read an article on the conflict in the Middle East on the SMH or News, both commercially backed entities and then clarify our own position by seeking independent reports from UGC sites such as Newsvine. To quote the late Don Chipp, this is a way for us to “Keep the Bastards Honest”?
And it’s not all about news. It’s a well documented rumour that MTV, at the cutting-edge of youth broadcasting across multiple mediums, is currently developing a standalone UGC channel. A whole MTV sub-brand essentially owned and run by the audience.
Triple J has very successfully launched Triple J Unearthed in the last 3 months to amazing success. After being in radio format for 30 years and the breeding ground for unsigned Australian artists, they have handed it over to the people. No longer do Triple J manage the music they receive, no longer do they play what they believe will be of interest to the audience – the audience now choose what they hear and when they hear it. Essentially, it’s about empowering the user.
Further to this point, here’s an except from an interesting article in Newsweek Magazine, The New Wisdom of the Web. I’ve included a large slab here but if you have time, and it is long, it’s well worth reading.
“The smartest guy in the room is everybody. Tim O'Reilly, an early promoter of the Web 2.0 idea, says, ‘The central idea is harnessing collective intelligence.’ This sounds lofty, but is actually happening all the time on the Web. Every time you type in a search query on Google, what's happening under the hood is the equivalent of a massive polling operation to see which other sites people on the Web have deemed most relevant to that term. Magically, it yields a result that no amount of hands-on filtering could have managed. ‘It's clear that the Web is structurally congenial to the wisdom of crowds,’ says James Surowiecki, author of a book (The Wisdom of Crowds, naturally) that argues that your average bunch of people can guess the weight of a cow or predict an Oscar winner better than an expert can. That's why some people believe that an army of bloggers can provide an alternative to even the smartest journalists, and that if millions of eyes monitor encyclopedia entries that anyone can write and rewrite (namely, the Wikipedia), the result will take on Britannica.”
And the wake up call:
“Less than a decade ago, when we were first getting used to the idea of an Internet, people described the act of going online as venturing into some foreign realm called cyberspace. But that metaphor no longer applies. MySpace, Flickr and all the other newcomers aren't places to go, but things to do, ways to express yourself, means to connect with others and extend your own horizons. Cyberspace was somewhere else. The Web is where we live.”
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