About user generated content
- Details
- Aangemaakt op vrijdag, 22 juli 2011 14:42
- Geschreven door Stefan
There’s a lot of talk about what user generated content actually is on the internet. Are people asking questions about their products? Are people reviewing the things they bought?
The last week I’ve spent some time reading and annotating random posts from our crawlers manually… a boring task normally outsourced, but very rewarding on the knowledge you gain about the information you’re dealing with. And while my conclusions are not statistically valid, I do think we should look differently towards user generated content. Here are my conclusions:
- Yes people do start topics such as news items (or things they see as news), questions about something that bothers them or a product review.
- Usually in the correspondence after this, some people give a reaction on-topic, thereby answering the question or providing more insights about the topic.
- But after that, there’s just a lot and a lot of chatter.
Curiously, the chatter is usually not on topic, but much more like any “normal” conversation between a number of people. The only important difference is that outside intrusions are normally permitted and often even expected. If you think about it, it makes sense: people like to communicate and if a new suitable medium arrives (whether it’s a phone, sms or a forum doesn’t matter), conversations will emerge. Social media is no different from this.
You wonder why this is important?
- Most engagement and social monitoring companies will tell you that people are doing sensible things online and things they talk about have meaning. I can assure you, this is usually not the case: most people are just having a good time with conversation.
- Engagement of discussions as professional company will only makes sense if you tell the people who you actually are. This both explains “hit and run” behavior and also gives people context.
- If you’re engaging people in webcare, topicality is important. It doesn’t make sense to help someone with a product issue, when they are having a good time with idle conversation.
- Most information on the web is not important for you as a company, just like most phone calls in the Netherlands are not important for you as well. The reason is they are usually not about your company, but simply mention it.
- By simply listening to the chatter, you do gain valuable insights in how people perceive your brand, a market or a product and how they talk about it.
To get you more insights, I can recommend reading a couple of posts on the most extreme example of this chatter, which can be found on http://forum.fok.nl . Perhaps you have more insights to add?
