Jayson Ambrose

Whether you are running a contest, an online audition or a community assignment, attracting UGC submissions can be a challenge. Here are some tips that you can apply to your campaign to draw more content from your website visitors.

Experiential and luxury prizes

While a huge cash prize can bring in a tonne of submissions, you are also going to attract pros and cheaters.  Professional contesters scour the net for fast, easy contests and know every trick in the book to stuff the ballet box.  A large cash prize is sufficient motivation for a good developer to build software to exploit your user-friendly entry process.

Branded contests and communities should be more interested in attracting their core fans and getting them excited and involved.  Music fans will sing into their webcam, remix a video or create an original tour poster if it gives them a chance to meet their favourite band, get the limited edition box set or win an autographed guitar.

Make it Easy

Don’t make me think, don’t make me work.  If at all possible, don’t even make me get up: let me say / sing / yell something into my webcam.  Got a digital camera?  Capture the everyday everyman: “Show us your backyard and win a patio set” or “Show us why you need a new car”.

Because most users need an imagination kick-start, one of the most critical elements for a successful campaign is seeded content.  Nothing causes a high page bounce rate like the message, “Be the first to enter!”

Reach out to your internal network and get them to submit a video or photo.

When all else fails, have people upload a picture of their pet!  Canadian Living has blown the doors off the UGC contest standard with two massively successful editions of Most Lovable Pet 2009 and this years 2010 campaign.

Attractive Association

I don’t want to be perceived as evil or a sell-out for participating.  For example, “Show us how you club, and win a trip to Baby Seal Island” or “Tell us why you love Telecom Customer Service” are bad ideas and should be avoided.

Facebook Connect

When I upload my video, a link is automatically posted to my Facebook stream.  When someone comments or votes, they can instantly tell all their friends.  We have seen huge referral numbers from Facebook on our UGC campaigns.  Campbell’s Chunky Most Valuable Coach in particular is a great example of getting the most out of Facebook Connect.

Multimedia Commenting

Text comments are great, but enabling comment attachments and webcam responses, you can increase the number of photos and videos on your site.  Start a discussion or set a community assignment that facilitates the use of photos and videos.  For example, a men’s forum might have a thread for the best hair style, while women might enjoy exchanging pictures of their gnarliest scars.

Community Management

As I’ve written before, community management is key.  These days, growing an online community organically can be challenging if not impossible.  Community management is the growth hormone and industrial pesticide of niche networks and brand-centric discussions.

Your niche community might be a resource for customers, such as a support forum or advice column.  Depending on the technographics of your target audience, your manager(s) may be the life of the party, getting people excited, loosening them up and letting them participate in a way that keeps them feeling comfortable.  The authors of Groundswell, a Forrester Research joint, provide the Consumer Technographic Profile Tool for figuring out what makes your audience tick.

Quality user-generated content, and multimedia in particular is not something that comes easy.  Applying some of these tips to your next campaign, contest or community discussion will help keep things fresh and unique.

Social Media

EMarketer recently published research into interactive ROI, and concluded that the primary objectives of online marketers are to aquire and retain new customers.  Now it’s the fall and little has changed.

There are a number of projects, technologies and tactics that can be deployed to drive customer aquisition and retention, and I will be focusing on how publishers and brands can apply their online community platform for this purpose.

While the explicit definition of the terms ‘customer’, ‘acquired’ and ‘retained’ vary across organizations, I consider a new registered website user to be acquired, and a returning registered website participant to be retained.

Top interactive tactics include email and SEO

“For online marketers”, says David Hallerman, eMarketer senior analyst, “search is the most effective tactic for customer acquisition, and e-mail is the most effective for customer retention.”

Below is a breakdown of interactive marketing tactics.  Email is still the weapon of choice, and many of the other tactics are methods to add to the email database.

Niche communities should also be included on this list of tactics for several reasons.

First, they can provide value to existing and potential clients via support forums and knowledge exchange.

Second, these communities, if seeded, supported and nurtured by a community manager, can also reenforce the primary tactics of SEO for acquisition and email for retention.

Acquisition through community SEO

Eric Enge of Search Engine Land writes that “[t]here is the widely held belief in the SEO community that social media will be a major source of ranking signals for the search engines in the future.”

Using search engine optimized web applications that include blogs, commenting, forums and Q&A can build many more pages of relevant content. By enabling and encouraging sharing of that content, and setting up complimentary external social networking pages, you can greatly increase the number of quality, relevant inbound links.  Inbound linking is critical for SEO.

Site Suite has a good article on inbound linking, and Lee Odden describes the 5 Essential Steps to social media SEO success at Mashable.

Inside Facebook also provides an excellent guide to optimizing your actual Facebook fan page for search engines.

Community Managers should actively participate in the conversation, answering questions, and adding additional topical links.  They should quote and link industry blogs, and share community discussions in the comments of those blogs.

Focus on adding value for your audience, and you will grow your community.

Retention through community participation

Community platforms generate branded, direct communications from fellow community members.  Because these messages originate with others in the community, they tend to represent trusted advocacy sources and are less likely to be ignored.

Branded email can be generated by a number of activities:

• Digest content update (daily, weekly, etc…)
• Content matching specified interest has been posted
• Comment made on posted content
• Comment added to thread
• Content sent to fellow users
• Internal message waiting
• Registration welcome email
• Friend request or follow notification

Niche communities can also have any number of custom message triggers such as, “UserBob thinks you are funny” or “HandyHardware is interested in building your house”.

Each of these emails could be HTML emails with image branding, commercial calls to action or even banner ads, all in addition to the actual message linking back to the site.

MailerMailer recently published an Email Marketing Metrics Report (summarized by eMarketer.com).  The chapter How Personalization Affects Open and Click Rates states:

“Personalizing the message itself is associated with higher click rates. It is also correlated with higher open rates, though open rates are generally more influenced by the subject line, sender name, and subscribers’ relationship with the sender.”

Community-generated email perfectly provides these elements because the subject is timely and relevant to the user and the sender name can be the familiar community or a fellow member name.

If you have ever received an email from YouTube or Facebook stating that someone has commented on your content, you understand that opening it is irresistible.

How many emails can be expected?

This depends on a wide range of factors including the number of members, nature of the community and level of engagement.

An example is the wildly successful CBC’s Hockey Night in Canada Anthem Challenge that was built and run by Filemobile on the Media Factory platform.  The website logged 90,000 registered users, 80,000 comments, and 35,000 content shares.

That is 205,000 branded messages generated by the community in 90 days (and this assumes only one person saw a social network share message!)

This was not a permanent community, but shows how many messages can be generated by a great campaign.

Community management is key

This point is worth restating.  Active community management is key to acquiring and retaining customers online.

• Engage users personally and improve the breadth and depth of the conversation
• Push discussion points and conclusions out to the social web to link people back

The content created by this cycle draws people in via search and keeps them coming back with personal email.

For some great insight on community management, read this series of articles by Dawn Foster at Web Worker Daily.

Online Advertising, Social Media community

This was my first time attending ProductCamp Toronto and I was very impressed with the quality and value of the event.

I had the pleasure of leading a session entitled “Business Driven Product Management” where we discussed the finer points of taking the crazy out of the sales deck.  Luckily, I had Peter Hanschke, Al Huizenga, and Allan Neil in the room to back me up, and it was a great conversation.

The next session was “Power Tools for Product Managers” by Saxophonist Alan Armstrong.  In the short hour we had, Alan briefly described his approach to sales funnel win/loss analysis, which I found to be tremendously interesting.  I reckon this could have been a valuable four-hour session on its own.

Next was lunch.  Talk about value!  This was the second of three catered meals on the day!

The first session in the afternoon posed the question, “What is your favourite PM tool?” led by Barry Paquet of Quantum Whisper.  The group discussed experiences with different product management software packages, including the good, the bad and the useless.  Hakan Kilic of Ryma Technology and Kim Phelan of I Love Rewards added their valuable insights as well.  Conclusion: There is, and probably will never be one PM software to rule them all.

The final session of the day was “The strategic role of product management” led by Steve Johnson of Pragmatic Marketing.  This one hour session was just the tip of the iceberg that is the topic of The Pragmatic Marketing Framework – A Market-Driven Model for Managing and Marketing Technology Products.  I will hopefully have a chance to attend one of their three-day seminars soon.

The day closed with some booze, some jazz and some chat.

I highly recommend this event!

Join the ProductCamp Toronto LinkedIn group.

Uncategorized product management

The Walrus, Canada’s celebrated magazine of ideas and culture, has an immediate opening for an experienced online editor. This is a regular, half-time, contract position located at the magazine’s office in Toronto. This person will be responsible for the creation and execution of web content and web marketing in collaboration with the magazine’s editorial, circulation, and publishing departments – as well as the activities of the charitable, non-profit Walrus Foundation.

Apply at www.walrusmagazine.com/jobs

Uncategorized

Filemobile, the company of which I am a proud member, placed #6 in Backbone Magazine’s “20 companies that are driving innovation and changing the way we use the Internet”.

[Kate] Trgovac called this “the company I wish I had founded. White-label social media components that other companies can use: super smart.” [Michael] O’Connor Clarke called Filemobile a standout player in a crowded market because of its “breadth of solution offering, the flexibility of the UI, the quality of the analytics and the availability of functional APIs.” [Krista] Napier highlighted brand management: “Filemobile’s solution enables brand management with editing tools to let customers moderate their media services and approve and deny content, so they can protect their brands while simultaneously extending themselves to find and engage customers.”

Read the full article at backbonemag.com

Filemobile Filemobile