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

Vanity anaytics or “vanalytics” is the placing of your personal calling card into another website’s analytics data.

Direct Referrers in Google Analytics

A direct referrer is usually meant to indicate that your website URL was pasted or typed directly into a browser address bar.  While this is a useful stat, the growth of Twitter has started to skew this data.

Many links that are clicked via desktop applications such as Tweetdeck and Mail, and browser plugins like TwitterFox show up as direct referrers in Google Analytics.

WebTrends Outsider has a good list of reasons for “Direct Traffic” in referrer reports.

Manually Adding Analytics Data to Link

You can manually add query strings to your URL that will provide referrer data to the Google Analytics code in a website page.

For example, when I broadcast a message on Twitter stating that I have a new blog post, I use the following:

New Blog Post: Vanity Analytics http://www.jambrose.ca/vanity-analytics/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=tweet&utm_campaign=blog RT SVP

This pretty ugly, so I shorten the URL with bit.ly:

New Blog Post: Vanity Analytics http://bit.ly/QuWlH RT SVP

When someone clicks that link, the following is recorded in Google Analytics:

Creating a Vanalytics URL

Now that you have control over how your referrers are recorded in your Google Analytics, why not spam someone elses?

For example, when I retweet a great Twitter post, I use the following:

RT @TheOnion New Live Poll Allows Pundits To Pander To Viewers In Real Time http://www.theonion.com/content/video/new_live_poll_allows_pundits_to?utm_source=@jaysonambrose&utm_medium=tweet&utm_campaign=retweet Super funny!

Shortened (check out the video, too):

RT @TheOnion New Live Poll Allows Pundits To Pander To Viewers In Real Time http://bit.ly/16kLMW Super funny!

This makes my name appear in Google Analyics for The Onion!

Since The Onion already adds their own query strings to their tweets, I would leave it as a matter of ettiquette.

But if you are just sharing a link with your Twitter followers, why not take some credit for spreading the word?

Of course, there is good chance no one will see your tag on a large website’s analytics, but it might get noticed on a bloggers list.

I admit this is a goofy idea, but I thought it would be fun to coin Vanalytics and Spamalytics!

Can you think of some funny, smart or easter-egg-style Spamalytics?

Lighter Side, Social Media

At Filemobile, I manage the deployment of a number of UGC contests. People upload pictures, videos of things they like, explain themselves to a webcam or write a story in order to be considered for a prize.   It’s pretty straight forward until you have to pick a winner.  You could go with a random draw, but that’s no fun.  A classic voting scheme keeps people coming back, it provides a sense of competition and it produces a winner.

Contest hosts want to maximize the number of times a person can vote.  If you do not wish to have users log in to vote, they can vote repeatedly.  Although this can translate into page views, more and more UIs are moving to a stationary experience, where pages are more dynamic and don’t require page refreshes.  In order to prevent people from just hacking away at it, or writing scripts to vote automatically, we always require a captcha.  Why not just disable the vote button and set a session cookie?  This is unreliable because some users (like my paranoid dad) have cookies disabled for various reasons.  This means some people will never know that they are not meant to have unlimited votes.

There are a number of options for a voting process if you require the person to log in.  Our system is able to attribute votes to a logged-in user and hence regulate the frequency of voting ie. voting once per day, once per entry, etc… Daily voting generates more engaging page views, as users return repeatedly to complete the experience (however short!).

The main problem with having people log in to vote, is that they have to register. Registration pages are notoriously bouncy: people hit them and split.

This is a good primer on bounce and exit rates.

Long site registration forms can be the touch of death, but there are ways to minimize the bounciness with shorter forms and potentially, services like Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect,  and other single sign-on systems.

A two-step process would make it easier for a person to engage the site and as a result, lower the bounce rate on that page. The first step is a fast and simple, one-click register experience.  Once a person is logged in, he can vote and comment. He has a display name, an avatar, and all the fixins.  You can see this happening on this very blog using Facebook Connect.

If the person wishes to submit an entry to the contest, we need some more information.  Another form is presented to them, asking for name, address, etc… At this point, we would not require a captcha.

In the case where a 3rd party identity isn’t used, users must at least enter a password and confirm their email in order to participate.

Here are some ways people try to log fraudulent votes, and what to do about it:

1) A cheater can register repeatedly with phoney email addresses, and basically get unlimited votes. Without centralized identity, we can mitigate this by sending activation emails (yuk). The alternative is the contest host being prepared to manually search a vote log xls file and disqualify votes.

2) The cheating bastard could write a script to break your captcha and vote like crazy, automatically. A good programmer can use a combination of OCR software and other methods to read and crack a captcha. A better captcha makes this possible for only the more rare wily hacker. At that point, we can usually detect a crazy number of vote requests coming in via IP address. The user is denied access, and we can determine an estimated number of fraudulent votes.

3) The best fail safe is to simply reserve the right, in the rules, to use discretion in selecting a winner. If some jerk does manage to cheat, turf him.

I think voting is fun and effective for UGC contests.  If publishers and sponsors take the appropriate care, ensure a reasonable user experience, and allow discretion in the rules and regulations, voting can contribute greatly to the success of the project.

Online Advertising, Social Media contests, SSO, UGC, voting

This is the first blog post I have had time to do in the last 1.5 months.  If I worked at Expedia, I could have designed and built an entire website and produced two videos as a joke.

Honestly though, a great viral marketing campaign!

Lighter Side, Social Media marketing, viral