ConsumerGeneratedMedia.com: Recently, my colleague Max Kalehoff and I put together a list of “Top Ten Principles of Consumer Consumer Generated Ad Campaigns.” Max added a few additional thoughts on top of this list in his most recent MediaPost column. You may also recall an earlier blog post on this topic in the context of Super Bowl advertising. Key message: by all means test the waters, but keep a good check list in front of you!
1. Connect The Program To Larger Business Goals: Ensure that your strategy aligns with well-defined goals and objectives, and create a measurement framework for program planning, tracking, adjusting and evaluating.
2. Keep It Authentic: Leverage the full creative power of the participants and don’t set narrow guidelines on the creative. .
3. Be Transparent: Don’t play fast and loose with the fact that the brand facilitated content creation.
4. Encourage Advocacy: Don’t be shy about allowing entrants to vote for their favorites and encourage their friends and family to vote.
5. Empower Syndication: Make it simple to upload, simple to share, simple to embed on blogs and other community and video platforms.
6. Tap The Long Tail: Don’t hesitate to leverage non-winners for other marketing purposes. Embrace them as passionate and loyal stakeholders, and use the Web site as a repository for their rich content.
7. Capture The Moment: Capitalize on “great brand moments” when consumers are highly vested and more likely to advocate, such as new product launches, purchases, or actual brand use and enjoyment.
8. Be Consistent: If you create an environment of dialogue and interaction, stakeholders will notice inconsistencies across other customer touch points or company silos.
9. Embrace Criticism And Deprecation: You’ve got to take the bad with the good. While a good strategy will acknowledge and plan for detractors, the reality is that everyone is empowered to publish.
10. Move From Campaign To Platform: Campaigns may have clear beginnings and endings, but there may be dimensions of your program that want to live on forever. Prepare a platform to facilitate and leverage sustained engagement and brand return.
Ten Tips & Principles of Consumer Generated Advertising Campaigns [ConsumerGeneratedMedia.com]
Categories
Business 2.0: As an eager young buyer for gourmet market Cowan & Lobel in Albany, N.Y., Rachael Ray spent hours spying on customers, looking for tipoffs to new trends. One odd pattern she noticed again and again: Many well-to-do shoppers would bypass the produce section and head straight for the prepared-foods counter. That gave her an idea: Why not run a cooking class for harried consumers, showing them how to make gourmet meals in 30 minutes flat?
ClickZ: With all the talk about user-generated content (UGC), marketers often overlook one of the most effective ways to exploit this concept: providing a way for your target audience to share their photos on your site. With today’s tools, photo-sharing is easier and more cost-effective than you might think.
Mediapost: With the childhood obesity issue and food marketing back in the headlines, McDonald’s is launching a summer PR effort it says is in response to consumer rather than political pressure. Six moms will serve as embedded citizen reporters, covering the company from the inside.