Sending a shiver down many a marketer’s spine, experts are presenting talking about UGC (!) at MediaPost’s Content Marketing Insider Summit. Yes, having backfired a time or two, UGC
campaigns make many brands “nervous,” admitted Beth Tomkiw, Chief Client Officer at McMurry/TMG. But user generated content need not put a brand’s reputation at risk, she insisted.
Take a campaign the consulting firm did with UPS, which encouraged customers to send in their favorite driver stories -- rather than encourage people to share their stories via social media channels.
That way, the brand and partner agency were able to safely package the stories and produce what then became sort of a UGC-light campaign. Indeed, there are plenty of similar ways to do UGC in “a
controlled fashion,” said Susan Getgood, SVP of Integrated Marketing at SheKnows. “There are ways to produce UGC that doesn’t look like the Blair Witch Project,” she assumed.
