Connected Consumers are Collectively Shaping Your Brand
Put Web 2.0 to work to harness this phenomenon

From media sharing to wikis to social tagging, user-generated content reflects a powerful way for consumers to control and enrich their online experience. Although it may seem scary for most businesses, user-generated content also represents a golden opportunity for marketers: by harnessing this phenomenon, companies can get closer to their customers, strengthen brand loyalty and capture new ideas and insights.

The emerging role of connected consumers—combined with the explosion of other digital technologies—has transferred control of marketplace conversations from marketing organizations to consumers. In short, people are already talking about your company and your products and services online—the good, the bad and the ugly. While this kind of warts-and-all public discussion may make you nervous, there’s no going back. It’s the nature of the Web.

When consumers are connected, individual acts transform into collective power. Today consumers can rate and review products and services, offer advice to each other and contribute to the relevance of their own experience. They can upload photos and share stories—and contribute positively or negatively to your company’s reputation. Consumers are making their voices heard; rather than ignore the inevitable, many companies are actively participating in the dialogue. Those that don’t participate in the dialogue might lose marketshare to those who do.

We are surrounded by television, print, advertising and a plethora of digital devices. As a society we have become overwhelmed with people clamoring for our attention. In advertising circles this is called the "clutter" effect, and that clutter has made it harder to effectively deliver messages that stick. In short, the digital age has created a "stickiness" problem.

Increasingly, marketers are leveraging the Web as a way to break through the noise and solve the stickiness problem. They are actively engaging their site visitors in a dialogue and learning how to encourage and manage consumer contributions to their website and, by extension, better manage their brand.

The Social Content Lifecycle Defined
Connected consumers increasingly insert their voices into the marketplace in ways large and small. Consumer contributions to websites take five primary forms: ratings and reviews, social networking, tagging, editorial control and collaborative publishing.

1. Ratings and reviews: Consumers are smarter today and more apt to research the Web before engaging a service or purchasing a product. Research shows that consumers tend to be skeptical and, therefore, find peer ratings and reviews more compelling than the opinion of the "experts." In short, we trust websites that promote ratings and reviews and reward them with our loyalty. Ratings and reviews are even more powerful when they are a component of a social network, discussed in the next section, where the commentary comes from a community with shared perspectives.

The strongest argument for promoting ratings and reviews is that customers are already sharing opinions about your company and your products and services. Ratings and reviews allow you to elevate that conversation onto your website, where you can monitor it, influence it and learn from it.

Best Buy is a good example of a big brand that leverages ratings and reviews. On its home page, Best Buy encourages customers to review any product in "three easy steps." They take the manufacturer’s content, such as SKU data and product specifications, and add some of their own marketing content in the form of persuasive copy and photos. They then open it to the "community" for additional commentary and concerns or—hopefully—extra positives that other consumers would like to know about. Best Buy is counting on the voice of the community to increase the value of their Web channel and positively contribute to sales (while also getting great data that could influence how they manage their future inventory).

2. Social networks and online communities: Social networks, made popular by sites like MySpace and Facebook, are websites that provide a virtual community for people interested in a particular subject or who just want to "hang out" together. Members create their own online "profile" and communicate with each other by voice, chat, instant message, videoconference and blogs. Social networks have quickly moved beyond meeting places to become unpredictable arbiters of taste, music and politics.

Initially developed for social interaction, the concept also works in business environments. Companies can participate in these "destination" social networks as well as create, manage and/or sponsor their own. The social network model can be used to build an online community connected by loyalty to your product and the desire to talk about it. In another form of social networking, business networking sites have absorbed traditional business networking practices and taken them online.

Jeep.com has taken social networking and leveraged it for marketing purposes. Jeep’s home page directs you to the "Jeep experience," which offers a Jeep photo feed and a Jeep video channel as well as links to Jeep MySpace and Jeep Facebook. As they like to say, "The Jeep brand ‘social network’ actually started a long, long time ago—grassroots-style. Now we’re bringing it all together, online. Let’s see what ya got."

3. Community tagging: Giving users the ability to organize and classify information on your website via "tagging" can be a very powerful attraction. Think of a tag as a key word or category associated with your content. Many companies leverage tags today to classify and organize their content based on an internal, corporate taxonomy. Now, your users can help you prioritize and classify content in the way they best understand it, making it easier for them to find the information they need. Community tagging can increase time on websites, repeat visits and complement or improve search engine results. Community tagging can also help extend the reach of your content into other online networks frequented by your target market.

Technorati is a good example of "social tagging" at work. It leverages the tags provided by authors of blogs to organize and more effectively market their content on the Web. As a result, Technorati has become a critical hub for the centralization and distribution of information.

4. Editorial control and user prioritization: As the Web evolves, the model for editorial control—what content to present when—is increasingly based on consumer behavior and preferences. The principle is simple: most people are interested in similar things. The behavior of your broader community of users, therefore, is a great model for determining the value and priority of editorial content. Allowing content to "bubble to the top" based on what users click most can be a great way to streamline the online experience. In a more sophisticated scenario, retailers track online purchasing or research behavior and deliver recommendations for cross-selling purposes. For example, "people who looked at this item also looked at that item." In another twist, some product manufacturers use voting as a customer service tool to prioritize product improvement. At Interwoven, search results are prioritized by ranking.

Notable examples of allowing users to drive editorial content include:

• CNN’s and USA Today’s most-read stories;
• Yahoo’s most-e-mailed photos; and
• Digg’s stories that got the most votes. 

5. Collaborative publishing: Led by the success of the Wikipedia model, which allows individuals to edit pages and collaboratively create content, a number of business websites are inviting their customers to engage in deeper, more collaborative contributions. Collaborative publishing environments are largely self-policing, which means that errors and extreme viewpoints are filtered out by the collective intelligence. When you encourage knowledgeable customers to contribute product information beyond basic reviews, you engage them in a positive way. You also simultaneously improve the site experience for everyone else.

Amazon.com now has wiki functionality on its product pages. Customers can extend existing information with more photos, directions on how to configure or set up products, and even detailed schematics of electronic components and plug-ins, such as those that exist in the back of high-end stereo systems.