Blab #14: What is User Generated Content?

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Hello, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Marketing Labs. I'm your host, Tom Haslam. I'm the creative director here at Marketing Labs. Today, we're diving deep into a topic that's at the very heart of the social media landscape at the moment that is user-generated content. Joining me on today's Blab is Mel Healy, our head of content. How are you doing, Mel?

Good. Thank you, Tom.

Finished laughing fits yet?

I'm composed. I'm ready to go.

Same. Matt Janaway is also here with us, our founder and CEO. You good?

Afternoon, Tom.

Afternoon. You sounded very formal.

Yeah.

Did you mean it to be?

I did. I liked it.

And also last but not least, Josie Quigley-Jay, our digital marketing executive.

Hello.

You good?

Yeah.

We've been doing some stuff on social media today, aren't we?

Yeah. Doing some paid social ads for ML.

Yeah, more paid social, but it's still good stuff.

Yeah.

Nice. So we'll get straight into it then, shall we? I want to start by just defining what user-generated content is. Does anyone want to kick off on what it is?

So UGC is any form of content that is created by users instead of yourself as a brand or as a professional. It could be video, it could be text, it could be images, but it's content that's created by ideally your customers but also influencers and other marketers.

We see it a lot on applications like TikTok, for example. A good one that I saw was a brand called Hismile. They use influencers and, obviously, their customers quite a lot to talk about the products and how they promote them.

Yeah, I've seen a few from Adobe as well recently. They've been doing quite a few of... Where people have posted a video using their product. Any software or making particularly like jokes about editing and things like that, they'll repost that user-generated content.

Lush do a great job. Yeah, on the Lush website, on every product, if the product is used a specific hashtag, it pulls in videos of a bath bomb fizzing away, for example. That works nicely.

That's quite a good use for Lush, actually, because they don't have any social media presence anyway because they don't have their own profiles. They're still able to then use that content on their website rather than posting it themselves.

And you could argue that's actually much more natural and authentic than having your own social media. Not suggesting that people shouldn't have their own social media channels, but at the same point, often when you have your own social media channel, it's natural for people to just want to talk about themselves. But actually, UGC is all about, actually, what other people are posting about your stuff. It's much more authentic.

Is there any cases from a written perspective for UGC, or is it mainly visual images and stuff provided?

I'd argue actually UGC started with written content because, if you think about Amazon, for example, even 20 years ago, reviews on products, user-generated content. That's really the foundations of UGC is product reviews. But yeah, there's lots of benefits. Also, even outside of e-commerce, you've got blog posts where people comment on them. You've got forums that's all user-generated content.

Yeah. Have you heard any cases where you've had, I don't know, customers write blogs for your other jobs or anything like that?

Not customers, but guest bloggers, influencers, people in the industry who already have a following. If you can get them to do something for you, that's really powerful because they're sharing it with their followers, and you can share it with yours. So you're having more impact, greater reach. That's really, really powerful. But just echoing what Matt said, reviews and testimonials are user-generated content, and you can use those on your website or repost them on your social. So written as well as video and images is still just as important.

I suppose. It all comes together as like a trust factor, really, doesn't it?

That's the power of UGC, isn't it? It's the authenticity of the trust, the real experiences, real emotions. You can't really fake them. People try, and a few people get success with it, I suppose, but yeah, in reality, it's quite hard to fake.

What about influencers, though? Because technically, they've been paid, aren't they? In most cases, let's say for products that are sold online, is it as authentic as everyday Joe blogs buying a product and then just trucking a review on it?

Well, the interesting thing is, I find, and this is entirely subjective, I guess, but what I tend to find is, even if it is an influencer, it is no less trusting. I think it's actually more about it not being the company that's doing it. If you're talking about your own stuff naturally, it's less believable. Everybody does it naturally. Nobody's going to slag off their own product, for example. So I think even when it's an influencer, even if it's not a customer, it still holds a huge amount more weight than saying it yourself.

Yeah, because I mean as well, if it's in their niche, something that they're an expert on, and you would trust their judgement , their recommendation, then that's really powerful whether they're being paid or not, because they're putting their name to that. For them to put their name to that and risk their good name in the area they work, they have to have at least some belief in what it is that they're getting behind. So this partnership, for example, between Mrs. Hinch and Flash Products is really powerful because she's, obviously, a big name in home cleaning, she's chosen to get behind that of any brand. She could have picked any brand, but she picked that one. So you have to think there must be a reason for that.

Yeah, Mrs. Hinch is a good one, to be fair. Obviously, with that relation, I guess from what you're saying is the more the relation is with the end product and the user, the stronger it is.

Yeah, they're more likely to be trusted, I think, on things that they know a finger to about. There's always a little bit of distrust when it's something that you can't imagine that the person who's putting their name behind it could possibly know anything about. It's completely incongruous that it doesn't fit. There's no sensible association between the person and the product. So that's a tip for marketers out there choosing their influences. Choose wisely. It has to be believable.

And that's actually got better as well, I think. Have you found this?

I think it's gotten better, particularly because now things like Instagram of... Well, the law and legislation around ads and gifted products and stuff has changed. Obviously, it used to be... They could be any influencer could be paid to promote a product, but they'd never have to say that it was paid. While now it's much more somewhere in the description in if it's an Instagram story, somewhere on the screen it has to tell you whether it's an ad, whether it's a gifted product, whether they have any sort of investment in the company or that kind of thing. So that it's pretty transparent because I remember when I was growing up, obviously all sort of influencers and creators, past celebrities came from YouTube. That's where it all sort of began, and it was people going, "Oh, this is what I've bought today, a Halls or Boohoo or ASOS or makeup routine."

And from there, obviously, that was so natural and organic, and from there, it then grew to, they'd start to get sponsorships, and it was. I think a lot did declare back then, but since then, obviously, it grew and became much more of a hype, and so people were less likely to declare whether it was an ad or not because, as soon as you add that, I think even if the person has got a good relationship with their audience and it is a product they would genuinely use, sometimes even as soon as you put ad on it or paid promotion or gifted, it still adds that little bit of, oh, well, it's not 100% organic, it's not 100% their opinion because it is to an extent going to be influenced.

And I think brands have also probably clued up a little bit as well. So, we all know that there was a huge boom around influencer marketing, probably for the past five years now, and in my opinion, it has peaked and it's probably in the decline now because it often doesn't work as well as people would like. And the reason it doesn't work is because not enough thought goes into who the influencer is and who their audience is. And a lot of that comes down to just how natural a connection it is. So the fact that people have been burned, so to speak, with their spend or giving away products or whatever else it might be, I think just putting a little bit more thought into it makes quite a big difference, and that definitely seems to have improved, I think.

There's specific examples of what we were saying about the person being relevant to the product. There's one. There's a guy who I watch on YouTube all the time called Marty Schwartz. He's-

What does he do?

He's a guitar player, and if you want to learn a song, pretty much he's done a tutorial on every song. He's been around for years. But every now and again, he promotes guitar brands. So if Marshall bring a new amp out, for example, he'll do like, "Oh, little plug, I'm just testing this amp for Marshall." And obviously no one really minds because obviously they're still interested in that person because you're learning from them, for example, in this case. But I think going back to that, on the flip side, if a brand, let's say, I don't know, someone who had some face cream, for example, wanted to promote that they just chose someone who just came out of Love Island just because they've come out of Love Island and got loads of followers. There's a bit of a difference there, isn't there?

There is. And you can also see it a mile away because when that does happen in those situations, actually almost every post they do is then you can see a mile away that almost all of their posters are basically sponsored. And like Josie said, they are supposed to highlight it. They don't always, even now, although that has improved, but you can spot them a mile away if you go on an Instagram profile like that. Someone who claims to be an influencer, whether they do influence or not, is not really relevant at this point. But if you look down their posts, and the vast majority of them are actually just basically advertorials, you are removing the concept of the social proof that user-generated content provides. So selecting who you work with in that sense is the key to making it work.

I think there's a lot to be said as well about the strength of the community the influencer has set up for themselves. So going back to Mrs. Hinch, the community she's built around her brand is so, I would say, resilient. That even when it is an ad, it's still consumed with good faith by her audience because she has built a very solid audience of people who I think fit a certain criteria. When she does put something out there, it's very much consumed by her audience and taken on board. There's a lot of trust there. She's built a lot of trust with her followers.

I think as well, coming off again with the trust with the audience and sort of what Matt said of someone that promotes a lot, there are some influences that have promoted bad products in the past, and then that does break that trust. I remember, like I said, a lot of my knowledge has been around YouTube influencers, and I never particularly watched a girl called Gabbie Hannah, but there was a massive outrage all across the internet, not just at this YouTuber, but I think there's been a couple of instances similar where she promoted, I think they were these makeup brushes that were ridiculously overcharged. I think they were meant to be on offer, you could get them cheap or something.

So all of her audience, which were quite a young audience as well, were buying these, and they were awful quality. It was clearly just something that was done for an ad promotion, and they were terrible quality. And then moving forward, your audience doesn't have that trust with the influencer or creator. So if you are, as a business, going to someone that has got not a great track record for these products, they're happy to just partner up with anyone, then that's probably something to avoid.

Can I add something into the mix here as well?

Yeah, go for it.

So the initial topic really started around the benefits of UGC, and mostly we've been speaking about social so far, and I think that's clearly where the whole point of it is a social thing, but it has benefits outside of social media as well. So good UGC, for example, is great for SEO. Getting content on your site can show really good engagement statistics and signals to various search engines, potentially if they wanted to use those as ranking signals, but also fantastic for long-tail keyword content, really good way of improving pages, and I guess adding that social proof onto your page, so there's the added benefit there as well. And I think the other thing inside, for example, Google Ads, so the reviews make a big difference. We do this a little bit with our case studies and testimonials, their social proof. At the end of the day, it is user-generated content. It's user-generated content that we've-

Polished.

... polished and turned into something that's-

On brand.

... presentable and on brand, but ultimately it's still user-generated content. And that's very valuable, not just for social but also for ads and SEO.

I suppose on the SEO side, it might help with backlinks as well, I don't know 100%, but...

Could do potentially, depending on what it was. Absolutely, yeah, there's loads of byproduct benefits, I guess, of doing it. Ultimately, your main goal needs to be about social proof, proving that socially that there's a community behind your product that trusts it. But outside of that, there are loads of benefits.

I guess, we talked about, like you said, quite a lot of benefits of UGC from a number of different aspects, SEO, social media, mainly social. Obviously, we know now that people use that or brands use that as ahead of their own content because of that social trust or social affirmation, whatever you want to call it. But what about the challenges and concerns of UGC? Like we've said, risks of using influencers. Josie, that was a really good example where someone had promoted a product that wasn't great, and then they lost all that trust straight away. So there's got to be a good balance, but I think there's a big risk for sometimes people using the content without authorising it by the user, if that makes sense or copyright.

Yeah, I'd say there's probably, off the top of my head, I think there's three areas. The first one is misuse, and somebody else using it that they shouldn't really. The second one is misinformation. So, for example, we talk a lot about negative SEO and the impacts potentially of somebody having a negative SEO campaign against a website. You could easily do the same thing with UGC and make it look genuine. So there's a risk there.

And I think the final risk as well is around, I guess, how... One of the common conversations you might have when you start actively pursuing reviews, for example, is, brands will say, "The problem is, if I have an automated campaign asking for reviews, am I going to attract the people actually that weren't impressed?" So people that you might have not given a good service to, they might not like the product, and actually, that can harness negative UGC potentially. So they're the three risks, really. If you are opening yourself up to something like this, you've got to be pretty confident in your service and your product. Otherwise, the UGC might actually be negative, but certainly misinformation as well is a big one.

I think the hospitality industry has been grappling with that for a long time, hasn't it?

Massively.

And on sites like Tripadvisor and Booking.com where people are generating their own content with their own pictures they've taken and even video, and then a written bit of blurb to go with it, and it's not always fair and it is always very heavily, it's very subjective, and one person's experience might be very different from another.

And they have different ideas. And I read once, so when me and my wife went to New York probably maybe five or six years ago now, whenever it was, I was looking for some reviews of various things, and I remember reading one. I think it was the hotel bar, I can't remember what it was. And basically, all of the reviews were incredible, apart from one. And when you read this really long review, she was ever so angry at this woman, and it turns out basically that she was really annoyed because the flight was bad, but it pissed her off for the rest of her experience, and then that negatively impacted, you could follow her reviews around, and she was just really annoyed that day, and she reviewed two or three things. And that's a great example of where, actually, okay, it's authentic, but something outside of your control can sometimes leave a bad taste if you like.

I always like watching the reviews. If it's say a video review, for example, I'm going to use guitars as an example because I've just been looking at them loads, but people who actually give really honest reviews of a product or it's great for this, but it could be better here. Some people, like we say, they just focus on the good all the time. Sometimes you want to know what it's maybe downfalls are.

Well that feedback's incredible, isn't it? If you care about improving your product or your service, that feedback's gold dust.

Massively. And even if it's just a little thing like, "Oh, this button could be slightly different," or "This dial could be in a different position," then that's going to inform the people who develop and design the product to make it better, like you say, but also honest reviews to people who are going to be potentially buying it. And I think that's stronger than just being like, "Oh, it's amazing," just people lying about it in a way.

Well, that's the other beauty about UGC as well, isn't it? Because if it's good user-generated content, what it used to be is people doing exactly that, and you do still get it, of course, you do, but actually the best user-generated content is much more informative and honest. So actually, having those negatives or the things that maybe aren't quite perfect in there actually adds value to the rest of what they're saying.

Yeah. It adds value to the customer who's potentially going to buy it and adds value to the brand itself, as they can then improve.

Because it's a good social listening tool because you get into the psyche of the end user, so you can look at the way they talk about your product and the things they really like about it, the features, the benefits, the way they use it, and you can use all of that then to inform your campaigns and improve your products, and it just goes straight back into the cycle again.

Are there any ways that we can protect UGC or brands can protect UGC, do you think?

Yeah, you could watermark your videos. That's one way of doing it. You obviously don't want them to be too heavy, but if they're watermarked, that can sometimes help. Also utilise things like Google image search, do a reverse image lookup of your content, and see if people are using it and stealing it. And that's always a risk, isn't it? Unfortunately, when you put anything out on the internet, it can be used by other people.

It's quite important to protect that. Actually, you gave a really good example the other day, Josie.

Yeah, so it's sort of back to the power of user-generated content, but there's one that's been circulating recently. So there's a product called the Stanley Cup. It's sort of flask water cup that anyone would do sort of travelling around the car. And this video had been uploaded to YouTube. This woman had had, I don't know if it was an accident that caused it, but basically her entire car had gone up in flames, melted, burned everything on fire, and she was videoing the inside of a car and points out the cup holder in the middle. There's a Stanley Cup sat fully intact, looking a little covered in ash, but fully intact opens it, and there's still icing. So her entire car had gone up in flames, and this Stanley Cup had managed to still keep her drink cold, and Stanley Cup had even then responded, and I believe they've bought her a new car.

But that's an incredible user-generated content, example of she obviously wasn't asked to do that. She didn't deliberately set her car on fire, it was pure fate. And they've then been able to profit off the back of that by proving how good of a product it is.

How powerful is that? Even though they've obviously bought her a car and lost some revenue, they've probably made more back by people buying.

And they've made way more than that car is worth back.

I would suspect. So it's hard to put money on these things, isn't it? But when I saw the video, I'm sure it had something like a million likes, and that was the same day. So it's certainly getting lots of exposure.

Well, what's interesting though is thinking about this the other way also, and that if you are a brand and you want to use some of your customers content, you do need to ask permission for that too.

Yeah, that makes sense.

It's not just the other way around, so that you've got a broker a deal there to make sure, unless, of course, they've provided it to you, and there are ways that you can sort of incentivize that by running campaigns and competitions, and things like that to get that kind of content.

Yeah, there's loads of benefits, and obviously there's some risks as well, and you've got to protect that content as well. Just to finally wrap up then, what do we think with regards to the future of UGC? Do we think there's going to be any emerging trends or anything that's massively going to redefine UGC AI needed?

Continuation of short-form video, for sure. Everybody now, I think this is the best way you need to think about UGC. Everybody now that uses social media is basically a microinfluencer and that's the best way of looking at it. And actually, I would argue that's more powerful than utilising the conventional influencer process. There are still some that are very powerful. As Mel said earlier, Mrs. Hinch, for example, incredibly powerful to align yourself with someone like that. But at the same point, that's going to cost you money. And there are literally millions and millions and millions of users who are very active that won't want paying. They just do it because that's what they do now. It's part of their digital social life, if you like. So for sure, that's going to become more and more of a thing over the next few years, certainly, and we've seen it. I know we've talked about this on a previous podcast, but we've already seen Instagram, YouTube, they're trying to copy off TikTok because TikTok shot to stardom, if you like, with short form video.

So YouTube and Instagram, they're all trying to do similar things, and I think there may well be more platforms that follow suit. Yeah.

Nice. I think I've enjoyed that quite quick as well. Very informative. I hope you've all enjoyed it. Been on.

Yeah.

Thank you, Mel.

As always.

Thank you, Matt. Thank you, Josie.

You're very welcome.

Nice. So there you have it, folks, user-generated content. It's not just a buzzword, it's a fundamental shift in the way we interact with social media. It's essentially moulding the online world, giving everyone a voice, and reshaping the way that brands and businesses connect with their audiences. Thank you very much for tuning into today's Blab. I hope you've enjoyed it. If you found this episode insightful, then please consider subscribing to Marketing Labs on Spotify. And remember, the world of social media is constantly evolving, so stay curious and keep creating. Bye.