Business Advice

Brand Managers Are Running Scared Of Social Networking Initiatives

By Rob Marcus Director of Chat Moderators

User-Generated Content (UGC) is an increasingly popular brand marketing tool for many large enterprises today. It provides a fantastic opportunity for businesses to connect with existing customers and prospects with relatively little financial impact. For UGC to be effective the brand must retain credibility by exhibiting a relaxed attitude to submissions, especially critical ones, while taking care to avoid alienating its online community through heavy-handedness in moderation: it is the prospect of performing such a delicate balancing act that discourages...

...many brand managers from initiating social networking initiatives. And perhaps it's a marketer's worst nightmare to discover that the brand they are responsible for is associated with inappropriate, politically incorrect or even abusive content online. But steering clear of engaging in such initiatives altogether means companies could be missing a trick in terms of reaping the rewards of well managed UGC. How can businesses

- The inclusion of UGC to a business' website can bring with it many benefits. Namely, it provides a platform upon which the company can keep in touch with its customers on a regular basis. It allows customers access to interactive, frank and honest feedback.

- UGC is another way of raising brand awareness and improving online visibility via increased click-through activity and higher natural search engine rankings.

- Encouraging an evolving dialogue amongst your customers also creates new online content which will attract more traffic to your website. There is little appeal for a user to visit a static website where content rarely changes... continued on page two >

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