Tips on getting your business user-generated marketing campaigns right.

Chat Moderators, today unveils the top ten mistakes that business make when introducing an online social media initiative.

Based on eight years of customer research during the escalating popularity of User Generated Content (UGC) as a marketing tool, Chat Moderators has discovered that many businesses are making the same mistakes over and over again.

Customer intelligence has shown a number of examples of bad practice and a certain level of naivety regarding social networking initiatives including the common mistake of thinking that your audience won’t mind if you remove their submissions just because you can’t take valid criticism.

They certainly will mind and any attempt you make to deny justifiable criticism will simply compromise the integrity of your initiative.

Other common mistakes include:

• Not publishing a straightforward set of rules for the creators of uploaded material.

• Not creating a sophisticated set of rules for the judges of uploaded material.

• Not verifying the email addresses of registrants.

• Not having the software tools to record why you might have removed certain content.

• Not having the software tools to reinstate removed content, to remove previously approved content or even to simply ‘hide’ content that needs further investigation.

• Not being able to judge UGC from a back-end queue and instead checking submissions via email or the ‘front end’.

• Imagining that any brand secrets or skeletons in your brand cupboard will stay undiscovered.

• Assuming that your audience will generate content as on-brand and on-topic as your marketing department does.

Perhaps one of the biggest mistakes is: Not taking any interest in the initiative post-launch, Rob Marcus, director at Chat Moderators explains: “It’s often the most obvious things that are the most surprising in these instances. After all of the work brand managers seem to put into planning and creating an easily navigated and moderated social network at the start of the process, they forget to stay close to it. The early days are so important if you are to avoid cliques of troublesome users from developing. You need to ensure that your objectives are not going to be undermined by content that you hadn’t expected if you are to gain an influential foothold.

“Don’t be afraid to actively engage with your audience from time to time, especially to clarify misunderstandings. If you do so, don’t pretend to be someone other than who you are; the proud brand custodian who’s willing to listen”, concludes Marcus.

 

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