On today's guest blog, the first in a series of blogs from the Indaba team at SXSW, David talks about user-generated content.

I'm easing into the panels here at SXSW, so this post may seem a bit marketing and businessy, but I thought you all might be interested in hearing some of my thoughts from panels and discussions we’re having before those thoughts are clarified, solidified, culled, prioritized, and applied.

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I’ve been here just over 24 hours and I’m already struck by the lack of clarity in the market around the definition and application of social media in general, but user-generated content (UGC) in particular. 

THE FALLACY OF PERVASIVE BROAD “SOCIAL MEDIA” AND "UGC" LABELS
I often overhear marketers and brands talking about how they are (or are becoming/integrating) social media into their offerings and it sometimes concerns me that we’re moving colloquially toward a bad spot where “social media” means anything that involves people. 

The challenge is that defining it so broadly makes incorporating the concepts into programs extremely difficult, in part because there’s less distinction between posting a comment or testimonial and, say, collaborating on a film online using only video generated from the camera on your laptop.  More than that, an overly broad and unspecific definition implies that anything a person posts to the web is social media and, by extension, that because people post the core editorial content on most sites, a website itself is inherently social.

I’m of the opinion that the market will eventually work out something it’s comfortable with and that it doesn’t need me to define social media at a high level.  I will, however, note that I believe the line lies somewhere around [a] interactions primarily occurring between users vs. just between users and a site, [b] structure that encourages interactions between more than one user (so it has the potential to be a social setting vs. an intimate one-on-one discussion), and [c] is multidirectional (so interactions have more than one axis). 

My bigger concern is the impact a broad definition has on how we look at and talk about UGC.  The UGC panel I went to yesterday epitomized the problem:  too often, organizations don’t (or won’t) differentiate between different types of UGC and the reasons people create it.  If we don’t differentiate, we run a very real risk of not reflecting the creative process of the users and offering the right tools to facilitate the creativity that makes social interactions so enormously interesting.

After talking to several other organizations (for and non-profit alike) about their communities, I’ve begun to see two important points in working with UGC. 

EXISTING VS. ORIGINAL CONTENT
The first important distinction for an organization to make is between discussions, activity, and content that focus primarily on using existing content and those that center on original content (or content that the person creates without incorporating media created by others).

Organizations that fail to do this will end up with either underlying brand issues, technology/usability issues, or process issues.  A great example is YouTube, which falls prey to the first and second:  it both has a lot of great original content that gets lost among the poor-quality repostings of people’s favorite TV shows and hasn’t addressed some of the key underlying audio issues (e.g,. mono audio) that would drive many more serious users to post more completed content.

THE DYNAMIC OF COMMUNITY INTERACTIONS
More and more, the way people interact in a UGC setting influences the type and format of media they contribute. At a high level, interactions fall into three broad categories:

Observation + aggregation.  Basic interactions such as commenting and tagging media.   Examples include any site that allows basic comments, feedback, or reviews:  Netflix, Facebook’s photo tagging.

Distribution + dissemination.  Interactions focused primarily on viral dissemination of content or content sharing and hosting.  Examples include sites that encourage sharing insights or content organization:  Flickr, Twitter

Creation.  Advanced collaboration-focused interactions. Users not only post content they’ve created, but allow other users to engage during and around the creative process, whether that’s music or essays, design or film. The market will start paying more attention to these sites, in part because it’s where the content for other sites will increasingly come from.  

I have some initial thoughts for how organizations can approach social media - and UGC specifically, but I’ll save those for another posting.