User-generated content

Definition

1. Publication requirement: While UGC could be made by a user and never published online or elsewhere, we focus here on the work that is published in some context, be it on a publicly accessible website or on a page on a social networking site only accessible to a select group of people. This is a useful way to exclude email, two-way instant messages and the like.
2. Creative effort: Creative effort was put into creating the work or adapting existing works to construct a new one; i.e. users must add their own value to the work. UGC often also has a collaborative element to it, as is the case with websites which users can edit collaboratively. For example, merely copying a portion of a television show and posting it to an online video website would not be considered UGC. If a user uploads his/her photographs, however, expresses his/her thoughts in a blog, or creates a new music video, this could be considered UGC. Yet the minimum amount of creative effort is hard to define and depends on the context.
3. Creation outside of professional routines and practices: User-generated content is generally created outside of professional routines and practices. It often does not have an institutional or a commercial market context. In extreme cases, UGC may be produced by non-professionals without the expectation of profit or remuneration. Motivating factors include connecting with peers, achieving a certain level of fame, notoriety, or prestige, and the desire to express oneself.

Media pluralism

History

So what we're going to do, if I have your agreement that we're going to produce such a dictionary, is that we're going to send out invitations, were going to send these invitations to every library, every school, every university, every book shop that we can identify throughout the English-speaking world... everywhere where English is spoken or read with any degree of enthusiasm, people will be invited to contribute words. And the point is, the way they do it, the way they will be asked and instructed to do it, is to read voraciously and whenever they see a word, whether it's a preposition or a sesquipedalian monster, they are to... if it interests them and if where they read it, they see it in a sentence that illustrates the way that that word is used, offers the meaning of the day to that word, then they are to write it on a slip of paper... the top left-hand side you write the word, the chosen word, the catch word, which in this case is 'twilight'. Then the quotation, the quotation illustrates the meaning of the word. And underneath it, the citation, were it came from, whether it was printed or whether it was in manuscript... and then the reference, the volume, the page and so on... and send these slips of paper, these slips are the key to the making of this dictionary, in to the headquarters of the dictionary.

Motivation for creating UGC

1. Implicit incentives: These incentives are not based on anything tangible. Social incentives are the most common form of implicit incentives. These incentives allow the user to feel good as an active member of the community. These can include the relationship between users, such as Facebook's friends, or Twitter's followers. Social incentives also include the ability to connect users with others, as seen on the sites already mentioned as well as sites like YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter, which allow users to share media from their lives with others. Users also share the experiences that they have while using a particular product/service. This will improve the customer experience as they can make informed decisions in buying a product, which makes them smart buyers. Other common social incentives are status, badges, or levels within the site, something a user earns when they reach a certain level of participation which may or may not come with additional privileges. Yahoo! Answers is an example of this type of social incentive. Another social incentive is social comparison. Being aware of the user's own ranking or level among the whole community could affect the behavior as well. Social incentives cost the host site very little and can catalyze vital growth; however, their very nature requires a sizable existing community before it can function. Social incentive can also be split into identification and integration. The identification motivation has strong external standardization and internalization of behavioral goals, such as social identity, that is, users will follow some subjective norms and images to constrain and practice their behaviors. The integration has the strongest external standardization and goal internalization, and the agent often integrates its actual actions with the subjective norms of the environment, so it has the effect of self-restraint and self-realization, such as the sense of belonging. Naver Knowledge-iN is another example of this type of social incentive. It uses a point system to encourage users to answer more questions by receiving points.
2. Explicit incentives: These incentives refer to tangible rewards. Explicit incentives can be split into externality and projection. External motivation is more inclined to economic and material incentives, such as the reward for engaging in a task, which has little internalization and lacks relevant external norms and constraints. Examples include financial payment, entry into a contest, a voucher, a coupon, or frequent traveler miles. Direct explicit incentives are easily understandable by most and have immediate value regardless of the community size; sites such as the Canadian shopping platform Wishabi and Amazon Mechanical Turk both use this type of financial incentive in slightly different ways to encourage user participation. The projective agent has some external norms, but the degree of internalization is not enough, that is, it has not been fully recognized by the actor. The drawback to explicit incentives is that they may cause the user to be subject to the over justification effect, eventually believing the only reason for the participating is for the explicit incentive. This reduces the influence of the other form of social or altruistic motivation, making it increasingly costly for the content host to retain long-term contributors.

   Ranking and assessment

• Community-based approaches rely on establishing ground truth based on the wisdom of the crowd regarding the content of interest. The assessments provided by the community of end users is utilized to directly rank content within the system in human-centered methods. The machine-centered method applies these community judgments in training algorithms to automatically assess and rank UGC.
• User-based approaches emphasize the differences between individual users so that ranking and assessment can interactively adapt or be personalized given the particular requirements of each user. The human-centered approach accentuates interactive interfaces where the user can define and redefine their preferences as their interests shift. On the other hand, machine-centered approaches model the individual user according to explicit and implicit knowledge that is gathered through system interactions.
• Designer-based approaches primarily use machine-centered methods to essentially maximize the diversity of content presented to users in order to avoid constraining the space of topic selections or perspectives. The diversity of content can be assessed with respect to various dimensions, such as authorship, topics, sentiments, and named entities.
• Hybrid approaches seek to combine methods from the various frameworks in order to develop a more robust approach for assessing and ranking UGC. Approaches are most often combined in one of two ways: the crowd-based approach is often used to identify hyperlocal content for a user-based approach, or a user-based approach is used to maintain the intent of a designer-based approach.

Types

Blogs

Websites

Video games

Advertising

Retailers

Educational

Photo sharing

Video sharing

Effect on journalism

Use in marketing

• It encourages more engagement with its users, and doubles the likeliness that the content will be shared.
• It builds trust with consumers. With a majority of consumers trusting UGC over brand provided information, UGC can allow for better brand-consumer relationships.
• It provides SEO Value for brands. This in turn means more traffic is driven to the brands websites and that more content is linked back to the website.
• It reassures purchase decisions which will keep customers shopping. With UGC, the conversion rate increases by as much as 4.6%.
• It increases follower count on various social media platforms.
• It helps integration with traditional marketing/promotional techniques which in turn drives more conversions for the companies.
• It helps in increasing profit with significant reduction in costs for the company.
• '''It typically low cost promotion since content given by free for firm's customers.

  Opportunities

• The companies could use social media for branding, and set up contests for the audience to submit their own creations.
• The consumers and general audience members like to engage. Some have used a storytelling platform to both share and converse with others.
• To raise awareness, whether it be for an organization, company, or event.
• Gain perspectives from members that one wouldn't otherwise get to engage with.
• Personalization of the content put out; 71% of consumers like personalized ads.
• Encouraging participation can be weakened by company claims to owning this content.

  Criticism

Legal problems

Copyright laws

Research