Consumer Generated Content: Making It Work in Your Social Media Strategy

This book discusses the growing popularity and reliance of consumer generated content on our everyday lives and how marketers can utilize it. Consumer generated content involves various social media platforms. These platforms include, to name a few: community discussion forms, product review sites, and social networking sites. These sites are heavily driven by consumers, often labeled as Consumer Generated Content or User Generated Content. With constant changes in consumer attitudes towards consumption, marketers are consistently looking for ways to reach out to consumers. These changes in consumers behavior are becoming evident as consumers try to keep up with the technology advancements and gradually increase their dependence on the internet. Thus, as part of their promotional efforts, marketers turn to online media for support. Contributions in these consumer generated content sites are on voluntarily basis, either paid (e.g. sponsored) or non-paid (e.g. personal blogs). A good example of a company utilizing consumer generated content in their internet marketing strategy is Heinz, a company known for their sauces (e.g. ketchup). Heinz is an active online community member promoting their products by encouraging participation from their Heinz community. They encourage participants to share recipes and ideas (using their products) on their community discussion boards, as well as seek opinions for dish names proposed for restaurant which uses Heinz product as part of their menu items. To increase participations from their Heinz community, they compensate with Amazon gift vouchers. However, despite the convenience of knowledge transfer via the internet, there are still disadvantages and difficulties in the use of consumer generated content. This book aims to provide valuable knowledge to marketing practitioners as well as marketing students. This concise book gives an overview of what consumer generated content is and describes its role in this twenty-first century consumers decision-making process. In addition, based on a combination of academic research and practitioner-based market research data, this book informs readers on the pros and cons of CGC and what they should do to make sure that they are taking advantage of such a tool and using it properly in marketing operations. This book includes information not only from a US perspective but also from a cross-cultural perspective (e.g. East vs. West). A concise book suitable for marketing students, marketing practitioners as well as marketing academics.