During our recent webinar, How Content Marketing Drives Search and ROI Success, Janet Driscoll-Miller and I talked about different types of content that can be created to help drive your organic search marketing efforts. We talked briefly about user-generated content (UGC), which can come in many different forms, such as reviews, forums, Q&A sites (such as Quora), member communities, customer support communities…the list goes on and on.

User-generated content provides several content marketing benefits, including:

  • UGC can shift the burden of content creation off the shoulders of the internal team.
  • It can help with generating lots of content over a short period of time, which can be indexed by search engines.
  • UGC comes from your customers and/or community, making it interesting story-telling content that can be effective for driving a variety of content marketing metrics such as website traffic, social media sharing and, that all important metric, LEADS.

BUT (and there’s always a “but”), this is not to say that user-generated content is the absolute answer for your content marketing woes or that it’s by any means easy to manage. If not executed properly or monitored closely, UGC campaigns can backfire in a major way.

Here are a few examples we talked about during our webinar (plus a BONUS example we didn’t mention) of what happens when user-generated content goes oh-so-right and horribly wrong:

read more User Generated Content: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

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