UGC Through Social Media

May 11, 2009 by Steve Schultz @GeniusbyOsmosis · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Social Media

As a businessperson what’s the one source of information you would pay anything to access? Your customers. As a politician, you should be thinking the same thing. Except, with social media, the only thing you need to pay is attention.

UGC is something you’ll see floating around there and if you don’t know what is you’re going to learn it’s the most important thing to your campaign if you want to use grassroots politics. UGC | User Generated Content.

I’ve touched on this once before but if your constituents don’t have an outlet to contribute to your message you will fail in the world of social media. The only thing you really need to learn though is how to build these outlets where they can contribute.

Facebook: Facebook groups and pages allow for tons of UGC. Through discussion pages and other applications you can give your followers access to contribute. Remember, it’s not always public by default. I haven’t checked lately since FB made all these changes, but you may have to go in manually and make your pages public or at the very least, public to an individual few you trust.

Twitter: This one is tough, especially for politicians. If you use ghost tweeter as a politician and people figure it out, your toast. While it’s okay for businesses and organizations to do this the Twitter-sphere doesn’t like it, and understandably so. Well, the best way to do it is through hashtags. Create a hashtag that your supporters can use in their tweets. This at least allows them to categorize their tweets as your supporters and their tweets will get indexed as such. You could also look into selecting some to set up second Twitter accounts they can use when tweeting about what you’re doing.

YouTube: Let your followers create videos and upload them to your YouTube profile. Afraid they might upload something bad, don’t, you can moderate them.

Blog: When you’ve identified some supporters you can trust, invite them to be contributors/authors and blog for you. Not only does this create UGC, but it creates a ton of content period which ultimately makes you more findable on the Internet.

UGC is crazy important. Find ways to give your constituents the chance to share and not just join the conversation, but start the conversation. Don’t for a second think your staffers count as UGC….they don’t.