- Joseph Singh
May 24th, 2018
MCS
Jonah Brucker Cohen
Whether you want to believe it or not it is happening and it’s in right now, and possibly forever! What you may ask, well it’s UCG(User Generated Content). Within the next coming years, people won’t only have professionals to do the take of creating or producing content and material, rather it will be a wide spread open call where whomever would like to take a whack at the task at hand can.
Also knows as User Generated media, UCG is any form of content created by users of a system or service and made available publicly on that system. UGC most often appears as supplements to online platforms, such as social media websites, and may include such content types as blog posts, wikis, videos, comments or ecommerce.
With the Vast amount of social Media websites or apps and the advanced technology we have today, helps further my reasoning in why this is the future of technology. With all this access we are now being exposed to, its opening doors to opportunities that we did not have before.
Going viral is basically when you make a post picture or video that’s good and begins to accumulate a lot of views. Following that, it gets shared reposted and commented on or about and then you have just give viral. The reason I an mentioning going viral is because many people who just create random post go viral and begin to make a career out of there fame and sometimes May turn out actually successful. At this point in time the internet isn’t going anywhere, so I can say the sane about going viral, and going viral can be an outcome from producing great content.
Back in 2014, the Coffee Franchise Starbucks created this contest which basically made everyone who wanted to design a cup and submit it to the contest judges, and who ever had the best design would be the winner and have there cup out for the month. This contest was one of the many success stories that’s involve UCG.
Another successful campaigns was the “shake a Coke” can campaign. Basically, Coca Cola would have names on can and bottles of coke. And if you find you name you could take pictures and upload them or even just share a coke with someone that has the same or a similar name to yours. This was a huge success because it generated a lot attention and made the want for the product rise. Such a simple idea, yet so ridiculously effective. Just by putting names on its bottles, Coca-Cola was able to prompt an enormous amount of user-generated content. People just seem to love sharing pictures of Cokes with names on. Go figure.
With both cases, they succeeded because rather than leaving the public in the position of a consumer, they opened doors for us consumers to some levels of creative control and in essence generated way more advertising for their products by people constantly posting or sharing about the item.
Both worked out so well for the companies because by giving the consumers access to creative control ultimately created more want for the product as well. Furthermore, it created more hype over the product which had positive effects on the brands advertising, and revenue numbers.The more people who tried to contribute and be apart of the movements, the higher the desire for the product increased.
In my opinion, UCG is going to be the future. With the creation of technology and social media came great opportunity for unprofessional and amateurs to switch roles and be creators, not only consumers. And with this great achievement, we now have YouTube, Vine, and the show Ridiculousness. I can predict that the future will be the dawn of a new age called “The Age of the Professional Amateur” and have many more great things to come.
