User Generated Content: Understanding its Impact Upon Contributors, Non-Contributors and the BBC

This is just too tantalising for words:

The main findings of the research were that:

• There are 5 main types of "UGC" and they fulfill 6 different roles within the BBC
• Journalists and audiences display markedly different attitudes towards the five types
• Technology is changing the volume, ease and speed of gathering news material and sources, but traditional journalism practices still important
• "UGC" at the local level is particularly interesting
• Overall there is support from the audience for the ways in which the BBC has been using "UGC"
• Specific calls to action are most useful for news gathering and when eliciting high-quality relevant comment
• only a small, select group of people submit "UGC"
• UGC should never be treated as representative
• significant barriers to participation: digital divide, social economic background, lack of impetus, and - most interesting for me - negative perceptions held by general audience of contributors
• contributors want a real world impact for the contributions - eg. "If it was going to be read by Gordon Brown, then of course I'd submit it..."

The study also identified a typology of audience material:

• audience content
• audience comments
• collaborative content
• networked journalism
• non-news content ("photos of snowmen")

I hope we find out more.

Editors are more neurotic than readers

"58 percent of editors said letting journalists join online conversations and give personal views would harm journalism, but only 36 percent of the public agreed."

Nice to have some research back up this counter-intuitive claim that we've always assumed here. Of course, it's not quite as satisfying as saying that 64% of the public thinking that it enhanced journalism, but you can't have everything.

This research is from an Online Journalism Credibility Study.

Other interesting findings:

Some 70 percent of editors surveyed said requiring commenters to disclose their identities would support good journalism, while only 45 percent of the public did.
...

Expressions of personal views seem to help boost readers' interest and trust in Web sites, said John `Bart" Bartosek, editor of The Palm Beach Post in West Palm Beach, Fla., and chairman of the credibility committee for the AP managing editors group.

"That's contrary to most of the traditions we've all grown up with, to keep our opinions, viewpoints and personal lives out of our story," Bartosek said.

Somewhere in there is something about readers feeling more trust when they feel they know the person behind the journalist (c.f. blogging).

Ribbed for their pleasure

I'm being ribbed over at one of the Computer Weekly blogs- Downtime.

Affectionately, I hope.

They say...

User-generated content of every kind is all the rage in the meeja right now, and nowhere more so than online, where every website wants to prove it's passed Engagement 101 with flying colours. So much so that the trend is now officially a source of mainstream parody. Just watch this from the BBC's Mitchell and Webb show...

Selling user-generated content

There's a really useful document on Marketing Sherpa called Marketing Wisdom.

In it, "101 [good number!] marketers and agencies share real-life stories and lessons learned."

It contains e-marketing tips based on marketers' experiences such as "short email subject lines achieve better open rates than long ones".

Useful anyway, but the $127 price tag on the front of the document also got me thinking.

Acutally, it's not $127 , it's free to download, but it reminds me what a great source of material UGC is and how people love to see themselves in print.

Print (I reluctantly concede) confers prestige and people love to be in it.

To be featured in a real live book on sale to the world is also alluring. And now that self-published book printing can be achieved cheaply and easily through sites such as lulu, wouldn't it be easy to package and sell UGC collections (with the full permission of the users, of course) - tips, anecdotes, photographs, recipes.

If it flies, it flies. If it doesn't, nothing much lost.

I'm thinking, I'm thinking...

Oh, and you can download Marketing Wisdom here.

Metro MEview UGC video shares revenues with uploaders

Interesting development on the UGC video front at Metro where people uploading video can potentially earn money.

The new service is called MEview and apparently "every time one of your clips gets downloaded to a mobile you earn 20p."

But online views count too apparently:

We'll also ask you if you want to put an advert at the beginning/end of your clip. And every time somebody views your video, you get paid by the advertisers. During the beta phase, you will be paid £1 for every 1,000 unique views from UK IP addresses of any of your video clips. This means that if 100,000 separate people within the UK view your clip, you earn £100.

So far the top video only has just over 1,000 views so I don't think anyone's going to become a millionaire overnight quite yet, but it's an interesting idea.

Also quite open to abuse - one could download Otters Holding Hands (9 million views and counting) from YouTube, upload it to Metro and chance the fact no-one notices.

Of course, someone WOULD notice, but I'm just wondering whether this is going to end up being a moderation nightmare for Metro.

Where I think they've missed a trick is in localising MEview. The paper versions of Metro are distributed in Bath, Birmingham, Bradford, Brighton, Bristol, Cardiff, Coventry, Derby, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leicester, Liverpool, London, Manchester, Nottingham, Newcastle, Wolverhampton and York. These are "communities" which might encourage people to upload videos of local interest. But there's no such regionalisation on the Metro website.

Anyway. I'll be watching with interest(that and Otters Holding Hands again, obviously).

It's an ill wind...

There's nothing like a forest fire story for moving web news forward. We've had our own equivalents here recently and it's brilliant for helping focus the mind on what news is really about.

Martin Stabe reports how a San Diego TV station:

has responded to the crisis on its patch by taking down its entire regular web site and replacing it with a rolling news blog, linking to YouTube videos of its key reports (including Himmel’s), plus Google Maps showing the location of the fire.

There are links to practical information that their viewers will need at this time, including how to contact insurance companies, how to volunteer or donate to the relief efforts, evacuation information and shelter locations.

It’s an exemplary case study in how a local news operation can respond to a major rolling disaster story by using all the reporting tools available on the Internet.

Update: Mark Potts has a great blog post looking at the online coverage of the fires. What’s missing from local media’s coverage, he says, is user-generated content. Not so at the San Diego NBC station, though.

Both the Los Angles Times and San Diego’s public broadcasting station KPBS are using Twitter to provide rapid, rolling updates of the fires. A piece on a Wired blog explains how to do it. Both are also among those tracking their fire coverage on Google Maps.

All that and celebrities' houses in peril too. It doesn't get much more exciting than that.