User Generated Content

Content in which a company calls its own product good runs into a limit: readers file it as advertising before they read it. The same sentence is a claim when the seller says it and testimony when a user says it. No amount of production budget closes that gap.

The gap showed up in numbers at Pagedeck once. Ravi's feature video stalled at 1,200 views. The same month, a user wrote up their own way of organizing team meeting notes and posted it, and that write-up reached 8,000 people. Forty of the inquiries that week came from it, and it cost nothing to produce.

User generated content (UGC) is the practice of treating what gets made that way as a marketing asset. Gathering, selecting, and clearing permission rather than producing, which makes the handling nothing like ad production. Exposure that comes from other people mentioning you unprompted is earned media, and content users post is the largest part of it.

Running it as a program takes five decisions. Gather without making them and you end up with a folder mixing what you can use with what you can't.

1. Content types — what to collect. One-line reviews, write-ups explaining a workflow, screenshots, short videos, questions and answers from a community, and templates users built and shared are the common ones. Each type has its own home: a one-line review goes on the pricing page, and a workflow write-up catches people arriving from search. Collecting a type with nowhere to put it is how the folder fills up unused.
2. Collection routes — where to find it. Sweep hashtags and account mentions, read through community posts, spot it inside support replies and reviews, or ask a specific customer directly. The first three find what already exists; the last asks for something to be made, and it works only with customers who already got a result.
3. Permission — whoever posted it holds the copyright, the right belonging to whoever created a work. Public or not, moving it into company advertising takes separate permission. Writing down where, for how long, and in what form you'll use it, then getting that confirmed, is the safe version. A verbal yes ages badly.
4. Attribution rules — how the author gets named and how the original gets linked. Use the name and affiliation in the form the author wants, and set the line past which trimming a sentence would change its meaning. Get this wrong and someone who gave you something out of goodwill never does it again, and they tell others.
5. Whether anything was given — separate content made after money or products changed hands. If something was given, the content has to say so; unsaid, it's advertising disguised as a review.

Rewards work better when they aren't cash. Featuring a good write-up on company channels with a link back to the author often beats money, because what the author wanted was reach. Start paying and from then on nothing gets written without payment, which is a worse position than the one you started from.

Users make it; the company gathers, selects, clears permission, and places it. The owner is usually whoever handles social and community. Many teams sit it next to organic social — earning reach by running accounts without ads — because the finding and the posting happen on the same screen.

Four groups read it.

1. People evaluating a purchase are the largest audience. A signal that others use something, helping someone decide, is social proof, and a line written by a user does that work. One attributed line outpulls ten written by the company, and the name is what does the work.
2. Existing users read it too. Seeing someone else's workflow, they start using a feature they had skipped. Here it functions as documentation rather than as a marketing asset, which is a reason to keep it easy to find inside the product.
3. Sales uses it in meetings, though it reaches more often for a case study — content organizing a customer's results into a narrative — than for a one-line review. User write-ups are the raw material for those.
4. Product reads it as well. A workflow a user described themselves frequently contains a use the company never intended, and those are worth reading as research.

Getting users to make it takes two conditions. Something worth showing off has to come out of the product, and the action of sending it outward has to be easy. Missing either one, asking won't produce it, however good the request is.

"Let's put this review on the pricing page. Did we get permission?"

Clearing usage rights before using it.

"A user's write-up reached six times what our video did."

Noting the difference between content made by the seller and by the user.

"This one was sponsored, so it needs a disclosure."

Don't present content that came with compensation as a review.

Ravi built three things: a weekly sweep of account mentions and hashtags, a permission-request message to send when something worth using turns up, and a list holding everything cleared. The list records the author's name, the scope of permission, and the date it was given.

Over three months, 32 items came in and 11 got used. Three reviews went onto the pricing page, and two workflow write-ups were featured on the company blog with links to the originals. Both of the featured authors went on to write more.

The most common belief is that this content is free. Nothing was spent producing it, so the reaction follows. But the cost moved from production to management. Finding and reading, requesting and recording permission, and checking facts before use all take time. Treated as free, no owner gets assigned, and a good write-up gets used weeks after it was found, by which point the moment has passed.

The other common belief is that you only use the flattering parts. It's a marketing asset, so collecting praise is tempting. But a wall of nothing but praise gets filed as advertising by the reader. A list where four-star reviews are mixed in reads as more trustworthy than one showing only five stars. A critical post with a visible company reply underneath is stronger evidence than either. Left alone, the review count rises while conversion doesn't move, and nobody can say why.