Before the kooky kids came and invented the Internets with all its opportunities for individual self-expression, iReports and citizen journalism, traditional media (i.e. old newspapers and the Big Three Networks) pretty much had a monopoly on the news. In the old days, if a newspaper or broadcast news editor didn’t feel a particular story was news, it simply wouldn’t run, and no one would be the wiser. Nowadays, pretty much anyone can post anything online with the potential of it becoming news—regardless of whether an “establishment editor” vets it or not. So stories that Big Media could have traditionally buried or simply ignored, today still manage to see the light of day because of citizen bloggers like you and me.

According to Murdoch, this is exactly what’s killing the relevance of entrenched traditional media (and it may help explain his own networks’ pandering catering to popular tastes: “We deliver, You decide”). If you don’t give people the news they want, they’ll seek it out elsewhere.

So watch out, Edward R. Murrow, power is now in the people’s hands and the inmates are officially running the news asylum. Paging Howard Beale…

Javier San Miguel, Associate Creative Director

The vast majority of online users are not aware of how companies are following their every move online. Tracking the sites the user visits and placing the user in specific categorys, allows companies to better target the user. Search engines, ad networks and internet service providers contain mass amount of users’ web browsing data. With no regulation on how the data can be handled is it time for government to step in and regulate? The debate has begun, should internet service providers be allowed to sell user info to advertisers. Large companies like AT&T, Time Warner, and Verizon are all pushing to stay with self-regulation and not be controlled by government. The ecommerce times reported “In August the House Energy and Commerce Committee sent letters to 33 companies inquiring about their ad targeting practices. The committee also plans to introduce comprehensive privacy legislation, the Online Privacy Bill of Rights, in the upcoming congressional session.” This will all help better define how companies can track and use consumers’ online information.

In a perfect world users would be able to control their personal information and choose when to share and not to share information. For instance when one is on a music site, sharing my music preferences will only help target music that fits my music styles. Companies need to be more transparent by letting the user know what and how the information that is collected by a single user is used. If companies had these tactics in place it would significantly lessen the congressional control. Firewalls were self-regulated and it turned out not to work out so well. Firewalls were easily able to work around and did not control or protect as they were supposed to. This past June a court ruled that Google had to release all records of You Tube; including user names web addresses due to copy infringement. With no set rules in place, user data has an unsure future and with no rules in place your info could find itself in the hands of some many. Rules and restrictions set a foundation for online companies.

Drew Ammirati

Media Planner

Is this the start of a new trend? Web users toying with a volatile financial market by posting fraudulent company “news” and profiting from the reaction? I’m sure we’ll see some copycat stunts in the near future. Especially when so many news and entertainment outlets like CNN & CBS are tripping over themselves to solicit free user-generated content they can monetize through ad-supported distribution.

But as today’s events prove, even cheap things can come at a great price. In the end, CNN “America’s Most Trusted News Source” posted a fraudulent business story that adversely impacted the stock price on a major Fortune 500 company. I’m all for empowering the people with mobile data capturing tools, but media gatekeepers need to do a better job of policing their own user-generated products if they expect to maintain serious brand credibility while they strive to expand their brand.

Don’t get me wrong. User generation can be an effective and constructive online tool (see how Amazon user comments drive sales and enhance the customer experience). But UG initiatives require significant investment in strategic, human and financial capital in order to work effectively.

Scroll down for more on the unreliability of some user-generated content in “Unreliable Sources” posting below…

Javier San Miguel, Associate Creative Director, Senior Web Copywriter

Letting Web users upload their content will always remain a risky proposition in a free society. Offensive language, lewd materials, hate speech and otherwise snarky comments have a way of proliferating on user-generated sites despite the best efforts of Web site monitors and censors alike. While inappropriate rants, raves and rumor mongering are to be expected on things like email spam, gossip blogs, political blogs and even open social networks, they grow more perilous when directly impacting so-called factual Web content providers.

What separates fact from fiction on the Web is increasingly hard to discern, when even “trusted” news sources like CNN (whose business model is driven by late-breaking stories) sometimes fall prey to breathless and unsubstantiated headlines on popular “alternative” news sites like The Drudge Report, then re-post these stories on their own trusted sites and even broadcast them on TV. The moment these journalistic red herrings are caught, and they frequently are by self-policing news editors and alert readers alike, they’re quickly redacted and replaced by other headlines in the hopes most folks won’t notice.

You may dismiss these informational “dead ends” as the inevitable byproduct of the Web-driven 24/7 news cycle (and even free speech). But they pose a truly destructive threat to other trusted sources of information on the Web, specifically Wikipedia, which is entirely dependent on users for collaborative content generation and editorial oversight. By now, you may have seen reports of frustrated university professors and high school teachers across the country decrying the lack of accuracy and glaring factual omissions of many entries on the increasingly popular online encyclopedia. But before you shake your head in quiet lament for the declining state of higher education, consider how such popular yet unreliable sources of information can affect us all—regardless of education level.

In an emotional and financially charged political race such as the one we Americans currently face, information is currency. And political information is now most commonly obtained online. This fact does not go unnoticed by Republicans, who’ve made bold creative forays into the online informational space, most specifically on Wikipedia itself. As Gawker originally reported on Sarah Palin’s Wikipedia Whitewash, just prior to the campaign’s announcement of her selection as the VP candidate, “someone” made more than 30 favorable changes to her Wikipedia page (including editing down details of her beauty pageant past and of investigations into her alleged firing of Alaska’s Saftey Director for initially refusing to fire her former brother-in-law from his state trooper post).

Alas, the anonymous edits did little to cover up these uncomfortable items from Governor Palin’s past (the nation’s voracious media machine too vast and gossip-hungry to hold back with a mere Wikipedia entry). But the attempt at downplaying or even removing specific facts from Palin’s online biography illustrates the greater perils of our increased reliance on user-generated content on the Web. This is of particular concern when it’s common knowledge that students aren’t the only ones using Wikipedia as a primary source of factual information. As noted by the American Journalism Review, it’s the first stop for many journalists as well. Scary.

While Wikipedia’s creators and supporters will be quick to tell you that its very own system of user generation facilitates the self-correction and/or deletion of factual inaccuracies (as well as the removal of inappropriate content), it doesn’t take a genius to figure that even the most dedicated Wikipedians (as its contributors are known) cannot possibly monitor ALL entries, ALL the time, for accuracy. Never mind the fact that no single Wikipedian can remotely be considered an authority on even a sizeable fraction of the more than 10,000,000 articles in more than 250 languages the site claims to host.

In the end, much like in Gore Vidal’s satirical dystopia, the last person posting on a particular subject will always be the Final Authority. That’s simply not reliable. Not reliable at all.

Javier San Miguel, Associate Creative Director, Senior Web Copywriter

During a recent Super Bowl broadcast, a classic American beer brand ran a single national TV spot prompting viewers to visit their Web site for a major user-generated promotion. After visiting the beer brand’s site, users would get to see a video clip featuring the beginning and ending of a comedic “skin flick” in the style of the racy-yet-tame teenage sex comedies frequently broadcast late at night on basic cable. No explanation was offered for the missing “middle” footage, other than a prompt for users to register on the site and submit their own short script ideas for what transpires in-between. The winning script would earn its author an all-expenses paid trip to Hollywood, to shoot and direct the middle section of this opus with the help of an experienced film crew and some “major” film industry players. Upon project completion, the winner would get to screen his/her finished film on the beer brand’s Web site, boast major bragging rights and presumably have a foot fairly wedged in the proverbial Hollywood door. In return, the classic American beer brand would have driven user registration to stratospheric levels on its burgeoning online entertainment/branding site—a win-win for all involved.

Adding credence and cachet to the beer brand’s promotion were the other players involved in the affair—fairly big names which included staff writers from the most successful sit-com ever featuring a stand-up comic, and a major Hollywood production company launched by two popular male actor “buddies” who have enjoyed Oscar recognition for their co-screenwriting work.

Alas, what may have looked good on paper proved to be a spectacular marketing dud. During the entry submission period, which lasted a couple of months, the site received a fair number of page views, a modest bump in user registrations, but absolutely no script submissions. Zip. Zero. Zilch. Absent an actual script, the marketers would have to abort the entire promotion, an altogether unthinkable outcome—given the big names involved. So in true Hollywood fashion, an ad campaign insider tipped off an unaffiliated film school buddy looking for an easy break, who finally submitted a dreadful script (the one and only such submission) that was all-too-swiftly declared the winner “from thousands of entries.” The final piece of truly unwatchable dreck was eventually produced and broadcast on the classic American beer brand’s Web site—to little fanfare, and even fewer page views. And a Major Advertiser With Profoundly Deep Pockets learned a hard lesson in user-generated content promotion: it’s harder than you think.

Some points to ponder when considering a user-generated effort:

1)    Make it age-appropriate: The skin-flick film genre used in the promotion attracted an age group that was well below the age registration requirement of the beer brand’s Web site, so interested users couldn’t legally register on the site in the first place. (And older users just weren’t interested in participating at all.)

2)    Keep it simple: Despite (or perhaps because of) the big names involved, this particular promotion was too convoluted and required too much work on the part of users (write a cohesive script?) to drive participation. The online world is about instant gratification. Writing a script takes time and effort. Whatever content you expect users to contribute should be relatively easy to produce and upload in a short amount of time.

3)    Downplay your branding: Most young adult online users have a wildly independent streak. They can smell a slick marketing effort a mile away. And the bigger the brand, the bigger the target. Keep the brand placement modest and allow for maximum user customization. This may be scary for zealous brand managers, since the online user community is nothing if not unpredictable, but users need freedom in order to generate content (see YouTube).

4)    Avoid time limits: You shouldn’t expect to fit a user-generated campaign within a strict time frame (say, a couple of months). Successful user generation sometimes requires more time (yes, even years) to take hold and propagate.

5)    Learn to let go: See point #3 above. Understand that once you get the ball rolling on a user-generated campaign, you have to let go. If you try to control the brand image too strictly, users will most likely be turned off and click away.

Javier San Miguel, Associate Creative Director/Senior Copywriter