Your community wants to help you with your marketing - let them

If someone came to you with great ideas for your company's marketing and offered them to you for free, would you turn it down?

User-generated content isn't a new phenomenon - it's just that the tools to create and distribute it have made it much easier for fans and supporters of your brands, products, and companies to create images, videos, or articles that extol your virtues. And the reach such content can achieve is exponentially higher than what might have been possible once upon a time.

I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Judy Gordon of OmniSparx and Joe Hernandez of the Chicago Blockchain Project to talk about the value of UGC - user-generated content - for blockchain projects.

https://youtu.be/w45YbEjObog

Many blockchain projects are different from traditional companies or products, because their most die-hard community members are also investors, or consider themselves to be so. Many bought tokens in an Initial Coin Offering or a token sale of some sort, and have a vested interest in your success because of their financial ties.

Of course, many of those with financial ties to your company have those ties because they believe in the promise of your project. For both financial and emotional reasons, they want your project to succeed.

Time and again, they'll talk you up on podcasts, respond to queries on Twitter to talk about how your project will solve an intractable problem, or create fun images you can use on almost any social media channel. They do this not for recognition, but rather to spread your gospel.

Of course, the same tools and passion can be used to denigrate your brand, but your most passionate community members won't be sharing that around - in fact, the best antidote for negative UGC is supportive UGC. Better to have your community speak highly of you or defend you rather than you having to do it yourself.

The reach of these messages is far greater, because you're sharing, and those who create it are sharing. And their friends and family probably also are sharing it - especially if you, the brand, already are. sharing. The reach of that content is greater than your concentric circles, because they're reaching out to their concentric circles as well.

This is not to say that all UGC will go viral (just like any content, most of it will not, and any attempt to determine ahead of time which will, likely will be wrong).

In addition, not all positive UGC will be the right fit - or even make sense. Your community will sometimes have ideas about images or other content they create that is just a little ... off. That's fine. Focus on the stuff that does make sense and does fit. Amplify those pieces. Just make sure you always thank the creators - even for the pieces that don't make sense.

But most important of all?

Thank your creators. More than once.

A little gratitude goes a long way. And, if you can, toss them a few tokens or swag.

find the active community members

people are already creating content

support and thank them

subtly encouraging the things that make sense and represent your brand well

gets other people really getting into it

really engaged members of the community -

one week was images, infographic, video, text

could receive some tokens - only winners. rewarding quality

rewarding them with tokens that they actually use or want to use. the more people who are actually using it, the more value it has. the people most likely to use it are those who are most excited about your brand and your community to build content about it

providing incentives for people to do some of your marketing work for you - and people WANT to, because they've invested not just money, but their excitement and their passion into your project and they want to share that with other people. because they get something out of other people recognizing that this project is of value when tey were in at the ground floor

if you have user-generated content that you're using, other people are sharing

cost-effectiveness - better than getting some slick marketing content.