It’s not goodbye to UGC, it’s hello to SPUG

A client reported yesterday that members of the Europe-wide internet group of his parent company had reported that UGC (ooh, that ugly term) had crested the wave and was crashing. The evidence given was that a user generated video site in Germany had bombed.

“Would I like to comment?” He asked. “Well”, I replied, thinking quickly, “For the last hundred years we’ve had mass media – and that was it: now the world’s turning to social media. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing in between. Last year people said editorial was dead; this year people say UGC is dead: neither is true: it’s the pendulum swinging.

Naturally, anyone threatened by social media will search for signs that it’s just a fad (I don’t mean my client, I mean his partner companies). In a way, UGC as we’ve known it is a fad, in that flickr and youtube are phenomena that are unlikely to be repeated in the same way  because, unlike the German video site, they flourished without serious competition.

JPG is a good example of something in between. The photography magazine sets assignments online and people compete to appear in the glossy print publication (for no payment!) by uploading submissions online. This is editor-as-curator, taking content from a much broader range of sources than was once possible. At Made by Many we’re currently working on a project that combines destination reviews from up to 50 expert sources with user’s comments and ratings. We give our experts direct access to the content management system and we don’t edit their contributions – they just get on with it.

It’s a way of increasing the signal-to-noise ratio. UGC is noisy. Lots of people contribute and the rubbish drowns out the quality unless there’s a very finely-tuned algorithm to separate the good from the bad or the irrelevant. Flickr created the idea of ‘interestingness’ to bring its best pictures to users’ attentions. Interestingness is based on a broad set of variables adjusted over time to see what works, and we’ve used a similar idea with our review site to create a special rating that’s much more sophisticated (and useful) than a simple ‘5 stars’ that perpetuates what’s popular and prevents new stuff coming through.

But we’ve also used our contacts and those of our partners to identify valued experts and are offering incentives for contributions. Future media will appear in many varied and novel combinations of editorial, curated and user generated content. We call expert content SPUG, by the way (semi-professional user generated…it’s ugly, but true). Between pure mass media models of one-to-many and social models of many-to-many there’s a host of shades of grey emerging in between. The history of technology suggests that these will, over the next few years, coalesce into a few recognisable typologies of communication.