User Generated

Canadian singer-songwriter David Carroll exacted revenge on United Airlines for having his guitar broken by its baggage handlers and refusing to pay for it by posting a music video on YouTube, United Breaks Guitars, which has been viewed more than 5.8 million times, The New York Times reports. But did it backfire on him?

The airline may have unintentionally gotten the last laugh, as the Times reports that Carroll's bag was lost on his last United flight, and he had to wait in the international baggage claim area at Denver International Airport for a bag that never resurfaced.

Ironically, Carroll was flying United to speak to a group of customer-service executives at a meeting organized by customer-service-software company RightNow Technologies, according to the Times.

RankOne Media rebranded its CDFreaks.com as MyCE and expanded its focus from optical-storage devices, making it a community-driven network covering consumer electronics and gadgets, TechCrunch reported, adding that MyCE launched in beta Wednesday.

CDFreaks.com launched in 2007, and RankOne said it totaled some 3.5 million unique monthly visitors.

MyCE allows users to create profiles including products they wish they owned, and they can discuss news, features and pricing, as well as contributing reviews, according to TechCrunch. The site also supports OpenID, allowing users to sign up with IDs from Windows Live ID, Google, Yahoo! and Facebook.

RankOne told TechCrunch content on MyCE is almost completely user-generated, adding that it currently features a database of about 100,000 products and more than 450,000 registered members.

Using social media to enable a dialogue with customers is great, but a smart social media strategy can improve the bottom line, Forrester Research analyst Emily Riley told attendees at Mediabistro's UGCX conference on Wednesday.

Riley laid out a four-point plan for organizations to create a "groundswell" of community:

1. Assess your customers' social activities

2. Decide what you want to accomplish

3. Plan for how relationships with customers will change

4. Decide which social technologies to use

More specifically, Riley offered the following strategies as things that work (she's very list-y):

1. Try something no one has done before

2. Focus on a single point of passion

3. Tap into the unique benefits of your chosen tactic

4. Make yourself indispensable

5. Create better channels for sharing information

6. Use personal engagement to drive sales

Riley said companies that create tools on their own web sites allowing consumers to rate and discuss their products can build credibility, even at the risk of the occasional bashing.

"To give away some power to the consumer can encourage them to buy your product" because it builds trust, she said.

The world is becoming the newsroom as social media and the ability of non-journalists to transmit information in real-time are becoming part of the news mix, panelists told an audience Wednesday morning at Mediabistro's UGCX conference in New York.

Whether it's bloggers breaking stories or people taking pictures with their mobile phones and uploading them instantly to Twitpic, we've entered an era of collaborative journalism.

"What's changed is that if the traditional media didn't report, no one knew about it," said Scott Karp, co-founder and CEO of Publish2, a company that provides tools for journalists to curate news from social media and the web.

Michael Meyers, co-founder and CTO of NowPublic, said the "difference is the participatory nature. In the traditional (news) model, it was all about the broadcast. In the new model, it's a discussion."

"Regular people like us have more power to contribute to the news than ever before," said Rachel Sterne, CEO and editor-in-chief of Ground Report.

Of course, immediacy and an open floodgate of contributors can lead to problems. Panel moderator Rome Hartman, executive producer of BBC World News America, noted, "It's a demonstrated fact that crowds often like crap. What often bubbles to the top is nonsense." (Insert Balloon Boy reference here.)

To some extent, the panelists agreed, you have to give the people what they want. Nothing wrong with that (up to a point), but what about when real-time journalism leads to inaccuracies and mistakes (insert second Balloon Boy reference here)?

Karp replied that immediacy actually can be a virtue. "With things operating in real-time, the ability to correct (misinformation) is better," he said.

What happens when marketing meets social media? Done right, it engages customers, repositions brands and provides valuable insights into customers, according to speakers at Mediabistro's UGCX conference Tuesday.

During a session titled "It's a 2-Way Conversation," Jessica Amason, viral media editor at BuzzFeed.com explained how her company used real-time analytics first to tweak the site's content, and then to help marketers fine-tune their messages on the fly.

Broadway producer Ken Davenport described to the audience his efforts to market a musical last year using social media. The show, "13", presented "marketing challenges because it had no stars, an unknown author, the title, it had a cast of teens, it had a band of teens, and it was a story about teens."

No problem, except only 12% of Broadway audiences are teens and children. The solution? So Davenport came up with what he called "Operation Tug Mom's Coat."

"I wanted to create our own social network for the show," he said. The site, ">13fans.com, allowed fans to interact with the stars of the musical, who all were young teens. Even better, Davenport said, the show's stars would rush home after a performance to get on the site and talk to fans. The result? More than 8,000 new fans in four weeks.

I Can Haz Cheezburger CEO Ben Huh told attendees at Mediabistro's UGCX conference Tuesday afternoon that his site's success is due to a laser-like focus on one mission: "Make people happy for five minutes a day."

Discussing some of the strategies the company used to build the user-submission humor site, which now has more than 1 million Twitter followers, Huh talked about the importance of seeing the site from a user's perspective.

"I ask myself, 'If my users had 40 seconds on my site, what would they want to do?' Huh said. What they want to do, he said, is laugh.

"We had to give them what they wanted, which was a chuckle. On a reliable basis, every single day," Huh explained.

In a humorous aside, he discussed sitting in his pajamas in his apartment after he bought the site, enjoying his free time while learning that trying to work just four hours a day taught him a valuable business lesson.

"Being lazy was one of the best training tools I ever had," Huh explained. "I had to only work on things that I knew were vital to the success of the organization."

Spoken like a true post-modern slacker.

User-generated content's success is dependent on the content producer's credibility to the audience, according to Peter Shankman, founder of Help a Reporter Out.

Speaking at Mediabistro's UGCX conference in New York, Shankman told a crowded ballroom of attendees at The New Yorker Hotel that "as we move more toward a user-generated world, in which everyone's contributing something, we've got to come up with a level of trust."

To do that, Shankman suggested some principles that he said HARO itself follows, starting with transparency.

"We've become a society of microjournalists," he said. "Transparency will be the first key by which user-generated content will be judged."

In HARO's case, Shankman said, "When we create a site, or modify anything, we talk about it." That means informing, soliciting input and responding, he said.

Related to transparency is trust, which Shankman said is a crucial element of social networks. "User-generated content is about personal relationships. That content will become more relevant," he said.

But that requires more than a one-way conversation, he said. "The best thing you can do to get people to pay attention to you is to pay attention to them first," Shankman said.

Oh, it also helps to not churn out crap, he said. "The best way to keep audience attention is to learn to write. I can't stress that enough," he said.

Bottom line, Shankman told the audience: "Your job is two-fold. One, you must turn your customers into addicts. And two, your job is no longer to do your own PR. Your job is to get other people to do your PR for you."

Which should be pretty easy to do once you have them in the throes of addiction.

British science fiction novelist Neil Gaiman won't have to brainstorm much for his upcoming short story -- he's outsourcing that job to his more than 1 million Twitter followers.

Paste Magazine's Gage Henry reports that the Coraline author is "encouraging people to tweet in their 140-character contributions for his next short story, which BBC Audiobooks America will later garner into an audio book."

He's mobilizing a large army of potential co-authors. Gaiman's Twitter account (@neilhimself) has more than 1.2 million followers.

The project began Tuesday, Henry reports, with Gaiman tweeting the opening line and fans then encouraged to run with the plot. The BBC will select about 1,000 submissions, which will be fashioned into an audio short story to be read by a narrator. (I've already sent in "It was a dark and stormy night," so don't bother.) According to Henry, the finished product will be available for free download before year's end.

To participate, you must follow the BBC Audiobooks America Twitter account (@BBCAA) and tweet with the hashtag #bbcawdio. The BBCAA blog explains the rules and regulations, including how BBCAA will own all rights to your (unpaid) work, "throughout the universe, in perpetuity."

Welcome to the glamorous world of publishing. Now get to work on Neil's short story.

Mediabistro interviews Kate Everett Thorp, chief executive officer of Real Girls Media (RGM), on what it took to build a user-generated content network for women. In a word, a bold vision (along with a bold request for a bold amount of financing).

Thorp, a featured speaker at mediabistro.com's upcoming UGCX conference, discusses with freelancer Andrea Hammer why she chose to start a content network targeting women as well as her philosophy behind creating a vibrant online community. An excerpt:

Could you elaborate on the decision not to focus on men?

Publications and brands need to have a focus. Gender is one of those top demographic things you check off as to what need you want to fulfill and for whom. For us, we felt that women have a lot to say and didn't have a clear-cut venue to provide that online. Those peoples' voices as well as the power bloggers deserved a place to come to both read and absorb information as well as have the opportunity to share on an equal level.

Thorp says 70 percent of the content for RGM's flagship site, DivineCaroline, comes from users, with 30 percent written by professional writers.

Xconomy chief correspondent Wade Roush covers the launch of Appswell, a start-up that essentially is trying to foster the creation of user-generated iPhone apps.

The premise is to reverse the flow of the apps-creation process, so instead of apps being originated by developers for consumers, the consumers determine what kind of apps they want developers to build.

Roush quotes Appswell founder Dan Sullivan:

"Rather than a bunch of developers putting 20 things on a whiteboard, we think we have a method of engaging thousands of people. For the consumer who has a great idea in his head but isn't a developer and will never build it, we are narrowing the gap for getting that idea tested and vetted and turning it into reality."

But wait, it gets even better -- there's money involved. iPhone users can both submit their ideas to Appswell or vote on other submissions. The most popular app idea each month wins $1,000 in cash and a piece of any sales.

If you do have an idea, now may be the time to strike. Roush writes that the "Appswell app is so new that users have submitted only a couple dozen ideas so far."

Here's a link to the ideas already submitted. My favorite: Morphing App, which (get this) allows someone to morph their face with another person's. Oh, wait, it just morphs photos. Well, that's cool too.