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, Read the rest of this entry
