If you have ever purchased or used a product and found it to be exactly what you wanted, you know that one of the first things you do is tell your friends. The friends you tell might be the people you see every day in real life. This, to some extent, is user generated marketing because you, the user, are marketing the product to your friends by saying good things about it.
In the world of the internet, user generated marketing can take on much more extreme importance. If you have a social network on an internet site that is partially made up of people you do not see every day, this increases the amount of user generated marketing that you can take part in. It might seem complicated, but it is not. You can say good things about the product to these people in your social network or even write about the product on their own website if it has an area for comments, which greatly enhances the potential success of their business.
More and more websites are incorporating elements to leave room for user generated marketing by having space for reviews, comments, or anything you wish to write about at all! This allows you to see other people’s experience of the product so that you can trust it and it also allows the company to benefit from the phenomenon of user generated marketing. The more of a transparent relationship the company has with the customers and the more they listen to and interact with them, the more they are likely to succeed in this world of marketing 2.0.
Marketing 2.0, web 2.0 or business 2.0 is a phrase you may come across. It basically is referring to the websites that allow you to interact with the company who created them, such as social networking sites or blogs. People can get together in a virtual community and actually affect the development of new product ideas and the content of the website.
Why User Generated Marketing Works
There are many answers to this question. One reason is that we all like to feel important. Whether it is in our life at home or at our jobs or even in the world of the internet, we like to feel like people are listening and that our opinion matters. When you are allowed to talk about a product to the company and other potential customers, you realize that your opinion does matter.
When the company actually listens to the reviews and feedback from the customers, they can make any necessary changes to keep the customers happy and also allow those customers to feel like they have been respected. User generated marketing in many ways is about respect for the consumer, and who would ever want to argue with that?