Right about the time that Google ponied up a cool $1.65 billion for YouTube, marketers suddenly concluded that most Web users have nothing better to do than channel their untapped creative energies into Web content, especially content in support of their brand initiatives. And thus the user-generated content contest was born.

Make no mistake, we at White Horse have hopped right on the UGC bandwagon with everyone else, with some success to show for it. But with the last half-dozen or so UGC promotions we’ve done, I’ve been very interested in the question of threshold, i.e., how much and what kind of content is a user really willing to contribute when entering to win something?

At the lowest threshold you have the traditional sweeps, which draws high response rates and asks nearly nothing of the user. We’re recommending sweeps less often as marketers come around to the idea that brand interaction is worth something. But there’s greater peril in setting the threshold too high: where we’ve asked users to contribute photo or video content, we’ve seen responses rates as much as 10 times lower than text-only entries.

The proliferation of YouTube aside, that’s not surprising. A flat majority of contest entries come through during the day, when users are at work (shocking, but true). Chances are, they don’t have access to their vacation photos or whatever else you’re demanding of them, and even more shockingly, they’re not coming back later.

Is the trade-off worth it? It depends on your goals. More youth-oriented brands with intensely loyal fan/customer bases should be able to use photo/video UGC very effectively, because they’re tapping into what their users are doing anyway, i.e., shooting video. The rest of us need to weigh the value of direct response vs. generating content and set expectations accordingly.
I believe the right threshold allows video but doesn’t require it; otherwise you’re potentially excluding your best UGC and your most loyal and creative brand evangelists. Let the written word prevail.

Clickz has a piece on this subject worth checking out, and see White Horse’s UGC promo for Nike 6.0 for an example of a recent UGC contest.

My blog’s title is inspired by my man Ralph Waldo Emerson, the 19th century philosopher whose essay “Circles” in particular had a big impact on my way of thinking. “Circles” is late Emerson, after personal tragedy had rounded off the corners of his eternal optimism, and it’s basically about incompleteness and instability as sources of insight. As we move through the world, devouring ideas and images, the incompleteness of our vision (our circle) intersects with other circles in a way that’s always liminal and partial, leaving more to be explored.

I take some comfort in that notion, as did The Stranger in The Big Lebowski, when he noted that “the Dude abides.” Like the Dude, Emerson takes all things into himself without ever compromising his core dudeness: “No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no Past at my back… Whilst the eternal generation of circles proceeds, the eternal generator abides.”

Here’s my previous (unpublished) letter to The Oregonian from December 2006. One more and I’m officially considered a crank. Hey at least my unhinged ravings are consistent:

After reading Richard Melo’s embarrassingly inept review of Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day, I have to conclude what I have long suspected: The Oregonian doesn’t care about book reviewing.

I share Melo’s glowing assessment of the novel, but with one key difference: I’ve actually read it. I can’t prove of course, that he hasn’t, but it’s the only merciful way to explain why the review is so chockfull of useless filler regarding the book’s physical weight (3 lbs!), a fan wiki, the author’s reclusive nature, and best of all, a full paragraph on the book’s cover typography. I was struck by the review’s similarity to an episode of The Simpsons in which Bart attempts an on-the-fly book report on Treasure Island based on the book’s title and cover. Bart’s effort was better.

I’m not sure what qualifies Melo to review the first novel in a decade by one of the most important writers of the last 50 years (or, as Melo styles it, a writer whose past successes can no longer be considered a “fluke”). Melo has written a novel himself, it seems; is that the extent of it? In a city renowned for its literary culture, its bookstores, and its libraries, it is shameful that our newspaper of record shows so little regard for the reading that goes on beyond its pages. Give books at least the same regard you give to films; turn them over to professional reviewers who take their craft seriously.