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A Brief Digression

Expect the Best, Plan for the Worst When Asking for Fan-Generated Content

I’m not sure why anyone is surprised this went south so quickly. Coke recently launched a tool that gave people the ability to easily make custom GIFs using a stock of supplied images and featuring Coke branding. And of course people took that and used it to be as annoying as possible, putting the worst possible spin on those GIFs.

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History is rife with examples of this going very, very poorly. Years ago there was a car maker that did something similar and found they quickly had to shut it down because it was doing substantial damage to the brand. In all cases it seems the common thread is that the company – and the people behind it – seriously underestimated the internet’s desire to poke fun and be annoying.

It’s easy to write some of this off to the equivalent of online hecklers and cross your arms and complain how the Reddit/4Chan wing of the internet won’t let anyone have nice things. It’s not that the person who put the program together failed to account for worst-case scenarios or do *any* research into similar previous campaigns. It’s always the hooligans.

Except that it’s not. It’s not that sarcastic people just won’t let brands inject their marketing into the conversation. It’s that brands are fundamentally misunderstanding the power dynamic. They think people need and are just waiting for these kinds of opportunities and tools. But they exist already. And anyone with even cursory experience on the web will be able to point that out.

Yes, it’s completely reasonable to expect people to play nicely when asking for user-generated content as part of a marketing campaign or other effort. But that’s most likely to come to pass when there’s something in it for the participant and creator, be it entry into a sweeps, the chance to have their material featured in a broader campaign or other incentive. When it’s just “look how hip we are, here’s a GIF creator that includes our campaign messaging,”…well…it doesn’t take a genius to see that that’s going to go badly in no time. That creates the feeling that people are being co-opted into something they want no part of. So you get “Bye, Felicia.”

Marketing, including content marketing, *is* about injecting corporate messaging into places it otherwise shouldn’t be in an attempt to reach the desired audience. But before you start thinking people will gladly latch onto any attempt to have them do your marketing for you, be sure you’re brought in the most annoying person in the company to poke holes in the plan. Then decide whether you need to either spike the program because the downsides are too substantial or have a plan for when thing go pear-shaped on you. Because the odds are good they will.