Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Advertising and marketing are changing and more than ever, and it's the customers who are pulling the strings. The Internet has given customers ever-increasing powers to research, compare, and review brands, enabling both good and bad customer experiences to be broadcast to the world. This is proving challenging for many companies, who've always exercised so much control over their brand messages.

But many brands are harnessing the power of the Internet and "social proof" by optimizing user-generated content (UGC). These are the brands that understand the power of co-creating their brand together with consumers and tapping into the creativity of their biggest fans. For most companies, this also means encouraging—and actively participating in—reviews of their products/services and conversations around them, either on their own, or on third party websites....

An infographic by Crowdtap and Ipsos showed how much millennials (individuals born in the 1980s or later) use and trust user-generated content (UGC).

Here are some interesting facts:

-  Millennials trust UGC 50% more than other media. This doesn’t surprise us in the least, and we’ll explore why below.

-  More millennials trust peer reviews (68%) than professional reviews (64%!).Think Wikipedia vs Encyclopædia Britannica. Just because something is ‘professional’ doesn’t mean it’s accurate.

-  UGC influences millennials’ purchasing decisions 20% more than other media. After all, would you still readily buy something after reading a bad review?...