User-Generated Life

A painful amount of my day-job is spent thinking about User-Generated Content. What does it mean? How can advertisers best capitalise on it? How can brands be protected from the networking masses? What does it mean for traditional media companies? How can we make money out of it?

So in this kind of environment, it's nice to take a moment and remember that it is people that are at the heart of this seismic shift in communications, not marketing strategies. The below video's quite long, but it reminds you of the sheer variety of people that make YouTube such as fascinating place...



Semantic note: Most US advertising companies are now talking about Consumer-Generated Content, not User-Generated Content, which illustrates just how much they are putting the cart before the horse. Would it be totally radical to suggest people called it People-Generated Content? Or even just 'stuff that people make'? With this in mind, have a look at the new BuzzMetrics system from Nielsen and shudder.