Reliability of User Generated Content
It was not before the last part of the decade that online market found this revolutionized way of marketing. Yes, I do believe that user generated content is a strong and positive marketing way. Anyhow, it is important to note that the reliability of user generated content is all upon you to judge. This content is left by the customers and the clients as an evidence to support the marketing of the company. These include customer reviews, testimonials and feedbacks. Often these reviews and testimonials talk about the positive aspects of the objects and things however; neutral reviews do highlight weak areas of the product as well. These reviews talk about salient features of the products in detail and help the viewers to get all knowledge about them.
User Generated Content! It is abbreviated as UGC. It includes a range of media content in the realm of modern technologies. In other words it stands for the content generated by the user of the relevant product or a viewer. It was entered in mainstream in 2005 when euphoria of web content was arisen. It has now included a wide range of applications and programs like database, automated answers on questions and the latest digital technologies.
However, still in some websites, it constitutes a part or little of the main website. It is often based on the part of reviews of the customers who have often made use of the sold product and sell their entries on regular basis. Often User Generated Content is controlled by the administrator in order to avoid any prejudice, offense or abusive content. As User Generated Content is uploaded with very little or free of charge hence; today world’s data is replete with UGC.
As far as the reliability of UGC is concerned; there are some rules that must be followed. First of all the responsibility of posting UGC is on the administrator of the domain, publishing this content. Therefore, the quality varies from web to web. Highly trusted a domain is, more reliable the User Generated Content will be expected. Coming back to the point of the reliability, it is the agreement that an owner of the domain must agree in that he is responsible of editing, excluding or including this UGC. He must not be ready to post any abusive, offensive, defamatory or illegal UGC. He should take care for not posting any rule violating content that fringe upon proprietary. For making it worth reliable, he must also agree that MMS is not responsible for any of the posted UGC.
Some critiques claim that user generated content is not reliable on account of certain reasons. These include privacy, difference of a publisher and a user, quality and legal concerns. They claim that you do not have any source to judge whether the content is written by a publisher or a user. It may deceit a naïve or a beginning user because many publishers working on small scales tend to generate this free user content. Second matter is of the privacy where it is being claimed that sometimes domain owners do not conceal necessary personal information which can give way to physical and financial harm to the vulnerable user.
The response to this criticism was not strong in the beginning; however with the passage of the time, it became clear that sometimes domains do it intentionally to exclude the particular user from posting or generating content. The real problem is in the reliability of the content where it is controlled by the users on themselves. Here the true worth of the product may not be trusted as users are not randomly checked or questioned before their content go on post. However, it is one of the proven facts that UGC has taken ample place in the world of communication technology.
Though user generated content has become an essential part of internet marketing yet its reliability is a big question. Many a sites now hire people to write users’ content for them so, here it is no more genuine in this case. Anyhow, the top ranked sites like Amazon and others are reckoned for the reliability of their user generated content but no wonders if one returns with the claim that he has offered his content services for these sites as well. You know, this is internet all about!
By: Ammarah Khan
