How to turn user generated content from Instagram into valuable marketing assets

Content from your customers, users, fans, employees and partners can become a valuable media type for your marketing mix. The ubiquity of smartphones and social media opens the door for brands to inspire, capture, and share user generated photos and videos. User Generated Content (UGC) capitalizes on the authentic experiences your consumers have with your your brand.

Digital asset management systems, processes and administrators can play a vital role in aggregating, managing and putting UGC to use. After integrating a DAM with your social media channels and online capture mechanisms (e.g.  web forms), you can will be able to efficiently collect, review, edit, scrub, and catalog thousands of user experiences. 

What’s more, you will be able to curate, share, embed and publish this content to spark greater engagement with your audiences, both online and offline. The user access controls, lifecycle stages and rights management features of DAM tools help you control who can view, access and use what content, when and how. Asset analytics and system analytics help you understand usage and measure the impact of user generated content alongside all other assets in your library.

Essentially, DAM enables you to put UGC to work. See how MINI USA and Schwinn do it.

• Use #hashtags that inspire people to capture and share unique moments
• Hold contests online, in social media and at live events to rally audiences.
• Promote your #hashtags across all channels where you engage your audience

Option 1: Use social listening with IFTTT.com and Dropbox

1. Activate the Dropbox plugin through the features page of your Media Collective site.
2. Connect your Dropbox account with an upload profile in Admin Tools.
3. Setup an account with IFTTT.com (or another cloud connector service).
4. Watch hashtags on social media. Instagram proves to be the most “open” for automation. 
5. Set your trigger to send files to your Collective Apps folder in Dropbox.
6. Hold a contest or event to rally your audience and share content by promoting your #hashtag. 
7. Collect FREE assets in your DAM site automatically.
8. Do DAM tasks like weeding out low quality or off-brand content; enter metadata and other admin details to confirm usage rights and release dates.
9. Share new assets in a collection for internal collaboration or external sharing.
10. Share your favorites on your website and social networks. This is a good way to thank your contributors and inspire more people to share in the next campaign.

Get the blueprint here in this blog post to learn more.

Share your photo on Instagram with #YouCanDAMit and see your shot make its way into this Widen Media Collective collection, available: http://go.widen.com/ugc-workflow.

Option 2: Create your own web form with the Media Collective API

With the Widen Media Collective API, you can create a branded web page where your customers can upload user generated content directly to DAM. Through the Widen API, an Upload Profile can be set that places all the files directly into one asset group with default metadata for easy review later. If you are new to creating upload forms, check out our open source file uploader tool FineUploader. This tool is pure javascript to upload files with a feature rich UI. Learn more at FineUploader.com.