By Christine Alford, Director, Business Program Management
User-generated content has an ever-expanding impact in today’s age of online connectivity. Azure Marketplace partners like Squigl are applying user-generated content to more than just its familiar marketing business cases, bringing it into the corporate learning space. Squigl for Enterprise uses AI assistance to rapidly transform existing content into training videos. These videos are designed to increase viewer attention and boost information retention, facilitating learning.
Andrew Herkert, Vice President of GTM at Squigl, shares five tactics below for user-generated content in corporate learning and human resources environments:
Brand leaders worldwide are crowd-sourcing creative via user-generated content (UGC). This means audio clips, advertorials, social proof, video, textual content, and other forms of media are being amassed by the petabyte. This content has immense value. When used tactically, these troves of content can yield considerable ROI (10x-20x or more, according to Forrester). When making buying decisions, consumers are highly impressed by key opinion leaders and social engagement, byproducts of UGC.
Businesses can translate marketing value drivers from UGC to the disciplines of human resources or learning and development with the help of Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Cognitive Services. With the correct UGC strategies, businesses can tactically execute design and delivery of a valuable solution. More than a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, the idea of engaging with distributed teams needs to become a reality.
“In today’s remote work environments, it is more important than ever to meet employees' varied learning and communications needs, wherever they are," said Jake Zborowski, general manager BO&PM management at Microsoft. "Squigl, a highly innovative content creation solution available in Azure Marketplace, enables business professionals to meet those needs quickly and with demonstrable ROI. Sharing relevant, engaging, just-in-time Squigl videos will enable the remote workforce to achieve their objectives and create market value."
Below are five example tactics taken from the Squigl install base and deployed globally, often across multiple customer instances, with considerable returns generally above 20x:
1. Storytelling: Users respond to prompts to create content on an integrated PaaS environment, combining Squigl with existing front-end content management system elements, while Squigl's AI processes the content. AI amplifies and elevates the resonance (impact) of the message. Culturally sensitive, AI-driven media containing user stories can now be crowd-sourced from around the world with greater impact than ever.
2. Creative competition: Squigl users are given incentive to create something in the style of, or similar to, a model set forth by the brand leaders. Brand leaders create a 3-to-5-minute content piece, then prompt users to create a story of their own in response to the original content.
3. Analyst's day: Squigl users produce meta brand content used in conjunction with fiduciary reporting to add a "human element" to index valuation discussions and beyond. Predictable growth ensued in a Fortune 10 company when deployed consistently.
4. Brand fan: Brand leaders create sequences of UGC tactics and begin to attribute and publicly recognize contributions made by power users over time. Reddit’s Karma system originated this in the mainstream. The same principles apply in B2C as in B2B.
5. FAQ and product advertisements: Brands can now rely on end users to create ”tips and tricks” and other ”power user” content oriented at accelerating product evangelism curves.
The above campaign tactics apply near-unilaterally at the global level, and are proven playbooks to drive growth from zero base as well as in established channels.
In combining AI and UGC and bringing this stack in-house, key metrics can grow by 200 percent or more if the right models are trained against the right data sets with the right outcomes in mind. The below chart illustrates how AI can reallocate time for teachers, generally showing potential to reallocate as much as 20 percent to 30 percent of their time to more meaningful interactions.
Neural networks customize delivery of content timing, process language (translate, speak, interpret, etc.), and execute event triggers. This means when applied to UGC, artificial intelligence automation (AutoML) can enhance business impact drastically. McKinsey has shown that 50 percent to 150 percent engagement uplifts driven by AI are the new benchmark.
This is an ongoing and rapidly developing trend, and Squigl is fervently pursuing this outcome for millions of end users at hundreds of multinationals worldwide.