In the age of user-generated and user-submitted content, how do you determine what’s legally protected and what’s OK to share or re-purpose?

Although this question might not be top-of-mind when you’re starting a new project, it’s an important consideration in today’s content! content! content! marketing scene. Since legal isn’t really my thing, I sought out the expertise of someone who works in marketing at a local law firm. And since blogging isn’t really her thing, here’s a quick summary of the conversation.
The number one thing I took away from our discussion is that not considering legal implications for your online content can be very risky.

What you decide to protect and what you decide to share are critical factors in protecting and promoting your brand. How do you decide where to draw the line? Consider a proactive approach and attempt to answer these questions in order to determine the level of brand access to give to the user:

• Ideally, what role does the user play?
• What are the essential tools the user needs in  order to participate?
• How active is the user currently with the  brand?
• What is the motivation of the user in this  initiative? What gets the user interested?
• What is the expectation of the user? What  does the user hope to accomplish by participating?

At the most simplistic level, determining what to legally protect and what to share starts with audience analysis. As user-generated content becomes more effective in marketing initiatives, what to share / what to protect will become an essential part of brand strategy.

Is it more exciting to spend more time on how to get and use user-generated content? If you ask this marketer, the answer is yes. However, if you don’t devote time to building a strategy around what content is protected, you may find that your users will make that decision for you. Eek.

This is a tough question. But as a person getting paid to think about this sort of thing, I had to respond to this question from Rebecca Lieb, one of the MIMA Summit keynote speakers.

Because there tends to be confusion on exactly what “content” is, this chiken-and-egg questions always bubbles up. So first, let’s get that out of the way:

Content isn’t just headlines and paragraphs — but rather, all the stuff that fills up a website (e.g., error messages, metadata, video, audio, imagery, link text, form fields, etc.). So just like when you’re shopping, the CONTENTs of your cart include everything contained in that rolling plastic basket.

So following this logic, content (a website) IS what you market.

What’s interesting, though, is that to really create effective content, marketing considerations must be addressed. For example:

• How are you listening to your customers? What are they saying?
• How can you be credible (trust, authenticity, transparency, listening, responsiveness, affirmation) with your customers?
• How do you define engagement, and what are the related metrics of success you use to define it?
• How can you stay authentic and meaningful (while still achieving brand guidelines and objectives)?
• What verticals within your company do you work most closely with? What are their deliverables to / from you?
• How can you nurture customer advocacy? What information and tools could be given to customers to do so? What are the drivers for customers to become advocates?

Backing up to think about questions like this needs to happen long before content development development begins. It’s questions like these that help shape a site’s content strategy, which then informs a site’s editorial strategy, which finally puts the pieces together for beginning to develop content — that can be marketed.