“Context” over Content

Umair Haque of the Havas Media Lab does a nice job deconstructing the now-common phrase “user-generated content” and making it more understandable from a business point of view.

Despite people creating more content via blogs, comments, videos, social media sites and the like, many businesses are having a difficult time wringing value out of those activities. Haque’s report (176k pdf file) repositions those postings as “context” rather than “content”. The content comes from professional organizations, either newspapers, magazines, or online publications like TechCrunch or paidContent. The context is then the information about the information: blog posts about newspaper articles, MySpace postings about bands, and so on.

Given that understanding, Haque writes, new media companies must embrace these contextual pieces as complementary, rather than competitive, and treat “connected consumers as active, vital, coproducers”.

So rather than “us vs. them”, it’s “us and them”.