Ymogen & social networks
Nuts and bolts
User generated content
Ymogen works as a strategy & creative partner with brands and their agencies, to deliver digital communities and manage user generated content.
Our work is delivered on our Create platform, offering clients the benefits of a fully hosted solution supported by mature technology that just works.
Create provides all the essential nuts and bolts required for a successful digital community. But at heart we are social animals, and so Create also offers tools for collaborative creation of audio-visual content.
Create can be fully branded to merge seamlessly with existing brand sites, building both online and on-mobile communities, connecting the digital world with the real world.
We've learned a lesson or two about digital campaigns and communities, and we'd be happy to share them over a coffee. Come and chat.
We aim to turn people into brand advocates. That’s the key, and we achieve this by fostering creative connections between those behind the brand, and the brand's audience.
Our work spans user generated content and user interactions across web and mobile. Online we almost always work on media rich projects, that is, sites that involve maps, pictures & video, rather than forums and blogs.
We focus on creating valuable experiences for users, and create spaces that don’t talk about the brand, but shout what the brand is about.
Our sweet spot is collaborative content campaigns and networks. Collaboration is a key component of creation. Many UGC campaigns ask too much of users and suffer from lack of response. Brands can address this by supporting users, bringing creative people who work inside or are associated with the brand into a social space to give direction. This creates immense value and support for users.
Ymogen’s Create platform enables virtual production groups to form around ideas, and these groups can unite the people behind the brand with the people they want to connect to.
We're good at social media, an easy claim to make, however Ymogen has the awards to prove it. We're one of only two companies in the UK to win consecutive BBC Innovation awards, one for our work on social collaboration, the other related to social moderation methods.
We've also won two grants from the UK Technology Strategy Board for our innovative ideas around collaborative film-making and location based social gaming.
We've launched our own social networks:
Create.tv, a brand friendly digital community enabling the collaborative creation of film.
And Shmash.tv, which puts film making at the heart of education.
All this means we can be trusted to deliver innovative and creative digital communities and UGC campaigns that offer value and excite customers.
...encompasses three core products:
"Create social" - managing user generated content, and digital communities.
"Create collaboration suite" - a set of real time tools which allow users and brands to collaborate together in real time to create content.
"Create mobile" - our SMS and mobile content management product, which we use to run mobile marketing campaigns, extend communities to mobile devices and connect a brand's digital communities to traditional marketing via SMS text.
Within our work we mix and match components and services from these products to meet client needs.
Underpinning the core products are integrated management and reporting tools to allow us to improve and grow the community in conjunction with our brand partners.
A while back, BBC commissioned Ymogen to try and work out how to improve the quality of user generated content (UGC). We spent quite a bit of time working with amateurs, and found some interesting answers:
We not me Creativity is an import-export exercise. People need to connect in order to create. Enabling collaboration is essential to improving UGC.
Direction There are already well understood (although rather industrial) methods for creating good content. We found we can take a simple creative process, socialise it, and make it fun. We move from UGC to Directed UGC
Web & mobile The mobile is the camera in everyone's pocket, for a good campaign make sure people can use it.
This learning led us to develop the Create platform, an enterprise class social media platform, which enables directed or collaborative user generated content accesssible across web & mobile.
Moderation tends to include both brand protection and scouting content for editorial interest.
Users expect and need their own voice, however the brand must be protected from inappropriate content and copyright violation.
Elegant design of the community coupled with clear messaging during content publishing phases ensures users are educated and respect the communities values.
Moderators should be active members of the community, educating and engaging (not shouting).
Create includes three moderation models that can be mixed and matched within content publishing workflows.
Brands can choose to moderate all content prior to publishing, ask community groups to moderate each other, or moderate content by exception (where users complain if they are offended by content).
Technically, Ymogen's live infrastructure is delivered from a high-availability network of dedicated 64-bit multi-core multi-processor blade servers located at Telehouse in London Docklands.
Our network has supported voting for hugely popular shows like Pop Idol and sites that are referenced during live TV broadcasts (e.g. BBC's "Do Something Different") creating extreme peak loads.
To ensure high availability and scalability, we use established industry standard software for load-balancing.
Our database systems are resilient with master switch-over in the event of failure.
All our systems are monitored 24x7 by an automated monitoring service. On any significant failure or indication of possible failure, support staff are automatically notified.
Create itself is served by multiple redundant Apache Web servers with a ModPerl backend. Apache is a world-leading web server, and ModPerl has been an established and trusted platform for more than 10 years, serving significant online sites such as NASA, Adobe, Macromedia, BBC and Yahoo.
Speed is essential to communities and therefore dynamic caching is used throughout Create.
Last but not least, we use best of breed security technologies to ensure user data is safe.
UGC campaigns need a few layers (like parfait; everybody likes parfait).
The deepest layer asks people to shoot & edit video (which is a big ask). Before that there may be mashing, submitting ideas, twitters or simply rating other people's work.
Graduated layers of interaction (not too many), with the opportunity to collaborate, leads to more participation.
Create was built with this in mind, and has some cool features to make UGC campaigns fun and successful.
Text to join
Allowing people to text in to join your campaign, and marketing the keywords across all active channels will substantially increase interactions.
Channels
We offer branded channels for your campaign or your brand within Create.tv.
File upload
Our flash video upload tool is brandable, supports multiple file uploads
(so users don't need to upload one asset at a time), and will report the progress of backend postprocessing (which can
take some time) to users if desired.
The upload tool allows users to tag content and set the geographical location of assets.
Communications
We've added private group chat as well as regular comments and messaging. Chat provides a freeform space where ideas can be developed.
Asset library
Brands can upload pictures, video and music for users to mash or add to their edits. The assets that brands provide can form an important part of the value proposition.
Publishing
All user or group work is private until published. When a user requests that content is published, it can be passed through moderation.
Resource library
Resources may include exemplar films, how-to videos, briefs, or background material.
Groups
People can easily work as teams within Create, which is much more fun and creative.
