Government, It’s Time to Modernize Your Citizen’s Digital Experiences with User Generated Content (UGC)

Government agencies can now use UGC to provide a more immediate, authentic, and engaging digital experience for citizens—and it’s easy to do in just a few steps.

Like the private sector, government today is in the middle of a digital evolution. Agencies are working hard to stay current by investing in new infrastructure, technologies, and workflows.

The expectations are clear: citizens demand an easier, more modern experience with their government. One that encourages a transparent relationship, clearer communications, and more efficient services.

Your challenge? Doing this with very limited resources and budget. And, it’s seen as your responsibility to solve regardless of where you are in your agency’s digital transformation.

Today, the public is used to real-time, personalized, and relevant information being available whenever they need it — and accessible via all digital touchpoints. It takes creativity and the right choice of tools for government agencies to come out ahead with these demands, without breaking the bank or hiring more resources.

An effective way to solve this today is using user-generated content (UGC). UGC sources authentic, engaging, and relevant content from social media channels. This allows any member of your team to publish trusted content in under an hour (compared to days or weeks) onto your website — without having to create the content yourself.

Whether your agency has fully migrated to more modern tools or need ways to circumvent your old, laborious publishing workflows, integrating a platform for UGC is a proven best practice that gives citizens helpful content without creating a significant amount of extra work for your team.

The future of content is User-Generated: Amplify your own posts or posts from the public and reap the benefits

Content is all about being relevant and helpful.

To provide great experiences in a fast-moving world, it’s important to modernize the way your team publishes content to be responsive to breaking news, national discussions, and public information updates.

With little effort, agencies can leverage user-generated content to:

1. Publish affordable, modern, authentic content to your website — whether your own social content or that of your constituents — in real-time while reducing the burden of content creation on small teams.
2. Create a human connection and build trust by welcoming voices of the people you serve by adding them to your website.
3. Authentically show the public that your agency is succeeding in its mission.

Plus, UGC has proven to increase return visits by 20 percent and time-on-site by 90 percent. This means your audience will spend more time connecting and learning about your organization’s mission and getting involved.

Government agencies such as Tourism Australia and Indonesia Tourism are already trusting UGC to support their engagement efforts.

Two fast and easy ways UGC can directly impact and provide citizens a better web experience

1. Create a dynamic pressroom to inform and engage citizens around an event, conference, breaking news, or public service announcement.

• Use
• Adobe Experience Manager Livefyre
• to combine your own editorial content with social media posts to craft a multi-dimensional story.
• Have the option of integrating UGC from the public at large — and easily moderate the content and request usage rights — or pull content from your own social channels authored by your public information officers
• Allow multiple editors to update the blog simultaneously, visualizing their changes in real-time.

This digital newsroom example shows how to pair social media posts with agency updates on a breaking weather event. It provides a single location to access the most up-to-date information and a holistic view of a severe weather issue that’s impacting the community.

2. Add UGC to your webpages to promote and recap events, social campaigns, and important initiatives.

• Use
• Adobe Experience Manager Livefyre
• to source and curate photos, videos, comments from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and more that tie into your organization’s mission.
• Publish the UGC into visualizations like media walls, filmstrips, or carousels that live on your webpages.
• Continually stream new content to keep the experience fresh and maintain an engaging two-way conversation about events, public service campaigns, and key initiatives.

This example illustrates how to integrate social media posts about a community volunteer event and display them in a Livefyre media wall visualization.

Livefyre is safe, secure, works within your Adobe Stack and on its own

Livefyre makes it secure and seamless to deliver compelling UGC experiences to your digital properties that meet business goals.

With Adobe’s UGC platform, you can easily:

• Use hashtags and keywords to easily search for and find user-generated images, videos, and comments from Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube that are related to the themes and topics that are relevant to your communications goals.
• Use Adobe Sensei-powered smart tags in Livefyre to ensure highly curated search results that surface exactly what you need and eliminates a time-consuming and high-touch workflow.
• Moderate content with Livefyre’s prioritized inbox that automatically flags hate speech and offensive content that makes it easy for moderators to view questionable content the moment it arises.
• Easily request usage rights from the content creator to assure you have full permission to use as needed.

Already use Adobe Experience Manager Assets or Sites in your government agency? Native integrations with Livefyre dramatically improve the time it takes to publish UGC to your web experiences.

See how Livefyre works with Sites and Assets in our two-minute video.

Curious to try user-generated content (UGC) for your organization? Learn how Livefyre can support your team today. Or get in touch with your Adobe representative to learn more today.