Tales From the UCG Trenches: Developing Standards and Guidelines for Gen Z | Liz Bloom Levatino
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Delivered at Casual Connect USA 2017. Episode Interactive is a storytelling network and platform that has built the world’s largest community of mobile content creators. Managing the quality and subject matter of a UGC platform has presented us with many challenges around content guidelines and processes. Learn about how we set and enforce content standards and manage community expectations. Hear how we’ve learned to deal with community blowback from guideline enforcement and creator suspensions.
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Tales From the UCG Trenches: Developing Standards and Guidelines for Gen Z | Liz Bloom Levatino
- 1. Tales from UGC Developing Content Standards and Guidelines for Gen Z Liz Bloom Levatino Player Experience Lead Pocket Gems
- 2. Episode by the numbers ● Over 3 billion episodes watched ● Primary audience is females ages 13-25 ● 5 million+ WAU ● Over 90 million installs What is Episode? ● Interactive, mobile storytelling platform ● We produce content and so do our users ● They write, direct and upload custom art into their own stories and get paid for it.
- 3. The Episode Creator Community: ● 6 million+ registered for the Writer Portal ● 70,000+ User stories published ● Instagram Community of 800k+ ● Episode Forums
- 4. Lesson 1: Create clear guidelines ● Be as clear as your legal team will let you be Questions to answer when creating your guidelines ● Who is your audience? ● What kinds of content do you want creators to produce? ● What DON’T you want creators to produce? ● What do your users want to see?
- 5. Lesson 1: Create clear guidelines ● What do your users want to see?
- 6. Lesson 1: Create clear guidelines ● Make sure your staff are clear on the guidelines
- 7. Lesson 2: Guideline Enforcement ● Remember that your creators are often your most invested players
- 8. Lesson 2: Guideline Enforcement ● Know that you will have a constant stream of content violations. Plan for it. ● Our approach: think scalpels not hammers ○ Tiers of offenses / consequences ○ Soft ban vs ban hammer ○ Tools for content and accounts
- 9. Lesson 3: Connect with your Creators ● Engage your users where they live ○ Build your own intentional communities ○ Keep an eye out for more spontaneous and organic communities
- 10. Lesson 3: Connect with your Community ● Close connection with your creators presents opportunities and challenges ○ Petitions ○ Hashtag campaigns ○ Targeted harassment
- 11. Lesson 3: Connect with your Creators ● Hashtag campaigns ○ #NoticeMeEpisode ○ #EpisodeLove
- 12. Lesson 3: Connect with your Creators ● Hashtag campaigns
- 13. Lesson 31/2 : Prepare to become public record ● There is no such thing as a private conversation ● Gen Z is tech savvy, connected and capable of organizing ● It becomes a balancing act between connecting with your community and maintaining professional distance
- 14. Takeaways ● Create guidelines that meet the needs of your product AND your content creators
- 15. Takeaways ● When enforcing your guidelines, work with your creators - they are your most engaged users and are valuable to your product
- 16. Takeaways ● Connect with your creators where they live. Gen Z has different expectations than other demographics - adjust accordingly.
Editor's Notes
- You are probably here because you either have a User Generated Content component to your product or a platform of creators. We have found that working with Gen Z presents unique challenges that differentiate them from other demographics of users.
- EPISODE: We are the world’s largest platform for interactive mobile entertainment. UGC, makes up the bulk of our platform.
- UGC, makes up the bulk of our platform. Authors have made more than 70,000 stories on our platform, internally we have made approximately 100. Monitoring and curating this content is a huge aspect of our platform Forums are primarily populated by the Writers Resource for them to improve their craft, and for us to gain insight into how they use our tools
- Be as clear as your legal team will let you be When setting guidelines balance community desires with legal advice and product goals - this will most likely be a push pull between what is clear to your creator community and what your legal team is comfortable with you spelling out. Know that no matter how clear you are there will always be some users who will try and game the guidelines Questions to ask when creating your guidelines This should be a multi-departmental effort: Product, Community/Social, marketing, internal story team Who is your audience? Check in on this regularly - it may shift. Episode initially launched it was 95% female, now we are 85% What kinds of content do you want creators to produce? We have a philosophy behind our content platform we want to empower users to tell their stories This may mean making space for Creators to tell stories about difficult subjects: sex, drugs, violence and abuse. Our guidelines exist to help our creators tell their stories, in ways that are appropriate to our 13+ audience and brand What DON’T you want creators to produce HINT: The answer is porn. Sexually explicit content Fanfiction / celebrity stories Anything that infringes on copyright, trademarks or IP (what about your IP?) What will they want to see? You users will tell you what they want - consider their interests when laying out your guidelines Ex: WORD CLOUD These are in-app search terms from a period of 60 days For us sex and pregnancy are major interests for our users - we have had to develop pretty robust standards around what kinds of sexual content are allowed on the platform. As well as rules around the age of the expectant mother, etc.
- What will they want to see? You users will tell you what they want - consider their interests when laying out your guidelines Ex: WORD CLOUD These are in-app search terms from a period of 60 days For us sex and pregnancy are major interests for our users - we have had to develop pretty robust standards around what kinds of sexual content are allowed on the platform. As well as rules around the age of the expectant mother, etc. We get stories like Pregnant by a Nerd, Best Mistake, My Charming Vampire, My Brother’s Best Friend, My Best Friends Brother and Billionaire Baby Daddy
- Make sure your staff are on the same page with the guidelines: for us it means the story, marketing, community, social media and support teams are all on the same page. Loving Bad: Episode branded story published before we had clear guidelines: featured excessive violence and an explicit sex scene Was challenging when the community started referencing this story as an example of what could and could not be on the platform If Episode is doing it, so can I... We ended up making a Visual guide that spells out exactly what is and is not appropriate part of training and regularly referenced and updated. (screenshots of guide)
- Recognize that your creators are making a significant emotional investment in your product that is valuable and it is possible to salvage content and preserve your creator’s investment TALK ABOUT GRAPHS Their content is often deeply personal and can form a huge part of their identity - cultivating these kinds of relationship can be valuable to your product but means that emotional reactions are likely in the face of bad news. You are potentially deleting their baby or their art or their livelihood Because their investment and commitment to us is so intense, we try to mirror that back to them in the way we enforce our guidelines Our goal, and we’ve publicly stated this to our users, is to make sure as many stories as possible are able to remain on the app and that we are committed to working with authors. To the extent that we have spent weeks going back and forth with authors over their stories. Our record for longest notice to edit doc is around 40 pages. This is the depth of our commitment to them
- Your content guidelines will get broken a lot (in the last 60 days we’ve review 193 stories for content violations, 97 were permanently banned, the remainder were suspended/edited/returned to the app) Of the 97 that were permanently removed: 60 of those were because they were plagiarized, infringing on Copyrights or were fanfictions. THINK SCALPELS NOT HAMMERS: the more precise and targeted we are the less traumatic it is for our authors. We can remove only the pieces of content that are outside of our guidelines as opposed to the whole story. We specifically do not use the word ‘ban’ when communicating with our authors. In our community, ‘ban’ has a severely negative connotation that really just freaks the authors out. Instead we soften the language and use the work ‘removed’ or ‘suspended.’ Have tiers of offenses: inadvertent use of a trademarked logo is different than trying to write Twilight on Episode. Most stories that are found or reported for breaking are suspended Have tiers of consequences: Soft ban vs. ban hammer Suspend content allows us to pull it from trending sections and featured shelves, story still searchable and shareable on the app and allows readers to retain their reads (crucial for getting into the Writer Payments Programs) - Reversible Ban completely removes the story from the app, cannot be shared or searched and reads are lost. - also reversible Tools for content / accounts: how can you have those precision cuts for content on the platform. Distinction between what they produce vs their ability to be on the platform Recently launched a new tool that allows us to provide specific feedback to authors about why their story art is rejected Is reducing the number of images in the queue and support tickets regarding rejected images Tools for accounts After enough content violations, not only is creator’s content removed, but we can start restricting their access to the platform (forums, portal, app) Basically the equivalent of a time out
- Our Demo is made up of very creative young people, this presents us with both a lot of opportunities and a lot of challenges Engage your users where they live - chances are your community lives outside your walled garden Intentional Communities are places like forums that you control and run Spontaneous or organic communities are place like Instagram, ask.fm, music.ly or fan communities We have a very large following on @episode account, but it was increasingly difficult to connect in a meaningful way with our creators. Too much noise So we launched and are developing @episodecreators. The following is much smaller, but the connection is much more meaningful and personal So far has been extremely useful for cultivating feedback directly from our authors as well as communicating creator-specific news and updates that might otherwise not resonate with our broader @episode community Content guidelines and enforcement Developing and diversifying our customization options Beta testing new features You can create a bridge between what the community created hubs and your own. @episode is where we talk to them, @episode_new is where they talk to us, @episodecreators is where we have a dialogue Can help strengthen your own communities as well as win brownie points with your community Significant cross-promotion between forums and IG on @episodecreators We promoted episodelife.com on our main channel.
- Close connection with your creators can be a double edged sword You are accessible to them which means you will get both their joy and their frustration. Petitions Change.org Petitions Both the requests and the ways in which they make requests will not be consistent. These are two real life petitions: one is asking for us to reinstate a story about Human Sex Trafficking that included sexual content and the other is asking us to make ads and stories less sexual.
- Hashtag campaigns: #EpisodeLove 3,604 dedicated posts! #noticemeepisode 1,513 posts One of my favorites Our attention or response to a post or comment has the potential to make their day I refer to it as our blessing and it is powerful
- When a community gets upset, there is a cascade effect from social media onto your support staff and you can see they are closely associated The Arrangement The Arrangement was a story with over 10M reads and a paid author with 40k Instagram followers Plot summary: Boy & girl meet in Math class and have a contentious relationship, they make an arrangement: if she gets a higher grade on the test, he has to leave her alone. If HE gets the higher grade on the test, she has to become his ‘pet’ and do whatever he says We banned this story once in 2015 because it contained sexually explicit content Allowed the author to republish, provided she removed the SE content, which she did initially…. In early 2016 she re-introduced the SEC, didn’t respond to our emails asking her to edit… so we banned her And her readers got angry Slight limitations with this chart only shows dedicated posts on IG, not the torrent of #bringbackthearrangement comments in our IG posts over the same time period Started in 7/11/16 too until 8/5/16 to really quiet down Peaked with 69 IG posts on peak day and 22 support tickets #bringbackemily Emily Flowers is a popular author with a large IG following (50k), and several stories published Paid author and contest winner Had 3 content violations in 4 months for SEC temporarily suspend her for 7 days because she kept adding more scenes to her stories Both she and her followers got angry Peaked 26 IG posts and 23 support tickets Started 4/10/17 and died down pretty quickly after she was reinstated Same limitations as the arrangement chart in that it does not cover the numbers of comments we got on our posts during that time In addition to the general out cry in this case, Emily and her users also launched a campaign against our community staff / brand Which leads me to my last point….
- There is no such thing as a private conversation. Everything you say to a user via Social Media, Support, direct emails can be made public and used against you. Emily and her campaign against us Author shared every email or DM we had ever sent her, of course edited for maximum pity Which resulted in our staff getting death threats, name calling, calling for staff to be fired It was bad and went on for days But on the other hand, they also share the positive news! When we select stories for featuring we send the author an email. They share those too, usually accompanied by several crying face emoji Gen Z is hyper connected: whatever they chose to share or make public will travel quickly Gen Z is different than Millennials or Gen Y. They EXPECT you, as a company, to engage where they are.