Who are Hashtag’d?
To state it in simple terms, hashtag’d allows brands to harness their audience’s content.
Over the last decade, technology has grown ever more powerful and capable of new things, particularly when it comes to the devices that we carry in our pockets. For the consumer, this means we are capable of creating high-quality content with our phones that was previously only possible with expensive equipment. As so much of this UGC is high quality and extremely creative, it doesn’t make sense for a brand to let this opportunity pass them by. Instead they should be harnessing the self-expression of their audience, and this is where hashtag’d comes in.
Hashtag’d is a platform that can curate and manage audience’s content, and can either be accessed by us or by the brand directly with the additional possibility of it being a managed service from hashtag’d themselves. To start curating content, all you need to do is select a campaign hashtag to track and set parameters for timings and content type. The hashtag’d platform then curates social content from across platforms ahead of the moderation of content by either us or them. Then you’re ready to go! Brands then have a catalogue of audience content to pick and choose from for their campaigns. Whereas before, filtering through UGC was a time-consuming activity now it can be done in a matter of minutes. Once you have this content, it can be integrated across all media but has particularly successful within social and OOH formats.
I spoke with Adam from hashtag’d last week and asked him about what the biggest hurdles were for getting brands on board with using UGC in this way. From his perspective, he identified the below three concerns as most common:
1) Rights and Legal Issues – one of the main concerns for many brands is whether or not they have permission from the creator of the image or text to use in a brand’s comms. What hashtag’d can do to address this is request permission from the user in an extremely quick way, meaning that any rights issues are solved instantly.
2) Quality – although modern technology is capable of capturing high-quality content, it certainly doesn’t mean that all content created by consumers is going to be good. Hashtag’d can filter out the rubbish and present a final shortlist of options, all of high quality.
3) Effort – the final major concern for brands is that UGC campaigns are more effort than they’re worth. Hashtag’d is able to take the effort out of a previously very manual process and make UGC campaigns extremely simple.
One of the other interesting things that hashtag’d is able to do are Shoppable Selfies – a way of allowing a brand’s customers to be their ambassadors. Hashtag’d lets you use this feature to collate social content and put photos and videos directly on e-commerce pages. This is an invaluable delivery of social proof for potential customers.
One way of seeing these campaigns is as a partnership between brands and consumers, where both parties benefit from the sharing on social content. An example of a brand that has used the technology to great effect is IMAX who use hashtag’d as part of their campaign to promote Spectre. To build on the social buzz around the film, IMAX used the platform to curate attendees’ posts and filter them by message and positive sentiment. Once these posts had been found, IMAX were able to easily request rights from participants before feeding the content into digital display and twitter ads. Overall, the campaign resulted in extended sell-out bookings and a client who was so happy they commissioned their next campaign with hashtag’d immediately.