Why creating sustainable growth means looking beyond the digital present

Over the past decade, it has become common to suggest that every company is now a tech company.

The exponential growth in digital usage quickly outgrew what we traditionally think of as the technology sector and, for users, the agility of the internet didn’t stay confined to the online world. Technology has shifted expectations about how everything can or should work. Soon, companies selling everything from furniture to financial services started to look and act more like innovative tech companies. They find new ways to solve old problems through digital channels.

In other words, business leaders seeking to guarantee growth turned to digital technology – to the point that, now, the Chief Technology Officer is a key part of the C-suite.

After a year when we’ve all relied on the internet more than ever, in every aspect of our lives, growth through digital has never been more apparent. For business, digital communication has at times been the only possible way of staying in touch with customers, and there’s no sign that the CEO’s focus on agility and technology is fading. In recent surveys, IBM found that 56% of CEOs are ‘aggressively pursuing operational agility and flexibility’, PwC found that they see cyber threats as the second biggest risk to business, and Deloitte found that 85% think the pandemic accelerated digital transformation.

If the exponential growth of digital has made every company a technology company, though, it has also made terms like ‘technology’ and ‘agility’ less useful. If every CEO is pursuing a digital strategy, that term must be encompassing a vast range of different ideas. As we look towards the next decade of growth – focused on managing the challenge of achieving more responsible and sustainable business along the way – we will need to think carefully about what comes next once digitalisation is universal.

Supercharged tech growth has skyrocketed user-generated content

Of course, the importance of agile technology has never been the tech itself, but what people do with it. For customers we’ve seen tech innovation create new ways of talking, direct access to brands, and large changes in how we consume media and make purchases.

As digital channels take on a greater share of activity than ever, one of the effects of an exponential growth in digital is an exponential growth in user-generated content (UGC).

This user-led interaction, from product reviews to marketplace listings to social interactions, fully embodies the agility that companies have spent the last decade trying to bring to their processes; because it is made by people, UGC is rapid, diverse, and flexible by default. While it may be too soon to say that every business will become a content business, it’s clear that this will become an increasingly important part of how businesses operate. Certainly, it’s already a major driving force for sectors as diverse as marketplaces, gaming, and dating.

A UGC business must be protected to maximise opportunity

In the move towards UGC, a business’s user interaction and user experience will have consequences across the organisation – from profit margin, to brand positioning, to reputational risk, to technological infrastructure. Across all of these, there will be a need to uphold users’ trust that content is being employed responsibly, that they are being protected from malign actors, and that their input is being used for their benefit. Turning content into sustainable growth, then, is a task that needs to be addressed across the company, not confined to any one business function.

Marketers, for instance, have benefited from digitalisation’s capacity to make the customer experience richer and more useful – but it has also introduced an element of unpredictability in user interactions. When communities are managed and shaped, marketers need to ensure that those efforts produce a public face in line with the company’s ethos and objectives.

While tech teams need to enable richer user interaction, their rapid ascent to become a core business function has left them under pressure to everything, everywhere. Their innovation in how content is managed, therefore, needs a middle path between the unsustainable workload of in-house development and the unsustainable compromises of off-the-shelf tooling.

With the ultimate outcomes of building user trust being measured in terms of things like brand loyalty and lifetime user value, finance departments will also need to adapt to this form of customer relationship. The creation of long-term financial health needs investments and partnerships which truly understand how the relationship between businesses and customers is changing.

UGC as a vital asset for sustainable business growth

Bringing this all together will be the task needed to create sustainable growth – growth which is fit for and competitive in the emerging context of UGC, sensitive to the increasing caution that users will have around trusting businesses, and transparent about the organisations ethos, purpose, and direction. It will require not just investing in technology, but understanding how tech is leading us to a more interactive economy at every scale.

As digitalisation continues to widen and deepen, we may find UGC, and the trust it requires, becoming just as vital an asset for businesses as product stock or intellectual property. To prepare for that future and maximise their business growth from their UGC, businesses need to start thinking and planning today.

By Petter Nylander

CEO Besedo Global Services

Over the past 2 decades, we’ve seen a ton of in-house tools created to support content moderators in the important task to keep users safe.

While these tools have mostly been created by very talented developers, it has also often been evident that the team behind them has not been able to put the time and resources into creating optimized moderation solutions. Likely because they’ve made the smart business decision to prioritize developing new features or polish for their core product. The platform their users use.

The problem is that the trade-off comes back to impact end-users at some point. Ineffective moderation processes (caused by unwieldy tools) will ultimately mean users get a worse user experience and substandard service.

Obviously, in-house tools vary wildly in features, capacity, and user-friendliness, but over the years we’ve come across 5 features that we regularly see in-house tools lacking.

Whether you own an online marketplace, dating site, or manage a sharing economy, falsified information and fraud is an unfortunate part of the package, but it doesn’t have to interfere with the way your users interact. Do you know what it takes to create a safe and trustworthy experience for your users? Take a look at Besedo’s latest infographic to unpack the importance of it all, and what next steps to take to implement your ultimate content moderation strategy.

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Take a look at how Besedo can help your content moderation strategy, for free! Try our all-in-one filter automation tool to get started.