As the volume and importance of user-generated media grow, marketers—ever on the lookout for effective new ways to influence and even leverage customers—are eagerly experimenting.¹ Their efforts, which frequently take place deep in the trenches of business units or brand teams, touch upon a wide range of activities, including advertising, public relations, customer service, and even product development. The result can be exciting initiatives, such as the recent enlistment by Netflix of more than 25,000 global consumer “developers” to improve its movie recommendation algorithm by contributing ideas. The best will win a prize of a million dollars.

In our experience, however, marketers who let a thousand flowers bloom risk losing focus—for instance, by failing to recognize the areas where user-generated media could make the biggest difference or by stumbling into the public-relations problems that intense customer involvement sometimes creates. One way of enhancing focus is to take a top-down approach, starting with drawing a conceptual map that links a company’s brand, industry, and customer characteristics with its core marketing activities that could benefit from user-generated media. While each company’s map will be somewhat different, general...