Cover Story: Top Dog

Voice of the Customer
While the campaign was fun and successful, it also allowed PETCO to add user-generated content (UGC) to its site. UGC, which includes everything from reviews and ratings to blog posts and stories, is a key part of PETCO's social media strategy.

UGC can benefit a company in several ways. It's a source of information for new visitors to learn about products and how real people feel about them. It's also a forum for marketers to get feedback and ideas from customers about their sites and product selections, among other things, and a place to answer customers' questions. UGC helps create a sense of community, offering customers a place where they can feel like stakeholders in a brand, and it enriches websites with free content that feeds search crawlers, a benefit particularly important to PETCO.