What does it mean to "get burnt" by a UGM campaign? Various experts define it as anything from a general lack of enthusiasm to consumers publicly attacking your brand.

Generally speaking, you've been burned if the campaign:

• produces unflattering buzz
• turns out to be a net negative in terms of consumer attention (probably not the case for Chevy Tahoe)
• proves less effective than a traditional alternative might have been

In March, General Motors experimented with user-generated media in a promotion involving the new Chevy Tahoe and the TV show "The Apprentice."

GM invited users to create ads under tightly controlled conditions, but didn't reckon on people taking the provided images and using them outside the box that it had provided.

The negative ads -- talking about the negative environmental impact of SUVs -- found a ready audience and garnered significantly more press attention than the company's positive ones.

By some tallies only 16 percent of entries to the Chevy Tahoe user-generated-advertising campaign were negative-- that's one out of six!

But did it really backfire?
Another way of reading the numbers is that of the 22,000 ads which consumers created a whopping 84 percent were positive, and 5.5 million people interacted with the site.

What's important to note, here, is that while GM did screen the user-generated ads for offensive or inflammatory content, it did not "remove material based solely on a 'negative tone' toward the company" (according to a report on CNET).

GM understood that getting involved with user-generated media is a way of having a conversation with your customers; it also understood that good conversations are rarely one-sided and universally positive.

In an interview with The New York Times, Chevrolet spokeswoman Melisa Tezanos said, "We anticipated that there would be critical submissions. You do turn over your brand to the public, and we knew that we were going to get some bad with the good. But it's part of playing in this space."

The takeaway: if you're going into a UGM campaign, expect to take some lumps from your consumers as well as praise. Don't try to stifle negative voices.

Not all negative UGM is short term. But how a company handles negative UGM is important.

Next: The Dell example