Crowdsourcing has become one of those marketing buzzwords that gets thrown around a lot on blogs and in conference rooms. It’s the shiny new toy and everyone wants to play with it. That’s great, it is an exciting and potentially dynamic way to generate breakthrough ideas that will resonate with consumers. But the term is applied rather liberally to a wide variety of activities and executions.  Want a new logo for your brand? Crowdsource it! Want to engage consumers via a contest? That’s crowdsourcing!  Looking for new product innovations? That’s right, you guessed it, that’s crowdsourcing.

Now this is to be expected and comes with the territory. Until the marketing communications industry has had a couple more years to adjust to the opportunities that technology enables, crowdsourcing is going to be wielded more like a club than a scalpel. But hopefully agencies and brands will become more sophisticated and nuanced in their approach.

When a brand invites customers to produce content and receive something - money, recognition, prizes - in return, that’s not crowdsourcing, that’s a contest. We’ve been doing that for years.

When a brand puts out a call to action to the freelance creative community (amateurs and pros) to create a new 30 second TV spot, that’s not  crowdsourcing, that’s a cattle call.

We have the ability to harness the skills, experiences and intellect of virtually anyone on the planet and the best brands can come up with is, “Hey everybody, what should the new flavor of our fizzy sugar water be?”?  Ok, I guess, but this seems like a missed opportunity, and that’s why I advocate expertsourcing rather than crowdsourcing.

What is expertsourcing? Expertsourcing is a sub-category of crowdsourcing where the goal is to aggregate a wide range of individuals who are experts in their fields, rather than just a ‘come one, come all’ herd of people who have come to the party perhaps with nothing really worthwhile to contribute. Is there really much value in the 35^th, 70^th or 100^th extra logo concept that was just slapped together by someone with no training?

With expertsourcing you’re looking to get a group that ideally has little overlapping skills or knowledge. The more diverse the better, the more esoteric the better. For a brand, utilizing this sort of talent to create a new ad for beef jerky is a waste. You’ve got to think bigger. You have to challenge them with a BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal).  Reinvent the education system; create a downtown with only bike traffic; create a better system of government!

Experts have a passion for causes and often have connections to experts from other fields. They are highly self-motivated the synergies created by having multiple experts often produces even greater results.  It’s time for brands to start thinking about trying to harness a school of sharks, rather than herd a flock of sheep.

Bio:

Rick Liebling is a marketing communications professional and brand consultant based in New York.  He recently published an eBook on crowdsourcing, Everyone Is Illuminated. You can follow him on Twitter @eyecube and read his blog at rickliebling.com

Readiness tips for crowdsourcing the first-time, and every time after

I spent much of the day yesterday with Carrie Maynard at PWC working out the game plan to launch and manage a community which PWC is creating to uncover how Canada can best lead in a digital economy. It’s an initiative that combines some of the things Chaordix is most passionate about - change making, technology and tapping a crowd.

As we countdown to launch, it was a chance to bravely run through some crowdsourcing worst case scenarios that are worth it….

1. Nobody comes - like the party where you have set out appetizers for 50 and 3 guests show. This is a risk when there’s no thinking on crowd recruitment and promotion. So it’s avoidable, but if it does happen the loss is really in face and time. And that’s always the risk of innovating.

2. Nobody comes and everybody notices - this is a twist on #1 where paparazzi on the front lawn merrily shoot photos of you hucking appetizers in the trash which they publish alongside scathing reviews. This one hurts a little - especially with condolences rolling in for weeks. Best response here - read the criticism, re-plan and announce improved round #2 right away.

3. Lots of people come, some have an axe to grind - The first time (expect this more than once) that a casual stranger in the community slags the host or panel will be… uh uncomfortable. Our advice there, trust that the crowd is up for open mic night. The host and panelists should comment back with their perspective. Don’t worry about getting everyone agreeing - that’s dull really - and members joined to see differing ideas and debate.

4. People crash the party for the free food - if members are eligible for participation rewards when they contribute - submit, vote or comment - even when entry is a blind draw there’s a chance that lurkers who aren’t really doing the heavy lifting will steal the loot. Just like at the airport when the most impatient guys worms his way into getting the best last seat on the plane. Online life mirrors offline. It’s not the Holodeck but trust that hackers worldwide are unlikely to organize a commando effort for a free iphone. What’s more technology lets you track gaming and collusion - you can solve and manage the anomalies. And you can always special prize an overlooked contributor.

5. There’s a power failure - this is part of what Chaordix is paid to worry about. As much as technology is based on logic and math, there’s still an element or pure chance in making it work non-stop. I say this even knowing that we perform at least quarterly audits of our system stability, security and impenetrability of our code to risk. Beyond great redundancy plans, the main thing to remember if this does occur is to not be Tiger Woods. Act fast and honestly admit something’s up, say you’re sorry, solve it quick and invite everyone warmly back after the hiccup is fixed. If you have any sense of humour at that point, look at the spike in traffic you’ll see as the critics all lend you new member leads as they heckle your site.

6. It’s a bit of a dud convention - lots of people show, but you don’t feel like they are smart or saying much interesting. Good that we rip off the Band-Aid here and tell you this is HIGHLY likely to happen. The thing about inviting in unfiltered members of the public is they will bring along widely varied ideas. Some you won’t want to spend time on. Some will have you thinking for days. The whole value of crowdsourcing versus just a suggestion box is the crowd helps to filter the quality from the quantity. And prepare for a few surprises in where that quality will come from. We’ve all had a friend’s visiting cousin turn out to be the most interesting and entertaining guy at our party.

PWC’s Canada’s Digital Compass project is sure to raise the profile of Canada’s opportunity to lead on a global stage in technology. It demonstrates that PWC is willing to take risks to bring its clients innovative thinking that will help them best compete. It will hopefully get some Canadians connected and talking that would otherwise not have met. It is also sure to demand a little courage. We salute PWC and all of our clients who take risks to catalyze new possibilities.

In February 2010 Super Bowl XLIV became the most-watched TV program ever, pulling in an average audience of 106.5 million viewers. The big game, the fans and the ads all contributed to a huge event.

But did you know that 2 of the top 5 ads shown during the Super Bowl were crowdsourced by Doritos?

Or that the top ads before and after the Super Bowl — those with the largest viral reach and sustained engagement — were crowdsourced? *

True and true.

Advertising is just the latest industry to find remarkable ways of unlocking the value of crowdsourcing.

Through the last 2 years I’ve seen advertisers experiment with crowdsourcing, find early success and expand how they use crowds in their marketing mix.

And we’ve discovered the following guidelines to maximize the chances of advertisers finding outstanding success with crowdsourcing.

• Fit the process to the brand — How open to participation is the brand? Or, to flip the question, how much control of communications does the brand need? Many brands are consumer-focused and benefit from a totally open creative process. Other brands are business-to-business or subject to regulatory requirements and need a different approach. Match the process to the brand and you’re starting on the right foot.
• Start small and specific — You’re getting your feet wet when you’re starting, so start by dipping your toe in. Define a specific advertising campaign, objective and scope of work. The smaller and better defined, the better chance you have for success.
• Great tools + great people = win! — Once you’ve set yourself up to succeed, success is a matter of combining great tools and great people. Great tools so the process works clearly, quickly and pain-free. Great people because they are the source of ideas and the engines of creativity. And if you’re starting from scratch both tools and people are hard to create and recruit.
• Measure, listen, learn and repeat — Measure effects of your advertising. Listen to feedback from customers, employees and stakeholders. Learn how to apply your lessons to the next phase. Then repeat. It’s not always the best first shot that wins, it’s always the fastest to learn that wins.

When we worked with the team at Crispin Porter + Bogusky on the launch of Microsoft Windows 7 we needed to work to specific launch deadlines and with confidentiality requirements. They wanted a big bang and no leaks. So we fit the process to the desired outcome.

With other clients, we’ve done whole creative campaigns in public, with an open call for contributors, refined to a select group of creators and available creative work throughout the process.

The ads that resulted had feedback and market testing baked in and lived up to our tagline: People-Powered Advertising.

Next up: more.

More different ways for crowdsourcing to improve advertising.

More variations of ads so you stop seeing the same ones over and over and over, etc.

More types of creative work — iPhone apps, social games, digital billboards — to help companies communicate and engage their customers.

Today: we can see how crowdsourcing of advertising has unlocked creativity and led to new approaches, new ideas and new creators finding outlets for their work.

Tomorrow: we can only guess what we’ll see. But it’ll surely be creative and it’ll surely connect people with great creators and creative work.

* AdAge article Doritos, Google, Super Bowl Ads Storm Chart

James Sherrett is the founder and CEO of AdHack — the marketplace for ad creative. In past lives he wrote a novel entitled Up in Ontario and guided fishermen. Now he connects brands and ad agencies to the world’s top on-demand creative department: 500+ strong in 18+ countries, working in all media types: TV, web, video, print, games and more.

Located not far from Vancouver, with a live feed of the Olympic into our office (you nailed it CTV!), we’ve felt real comradery with team Canada this last week. Our team’s thighs much less muscular than bobsleighers or even female figure skaters, so why do we feel this kinship with Team Canada? It’s more than our passports (or most of them - we’re not all true north), it’s a bit of a love affair with an abnormal, competitive life.

10 Ways team Chaordix is just like team Canada:

1. Daily people tell you you’re insane and obsessed
2. You’re scored on a performance of minutes and seconds. No one asks if your product was having an off day.
3. You hope for fair judging. As if the market were a meritocracy!
4. You see people around town wearing your shirts
5. When camera’s turn on you are all driven, all dedicated, but humbly grateful too
6. Whoever picks your outfit on race day (VC pitch), you worry it makes you look like you’re trying to hard.
7. To make it to the finish line, you consider taking cash from people you’ve rallied against- competitors or uh…McDonalds
8. Some days you crash and consider quitting but you don’t. So do your team mates.
9. You care A LOT about gear and about what’s for lunch
10. When retired you’ll do one of two things - coach the next up and comers - or go “odd” maybe herding sheep on an island
11. (For bonus points - of course you go for those) You miss seeing your family more, but are profoundly motivated to make them proud.

GO CANADA GO!

We’re cheering for us.

Team Chaordix

TED has a new program this year called TEDx - local, independently organized TED style events. We’re big fans of TED, so jumped at the chance to sponsor our local version, TEDxYYC. It’s this Friday and you can watch the live stream of it, if interested.

Looking at the list of speakers, we got to talking about how TED and TED-style events are all about crowdsourcing ideas. Let me explain, with crowdsourcing projects, adding one more person doesn’t add incremental value, it adds it exponentially. With events like TED, the same thing happens. Instead of putting together a group of experts on one subject, the idea is to mash up all kinds of experts and listen to the resulting conversation.

Think of the possibilities. When looking to crowdsourcing to help solidify your brand, for example, looking to smart experts across a number of industries would yield a very different conversation than only asking current customers. When looking to crowdsourcing - or move to open - the local government, instead of asking local politicians, why not involve different people in the conversation. Local entrepreneurs, for example, might be a great resource for different perspectives.

Don’t get me wrong, going deep on one subject is important (hooray for dental conferences), but the opportunity to spark your imagination, or to see a problem from a completely different vantage is pretty magical. If we think of it as an online conference of great minds, what sort of crowdsourcing communities would you like to see?

Before heading home from Mobile World Congress I got to spend a day off in Barcelona over at Gaudi Park with my friend, Michelle Sklar. We got talking about how some cities seem to be more open to innovation and wondering whether Barcelona might offer some lessons to organizations looking to innovate.

First, travelling around Barcelona, we see touches of Gaudi all over. While his original work didn’t win immediate praise (his patron may have been his only fan for a while!), the city of Barcelona has really benefited from the mark Gaudi made on it. Barcelona allowed Gaudi’s almost Dr. Zeus-like buildings go up right next to highly traditional, old world architecture and that co-habitation of innovative next to conventional is something that really helps put Barcelona on the map. How do we enable this to happen inside corporations?

Even companies ready to embrace innovation are unlikely to make a wholesale switch from conservative to open overnight. One great approach is to pick one area of a company (e.g. R&D, product development, corporate responsibility, or marketing) and get a crowdsourcing initiative underway that compliments existing business but doesn’t disrupt anything that’s already profitable. For example, at Shell, they are in the business of producing and selling oil but they also have funded a project called Game Changer. According to Game Changer, the goal is to invite ideas in for increasing energy production, carbon management, energy conversion, storage and distribution and fuelling transporation. The more likely they are to say, “You know, that’s so far out there, it just might work.” The more likely they are to fund it. So they are continuing to focus on what is currently making them money, while also looking ahead to find new, sustainable ways of making money (and energy) in the future.

Gaudi’s presence in Barcelona is a reminder that what will help a company or a country stand out in the future will not be “what we’ve always done.” Finding the way to invite unexpected innovation into an organization is a vital way to lead.

Photo by: Carlos Lorenzo

Ok, so mobile is just one of the many moving parts at play in how Chaordix’s views future of crowdsourcing, but we share Google’s belief that over the next few years mobile will be bigger than desktop. I had the chance to attend Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and as always, had my crowdsourcing hat on the whole week. Here are two trends in mobile and my thoughts on how we might see them intersect with crowdsourcing:

Interconnectivity - the biggest word of the conference. Everything working together, to help mobile users minimize their efforts. The idea is to have all of your groups and social networks all aggregated to one place - so when I’m on my mobile and look someone up, I see all of their information in one place. On the flip side, I can pull information about one thing, from several different sources. Think of it as RSS for all of the different modes of communication and communities. How this helps crowdsourcing: If a crowdsourcer is juiced on an area, they have the opportunity to broaden their footprint, without a significant increase in time spent. For example, a developer can join several crowdsourcing sites and get information on projects he is interested in - all in one place.

Apps - At Mobile World Congress, one hall was dedicated entirely to apps. While there are still plenty of fun (possibly useless) apps, developers are focusing on apps that make lives easier. For example, apps aggregating real time data and spitting out practical info for people - like Traffic information. Waze is a social mobile application providing free turn-by-turn navigation based on the live conditions of the road and it’s 100% powered by users. How this helps crowdsourcing: Mass adoption. Crowdsourcing apps that people can use everyday and almost become invaluable (I’m heavily reliant on Yelp.com when travelling, for example) really help define what crowdsourcing is. While most people understand the idea of crowdsourcing through examples of American Idol and iStockPhoto, the more they use it on a daily basis, the more likely they are to embrace the value of it.

Figuring out how crowdsourcing fits in to trends in different industries is a good way to understand how we can continue innovating. It is hard work, but we’re excited about all of the ways we can enrich the user experience for people using the Chaordix platform.

Back in the olden days of Cambrian House, before “the cloud”, we, as with most startups, used hosting providers to host our sites.  This was typically costly, often requiring a long-term contract, and often took days to get a server provisioned.

Being a startup, money was always a concern, and having to sign long-term contracts was certainly not ideal for a startup that might not even make to a year.

Furthermore, what if your application takes off, and you need new hardware now!  (Yes, it happens.)

For us (and I’m sure thousands of other companies), the cloud was a godsend.  We primarily use Amazon EC2 and Rackspace CloudServers to host our Chaordix platform for our clients.  We host our demo sites in the cloud, allowing us to boot them up when we need to demo our technologies to prosective clients.  There’s no point in paying for running servers when they’re not doing anything.

We have developed our Chaordix platform to be quickly scalable, if needed.  With the cloud, we can spin up multiple new servers in a matter of minutes, reconfigure the platform to recognize a new database backend, for example, with all the other servers running apache behind Amazons load balancer.  Spiffy stuff!

photo by: kevindooley

Always dating the wrong dame? Why not try crowdsourcing the search for your next girlfriend? Because the rumors are probably true… your mother does know best…and so does everyone else. Just in time for Valentine’s Day, here are some tips on using crowdsourcing to help you find that special lady.

Make the right call to action. Before you ask people to join your crowdsourcing effort, you’ll have to be sure you know what you are after. A casual girlfriend? A long-term love? People will be more confident about reaching out to their networks if they know exactly what you are looking for.

Involve the right crowd. Cast that net wide. Why? You already know everyone your best friend knows - so just as in crowdsourcing innovative product ideas, you need to try a new approach. If you always hang out with the same type of people, think about involving a crowd that’s different. Don’t ignore your parents’ friends, for example.

Clean yourself up. Every good crowdsourcing effort knows the value of having the right incentives in place. In this case, the prize is you, so make sure you’re worth winning. Now, we’re not talking about fake tans and tweezed eyebrows (unless you’re into that, we’re not here to judge). We’re talking about you being you, plus an ironed shirt, minus the sweatpants.

Define the parameters before you start. If you know you can’t stand a girl who doesn’t like sports, you’ll want to make that clear. Helping people find qualified leads for you is a great way to narrow the field, as well as avoiding frustration. There’s nothing worse than trying to set a buddy up with a girl who is theoretically perfect for him, only to find out he’s not into blonds.

Manage the process. You’re going to have to keep the troops motivated along the journey. Let people know what’s working and what isn’t. This will help narrow the search. By giving people regular progress updates, you might spark new ideas from your crowd based on something you say.

photo by: joodles ]]> http://www.chaordix.com/blog/2010/02/11/how-to-crowdsource-a-girlfriend/feed/ http://www.chaordix.com/blog/2010/02/11/how-to-crowdsource-a-girlfriend/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/chaordix/~3/xn_IGwo2Cns/ http://www.chaordix.com/blog/2010/02/09/using-crowdsourcing-for-sensitive-topics/#comments Tue, 09 Feb 2010 20:52:31 +0000 Randy Corke http://www.chaordix.com/blog/?p=626

So, you’re worried about using crowdsourcing because what you want to Crowdsource about is “sensitive”.   Perhaps you really want to use open innovation to get new ideas for products, but CEO is worried about competitors joining your site, and getting almost all of the benefit of your investment in crowdsourcing.    Good news, you and your CEO are not alone, and there are ways to keep you both happy.

First of all, your CEO is right to be concerned.  If you are investing in building your crowd and leading them in a process to build value for your company, you certainly don’t want your competitors to be “listening in.”

But, fear not:  we’ve got some experience here!

One very pleasing and interesting observation is there really isn’t any “idea stealing”  on crowdsourcing sites.   In our original Cambrian House community, the crowd was genuinely supportive and effective in helping people with ideas make them better, and was not out to steal them.  Take a look at Mob4Hire as a great example of an idea made better by the crowd.

That said, it still makes sense to protect the valuable information you get from your crowd.  Some of the ways we work to protect our client’s important information include:

• Creative use of private, invitation only calls, private areas within a site,

• Using roles, privileges, and reputation management within a crowd community to allow involvement

• Using “hybrid” crowdsourcing models which utilize a blend of a “contest” and “collaboration” model attributes to enable the positive benefits of collective wisdom without giving out the store secrets.

So, bottom line?  Don’t let the fear of someone else stealing your crowdsourced ideas keep you from using crowdsourcing.   There are many ways to keep your CEO happy, while delivering the benefits of open innovation to your organization.