Serving citizens best by collaborating with them

by Craig Thomler

Government runs on rules. Policies, processes and procedures designed to address every contingency and plan for every possible risk in order to provide equity, stability and certainty.

However, as experience has shown time and time again, we cannot predict the future.

While we continually attempt to plan ahead, largely these plans are based on extrapolating past trends and experiences.

This has served us well in times of relatively stable and slow-changing societies and provides enormous capability to mobilise and focus resources towards a few large and separate goals.

However it doesn’t work as effectively during rapidly changing conditions where there are a myriad of interlocking issues. The approach can also neglect large and important changes, which are often discontinuous and almost totally unpredictable.

History is littered with enormous societal, economic and cultural shifts brought on by unpredictable innovations; gunpowder, the printing press, steam-power, radio, television and, most recently, the internet.

Each of these – and other – innovations profoundly changed how societies operated, destroying industries and creating a stream of new inventions, professions and both political and cultural challenges in their wake.

In hindsight we can often see very clearly how these changes unfolded and they can appear historically as an evolutionary process. However when living just before or during these enormous shifts it is virtually impossible for most individuals or organisations to predict outcomes ten, five, two or even a single year ahead.

I believe we are living in this type of time right now. The invention of the internet, progress in nano and bio technologies and in alternative – hopefully sustainable – sources of energy is in the process of increasingly rapidly reshaping our world. At the same time we are facing the consequences of previous disruptive innovations – most notably climate change, fuelled by enormous levels of fossil fuel use over two hundred years and population growth, fuelled by improvements in food technology and medicine.

This becomes a time of enormous challenge for governments. How do we extrapolate trends, develop policies, acknowledge and address risks which didn’t exist a few years ago?

How do we continue to serve the public appropriately when the time required to plan, develop and implement national infrastructure is greater than the effective lifespan of that infrastructure?

How do we let go of faltering systems to embrace new ways of developing and implementing policy without losing continuity of governance?

And how long can we continue to govern incrementally when living in an exponential world?

We’re in a place where there are many more questions than answers. Issues are ever more complex and multi-faceted and can no longer be in silos. Our organisations need to be more flexible and adaptive in response to an increasingly assertive community who often have better tools and information than the government departments servicing them.

Fortunately the disruptive technologies we are developing also allow us to approach many of these challenges collectively on a national and international scale.

We have the means to mobilise the brainpower of a nation – or many nations – using the internet and simple crowdsourcing tools.

We’ve already seen communities emerge online where companies ask their insolvable questions publicly, allowing scientists, academics and the general public to discuss and provide suggestions.

We’ve also seen governments willing to ask questions of their constituents, rather than rely on traditional stakeholders, academics and bureaucrats to have all the answers.

I hope over the coming years we see Australian governments embrace serendipity rather than attempt unsuccessfully to chain it. I hope we see bureaucrats and citizens working collaboratively to address major issues, working in adaptive and flexible configurations rather than rigid silos, stepping beyond ‘consultation’ towards participatory policy development and evolution.

This will require courage on the part of elected officials and senior public servants alike. It will require different types of leadership and thinking, better communications and a broader focus on connecting people over managing fixed resources.

Can we achieve this step from where we are today?

I’m optimistic that we can, but it will take significant work and pain to achieve.

Crowdsourcing ideas at US Homeland Security

Sourced with compliments from: http://www.informationweek.com/news/government/info-management/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=221600274

The federal agency plans to adopt the Transportation Security Administration’s IdeaFactory crowd-sourcing application to encourage brainstorming by employees.

The Department of Homeland Security is latching onto one of the Transportation Security Administration’s most innovative IT initiatives, a Web 2.0 crowd-sourcing portal called IdeaFactory. Like TSA, Homeland Security will use the platform to encourage its employees to come forward with new ideas on how to do things.

IdeaFactory is a custom-built, .NET Web application that lets employees submit ideas for new programs and rule changes. Other users can rate the ideas, comment on them, pick favorites, and forward them to others. When a proposal gets enough attention, it’s sent to an “idea committee” that reviews it and decides what steps to take. It’s essentially a digital, and transparent, ideas box.

The effort has been deemed a success at TSA, where 25,000 employees have posted 9,000 ideas, left 78,000 comments, and submitted 270,000 ratings. It’s led to the creation of more than 40 programs, such as the family security lanes at TSA-screened airports.

The White House has taken notice, featuring IdeaFactory on its Web site as an example of what the Obama administration is looking for in its open government initiative, and a few other agencies have mimiced the approach.

A plan to expand IdeaFactory was introduced earlier this year; DHS expects to make it available to all employees by January.

“This will definitely increase morale by allowing employees to give direct feedback, and it will also let us better communicate and share ideas,” said Larry Orluskie, IdeaFactory program manager at DHS, in an interview.

DHS is a larger organization than TSA, and DHS will have to work through technology and process issues for IdeaFactory to work there.

To help with that, DHS has assembled a 30-person group of representatives from each of its major divisions (Customs and Border Protection, Coast Guard, Federal Emergency Management Agency, and others) and its headquarters. The group, called the IdeaFactory Council, is putting processes in place that mirror TSA’s. One of its mandates will be to promote the adoption of ideas across the agency’s units.

DHS will encourage use of IdeaFactory internally, so that it doesn’t fall flat, and support is coming from the top. DHS secretary Janet Napolitano and deputy secretary Jane Holl Lute have been “very engaged” in the plan, said Orluskie.

10 Ways Small Businesses Can Harness Big Crowds

Sourced with compliments from: http://cs.sbtv.com/Post/?id=2512

Would your small business benefit from reducing costs, improving product and/or service quality, more effectively competing with bigger companies, innovating more, enhancing your expertise, and better managing your own capacity and the capacity of your small team? You bet!

In this post, I discuss 10 ways that your small business can leverage crowdsourcing. I’ll explain each suggestion and will recommend ways that you could take advantage of the service for your small business. I’ll include examples for each suggestion to show how a small businesses can leverage each service.

First – a short background. For the past 20+ years, many companies have outsourced certain types of work – such as product design, manufacturing, or customer service – to a third-party. Often, the third-party was located overseas (India, for example). Historically, outsourcing was the done mostly by larger companies. Although outsourcing continues to be a popular option for companies in many different industries, the diminishing savings from outsourcing, coupled with some of the disadvantages (quality, communication issues, turnover, etc.) have made outsourcing a less attractive option.

Over the past 6-7 years, some companies have found new, more creative ways to leverage others – through crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing involves taking a task which is traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to a large group of people – rather than to a specific third party (like one would do when outsourcing). Some large companies have been leveraging crowdsourcing for years (see Innocentive below).

How can your small business leverage crowdsourcing? Here are 10 suggestions:

1. uTest.

What it is: uTest is the world’s largest marketplace for software testing services. A community of 20,000+ quality assurance professionals from around the world help software companies test their web, mobile, gaming and desktop applications.

How You Can Leverage uTest: If your company develops software, you can leverage uTest to provide functional, usability, load and performance testing. Companies that develop software know that testing is time consuming and tedious. And while larger companies often have quality assurance staff – or entire departments focused on testing – small businesses must rely on their own employees or third parties to thoroughly test their software products. By crowdsourcing software testing, you can both control and reduce your costs, and make sure that your products are thoroughly tested before they are released, without putting tremendous strain on your small development team. You pay only for the services you need/use.

2. Innocentive.

What it is: InnoCentive is an online marketplace where organizations in need of innovation can leverage a global network of over 160,000 people to solve technical and business problems.

How You Can Leverage Innocentive: If your company runs into a business or research and development problem, Innocentive could be a great alternative to help you overcome that problem. You set the challenge reward (these are typically in the thousands or tens of thousands of dollars). While the cost to post a problem to Innocentive and attract a robust community of people to help you is not small (you set your own reward amount), many small businesses developing complex chemical or electronic products incur much higher costs when working with third-party contractors. And while Innocentive has traditionally been a great option for large corporations – it is equally attractive to smaller companies that must find ways to overcome complex and expensive problems that are delaying product launches.

3. Amazon Mechanical Turk.

What it is: Mechanical turk is a marketplace for getting various tasks performed by distributed groups of people. Tasks posted to Mechanical Turk are typically broken down into small components and multiple workers typically work on different components of each task.

How You Can Leverage Mechanical Turk: There are unlimited ways that you could leverage Mechanical Turk. For example, you can post tasks to have people write short blog posts for your small business blog or newsletter. You can have people create lists for you if you are developing a website focused on sports statistics or other types of statistics. You can have workers on Mechanical Turk transcribe audio and/or video files for you. (Tip: for transcription, you could also use a service like CastingWords, which uses Mechanical Turk to manage the process for you). You can have workers on Mechanical Turk answer surveys about a product or service (your own or a competitor’s). You can have workers on Mechanical Turk obtain data from multiple websites on a regular basis and provide it to you in a specific format. Think about any task(s) in your business that require large groups of people and you’ll come up with simple, low-cost (you set your own price) and effective ways to leverage Mechanical Turk for your business.

4. Inkling.

What it is: Inkling runs prediction marketplaces. These marketplaces could provide, among other things, early risk warnings about products and services (or about interruptions to your supply chain, for example), could help quantify the probability that an event will occur, and can predict how your business will perform.

How You Can Leverage Inkling: Inkling at first look appears more appropriate for larger companies – and the case studies posted on Inkling’s site promote use by large companies. However, there are many ways that small businesses can leverage Inkling. For example, if your company is developing a new product, you can use an Inkling marketplace to predict whether your product (or several variations of your product) will be successful in the marketplace. Given the often high costs of marketing and advertising, being able to predict which variation of a product is likely to be most successful is an incredible advantage to blindly launching a new product (or service).

5. Get Satisfaction.

What it is: Get Satisfaction allows companies to support customers, exchange ideas and receive feedback about products and services.

How You Can Leverage Get Satisfaction: Get Satisfaction has numerous price points, ranging from FREE to $899 per month. It’s a good alternative for small businesses that have popular products and active communities, but small teams. Many small businesses use Get Satisfaction as their primary channel for customer support.  For example, if you’re marketing a popular free product, you may have a very active and devoted community, but little money to provide customer support. Similarly, if you’re a startup, you’re most likely spending your money on development and not spending enough on providing customer support. Get Satisfaction helps you to leverage your community to help you deliver customer support to your users and lets your team focus on building and improving your core product or service.

6. Twitter/Facebook

What it is: Twitter is a social network. Users on Twitter communicate by sending text-based messaged of up to 140 characters in length. The messages are public (there is a private message option) and other people can subscribe to receive all your messages or find your messages by searching or visiting your page on Twitter. In turn, you can subscribe to other people’s messages. This process – “following” – allows people and companies to build communities of “followers” on Twitter (some of these communities are small – numbering in the single digits, but some communities are in the thousands, tens of thousands, and even millions of people). Facebook is also a social network. In addition to text based messages, Facebook allows you to upload photos, videos, and interact with other people who can become your “friend” on Facebook. Like on Twitter, your friends on Facebook can see your public messages and you can see the public messages posted by your friends. Companies can set up “fan” pages on Facebook where companies can interact with their customers and fans.

How You Can Leverage Twitter and Facebook: You can use your communities on Twitter and Facebook to help you generate ideas, to give you feedback about ideas, to help you with research questions, and in many other ways. For example, if you’re a freelance journalist or a copywriting agency, you could ask your communities for ideas about stories. Or if you’re a manufacturer of electronic products, you can ask your communities for ideas to improve your products. If your small company makes a popular software product, you could ask your communities for feedback about your latest public beta release. If you have a gift basket business, you can ask for feedback on your latest basket designs on several newsletter templates you’re considering. The possibilities are unlimited.

7. Mahalo Answers

What it is: Mahalo Answers is a social community where anyone can ask questions about anything. Members provide answers to the questions and in some cases, earn “tips” for the best answers.

How You Can Leverage Mahalo: Small businesses that do not have large communities on Twitter or Facebook must find ways to get help from existing communities. Even if you have existing communities, it sometimes helps to seek opinions outside your communities. Let’s say you have a small business on Etsy, selling various kinds of crafts. How should you effectively and inexpensively market your Etsy business? You can ask for advice on Mahalo. What if you’re building a voice mail application and doing market research to find out how many voice mails are left in the U.S. every month? You can spend time looking for the answer on Google or Bing – or you can ask for help on Mahalo.

8. Start a needed service

What it is: Sometimes, you’ll have an idea for new ways to leverage crowds and will see an opportunity to create a service that doesn’t already exist. For example, HARO (Help A Reporter Out) is a very successful free service founded by Peter Shankman – designed to help journalists request expert interview sources for stories. Peter started the service because he was constantly receiving requests for help from his journalist friends and he came up with a way to leverage crowds to answer those requests directly.

How You Can Leverage: Each company described in this article found a creative way to deliver a product service to others. Just like Peter Shankman, think about problems facing your business – or your industry – and assess whether you can find smart ways to solve those problems. As you can see from the many examples in this article, there are unlimited creative ways to crowdsource solutions to common (and uncommon) problems. The key to building a relevant business is to find an opportunity  – an industry need that is being unmet – and develop a solution that meets that need. In fact, you can use some of these other services, such as Twitter, Facebook, or Mahalo Answers, to identify opportunities and even explore possible solutions.

9. Create your own “crowd”

What it is: I’ve listed online services, but you shouldn’t forget the communities we’ve built offline. Those communities include your existing customers, friends and families, your co-workers, people you meet at seminars and conferences, or even random people you meet in shopping malls or at the Starbucks.

How You Can Leverage offline crowds: You should be using any and all relevant “tools” available to you. While online tools are often easily accessible and low cost, you might find that your offline communities can provide more insight. For example, you can ask your friends and families (or co-workers) for feedback and suggestions about a new product or service you’re considering offering. If you’re considering increasing your hourly rates for a service, you can ask for feedback about what people are currently paying and how they’d feel about different rate levels. If you’re a small accounting firm, you might ask for feedback and suggestions about a new brochure you’d like to send to potential clients. If you’re a real estate agent, you could ask for feedback about print advertising you’re considering running in the local newspaper. Once again – the possibilities of how you leverage your own crowd are unlimited.

10. crowdSPRING

What it is: And of course, thousands of small businesses around the world have leveraged our own community on crowdSPRING. crowdSPRING is a community of over 44,000 graphic, web and industrial designers – from over 170 countries around the world. Our community has helped thousands of small businesses from over 50 countries with logo, business card, website and many other custom graphic design needs. Unlike traditional marketplaces, a buyer on crowdSPRING posts their project, names their own price and deadline, and then selects from at least 25 designs to their specifications, from multiple designers (or they get their money back).

How You Can Leverage: You can use crowdSPRING in many different ways – here are 99 suggestions for how you can crowdsource on crowdSPRING (most of these have been posted as projects on crowdSPRING by other businesses). Small businesses have asked crowdSPRING designers to design logos, websites, blogs and marketing materials for them. Other businesses have asked crowdSPRING’s industrial designers to create actual products (mobile phones, devices, watches, utensils) and product packaging (for alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages, for consumer goods). The possibilities are unlimited.

Buy Me A Ferrari – A Social Experiment In Crowd Sourcing

Sourced with compliments from http://prmac.com/release-id-8266.htm

Galileo Lab just released “Buy Me A Ferrari”, an iPhone app to test a new paradigm of crowd sourcing and fund raising. What is BMAF (Buy Me A Ferrari)? It is a social experiment to combine the power of the crowd and the money from advertisement to fund ideas and dreams.

The big picture

Obviously this is not just about buying an exotic car, though that is not a bad perk and it captures people’s imagination. The big picture here is that if we can prove that this funding model works, we can apply it to much more deserving causes. Cancer research, pets rescue, you name it. We get to make a difference to real people.

How does it work?
People can download the free app from the AppStore. They tap on one or more ads that interest you. That is it. If a million people click on an ad on BMAF we raise plenty of funds.

‘Be A Mind Blower’ Crowdsource Competition

HENDERSON, Nev., Nov. 5 /PRNewswire/ -- Zyxio, the pioneer in next-generation
Human Media Interaction, announced today the launch of its "Be A Mind Blower"
online competition, allowing the public to submit their most innovative and
creative ideas for product development in a variety of categories, utilizing
Zyxio's new patented breath-enabled technology SensaWaft(TM).  The five most
ingenious applicants will be selected by the public to sit on the company's
special "Mind Blowing Advisory Board" for a six month period to assist with
the development of the new products.  They will also receive $6,000 and an
all-expense paid three day trip to Las Vegas. 

Imagine breathing out to flick through icons.  Or, think of exhaling and swap
gears in your favorite video game, hands busy on the controller.  With
SensaWaft(TM) technology, this soon could be a possibility.  "Be A Mind
Blower" gives anyone 16-years-old and older and legally authorized to work in
the United States a chance to be involved in advising Zyxio on the development
of its next breath-enabled project.  Applicants simply submit an idea online
in the following categories: PC/laptops/netbooks,
games/multimedia/entertainment, assistive/multimodal/virtual reality,
smartphones/in-vehicle/enterprise and digital music/graphic design.  

Additionally, anyone is eligible to enter as a judge to rate submissions on a
5-point scale from "Are you out of your mind?!" (one point) to "Genius, I Say
Yes!" (five points).  Submissions with the most points at the end of the six
week competition will win.  "Be A Mind Blower" has extended judging to the
public to allow those who may not have their own ideas to participate in the
process and believes that the best ideas should be decided by the public at
large, not a small group of corporate executives.  All judges are
automatically entered into a sweepstakes with the chance to win a Samsung
Go(TM) netbook or a Motorola Droid(TM) Phone.  Two of each product will be
given away at the end of the competition.  

"We believe that involving users in the development process of our future
products is of utmost importance as they will be the ones incorporating our
unique touchless technology into their everyday lives," says Pierre Bonnat
co-founder, Zyxio. "The scope of applications for our intuitive technology is
limitless, and we are turning to the public, rather than a focus group or test
panel, to give us direction by electing the most innovated and useful ideas.
Our job then is to tailor the technology to fit their choices."

After the initial five week submission period ending on November 30, 2009,
applicants will be narrowed to the top 25.  The finalists will have the
ability to promote their ideas utilizing blogs, videos and social networks
within the "Be a Mind Blower" Web site.  The five winners will then be
selected according to their points score. 

Through this competition Zyxio is introducing an incomparable proprietary
technology called SensaWaft(TM), an intuitive solution that senses and
analyzes when one intentionally breathes to interact. It was developed based
on human interactional behavior, and utilizes the untapped potential of the
kinetic energy of breath to control digital screens.

"Be a Mind Blower" competition runs from November 5th, 2009 at 12.00 pm PST to
December 13th, 2009 at 11.59 p.m. PST.

REWIND: US Papers filled with Crowdsources

Sourced with compliments from http://www.wired.com/software/webservices/news/2006/11/72067

According to internal documents provided to Wired News and interviews with key executives, Gannett, the publisher of USA Today as well as 90 other American daily newspapers, will begin crowdsourcing many of its newsgathering functions. Starting Friday, Gannett newsrooms were rechristened “information centers,” and instead of being organized into separate metro, state or sports departments, staff will now work within one of seven desks with names like “data,” “digital” and “community conversation.”

The initiative emphasizes four goals: Prioritize local news over national news; publish more user-generated content; become 24-7 news operations, in which the newspapers do less and the websites do much more; and finally, use crowdsourcing methods to put readers to work as watchdogs, whistle-blowers and researchers in large, investigative features.

“This is a huge restructuring for us,” said Michael Maness, the VP for strategic planning of news and one of the chief architects of the project. According to an e-mail sent Thursday to Gannett news staff by CEO Craig Dubow, the restructuring has been tested in 11 locations throughout the United States, but will be in place throughout all of Gannett’s newspapers by May. “Implementing the (Information) Center quickly is essential. Our industry is changing in ways that create great opportunity for Gannett.”

And great challenges: Like other newspaper publishing companies, Gannett has watched its share price slide steadily southward, losing 30 percent of its value since January 2004. Although newspapers still post healthy profits, circulation has declined precipitously as more and more readers migrate to the internet, non-journalistic news sources like The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, and on-the-scene videos posted to Youtube.com. Readership figures in the 18- to 34-year-old demographic have been especially dispiriting, and Wall Street has aggressively demanded that papers cut costs and adapt to rapid changes in technology.

Other large publishers are already experimenting with bringing readers into a more participatory role, and a host of citizen-journalism projects like NowPublic and NewAssignment.Net have sprung up in the last few years. But because of its reach, Gannett’s move could bring these issues into the mainstream.

Of all the pilot projects the company has conducted over the last few months, the most promising would seem to be the crowdsourcing of in-depth investigations into government malfeasance. Crowdsourcing involves taking functions traditionally performed by employees and using the internet to outsource them to an undefined, generally large group of people. The compensation is usually far less than what an employee might make for performing the same service. Well-known examples include Wikipedia and iStockphoto.

“We’ve already had some really amazing results with the crowdsourcing element of this,” said Jennifer Carroll, Gannett’s VP for new media content. “Most of us got into this business because we were passionate about watchdog journalism and public service, and we’ve just watched those erode. We’ve learned that no one wants to read a 400-column-inch investigative feature online. But when you make them a part of the process they get incredibly engaged.”

The most prominent example, Carroll said, occurred this summer with The News-Press in Fort Myers, Florida. In May, readers from the nearby community of Cape Coral began calling the paper, complaining about the high prices — as much as $28,000 in some cases — being charged to connect newly constructed homes to water and sewer lines.

Maness asked the News-Press to employ a new method of looking into the complaints. “Rather than start a long investigation and come out months later in the paper with our findings we asked our readers to help us find out why the cost was so exorbitant,” said Kate Marymont, the News-Press‘ editor in chief.

The response overwhelmed the paper, which has a circulation of about 100,000. “We weren’t prepared for the volume, and we had to throw a lot more firepower just to handle the phone calls and e-mails,” Marymont said.

Readers spontaneously organized their own investigations: Retired engineers analyzed blueprints, accountants pored over balance sheets, and an inside whistle-blower leaked documents showing evidence of bid-rigging.

“We had people from all over the world helping us,” said Marymont. For six weeks the News-Press generated more traffic to its website than “ever before, excepting hurricanes.” In the end, the city cut the utility fees by more than 30 percent, one official resigned, and the fees have become the driving issue in an upcoming city council special election.

Maness said the experience was so encouraging that Gannett will roll out the new approach in all of its newsrooms. “We’re going to restructure everything in how we gather news and information. We’ll shift our eyes and ears on the ground from reporters to the crowd.”

Sources at several papers, from The Indianapolis Star to The Cincinnati Enquirer to the Burlington (Vermont) Free Press, said Gannett corporate headquarters had directed them to adopt the new approach.

Naturally, the newsrooms are wary of the changes, despite the results achieved in Fort Myers. “We’ve broken into task forces to figure out how to implement this, but some of this stuff, I’ll be honest, gives us great pause,” said one midlevel editor at a Gannett newspaper, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The editor of the Indianapolis Star sparked a minor controversy when he launched that paper’s crowdsourcing efforts in the editor’s page a few weeks ago. Several staffers publicly expressed the concern that Gannett was turning to the crowd as a cost-saving measure, and worried that the changes would result in more job cuts.

“Look, we’ve got some hurdles to get over, as an industry and as a company. Cultural hurdles and technological hurdles,” said Gregory Korte, an investigative journalist with the Cincinnati Enquirer who has been working to implement some of these ideas at the paper. At some point, he says, it’s going to get painful. “The newspaper of the future is going to need more programmers than copy editors, and we’re going to have to figure out how to make that transition.”

Carroll and Maness have promised that no layoffs will occur as a result of the reorganization. “We’re retraining our people, and many will take on new duties,” said Maness, noting that photographers are being trained to take videos, and that library staffers may be called upon to man the “data desk,” which manages the influx of information Gannett hopes readers will be submitting. “But no one’s going to lose their job because of this.”

Above and beyond pink-slip considerations, crowdsourcing journalism raises many other thorny issues, said Korte. The paper recently asked the crowd to weigh in on the grisly murder of a 3-year-old foster child.

“All that water-cooler speculation moved online,” said Korte. The readers were convicting the foster parents before charges were even filed. “We wound up having to close down the message boards until an indictment came down. It’s very hard to separate fact from fiction online, and some people expect that whatever’s on our site undergoes the same degree of scrutiny as what appears in the paper.”

Korte said he feels that crowdsourcing holds a great deal of promise for certain “pocketbook” issues, like the sewage scandal in Fort Myers, but that it will take a lot of thought and experimentation before discovering how best to utilize the approach.

“We’re serious about this,” he said. “Do we have it licked? No. But we’re ahead of the curve. By maybe half a step.”

Online B2B Marketplaces: Should You Dive In

Sourced with compliments from

Business-to-business marketplaces are proliferating on the Web. Here’s how to tell a site is right for you.

Ron Burhkart was frustrated. His company, On Point Technology, Inc., provides software to help state unemployment insurance agencies weed out false claims, but getting the software written was proving to be a challenge. “We were dissatisfied with traditional models,” says Burkhart, who is vice president of product development. “As a small company, there are times when we need variable resources. We tried the ‘body shop’ approach, where we hired a programmer to come work in our office, and we also worked with an offshore development company. But neither met our expectations. In both cases, there were problems, not only with the quality of the code, but with the quality of the resource pool.” In other words, the coders themselves didn’t have a wide enough skill set to fill all of On Point’s needs.

So Burkhart decided to try Topcoder, an online marketplace where 176,000 software developers compete to create software components and win prize money from customers, instead of traditional fees. (Developers who work on Topcoder projects full-time can earn up to $150,000 a year, and even those who never win a contest receive money in a complex point system that rewards both skill and participation.)

That was three years ago, and Burkhart isn’t planning to go back to hiring developers the traditional way. “We’ve wound up with better, more stable code by leveraging their knowledge base,” he says. “It’s better than we could do internally, or that I could hire locally.” Three of On Point’s five products were built using Topcoder, he adds.

It seems like nearly every week, there’s news of another B2B marketplace springing up online where businesses can trade in everything from automobile components to laser engraving, with a specialized marketplace for nearly every industry. On Point’s experience shows how using these marketplaces can benefit your business, but how can you tell if a marketplace is right for you? Here are some questions to ask:

1. Is the market for this product fragmented?
   If there’s no good central way to reach the core group of buyers or sellers in your industry, an online marketplace can dramatically improve efficiency. “Our industry is particularly fragmented,” explains Jeff R. Lamb, president of DOmedia, an online marketplace for alternative and out-of-home advertising that includes everything from billboards to skywriting to printed cocktail napkins. “It’s difficult for someone who wants to reach a particular audience to navigate that market.”
2. How big and well-established is the marketplace?
   “You want enough participants to be able to make a difference, and some history of what they’ve done and how they’ve done it,” notes Jack Hughes, chairman and co-founder of Topcoder, Inc. “We’re going to have a whole bunch of new marketplaces that hook people up, but the outcome won’t be very good, because it’s too easy for people to promote themselves. There should be some mechanism for making sure you get a high-quality outcome.”
3. Is it easy to see how the marketplace works?
   “A marketplace should encourage transparency,” Lamb says. “Everyone should understand what’s going on behind the scenes, and it should make sense to all players.” Avoid marketplaces that seem to favor either buyers or sellers, or appear to be hiding information, he advises.
4. Does the size of participating companies matter?
   As a small company, the last thing you want is to feel invisible next to the marketplace’s large players. For instance, at DOmedia, all advertising opportunities are listed equally, whatever the size of the company offering them. “They compete solely on the quality of the opportunity and the data they provide,” Lamb says.
5. Is there an objective rating for sellers?
   “I don’t think user ratings, which work well in consumer product marketplaces, will work well in a marketplace like this one, because it can be easy to manipulate them,” Hughes says. Instead, look for an objective rating system, provided either by the marketplace itself or an industry association.
6. Does the marketplace encourage you to share your views?
   The best marketplaces function as online communities devoted to the industries they serve, and buyers and sellers can share industry info and advice along with their transactions. A good marketplace should actively encourage users to participate — and to provide feedback on the marketplace itself. “We are constantly making an effort to reach out and get more feedback,” Lamb notes. “It’s our job to make the marketplace fit users’ needs.”

“DOmedia reminds us to update our billboards and other information,” notes Ashley Robinson, producer at Massivemedia, which sells billboards and street-level marketing (such as chariot-like promotional Segways). She appreciates the reminders, because it’s easy to forget such matters in the crush of day-to-day tasks. But, she says, it’s worth taking the time over if you want to use an online marketplace successfully. “I’ve learned participation is important,” she says.

New Pepsi ‘Dewmocracy’ Push Threatens to Crowd Out Shops

Source with compliments from http://adage.com/agencynews/article?article_id=140120

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — The trend of marketers relying on the wisdom of crowds to create marketing campaigns is escalating as PepsiCo turns over the choice of agencies for three product launches to the masses, ramping up the potential threat to ad shops bypassed or relegated to a supporting role in implementing the resulting efforts.

 

Consumers voted on the color they wanted for three new Dewmocracy products and then a paintball of that color was shot at volunteers. The volunteer covered with the most paint at the end won.

In a contest beginning this month, Mtn Dew will hand off marketing duties, at least temporarily, for a $100 million-plus business to several potentially unknown players selected by consumers. Via the contest, any agency, independent film company or individual can submit 12-second clips via www.12seconds.tv outlining their ideas for marketing three new Mtn Dew line extensions.

Those line extensions themselves were created by the crowd. Distortion, Whiteout and Typhoon are the latest results of Dewmocracy, an initiative designed to open up product development to consumers. Last year, the Dewmocracy brands accounted for 25 million cases — or a couple hundred million dollars, according to John Sicher, editor and publisher of Beverage Digest. By comparison, Coke Zero, a major growth engine and core brand for Coca-Cola, sold 96 million cases last year.

“It really is a good piece of business for a line extension, even in this big a category,” Mr. Sicher said.

When Dewmocracy launched in 2007, it involved an online game. This time around, Mtn Dew is using Facebook, Twitter and its private online Dew Labs Community to determine the flavor, color, packaging and names of the new products. Now, it’s also allowing consumers to select the agencies that will produce 15-second spots for each of the new flavors. Digital advertising and point-of-sale materials could also become a part of the mix. Once the flavors and advertising break in April 2010, consumers will vote to determine which flavor will become a permanent part of the Mtn Dew lineup.

Fate of BBDO
Mtn Dew is adamant that the new effort will not impact its relationship with agency of record BBDO Worldwide, noting that it has been a part of Dewmocracy from the beginning and continues to play an important role in the process. BBDO directed a call for comment to the client.

Brett O’Brien, Mtn Dew’s director-marketing, said that the broadcast spots created by the selected agencies will be supported by a “robust media plan,” noting that marketing is a key part of the Dewmocracy process.

“If we’re going to have a dialogue with consumers and have consumers play a role in dictating the future of our brand, they’ve got to play a role in all aspects of it,” said Mr. O’Brien of the decision to let consumers select agencies.

Crowd-sourcing is a growing phenomenon among major brands such as Unilever and Amazon. Frito-Lay’s Doritos brand has run three consecutive “Crash the Super Bowl” campaigns, which ask consumers to vote on their favorite consumer-generated spot. The latest contest offered a $1 million prize if the winner topped the USAToday ad poll, which it did. But while contests like that have been decidedly gimmicky, a more troubling trend for agencies is emerging. This fall, Unilever’s Peperami brand dismissed Lowe, London, in favor of running a contest to find TV and print ad ideas. Just this month, two former senior managers at Crispin Porter & Bogusky launched Victors & Spoils, billed as the world’s first creative agency built on crowd-sourcing principles.

“Most agency relationships, they’re still the brand steward. They understand the brand they’re working with at an almost molecular level,” said Chick Foxgrover, 4A’s chief information officer. “It’s unclear whether [crowd-sourcing] will be a trend that takes hold in a universal way or whether it’s more of an experiment. … In general, there’s a lot of experimentation going on in agency compensation. This fits into the context of that larger conversation.”

Outside perspective
Mr. O’Brien said the review will be promoted to indie agencies, indie film companies, universities and film schools, as well as via online messaging and word-of-mouth. BBDO handled advertising for the previous Dewmocracy product launches. This time, BBDO will work on an umbrella spot that explains the overall Dewmocracy program, while the selected agencies work independently on the launch creative.

“I don’t know … that they’ll bring something different — certainly they may have a different perspective,” Mr. O’Brien said about the prospect of using a smaller agency or a film company, rather than a large, traditional agency. “It lets us get an interesting and unique perspective on the brand from people that aren’t living and breathing it every day.”

Asked whether the agencies tapped for the product launches could pick up more Mtn Dew business, Mr. O’Brien said he didn’t know, adding that “it’s certainly TBD.” PepsiCo has worked with small agencies in the past, especially in the digital space, and recently tapped Interpublic Group of Cos. digital agency Huge to handle a piece of business for brand Pepsi.

Mtn Dew has been one of the few trademarks growing in the carbonated soft-drink space, with volume up 1% in the first half, as the overall category declined 2.7%, according to Beverage Digest.

“[Dewmocracy] contributes to our growth. … The Dew fan is excited about engaging with new offerings from Dew. But it also attracts new people into the Dew fan base that say, ‘hey, this is something really interesting, let me give it a try,’” explained Mr. O’Brien. “And retailers love it, because it’s interesting news that drives folks into the stores.”

When campaigns go to the crowds

Crowd-sourcing isn’t new, but it’s increasingly popular, with major brands turning to consumers to create marketing for all sorts of products.

AMAZON: The online retailer turned to consumers this year for TV concepts, eventually awarding $20,000 to the winner, a photographer based in Los Angeles.

CAREERBUILDER: In May, CareerBuilder dropped Wieden & Kennedy. That same month it began promoting the HireMyTvAd contest. The winning ad could be shown during the 2010 Super Bowl.

CHEVROLET: In 2006, a contest to create ads for the Chevy Tahoe resulted in anti-SUV spoofs, but it did garner plenty of attention.

DORITOS: For three years running, the Frito-Lay brand has run a “Crash the Super Bowl” campaign featuring consumer-generated ads.

HP: To promote its Artist Edition laptops, HP launched the You on You Project this summer. It asked consumers to upload videos or remix a commercial using stock footage.

PEPERAMI: The Unilever snack brand dismissed Lowe, London, earlier this year in favor of a crowd-sourcing strategy to find new ideas for TV and print.

 

The Scary Economics of Crowdsourcing

Sourced with compliments from: http://www.ebizq.net/blogs/connectedweb/2009/11/the_scary_economics_of_crowdso.php

One of the emerging phenomena associated with Web 2.0 — and one of the themes of the Enterprise 2.0 conference, which I’m here in San Francisco to attend today and tomorrow — is the notion of ‘crowdsourcing’. This is the use of the Web to find people to complete work projects through an open competitive auction process. Dion Hinchcliffe had a long post on its relevance to enterprise here on ebizQ a few weeks ago and as I read through and explored some of the links I started to find it all rather scary:

“… idea generation, design work, execution of business processes, testing services, and even customer support. All of these can now be connected, often programmatically, directly to a company’s supply chain … most companies have ready access to crowdsourcing across a wide set of functional areas, to the extent that it’s often the easiest thing for them to try before going the more expensive outsourcing route.”

What I found scary was the massive commoditization and deflation of costs that these crowdsourcing options were enabling. It’s now possible to go out and find brilliant designers working from Asia who will deliver high-quality creative work for a fraction of the price you’d pay your local design shop. Electronics manufacturers and games developers can tap the skills of teenagers as crowdsourced part-time helpdesk advisers. The systems are now sophisticated enough to make sure everyone gets paid a market rate for the work they put in, but those market rates are lowered by the global and fragmented scale of competition, in which anyone with the skills and available time can offer their services.

Wired magazine recently carried an article about a company that is harnessing crowdsourcing with automation and intelligent algorithms to build a multi-million dollar business. The Answer Factory: Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell has some very scary passages, such as:

“That’s not to say there isn’t any room for humans in Demand’s process. They just aren’t worth very much … It’s the online equivalent of day laborers waiting in front of Home Depot … Nearly every freelancer scrambles to load their assignment queue with titles they can produce quickly and with the least amount of effort — because pay for individual stories is so lousy, only a high-speed, high-volume approach will work. The average writer earns $15 per article for pieces that top out at a few hundred words, and the average filmmaker about $20 per clip, paid weekly via PayPal.”

If this is the future of work, it’s going to ruin quite a few people’s careers, even while it makes others. I don’t think it’s stoppable, and it’s going to be a scary ride.

Colleges Try ‘Crowdsourcing’ Help Desks to Save Money

Sourced with compliments from http://www.resourceshelf.com/2009/11/02/colleges-try-crowdsourcing-help-desks-to-save-money/

At Indiana University at Bloomington, good help is not hard to find, but it’s pricey. Questions to the 24-hour tech-support help desk cost the institution about $11.41 per phone call and $9.39 per e-mail message—and last year the help desk handled more than 150,000 inquiries.

All that advice adds up, and at peak times some in need of it are left waiting. So, in a few weeks, the university will try something different: letting computer users answer one another’s questions.

Information-technology people call this “crowdsourcing,” a buzzword that puts a positive spin on leaving the job of writing and editing to volunteers rather than hired experts. The idea is to open a Web site where students and professors can post their IT woes and share their solutions. College officials tell me they hope it will grow into a self-service support center for colleges nationwide—a kind of Wikipedia for campus computer problems.

Corporate Social Responsibility + Social Media = Promise of Transformation

Sourced with compliments from

http://www.csrwire.com/csrlive/commentary_detail/1257-Corporate-Social-Responsibility-Social-Media-Promise-of-Transformation

“This is a world of transparency, openness, two-way dialogue with your constituents… I just think that’s part of the game today.” So said GE CEO Jeff Immelt in response to a question I posed to him, on how his company uses web 2.0 tools to engage with its stakeholders on sustainability issues, last week at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco (see it here – scroll to 23:15). “If you’re not willing to be completely transparent on just about everything you do, and if you can’t tolerate life in a world where you’re sharing information openly and getting input from lots of different people, where they have the ability to critique, criticize, have inputs… you better find a new profession,” he said.

I was there gathering material for a research fellowship I’m conducting with Marcy Murninghan and Bob Massie on web 2.0 and corporate accountability for the Harvard-Kennedy Corporate Social Responsibility Initiative, with the Summit sandwiched between the JustMeans Social Media for Sustainability and the Business for Social Responsibility conferences. The week’s takeaways: web 2.0 holds great promise to transform the way companies engage with stakeholders, but we are still way early in the innovation curve on using web 2.0 to advance corporate sustainability and accountability!

That said, web 2.0 has already radically transformed conference power dynamics: gone is the one-way transmission of information from the stage that privileges presenters; now, thanks to Twitter and hashtags, the audience voices itself in a meta-dialogue transpiring in real-time during presentations. For example, we who followed the #justmeans hashtag throughout that conference participated in creating a steady stream of comments, criticisms, questions – and “distillations” that I characterized as a “subtle art,” sometimes capturing points better than they’re presented. Kudos to Natural Logic CEO Gil Friend for best distillation — of InnoCentive CEO Dwayne Spradlin: “Crowdsourcing vs outsourcing requires profound organizational change.”

Harnessing the power of crowdsourcing, “Getting the Message Out” panel moderator Chad Boettcher of Weber Shandwick projected the conference Twitter feed on the screen to display audience questions for Treehugger Founder Graham Hill, TriplePundit Co-Publisher Ryan Mickle, and JustMeans Managing Director Deb Berman. “I was really happy with this use of distributive technology,” said CSRwire Chair Joe Sibilia, who I ran into at both the JustMeans and BSR conferences.

Joe and I shared our concern about web 2.0 in the CSR space focusing exclusively on money-making opportunities, such as brand enhancement, to the distraction of more promising transformative opportunities, such as leveraging its connective power for movement-building. We agreed that the CSR-social media connection needs to balance its business case with its change agency.

Measuring financial or social return on investment remains elusive, however. In the “How to Calculate the ROI of Social Media” panel, “the panelists could not give one compelling business reason for the return on investment in using social networking tools,” said Joe. “Many of my colleagues are trying to measure the amount of time and effort to expend on this new technology, and that’s why we went. We left the meeting with an empty feeling about the content, with this question unanswered…”

The Power of the Human Jumbotron: A Lesson In Crowdsourcing

Sourced with compliments from http://sparxoo.com/2009/10/28/the-power-of-the-human-jumbotron-a-lesson-in-crowdsourcing/

When has the crowd been more exciting than the game? No, it’s not the wave, nor is it the “war paint” covering bare-chested men. It’s crowdsourcing: when everyone works collectively towards a single objective. Below there is a video of a soccer game where the power of the crowd created more compelling entertainment than the game itself:

Crowdsourcing has never been more apparent and pervasive than in the online world. Wikipedia is often the most cited example of crowdsourcing–as it has met extreme success since its inception in 2001. It has tapped into the collective knowledge of the world to create a comprehensive and awe-inspiring assortment of content.

To understand how more brands can incorporate crowdsourcing into their business model consider the following key characteristics that lead to successful crowdsourcing initiatives:

Set an objective — Before throwing in tons of money and time in to your project, what are you trying to create; who is going to get you there; and who is going to benefit? In Wikipedia’s case: create an online encyclopedia; those experts specialized in specific areas of study; all those with web access seeking more information knowledge in one site.

Rally the troops — When you tell 100 people you want to create a human jumbotron, they can get excited about it because 1) it’s unique and 2) it’s tangible. With two words, you can inspire and lay out a clearly defined objective.

Plan — A human jumbotron does not get up and running overnight. It takes time, training and planning to make a vision a reality. Consider Wikipedia, they have a solid foundation for which individuals can build an rich resource for information.

Work as a team — The human jumbotron exemplifies how no one person is of greater value than another. It is through the collective efforts of everyone that the human jumbotron was successful. If even one person was of greater value, it would dissolve the final outcome.

Have a pay-off — Sellaband is an example of a crowdsourcing website that has a financial pay-off for participants. Fans give money to their favorite bands so they can cut a record. Once the record is released, fans can even share a portion of the profits if the album is successful.

Leveraging the power of the crowds, even if it’s only to fact-check or spark a discussion on your blog, can be invaluable for your brand. Allowing users to participate in something greater than themselves is tremendously rewarding and the nature of the web as a connector and facilitator has made collaboration and crowdsourcing more possible than ever before.

Next trend in advertising: “crowdsourcing”

Sourced with compliments from

http://www.bizmology.com/2009/10/29/next-trend-in-advertising-crowdsourcing/

It is difficult to be completely original and innovative these days. As soon as you come up with that brilliant idea you think no one has ever experienced, it gets packaged to you via the latest “hilarious” YouTube clip, Twitter message, or personal blog post making the rounds. More than ever, newer technology is giving the masses a vociferous outlet for creativity — an outlet ad agencies are now ready to exploit.

It is called crowdsourcing, and it ushers in a bold new creative turn for agencies. The term refers to a collaborative effort of crowds (typically online) to generate ideas. Basically, the agencies will rely on the interplay and bouncing around of ideas by a group of people, while they monitor and guide the community through the creative process. The idea is to get more people involved in the development of new ideas. Think creative focus groups.

The new term emerges in the midst of what some of the major advertising conglomerates are deeming a period of recovery for the industry. As Advertising Age reports that commercial time on television networks is increasing (might football season have something to do with that?), Maurice Lévy, the CEO of mega agency Publicis Groupe predicted this week that “the advertising market is starting its recovery”, and his company would enjoy organic revenue growth during this time next year.

Crowd Control

Sourced with compliments from http://www.adweek.com/aw/content_display/news/agency/e3i26911e62ce1ee0f724c394f5d3d7d664

Crispin Porter + Bogusky recently ignited an online debate and protest campaign on Twitter when it crowdsourced the design of a product logo for Brammo, an electric motorcycle start-up. Criticism mostly focused on the high-end agency taking such a low-cost route, as well as its putting creative into the hands of outsiders when experts were not just available, but the very ones passing it off.

For Brammo, crowdsourcing was more than just a way to stretch its budget. “We wanted to blur the line between [who works for Brammo] and [our] products,” says Brian Wismann, the company’s director of product development. “And it created its own buzz.”

Crowdsourcing creative — which includes user-generated contests, and receiving input on briefs and designs — is an increasingly popular option for marketers that want to add a consumer-engagement punch to their campaigns. It’s also controversial. Detractors call it gimmicky, say it encourages low-quality creative, and eschews strategic thinking and relationship management. But love it or hate it, this much seems clear: Not only is crowdsourcing here to stay, it’s picking up steam.

HP, for one, recently doled out $300,000 in prizes for its You on You Project, which asked participants to create Web videos in the style of its campaign, “The computer is personal again.” And Microsoft, pushing the idea that its users contributed to the development of its Windows 7 operating system, is asking for 7-second video demos for a Web series highlighting its features. Gayle Troberman, gm for advertising and consumer engagement at Microsoft, says, “The masses are the best way to deliver a message.”

But ad professionals who view crowdsourcing as a gimmick say these exercises are nothing but sweepstakes for the digital era. And because they’re driven by a desire for consumer interaction, they note, they’re more about the process than the final product.

“I’m interested in the high end of marketing creativity and production, and don’t think you can get anything high end” with crowdsourcing, says Benjamin Palmer, co-founder of The Barbarian Group. “By definition you’re asking people [to contribute] who are not at the top of their field.”

Some, however, believe creative does not have to suffer. Last month, Unilever, after working with Lowe London for the past 15 years on Peperami, decided to turn the brief for its next campaign over to members of ideabounty.com. “We felt we could get … even better content by opening up the brief to more people than we would typically get from an agency or agency team,” says Matt Burgess, managing director at Unilever U.K. So far, he adds, they’ve received 1,200 submissions.

Others point to Frito-Lay’s Doritos consumer-generated ads for the Super Bowl — the last one of which topped the USA Today poll that many marketers use as a metric of game-day success — as an example of crowdsourcing that delivers if not quality creative, qualitative success.

Economic motivators may certainly help drive the growth of crowdsourcing. For a brand like Brammo — which gave $1,000 each to five winners of its contest — crowdsourcing meant the agency could provide a service the client might not otherwise have been able to afford.

Burgess says Unilever sees huge cost savings with crowdsourcing. Ideabounty, he explains, told them to “put up $10,000 … as the appropriate reward, which is well below what you would pay an agency for their idea.” Unilever will produce the winning idea with a production partner.

“We would not have done this just for commercial reasons alone,” Burgess adds. “It’s to get our advertising from good to great.”

Not everyone claims savings: Doritos’ director of marketing, Rudy Wilson, says, “At the end of the day, we’re spending money to get awareness of this program out. The money we’re saving is being repurposed.”

Steve Simpson, partner and creative director at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, an agency whose clients include Doritos, HP and Netflix (which also has done consumer-generated content), says crowdsourcing is slowly maturing. “As crowdsourcing [grows] from being a gimmick, a big sloppy hug of Web 2.0 openness, the products and the process will become more professional,” he says. “The crudity of the pioneers will be scorned and the work will begin to show more finesse.”

A few ex-Crispin staffers are so confident in the wisdom of crowds that they’ve just launched Victors & Spoils, a shop based on the principles of crowdsourcing. On his blog, co-founder John Winsor describes the creative department as being staffed with traditional art directors and copywriters as well as “a global digital community.”

Of course, the more crowdsourcing grows in popularity, the more the “crowds” may demand more than a stack of cash for their contributions.

“Who knows how many of the ideas that don’t win prizes nonetheless influence a company’s thinking down the line — without payment to the contributors,” says Simpson. “Crowdsourcing is here to stay, but expect both parties to it to begin to cast a colder, more businesslike eye at the other.”

 

Crowdsourcing – A Jury?

Sourced with compliments from http://brand-e.biz/crowdsourcing-the-jury-is-in_4450.html

Best jury. This crowdsourcing bug really is spreading. Those folk behind the International ANDY Awards have launched a website, ElectTheJury.com, where visitors can select just who they want to see on the ANDY advertising jury from a long, long list of nominees (as well as add even more worthies, if they wish).
“The reality is, no one knows exactly what the future of our business will look like. We only know it will be discovered and shaped by the best people working in these widely disparate disciplines today – but working together,” the organizers say. “That’s what we want the ANDY Jury in 2010 to represent a coming together of the best of the best from around the world in storytelling, big ideas, creative technology and experience design.”
So in the spirit of change, we’ve decided to select a jury in a completely new way- by asking the industry to decide. By creating the first globally crowd-sourced group of judges, we hope to assemble the first awards show jury that truly represents where we are headed as an industry.
“For this to work, we need you and everyone you know to participate. To nominate others who we may have missed. And to vote for a 2010 ANDY jury you can truly believe in. Hopefully a jury that extends beyond the usual suspects and embraces some of the pioneers of emerging disciplines, as well as some stars from industries we must all learn to collaborate with.”
“We felt that a truer evaluation of the work would be to pull people in with different perspectives from outside the advertising business,” says Michael Lebowitz, CEO of US digital agency Big Spaceship, and ANDY Awards co-chair. “Our hope is that people will see this as an opportunity and feel compelled to participate.”
“Communications platforms have gotten so complex and advertising is going through unprecedented change because of it,” says co-chair Ty Montague, chief creative officer of JWT North America. “But one of the things that hasn’t changed is the way that awards shows work. Our mission is to get more people from different disciplines actively involved in figuring out who decides what the best work in 2010 is.”

The Myth Of Crowdsourcing… Or Misunderstanding Crowdsourcing?

Sourced with compliments from:

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090930/0126206365.shtml

A bunch of folks have sent in this silly opinion piece at Forbes, claiming that crowdsourcing is a myth. The reasoning? Because there are individuals in the crowd. Except… um… did anyone say anything different? Of course there are individuals, and the point of crowdsourcing isn’t that everyone in the crowd is equal, but that they each get to contribute their own special talents, and something better comes out of it. Every example that the guy dismisses as not crowdsourcing — Wikipedia, the Netflix prize, open source developing, etc. — actually does involve crowdsourcing. The problem is that this guy defines crowdsourcing in his own way — that if any individual contributes a greater amount, there’s no more crowd. Say what? The fact that a few determined individuals help craft a specific Wikipedia page, doesn’t take away from the fact that it’s the overall crowd that made Wikipedia so useful. It’s many of those determined individuals together who made the entire Wikipedia so useful. He then goes on to mock the Netflix prize… even though it disproves his entire thesis:

The Netflix contest is a prime example of individual virtuosity at work. One team was clearly in the lead and then a consortium of teams that had worse performance joined together and combined their innovations to create an algorithm that won the contest. For most of the contest, individuals toiled to figure out a solution. At the end, a consortium was formed. None of the invention happened through a crowd.

How to crowdsource

Sourced with compliments from http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2009/10/30/238362/media140-opportunities-challenges-and-benefits-of-social.htm

Crowdsourcing simply means asking people that you might not otherwise be able to reach for opinions, ideas, or help through some form of social media. It has possible internal applications for asking an entire, geographically dispersed company something.

The challenges could involve issues around intellectual property. If you are asking for ideas that are actually worth money, doing it such a public way could backfire. And once the exercise is up and running, there will almost certainly be issues around managing the information or ideas you receive.

A recent crowdsourcing exercise for a marketing campaign for Unilever got 1,200 decent responses – it’s then someone’s job to pick the best.

Social media is certainly low in financial cost, but you must be aware of the time costs, which can be relatively high if you are really going to do it well. Plus, you have got to make sure you think carefully about whether this technology is going to work for a particular task or brief.

Crowdsourcing may transform the “brainstorming” part of your project, but it won’t change the fact that once you have a great idea, you are going to need the same skills and investment to put it into practice.

What kind of brief works? One example floated at Media140 was car manufacturer BMW, which wanted a customer relationship management (CRM) system for managing a database of customers that the company wants to engage with in the long term.

Just because applications of social media have so far related to marketing, advertising or sales, doesn’t mean there aren’t hundreds of possibilities in other parts of the business. The important thing is to keep it simple, at least at first, and be clear about what you want to do.

Do’s

• Be honest. Especially about mistakes. People will see through you anyway, so don’t misinform. Dell is a good example to follow here – when it got things wrong, it owned up, changed the way it did things and is now often upheld as an example of good practice.
• Only contribute when you have something to say. Don’t go wading into conversations or harassing people – you wouldn’t do it in the real world, so don’t do it on Twitter or an internal network. Many of the rules of engaging in real-world conversation apply to online conversations.
• Target people properly. Make sure you are providing relevant information to the right people. You have to work out what will benefit the people you want to engage with.

Don’ts

• Don’t try to be something you’re not. One delegate at Media140 asked how you should approach social media if you’re already hugely unpopular – a bank, perhaps, or a certain brand of politician.
• Lloyd Davis, founder of Tuttle, said there’s no faking it. “You have to change who you are, not just the perception of who you are.”
• Dont forget to find some way to measure your success. You need to justify what you are doing – to do this, you need to be crystal clear about what you’re trying to achieve.
• Don’t patronise (or try to rip off) customers or even employees. Social media provides a way for these people to talk to each other, and as such, puts a bit more power in their hands.
• Don’t expect overnight success, unless you happen to be Oprah Winfrey. It takes time to build up trust, and it has to be done subtly.
• Don’t undervalue the skills it takes to get this right, or the benefits the company could achieve from getting it right. Some companies are hiring third parties to engage for them, but there’s potentially a role for in-house skills in managing this kind of engagement
• Don’t forget that social networks weren’t invented for companies – they were invented for people, and it is individuals who have flocked to and embraced them. The challenge for business is to work out where it fits.

Control

Some companies love to control things, but if your company is one of these, it’s time to relax a little. Your employees and your customers have always been able to say negative things about you – but now they can do it on the internet, and perhaps they’ll have a few more people listening. There is of course a danger than employees will misrepresent your brand online, but there’s a danger that they’ll do this every day anyway. Word of mouth is not a new concept.

There are different ways to approach this particular challenge. Drinks company Innocent and online clothing retailer Asos.com both spoke at Media140 and outlined different approaches.

James Hart, e-commerce director at Asos.com, encourages staff to add the brand name to their usernames and talk about what they are doing at work on their Twitter or Facebook pages, instead of just talking to their friends. He said,

“We have 55 people on Twitter. I trust them and I see what they say because I follow them. We like to be where our customers are, and we adapt to the environment. I’m not really sure what to do with the official account. People search for Asos so we need something, but we dont really push products at them. I just want to talk to and learn from them.”

In comparison, Ted Hunt, digital communications manager at Innocent, said his company has the one official account. Innocent isn’t strict over internet communication – it doesnt delete comments on its blog, unless they have swearing in them. Negative comments stay up, and the company encourages interaction. But Hunt says it is simply easier to manage one Twitter account than lots of them.

“We keep it as a single Innocent drinks account. Otherwise it fragments too much and it is hard to control the message. It is easier to get a message out in one go. But we don’t moderate strictly. In two years we have removed six comments on our blogs. Negative comments stay up. We take down swearing because children come to the website.”

A company can take whichever approach feels most suitable, but the key thing to remember is that you are not going to catch everything in your net. There are plenty of companies around if you do want to monitor what’s being said about a particular business, but ultimately trust is likely to get you further than draconian rules and spying.

Commitment

You cannot just turn up on Twitter and tick off “social media” on the to-do list. It requires a bit of work and effort before tangible results are seen. Social media may not seem like the most important priority in a recession, but taking the time to understand it and know the basics could be a good idea.

Take Dominos Pizza, it was landed in deep PR-trouble after two employees uploaded a video onto YouTube showing them doing horrible things with people’s food. It got 600,000 views and the damage to the company’s reputation could have been untold. Dominos took 48 hours to respond – which was criticised at the time for being too long – but when it did, it was effective.

Its response video has now had one million views, beating the first one, but what was important was that it chose the same medium to communicate with people instead of releasing a dry press release.

If a business knows the basics, understands a bit about how this technology works, it will be in a better position to respond effectively if an employee or disgruntled customer manages to get it in trouble. Some level of commitment is required by all.

For those who really want to get it right, training employees in what’s appropriate and what can work is a good first step. John Beasley, head of brand at Red Bull, which is relying increasingly on social media for its marketing, said at Media140 that long-term commitment is the only thing that will get it to work. The first thing the company did was create a presence online using MySpace, Facebook and Twitter.

He says, “But we had to develop that though and use content. We found consumers wanted short bits of content that needed to be refreshed constantly. We also created lots of different points for consumers to discover us through.”

Listen

Corporate arrogance is not what people are after. If there are complaints, it is good practice to acknowledge them. And if you manage to solve the problems people talk about, you will be hailed as a hero (it might be by only one person, but that’s better than none).

One example aired at Media140 was Comcast. TheUS internet service provider responded to a tweet from Techcrunch editor Michael Arrington complaining about the company, and sorted out the issues he was having. The result was free positive publicity in a blog post that went out to Arrington’s three million readers.

The 5 Most Entertaining Crowdsourcing Disasters

Sourced with compliments from:

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-5-most-entertaining-crowdsourcing-disasters-2009-9

Feedback is great, but never let your customers name the product.

Kraft Foods Australia recently came up with what they thought was a brilliant PR strategy for the launch of a new product: they began selling their new cream cheese and Vegemite spread with ‘Name Me’ on the label, encouraging customers to submit their own suggestions for the spread’s eventual name.

The result was a complete disaster that made fun of the very idea of the contest: iSnack 2.0. (See our slideshow for more)

Crowdsourced Advertising

Sourced with compliments from http://www.psfk.com/2009/10/the-worlds-first-crowdsourced-ad-agency.html

Victors & Spoils launched today, touting itself as the “world’s first creative (ad) agency built on crowdsourcing principles.”  The agency’s crowdsourced approach stems from identifying the need for companies, brands and agencies to be radically transparent, to address the consumer’s demand to be more involved and from a growing cost consciousness regarding clients’ budgets.  Recognizing that the crowdsourcing paradigm can feel a bit unruly for most clients, Victors & Spoils will face the daunting challenge of identifying an array of possible crowdsourced solutions and keeping them on-strategy for their clients.

With respect to its creative strategy:

“At the core of Victors & Spoils is our creative department. It’s not a typical creative department made up of art directors and copywriters but one in which everyone from art directors and copywriters to strategists and producers come together to solve a brand’s strategic problems. Our creative department is a global digital community where anyone who wants to participate can. People will not only be rewarded by the solutions they develop both individually and as a group but also for participating in the community, itself, and helping others develop their skills and talent. In an effort to guide this participation, members of the creative department will earn a reputation ranking that will help determine a share of the revenue from each project.”

Anibal Casso at Accidental Thinking was able to speak with John Winsor, one of the brains behind this ingenious venture and current Chief Executive Officer, to better understand their reasons for being and vision to launch the agency:

AC: A lot has been said both about crowdsourcing lately but I believe you guys are the first ones with the courage and the vision to actually do something serious about. Considering the current economic landscape, why now?

JW: It felt like the right time. there’s been a lot of momentum building from great pioneers, Crosdspring, Innocentive, BBH-Labs and CP+B. It’s time to take the next step in the evolution.

AC: With the rise of ideas built collaboratively, do you guys envision a future where the traditional model is death?

JW: All kinds of new models will emerge that will creatively solve different problems for different clients. You’ll see a very dense landscape of everything from hybrid traditional models to complete virtual ones.

It will be interesting to see how Victor & Spoils’ creative democracy plays out in actuality, vs. theory – and how its first clients and brand work perform.

How to Save Money and Draw a Crowd

Sourced with compliments from:

http://blog.entrepreneur.com/2009/09/–ways-crowdsourcing-can-help-your-business.php

Feeling shorthanded these days? Wondering if your business is truly meeting your customers’ needs? If you answered yes to either of those questions, have you asked all your customers to help you?

Increasingly, companies big and small are doing just that. It’s called crowdsourcing–enlisting the help of a large group of people to do company work or shape the company agenda, rather than delegating tasks to an employee or two, or perhaps an ad agency.

The growth of social media has enabled crowdsourcing, making it easy for companies to connect with huge mobs of customers. A couple of the key benefits: saving money and making customers feel more connected to your company.

A great recent example of crowdsourcing came during the Super Bowl earlier this year, when Doritosannounced a consumer video contest to create its Super Bowl ads. More than 2,000 applicants made their own proposed 30-second ad spots for Doritos and aired them online. Doritos gave out $5 million in prize money–likely not more than they would have spent having an agency design the campaign.

And do you think any of those customers will ever forget how much fun they had entering the contest?

Netflix has used crowdsourcing to engage the tech-geek crowd (possibly they stay home a lot and rent many movies?). This month they wrapped a contest to design better movie-recommendation technology for them, with a $1 million prize.

Wins for Netflix? More engaged customers, and better movie recommendations for all its customers, without the expense of putting their own dedicated team on the task of improving their software. The company immediately announced another $1 million contest to improve on the company’s “taste profile” software.

Crowdsourcing can be as simple as Dell’s IdeaStorm website, where customers can leave suggestions for new products or services they’d like to see. Rather than just a few engineers sitting around in a conference room, now they’re tapping their entire customer base’s brainpower.

Some entrepreneurs are even building small businesses entirely from crowdsourcing. As a reporter, my favorite example has to be Peter Shankman’s Help A Reporter Out, an online service that allows experts and PR people to see a daily feed of sources journalists are seeking. Through HARO, reporters can essentially ask a global crowd to answer their questions. All I can say is–it’s beautiful. Experts get the press they want, and reporters get the best available source for their story.

It’s free so far, but I’ve got to believe that at some point, he’ll start charging PR people a few dollars a month for these valuable reporter leads–and he’ll be rich. For now, he’s hooked a huge audience on using his service, and who knows how many ways he might leverage that in the future.

Are you using crowdsourcing in your business? If so leave a comment and let us know about it. If not, consider whether there isn’t a way for your business to benefit from crowd power.

Crowdsourcing Doesn’t Guarantee Quality… But It Can Be Great Advertising

Sourced with compliments http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20091023/0932216655.shtml

Earlier this month, BBC Audiobooks America started an audiobook project based on Twitter messages where Neil Gaiman kicked off an exquisite corpse process of stringing together about 1,000 Tweets to forge a storyline. Dozens of Twitter users contributed tweets to be edited into a coherent plot that will be released as a free audiobook download. From this publicity stunt, an approximately 50-page book (or 2-hr audiobook, actually) has been created from Gaiman’s fans. And presumably, the collection of tweets could also be remixed and edited — and improved — to possibly gain further participation from Gaiman (who contributed the first line of the story and will read aloud the completed audiobook) and the attention of any number of other authors. It’s not exactly a brand-new idea to compose a story in this way, but it’s a very interesting way to advertise and connect with fans to whet their appetites for more content to come (and even pay for).

However, the crowdsourcing aspect of this particular audiobook has been criticized in detail for exhibiting the worst of literary clichés as well as a meandering plot with too many characters and unresolved arcs. But generalizing this crowd’s apparently unsatisfying result to all possible collaborative-author processes seems a bit disingenuous. Perhaps it’s one of my pet peeves, but the schadenfreude surrounding crowdsourced works that aren’t “as good as Shakespeare” seems to focus too much on some artificial failure, and not the potential or the realized successes. Maybe fiction isn’t the best target for collaborative authorship, but the suggestion that collaborative writing won’t ever work for good storytelling is far from proven. In fact, many popular stories (TV shows, etc) are written by teams of authors. (So the question could be posed: where does the optimal number of authors arise?) Conversely, the overwhelming number of unsuccessful stories written by single authors should not discourage writers from working alone, either. Bad stories happen.

The real triumph of this crowdwork is that this experiment engaged with its audience and promoted Gaiman and BBCAA for future works. From the BBC’s perspective, a ton of content was generated largely for free, and a promotional audiobook was created in just a few days. Had the BBC commissioned a single author to compose a similar work, there wouldn’t be any guarantees of a compelling book in the end. And working with a single author might require more complex licensing rights and royalties. So crowdsourcing this project sounds like an advertising coup — generating a promotion appropriately disguised as free content. It’s not Shakespeare, but it’s a whole lot better than a banner ad, right?

 

Bruce Nussbaum on Design, Disruption, and Innovation

Sourced with compliments from http://www.dachisgroup.com/2009/10/bruce-nussbaum-on-design-disruption-and-innovation/

Sharing ideas and insights with Bruce Nussbaum, contributing editor at BusinessWeek, is always a pleasure, so it’s fitting that he’s one of my first round table interviews. Previously assistant managing editor in charge of BusinessWeek’s innovation and design coverage, he was named one of the 40 most powerful people in design by I.D. Magazine in 2005. Nussbaum wrote The World After Oil: The Shifting Axis of Power and Wealth, and Good Intentions, an inside look at medical research on AIDS. He has received awards from the Sigma Delta Chi Journalism Society, the Overseas Press Club, and the Industrial Designers Society of America. Nussbaum is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. For more of his thinking and writing, you can read Nussbaum on Design or follow him on Twitter. Photo credit to Alex_Cheek.

Crowdsourcing reveals 600 search engine flaws

Sourced with compliments from http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2009/09/15/237731/crowdsourcing-reveals-600-search-engine-flaws.htm

A competition for software testers to reveal bugs in major search engines has unearthed over 600 in Google, Google Caffeine, Bing and Yahoo.

The Battle of the Search Engines, as it is known, was carried out by uTest, which uses crowdsourcing to test software.

Over 1,100 software professionals from over 50 countries took part in uTest’s Battle of the Search Engines.

Of the 600 bugs found, about 78 were said to be “show stoppers” – or very serious flaws.

Google had 130 bugs, with 8% show stoppers, Bing had 321 bugs, of which 14% were showstoppers, and Yahoo had 70 bugs, with 10% showstoppers, said the report.

Crowdsourcing: 5 Reasons It’s Not Just For Startups Any More

Sourced with compliments from http://www.ebizq.net/blogs/enterprise/2009/09/crowdsourcing_5_reasons_its_no.php

Next-generation enterprises looking to drive efficiency and innovation have recently been able to tap into online communities to offload work. For the first time since outsourcing became prevalent in the 90s — making it easier to move tasks out to partners that could do something better or more cheaply than you could — businesses now have a new, potent, and often far cheaper option thanks to the Web.

Frequently referred to as crowdsourcing, and a darling of the Web 2.0 industry, it has recently come of age as the tools and marketplaces for on-demand work capacity on the network have expanded far beyond the early volunteer communities that originally proved out the concepts. These pioneers, which include the world of open source software and online services such as YouTube and Threadless, get most of their value from a large group of people or community through the simple use of an open invitation.

Games firm uses crowdsourcing to test products

Sourced with compliments from: http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2009/10/19/238192/games-firm-uses-crowdsourcing-to-test-products.htm

Computer Game supplier Blitz 1UP is the latest business to use crowdsourcing as a means of cost effectively testing its products.

According to a report on Develop-online.net, the company does not have the resources required to test the compatibility of games with different computer platforms.

Crowdsourcing Journalism With Actual Journalists

Sourced with compliments from:  http://adage.com/mediaworks/article?article_id=139842

Mother Jones, the nonprofit magazine of investigative reporting, has been around since 1976, but lately it’s been getting plenty of fresh attention. Partly because it’s a proven model for nonprofit journalism (the magazine gets support from subscribers, donors, advertisers and foundations) in a moment when old monopoly-driven for-profit business models for journalism, particularly at newspapers, are crumbling. But also because editorially, the magazine has been on a hot streak.

Crowdsourcing: Testing the Limits with John Winsor

Sourced with compliments from: http://dotnet.sys-con.com/node/1157405

Interview with John Winsor

“Having grilled some of the top minds in the software business, this installment of Testing the Limits will deviate slightly from the norm. With us this month is John Winsor – author, entrepreneur and crowdsourcing expert.

After a successful career as a journalist and magazine publisher, John founded Radar Communications in 1998, where he implemented a variety of academic-based market intelligence tools to help some of the country’s most progressive companies learn from key voices in their communities. Today, he offers that same advice as the VP/Executive Director of Strategy and Product Innovation at Crispin, Porter + Bogusky.

Crowdsourcing: Why it’s Not a Waste of Time

Sourced with compliments from: http://www.triplepundit.com/2009/10/crowdsourcing-why-its-not-a-waste-of-time/

Crowdsourcing. You’ve probably heard the term over and over, and when I began to hear it from Dwayne Spradlin of Innocentive as he presented at the inaugural Social Media for Sustainability conference in San Francisco on Monday, I began to tune out. A buzzword with not a lot of tangible results. A recipe for messy, small-results projects.

Active Crowdsourcing Examples

A list of working examples sourced with compliments from:

http://crowdsourcingexamples.pbworks.com/

WHO (Company/Sponsor)	WHAT (What is Crowdsourced?)	WHERE (Country)
99designs	Graphic Design	Australia
Article One Partners	U.S. Patent Reform / Prior Art Research	USA
Battle Of Concepts	Advertising Creative	Holland
Blellow	General	USA
Bon Bon Kakku	Graphic Design	Finland
Cambrian House	General	Canada
Catwalk Genius	Fashion / Design / Shopping	Ireland
Cameesa	Apparel / Design	USA
College Prowler	Education	USA
Colspark	Business / Sales / Marketing	USA
Covestor	Investing	USA
c,mm,n	Automotive	Holland
Creatad	Advertising
Crowdspirit	General	USA
Crowdspring	Design	USA
CureTogether	Medicine	USA
Current	Film/TV	USA
DoNanza	Agrregates All crowdsourcing projects from across the web into one place.	Israel
Dream Heels	Printed High Heels / Graphic Design / Shopping / Footwear	Global / USA
Ebbsfleet FC	Sports	UK
Elastic Lab	Advertising, Video Production	USA
Fat Muffin	Advertising	USA
Featurelist	IT/Computers/Internet	USA
Feedback2.0	Ideas+Answers	France
FeVote	General	USA
Foldit	Science	USA
Freerisk	Finance	USA
Galaxy Zoo	Aerospace	USA
GeniusRocket	Video, Design, and Copywriting	USA/Global
Get Satisfaction	Customer Service	USA
Goosegrade	Editing	USA
Graniph	Apparel	Japan
Guardian (Tech News on Sun Oracle)	News	UK
Halfbakery	Ideas?	USA?
HerdictWeb	IT/Computers/Internet (inaccessible websites)	USA
HourDB	Business, Shopping, General	USA
Hunch	Shopping, Decision Support	USA
Idea Connection	Business, Solutions for the Common Good	Canada
Idea Scale	Customer Service	USA
IMDB	Media	USA
I-StockPhoto	Photography	USA
John Fluevog Open Source Footwear	Footwear, Shopping	USA
Kluster	Business	USA
LeadVine	Business	USA
Mangahelpers	Media	USA
MyFab	Home/Furnishings, Shopping	France
MapMyRun	Sports, Recreation	USA
Naming Force	Design	USA
NewsTrust	Media	USA
NowPublic	Media	USA
Original Snowboard Art	Design	USA
Owngig	Music	UK
PC Tools Together	Computer Security Software	Dublin/Boulder/Sydney
Poptent	Advertising, Creative	Philadelphia, PA
Rate My Professors	Education	USA
ReCAPTCHA	Editing	USA
Redesign Me	Design	Holland
Seed Providence	Community Development, DIY City	Providence, RI, USA
Sellaband	Music	Germany/Holland
Smartsheet.com	Online Collaboration	USA
Something Awful	Entertainment	USA
SparkWords	News/Media	USA
Spreadshirt	Apparel / Design, Shopping	USA
Stocktwits	Investing	USA
StyleHop	Fashion Demand Forecasting	USA
Suggestion Box	Customer Service	USA
Swarm of Angels	Film/TV	USA
Threadless	Apparel / Design, Shopping	USA
TxtEagle	Mobile / Translation	USA, Kenya, Rwanda
Unigo	Education	USA
User Voice	General	USA
Vocalo	Media	USA
Wikipedia	Editing	USA
WikiCrimes	Society/Government	Brazil
WikiMapAid	Humanitarian Assistance	Brazil/UK
Wordia	Video	USA
XLNTads	Advertising, Creative	Philadelphia, PA
Yollege	Education	USA
Global Lives	Film/TV	USA
TekScout	Science / Engineering	USA
InnoCentive	Problem solving, General	USA
Fellowforce	General	Holland
Inkling	Forecasting	USA
HumanGrid	IT/Computers/Internet	Holland
Incuby	General	?
WhyNot	General	?
Naked & Angry	Accessories, Shopping	USA
Cafe Press	Accessories, Clothes, Shopping	USA
Zazzle	Accessories, Clothes, General, Shopping	USA
ArtistShare	Music	USA
Share Your Brain	General
Yahoo! Answers	General	USA
I-Bridge	Education	USA
TopCoder	Software Design, Development & Graphics	USA
IdeaNet	Non-profit	USA
Spot Us	Journalism	USA
TripAdvisor	Travel	USA
Oscar and Jim	Film/TV	UK
RYZ	Footwear	USA
MySoti	Apparel, Design, General, Shopping	UK
Txteagle	Mobile phones	USA
Ushahidi	Crisis information, mobile phones	Global
uTest	Software testing	Global
Pixazza	Advertising, Shopping	Global
Open metoCube	Processes, Procedures, Methodologies	Spain
Inkfruit	Accessories, Clothes	India
AddictLab	Advertising, General	Belgium
Idea Bounty	Communications, Media, Marketing	ZA
Kedai Photo	Event-Based Photo Sharing	USA
Fiskateers	Arts/Crafts	USA
MeGlobe	Translation	USA
Name This	Business Services, Naming	Canada
Nosago	Public sector issues	US/UK
User Testing	Usability issues	USA
BootB	Advertising, Creative industries	Russia/USA
Crowdsound	Customer feedback	USA
Hollrr	Product PR
Mob4hire	Mobile Application Testing	Canada
Brownbook	Business, General	UK
Jovoto	Advertising, Creative industries	Germany
LinkLarry	Media, News	USA
SiteBattles	Marketing	USA
OpenAd	Advertising	Slovenia
EyeKa	Marketing	France
JuJups	Design	USA/Singapore
Quirky	Business, creative ideas	USA
Exuve	Apparel	USA
Data Discoverers	Data	USA
NestCams- Cornell Lab of Ornithology	Photos	USA
Brewtopia	Brewery	Australia
Inkd	Print design	USA
YouSuggest	Ideas	India

Crowdsourcing the Brain

Sourced with compliments from: http://www.voiceofsandiego.org/articles/2009/10/23/science/869brain102209.txt

Thursday, Oct. 22, 2009 | Traditionally, the study of the brain was organized somewhat like an archipelago. Neuroscientists would inhabit their own island or peninsula of the brain, and see little reason to venture elsewhere.

Molecular neuroscientists, who study how DNA and RNA function in the brain, didn’t share their work with cognitive specialists who study how psychological and cognitive functions are produced by the brain, for example.

Crowdsourcing philanthropy — do the masses know best?

Sourced with compliments from: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/thebusinessofgiving2010055122_the_university_of_washington_a.html

Philanthropic efforts, when combined with the possibilities of the Internet, are producing interesting hybrids, and crowdsourcing ideas for development is one of them.

The Peace Corps is testing such an approach with Africa Rural Connect (ARC), an online community where creativity and global collaboration are the goals, and the best ideas can win $20,000 in funding. See the current top 10 ideas here. Oct. 15 is the deadline for submitting projects for the current contest.

Crowdsourced Content and Sharing Activity in Spiceworks More than Doubles in Six Months

Sourced with compliments from: http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20091009005072&newsLang=en

AUSTIN, Texas–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Spiceworks™, Inc., provider of the first free social IT management application for small and medium businesses, today announced that crowdsourcing activity by its user community of 775,000 IT professionals has doubled over the past six months. To help support the increased sharing of IT information and best practices, Spiceworks also announced the addition of a new Spiceworks Extension Center, where IT professionals and MSPs can easily upload and access custom scripts that help automate common network and systems management tasks. The scripts library, IT discussions, product reviews, best practices and how-to’s can be accessed through the Spiceworks IT Desktop or in the Spiceworks community by visiting http://community.spiceworks.com/extensions.

Crowdsourcing From Online To Traditional Airwave

Sourced with compliments from: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=115660

Triton Media Group, which provides programming to 4,500 radio station affiliates, has signed an agreement with Jelli to syndicate two Internet programs on FM and high-def stations. The Top 40 Jelli and the Rock Jelli programs are scheduled to go live across the U.S. early next year.

The deal surfaced after Jelli began testing the application with CBS Radio Bay Area affiliate Live 105 KITS a few months ago. The Sunday night Jelli show on Live 105 also led to an agreement with Australian-based Austereo. In November, the station will launch a Hot 30 Jelli show on stations in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth. The stations will broadcast the show on FM and digital radio (DAB+), and it will be available online 24 hours daily.

The Myth of Crowdsourcing

Sourced with compliments from:

http://www.forbes.com/2009/09/28/crowdsourcing-enterprise-innovation-technology-cio-network-jargonspy.html

The recent coverage of the $1 million Netflix prize was rightly heralded as a victory for crowdsourcing. The competition was designed to create a better algorithm for recommending films. But in the popular press, and in the minds of millions of people, the word crowdsourcing has created an illusion that there is a crowd that solves problems better than individuals. For the past 10 years, the buzz around open source has created a similar false impression. The notion of crowds creating solutions appeals to our desire to believe that working together we can do anything, but in terms of innovation it is just ridiculous.

Unilever to extend crowdsourcing to other brands – Revolution Magazine

Sourced with compliments from http://www.revolutionmagazine.com/news/948330/Unilever-extend-crowdsourcing-brands/

LONDON – Unilever is looking to extend the crowdsourcing initiative being trailed with Peperami to other brands in its international portfolio, which includes Lynx, Marmite and Persil.

Simon Clift, the FMCG giant’s global chief marketing officer, is considering a number of different crowdsourcing proposals that could be rolled out in multiple markets.

“Unilever is looking into crowdsourcing ideas that we can learn from and implement across our brands,” confirmed Noam Buchalter, marketing manager at Unilever. “We have our eyes and ears open to new ways of creating advertising.”

The brand-owner is currently offering $10,000 (£6,087) in a competition to find ideas for its next TV campaign for snack food brand Peperami.

Unilever has received 1,200 responses to the brief for a TV and print campaign featuring its Animal character. Ideas have been submitted to a specially created website called Idea Bounty, with the winner set to be turned into a TV ad with the help of specialist agency Smartworks.

In August, the crowdsourcing initiative saw Peperami part company with its ad Lowe after 16 years. Unilever has no plans to retain an agency for the Peperami account. Buchalter said: “Crowdsourcing is a sustainable way for Peperami to make advertising.”

 

Choosing crowdsourcing over ad agency

Sourced with compliments from http://www.smartbrief.com/news/aaf/storyDetails.jsp?issueid=166D7388-FAAA-4A57-824B-2E9765F7DA42&copyid=A3E25581-15D9-4FA1-B337-2B6FB546219B

Unilever has dropped Lowe, London, as the ad agency for its Peperami snack brand in favor of a strategy that involves using customers to generate ad ideas. The brand is offering a $10,000 prize for TV and print ideas for the meaty snack food. Unilever’s Matt Burgess said that Lowe’s, “great work has created a problem for them, because it makes Peperami the obvious candidate for crowdsourcing.”

Building a Better Burger, or Hipper Hype?

Sourced with compliments from: http://www.nbcnewyork.com/around-town/food-drink/Building-a-Better-Burger–63841042.html

Bill’s Bar and Burger, which Steve Hanson is opening this month in the old Hog Pit Space and above 675 Bar in the Meatpacking District, seems to be crowdsourcing its burger to a degree. The soon-to-open burger joint’s Twitter feed asks followers to offer up suggestions on toppings and cheeses.

Yesterday Wined & Dined picked up on a tweet about Bill’s Burger photo shoot, and got a hold of what it says might be Bill’s prototype. And if it is there is plenty of room for toppings and cheese, with two patties, and oversize English muffin bun and grilled onions. You can bet that this will end up being one of a few burger options Bill’s will offer.

Corporate crowdsourcing and innovation’s “dirty secret”

Sourced with compliments from: http://www.thestandard.com/news/2009/10/05/corporate-crowdsourcing-and-innovations-dirty-secret

Remember that super idea you had last year for a new service that had real potential to make life easier for customers while boosting revenue for your company? Whatever happened to it? Was it properly aired and vetted within your organization, or did it end up like 99% of good ideas — briefly tossed around in a conference room or email thread, before being forgotten and overtaken by new priorities?

How Understanding Customer Jobs turns Crowdsourcing into Smartsourcing

Sourced with compliments from:

http://www.business-strategy-innovation.com/2009/10/how-understanding-customer-jobs-turns.html

Crowdsourcing is becoming a part of many companies’ innovation strategy. But crowdsourcing suffers from a number of problems that limit its effectiveness. By selecting ‘emerging customers’ – who are better at spotting winning innovations – and helping them innovate around unmet customer needs, crowdsourcing can be turned into smartsourcing. Leading companies like Cisco already use smartsourcing to identify tomorrow’s winning innovations.

Million-Dollar Crowd Sourcing

Sourced with compliments from http://www.forbes.com/2009/09/08/crowd-sourcing-shankman-technology-internet-haro.html

Peter Shankman is a media matchmaker. If you’re looking for publicity, you could call him ”Mr. Opportunity.”

BURLINGAME, Calif. — URGHARO: Forbes is looking to profile entrepreneurs with disruptive, million-dollar ideas about building profitable businesses in an Internet-centric media world. Bonus points for proof of concept. Contact taylor.buley@forbes.com.

 

Wikipedia: A ‘Victim Of Its Own Success?’

Sourced with compliments from

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113128568

Wikipedia has been hailed as revolutionary, attacked as inaccurate, and held up as a model for Web 2.0 collaboration. The site hosts more than 3 million articles in English, it’s written and edited by hundreds of thousands of volunteers, and it’s the poster child of crowdsourcing.

But Wikipedia’s growth, once exponential, has flattened. In an article for TIME magazine, Farhad Manjoo writes about how volunteer editors are slower to create new entries and correct errors on existing articles.

“[Wikipedia] remains a precious resource,” Manjoo writes. “Still, Wikipedia’s troubles suggest the limits of Web 2.0 — that when an idealized community gets too big, it starts becoming dysfunctional. Just like every other human organization.”

Crowdsourcing and Regression Analysis of Polls; Can We Help Prove That Oklahomans Are Not That Dumb?

Sourced with compliments from

http://www.examiner.com/x-24816-Denver-New-Technology-Examiner~y2009m9d27-Crowdsourcing-and-Regression-Analysis-of-Polls-Can-We-Help-Prove-That-Oklahomans-Are-Not-That-Dumb

One of the great things about the new high-tech world we live in is that serious nerds can be celebrated and given a chance to shine. For my money, the best source of election information from last year was not a pundit, or a candidate, but a baseball stats geek who started doing some excellent technical and statistical analysis of polling data. That site is fivethirtyeight.com, and the guy is Nate Silver.

Wipro logs on to ‘crowdsourcing’ mode

Sourced with compliments from http://www.ciol.com/News/News-Reports/Wipro-logs-on-to-crowdsourcing-mode/24909125511/0/

BANGALORE, INDIA: IT outsourcing major Wipro Technologies has started off with crowdsourcing by asking the page viewers to decide on their homepage theme. The company is looking forward to introducing the concept for white papers and featured articles as well.

The visitors of the Wipro Technologies homepage will be provided with an option to vote for their preferred homepage themes. The option with the majority of the votes would be highlighted on the homepage.

Events Often Overtake Companies

Sourced with compliments from http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/09/events-often-overtake-companies.html

I’ve found myself saying “events overtake companies” a lot this week. I’m not sure exactly why it was the phrase of the past week, but I did spend a lot of time talking to entrepreneurs running businesses that are growing rapidly, causing the founders to rethink their strategic plans.

I think less than 20% of the companies we back end up doing what they started out planning on doing. They build something, get it into the market, and then things happen. Often it turns out the market wants something a bit different than they are offering. Or that the users adopt one part of the product and don’t use another part very much at all. Or developers start building things on top of the API that opens their eyes to a much bigger opportunity. Or it could simply be that the market loves what they built and they have to spend all their time on scaling and infrastructure and all the things they planned on building go to the back burner.

When Paid Crowdsourcing Hits the Mainstream: A Report and Online Panel

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Sometimes the only way to flush out the truth on something is to state an opinion and spark a discussion. Using on-demand workers has been around for over 10 years, but there are precious few resources available for someone to get educated. Hopefully my report will stimulate discussion and bring a greater level of awareness to the paid crowdsourcing market.

Smartsheet Releases First Comprehensive Crowdsourcing Research Report

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BELLEVUE, WA — (Marketwire) — 09/16/09 — Smartsheet.com announces availability of the first comprehensive research report on the paid crowdsourcing market. The report entitled, Paid Crowdsourcing, Current State & Progress (http://www.smartsheet.com/paid-crowdsourcing-current-state-and-progress) is available now at no charge.

The report includes original research on the paid crowdsourcing industry, including:

– Six hurdles paid crowdsourcing vendors must clear to break into the mainstream market.

– Five predictions, including one which states vendor revenue will exceed $1B in five years.

What’s Crowdsourcing Have to Do with It?

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I enjoyed Dan Wood’s recent Forbes article entitled, The Myth of Crowdsourcing. But, his argument is confusing. Here’s the core of what he’s saying:

But in the popular press, and in the minds of millions of people, the word crowdsourcing has created an illusion that there is a crowd that solves problems better than individuals. For the past 10 years, the buzz around open source has created a similar false impression. The notion of crowds creating solutions appeals to our desire to believe that working together we can do anything, but in terms of innovation it is just ridiculous.

There is no crowd in crowdsourcing. There are only virtuosos, usually uniquely talented, highly trained people who have worked for decades in a field. Frequently, these innovators have been funded through failure after failure. From their fervent brains spring new ideas. The crowd has nothing to do with it. The crowd solves nothing, creates nothing.

Hmmmm…

So, individuals innovate and groups don’t. But what’s that have to with crowdsourcing?

Pursuing creative crowd control

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The crowd is feeling pretty good about itself these days. What with the sudden popularity of “crowdsourcing” and the arrival of new books about the wisdom of us, marketers may be tempted to just chuck all their high-priced talent and let the hoi polloi deliver the message. Certainly the ranks of freelance writers, designers, videographers and other media professionals are feeling the pain these days.

But before you outsource your creative process to the world, consider a passage from Advertising Age columnist Bob Garfield’s wonderful new book, “The Chaos Scenario.”

How groups form, conform, then warp

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When we’re in a group other people have an incredibly powerful effect on us. Groups can kill our creativity, inspire us to work harder, allow us to slack off, skew our decision-making and make us clam up.

The keys to understanding human behaviour—our lives as citizens, as workers, as friends—are in the research on group psychology, which PsyBlog has been exploring over the past few months.

This post provides an overview and you can follow the links to explore the experiments that reveal the power groups hold over us.

Why Groups Fail to Share Effectively

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In 1985 Stasser and Titus published the best sort of psychology study. Not only does it shine a new light on how groups communicate and make decisions, it also surprises, confuses and intrigues. Oddly, the results first look as if they can’t be right, then later it seems obvious they are right, then attention turns to what can be done about it.

The findings were relatively straightforward and, as is often the case with decision-making research, another blow for the fragile human ego. They found that people trying to make decisions in groups spend most of their time telling each other things that everyone already knows. In comparison people are unlikely to bring up new information known only to themselves. The result: poor decisions.

As it happens Stasser and Titus’ (1985) participants were making a relatively trivial decision—who should be student body president—but subsequent research has tested all sorts of other scenarios. Experimenters have asked people to choose the best candidate for a job (Wittenbaum, 1998), the best type of investment (Hollingshead, 1996) and the guilty party in a homicide investigation (Stasser & Stewart, 1992).

Again and again the results have shown that people are unlikely to identify the best candidate, make the best investment or spot who really committed the crime. When asked to make a group decision, instead of sharing vital information known only to themselves, people tend to repeat information that everyone already knows.