We hosted a panel of smart people this morning. It was an hour of smart discussion that started out with Edward Boches commenting that “The crowd wants to play, why not embrace them?”  Then got right in to why crowdsourcing continues to be such a big topic.

James DeJulio, from Tongal said that it is still in the spotlight because tt’s feasible for everyone to creative and make content now, for cheap.  At the same time, the economy has a lot to do with it, business are looking for a better way to spend their money. Social media has given people the opportunity to collect a wide group of fans – why not give them something to do? It seems like a positive for both the business and client side.

John Winsor, from Victors & Spoils added that there’s a feeling that when a traditional agency brings new ideas to the table, there aren’t many ideas. Companies these days want more creative ideas and a closer relationship with the people coming up with those ideas. With crowdsourcing, not only are they getting creative, they are also getting research at the same time. Also, traditional agency relationship clients are becoming uncomfortable with that. They want more radical transparency than they currently have.

Edward’s summary of the three things were  more ideas, closer to the community and definitely cost savings. Peter LaMotte, from Genius Rocket added that it is also diversity of concepts and affordability.

Edward’s next questions were about the benefits of analytics and the knowledge insight and intelligence that comes along with crowdsourcing.

Peter said that tapping into a community really brings a diverse set of input to clients that can actually provide insight into their brands that you wouldn’t get from an agency. With crowdsourcing, from the front and on the back end, you are able to capture much more info than ever before.

Edward noted that what fascinated him when he did a project with Tongal was it was like getting back qualitative research along with creative, which is valuable.

James DeJulio,  Yes, the more places you can get people to participate and the more types of people you can get to participate, the more you get back real interpretations of your brand. He added a great analogy about how people view your brand and how you expect them to view your brand – sometimes what people want and what people say they want is different, “If you hate Duke, but think they are going to make it into the final four, you are going to put it in your top picks.”

When Edward asked if there were any conflicts to people embracing crowdsourcing as a way of working John Winsor chimed in and said he thinks it will be interesting to see what agencies do. Will they try and lockdown talent with more non-compete type things? There’s no answer to this. However,  Mark Walsh said what they’re seeing in the Genius Rocket community is that a lot of people in the creative agencies have realized that they are their own brand. They need to cultivate and promote that brand (themselves) more than they have in the past.

Edward Boches said as an employer, when he hires young people now, they all have outside interests. They pretty much insist that if you try and deny their interests in these other areas, they won’t work with you. The whole crowdsourcing model could affect the relationships people have with their employers.

The panel wrapped up with some words of wisdom from each panelist

James Sherrett AdHack – What you are looking for has to be key to the objective. Try it out on a low risk, small project, figure it out fast and iterate.

James DeJulio Tongal – First, commitment as an organization, Get behind it. Second,  a leap of faith that it is going to work, because it will work.

John Winsor Victors & Spoils – Break down silos. Connection and integration between product and marketing within your company is key.

Mark Walsh Genius Rocket – Start small with an orphan brand, so you are willing to try new stuff on. Those who ignore where crowdsourcing is taking the relationship between a brand and its customers are looking for trouble. Customers today are so drenched in interactivity and transparency, you have to respond to that, it is no longer an option.

It doesn’t mean that crowdsourcing is the enemy of ad agencies. We all want to play nice together. We’re just a new tactic in a toolbox that is coming along like a freight train.

Edward Boches Mullen – I look at one thing only: How consumers behave, interact and use content, community and the tools that are out there. The consumer has already decided. They are creating content. Any brand or marketer that doesn’t take advantage of that in a way that will work for them is crazy.

note: you can listen to the full hour panel here: Advertising and the Crowd Invasion – recorded audio

Crowdsourcing is as much about the process and the theater of creation as the output.  Maybe even more so.  A lot of my job is to explain to our clients that not only is the content we produce incredibly valuable (that’s easy to understand) but the engagement, participation, sharing, and all the other intangible (an important) benefits of crowdsourcing are what you’re paying for?  If no one can understand it’s value, then how do we charge for it?

Indulge me in a Chuck Klosterman-esque fantasy for a second…

INT.  INDUSTRIAL BROOKLYN, NY OFFICE BUILDING

This doesn’t really look or feel like an office, but it must be because there are a lot of people working here.  “The Hold Steady” is playing over a house PA or Muzak system.  There’s an overwhelming concentration of Apple products, exposed brick, exposed heat ducts, exposed electrical outlets–a lot of exposed shit…

JAMES DEJULIO (30s, Italian-ish) has a room of hipster looking (boat shoes, rock tees, tight jeans, ironic moustaches, etc.) forward thinking BRAND EXECUTIVES captivated after demo-ing the Tongal Platform.

EXECUTIVE #1

This is really cool. Brilliant model.  I really think we can make this work.

EXECUTIVE #2

How many videos do you think we’ll get?

DEJULIO

Depends.  50.  100 maybe.

EXECUTIVE #2

Really? And people all over the world are going to create these…for us?

DEJULIO

Yeah, if we do it right.

EXECUTIVE #1

Ok.  If this program produces 50 decent user generated ads for us and we’ve paid out

$10,000..that’s pretty good.

EXECUTIVE #1

That’s rad—and no one in this room is going to lose their jobs over that.  Right Julian?

(beat)

Julian?

Executive #2, not paying attention is texting on his iPhone.

EXECUTIVE #2

Oh, sorry, I just saw a tweet that the Kogi truck is outside.

EXECUTIVE #1

Ok.  Let’s do this.

DEJULIO

Hey that’s really great guys, I love early adopters.

DeJulio, ready to bust out the Tongal green-colored business Amex and take his new clients out for some over priced Micro Brews goes in for a high five…no reaction.  A long beat.  EXECUTIVE #1 whispers into EXECUTIVE #2′s ear.   EXECUTIVE #2 nods, breaks up the action.

EXECUTIVE #2

Hang on, what’s your CPM?

EXECUTIVE #1

How many users do you have?

EXECUTIVE #2

Is it comparable to Facebook?  What about traffic?

DEJULIO (to self)

Christ.

(to group)

Why does that still matter?

It’s easy to measure (and charge) for impressions.  But what are those impressions really worth?  I think the reason that a lot of people fail to wrap their heads around the value of crowdsourcing (and other forms of social media) is that there’s no metric for it yet.  Do social media companies need a rating agency?  What characteristics would justify a AAA rating for a social media platform?

Before we can even entertain that idea, businesses need to begin to assess a real value to what engagement and total brand immersion are worth.  They need to understand that if a 1,000 people completely engaged will always be more valuable than 100,000 people who aren’t paying attention.

Pretty bold statement, but why do I think it’s especially accurate for a creative, well-designed and executed crowdsourcing campaign?

For example, if there’s a crowdsourcing project on Tongal to create a 30 second spot and a member of the community opts into spending an afternoon thinking about a concept for a commercial for your product-maybe even researching your product and asking his or her friends for their input–then distills that down to 140 characters and submits it to a Tongal campaign, what’s that worth?  What’s that dialogue worth?  What’s it worth compared to 100,000 people fast forwarding through your ad on DVR? Or, flipping right past it in a magazine while getting a whiff of some terrible cologne?

What about when that user comes back in a week and opts-in to gathering a group of friends to spend a weekend creating a video for your product? He has to enlist help, he has to call in favors, he has to spend a few hours editing the film.  When the film is completed, he’ll begin sharing it with the friends who helped him, his mom, and their moms-because they’re all proud of it-and what’s just magically happened is that all of these people have become emotionally vested in your product.  (pssst-you may also have a fantastic piece of work which you now have the option to purchase)

The interesting thing is that the user has chosen to do this.  He’s having fun.  He either had a previous affinity for your product or service, or he just discovered it and he likes it.  Especially, he likes you because you’re letting him in the door by giving him a chance to do something he enjoys and your product is the catalyst.

How can you compare that to a banner ad?

James deJulio is the President and Co-founder of Tongal. He is a partner in Half Shell Entertainment and formerly Vice President of The Robert Evans Company at Paramount Pictures. In mid-2008, disillusioned with the inefficient, bureaucratic manner in which films were being developed, produced and financed, he decided to “shake things up a bit”. He began exploring with Jack Hughes ways in which the TopCoder thinking could be applied to creating filmed content.

If you’d like to hear more from him, join us on Wednesday at 11am EST for an online discussion about advertising and the crowd invasion.

There’s more to crowdsourcing than brainstorming

Idea brainstorms are to crowdsourcing what reality TV is to television – a popular slice that doesn’t represent the full HBO-caliber spectrum. It’s not that popular isn’t good but there’s a lot more to crowdsourcing than FOX-style calling for ideas.

To be fair – brainstorms online where the crowd is asked for open ended simple input can be very productive. Calling to consumers to ask what they want most in products and services, calling to manufacturing partners for ideas on accelerating production and delivery, or to citizens for ideas to how to allocate municipal spending – all are worthy crowdsourcing initiatives with valuable outcomes in terms of market prediction, optimizing a company’s operations or achieving government relevant to the people.

Idea jams, or ideagoras as they are sometimes called, represent the simplest form of crowdsourcing where the output is ideas. Crowdsourcing may also be use for crowd production and even funding. As a production tool, crowdsourcing can be used to invite solutions to a complex problem, generate technology, produce creative content and trigger research break throughs.

PwC’s Canada’s Digital Compass (full disclosure this is a Chaordix crowdsourcing initiative) asking how Canada can best lead in a global digital economy is a good example of crowd production. In what we call a Solution Hunt, the crowd is asked to push beyond the ideation stage, to conceive a solution to a problem identified. It’s heavier lifting than free form ideas so submission numbers are usually lower than brainstorms, but the contribution value is significantly higher to the host organization.

Among top enterprises in the S&P index, many use multiple models of crowdsourcing across multiple divisions in their organization including human resources, product development, R&D, corporate strategy and marketing. Serving all of these needs demands a capability in multiple crowdsourcing models, from brainstorm to solution hunt to best of picks to crowd-test appeal of an internally developed direction or product.

It’s great to be see demand for crowdsourcing going mainstream and the proliferation of idea forum tools is a natural market response. Most are strong on enabling input, but weaker at how they help to filter the cream from a motley crop of ideas. As organizations contemplate what technology to adopt for highest value open innovation, it’s worth contemplating the value of multiple models of crowdsourcing and protecting yourself from ideas-orama.

Photo by: Erikadotnet

I often sit back (usually over coffee) and think about where crowdsourcing and collaboration are heading. It’s a fascinating exercise, coming up with different scenarios and expanding them out to see if and how it would work. My latest mental exploration has been about the concept of organizational crowdsourcing.

Most crowdsourcing is currently structured around the task, a production-oriented model. The community is given something to do and they do it. I want to design a logo. I want to analyze this data. I want to test this software. I want to provide customer support.

What if we expanded this into a process-oriented model where organizational structures in various forms move into the global community? For example, a structure (on the agency side) may look like this:

1. Project Owner(s) – Define the strategy to meet the project’s goals.
2. Project Manager(s) – Break down the strategy into specific steps and milestones. Assign particular tasks to various teams. Document the project’s status.
3. Team Leaders – Divide and delegate the team’s responsibilities to individual member types. Review requirements and submissions.
4. Team Members – Work on delegated task(s).

At each level, the work produced moves up and down the organizational chart for requirements, reviews, clarifications, etc. There also may or may not be an equivalent role on the client’s side, so the community would also step in to fill those gaps.

Now, I’m not proposing that members report to each other based on their overall job role like an employee to a manager, but base it on the specific role and project task. I don’t think anyone wants to transfer distracting political business environments onto the crowd, but what if we implement a process that enables a true strategy and delivery to be achieved through crowdsourcing?

I’m also not proposing that we broaden the scope of the tasks we give to the crowd. It’s been shown that crowdsourcing is more successful when the community is given smaller, more defined assignments instead of generalized broad goals. So thinking in terms of the organization, the tasks would just be defined for each particular role.

So how could this be implemented? I think a few things need to happen:

1. Members
Member types would no longer be defined by only skill set, but also by responsibility, experience, reliability and job role. This is also followed by more scrutiny and validation of these participants and less based on an open registration format.

2. Teams
Sub-groups of the community are created along with the infrastructure to handle the team dynamics. This is not an easy task. In-person teams tend to develop their own dynamics and virtual teams add another level of complexity. Include the third layer of the crowd and you have an interesting challenge.

3. Projects
The structuring of projects should be looked at with fresh eyes. Not in the fact that traditional project planning is ineffective. Just the opposite. Projects should be arranged into types or templates so their integrity is not at risk by putting them out to the crowd. Yes, every project is different, but how the community engages each project should be similar.

4. Clients
Clients would need to shift their mindset into understanding that not only the production tasks are done through the community, but strategy and planning as well. This may be more difficult to initially accept since some or all the ownership and direction of a project is resting with the crowd. Obviously the ultimate responsibility is still on the crowdsourcing firm and the client, but each project would have a certain level of crowd vs company engagement.

5. Communication
Communication between the community members at all levels as well as between the members and the company should be the utmost priority. An online environment would need to be created and nurtured that encourages this communication and openness. As with traditional structures, it’s an essential component to getting a project done successfully and maintaining a happy, productive work environment.

6. Technology
Web applications currently being used for competition, collaboration and communication would need to be upgraded to handle the more complex interactions between the individual members in all roles as well as inner-team and inter-team dynamics.

7. User Experience
The design and user interface, like technology, should also be updated to maintain and enhance the overall user experience of the competition, collaboration and communication. However, while the technology may get more complex, the user experience should become even simpler and more transparent. The users shouldn’t be aware of the increasing number of moving parts behind the scenes.

Of course, there are benefits and drawbacks to this idea as there are with all ideas. And it’s certainly a big leap from most organizational models, but I think it could be beneficial in some cases. What do you think? Should we expand the idea or go back to the drawing board? Call it a day or get more coffee?

Jason Spector is a creative and crowdsourcing consultant based in Pittsburgh, PA. He uses his extensive background in design, innovation and user experience to create a better crowd and a better world. You can follow Jason on Twitter at @JasonSpector or read his blog at jasonspector.com.

Photo by: llawliet