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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bio:

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

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

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

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

True and true.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next up: more.

More different ways for crowdsourcing to improve advertising.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think it is safe to say that Big Rock Brewery is Calgary’s favorite beer. Since the start, its customers have been its biggest promoters. Long before it became known as crowdsourcing, Big Rock thought up creative ways to involve those promoters in its brand. The brewery does a great job of managing its crowdsourced campaigns so both the brand and customers win. I think one of the reasons it continues to be successful is Big Rock is heavily involved in the local community. They promote local arts and culture events and even host their own lecture series. Their VP of corporate and community affairs, Jim Button, wrote about how the Big Rock Eddies came about - and why people still love it going into its 17^th year!

Would you pay $100 to watch commercials while sampling the product being advertised?

Jim Button

I’m sure Ed McNally, Founder Big Rock Brewery, had no idea back in 1993 that he was participating in a powerful tool called Crowdsourcing.  Really, he was simply having some fun with the customers that love his brand while saving himself some money.

What Ed knew was that his small regional craft brewery couldn’t afford the high price of traditional advertising. Even if he could, he wasn’t interested in following suit and doing what the large industrial breweries were doing. He knew PR was much more powerful than traditional advertising in creating a meaningful relationship for a product that had a short history and relatively small market share.

So, take his Scottish background, and combine it with his desire to create a relationship with beer drinkers and you have The Big Rock Eddies Beer Commercial Contest. Instead of hiring an agency and booking expensive media time to create awareness, Ed simply asked his beer drinkers to create beer commercials for him. After all, who would be better at selling than the people that already loved the beer?  And really, what could be more fun than drinking beer and watching a bunch of funny beer commercials.

17 years and thousands of videos later, the Eddies have become a much sought after trophy and equally sought after event ticket. Every year tickets for the annual fundraiser sell out in the first day, over $60,000 is raised for charity and everyone walks away happy. Imagine that, close to 2,000 people attending a party and paying $100 a ticket to sample your beer while watching your beer commercials. Crazy.

Here at Chaordix, we like listening to smart people. There’s nothing worse than being excited for a conference, only to hear people talk about the same ideas that were discussed the year before. Therefore, we love when we come across someone that really challenges the way we think. So far in 2010, that person is Jonathan Zittrain. He teaches a course co-hosted by Harvard and Stanford law schools titled “Difficult Problems in Cyberlaw,” and wrote a book,  The Future of the Internet - And How to Stop It

His lectures and posts on Ubiquitous Human Computing (websites like Amazon Mechanical Turk) are thought-provoking and help us think about how everything we are doing has an impact on how we traditionally do work. While we’re dreaming of all of the possibilities of crowdsourcing, it is nice to know that others are thinking about the impact all of those possibilities might bring - and guiding us somewhere positive. Jonathan was kind enough to say we could post his lecture on our blog - and we think you should sit down and watch all 77 minutes as soon as you can.

*note: if you like this, he’s also talked at TED also - buy the book

Steven Adler (not the one from Guns and Roses) organizes the The IBM Data Governance Council. An organization formed by IBM consisting of companies, institutions and technology solution providers with the stated objective to build consistency and quality control in governance, which will help companies better protect critical data. Data governance encompasses the people, processes, and information technology required to create a consistent and proper handling of an organization’s data across the business enterprise. He is a friend of Chaordix and has some good insights we wanted to share:

Data Governance and Tennis

Recently, I played tennis with my son.  At 16, he’s tall and lanky like me, but full of boundless energy and I have to play smart to keep up with him.  I taught him most of what he knows in tennis and we both play at the same level - though I do enjoy when he wins.  But on this day, there was no winning or losing.  Our rallies were endless.  We exchanged vollies, drops, topspin, and slice.  If I won a point, he came back and won the next.  There was no mercy and no letup.  At one point, he sliced a ball low to my mid-court forehand and I had to rush from the backhand side of the court across to reach it.  I’m not as fast as I once was but on this day I crossed the court with speed.  As I got to the ball and lined up a chip drop, I looked up and found that my intrepid son had already anticipated that move and was rushing to the net to cut me off.  I stopped short and just laughed.  I said “you know what I’m going to do next, don’t you,” and he said “like, yeah, I know all your shots.”  That happens when you play with your son, because we know each other so well.

We played out the rest of the match and after I thought about that laugh we shared at the net as a metaphor for much of what I’ve learned about Data Governance, Risk Measurement, the financial crisis and the challenges of information and knowledgeknowlegde.  You see, people are best at anticipating what they expect - especially in situations that breed familiarity.  That’s the reason why Value at Risk (VAR) was such a seductively attractive formula - in a largely pro-cyclical business culture, a formula that helps you anticipate what you expect (that today will look mostly like tomorrow, yesterday and the day before) is a winner.  People who anticipate other outcomes are either brilliant visionaries who make “discoveries” (minority), or outliers who make trouble (majority).

I began the year thinking that financial regulatory authorities could make better policy decisions if they had the right data.  But I now understand that many of them had the right data in 2005, 6, and even 7 but they didn’t understand it, chose to ignore it, or lacked the political will to make radical, outlier, decisions that would adversely effect many key constituencies.

Hence my conclusion: Data Governance isn’t enough.  Collecting and aggregating data is an important step, but people need to understand what the data means as information, and that information needs to be communicated widely as knowledge.  Not the finite biological knowledge we all have in our brains - the organic translation all of you reading this article are performing right now - but the metaphysical knowledge of a community knowing a common truth about the world so they are prepared to accept a decision to avoid an outcome they did not expect.

I don’t care what kind of new Systemic Risk Council gets built at the Federal level of our government, or indeed what kind of new Regulatory Information Architecture is designed to support it.  All of that is important but not as important as the steps people take to disseminate the information in both raw and interpreted form to a wide and varied constituency.  The more people inside and outside the group that know what the group knows the better chance we have that outliers will interpret things the group will miss.  And it is upon those outliers - the ones who anticipate what we don’t expect - that crisis prevention most rests upon.

This last point is the hardest.  In the financial crisis, only a few economists like Nouriel Roubini predicted the credit crisis before it began.  Most of the other economists predicted it perfectly only in hindsight.  But Nouriel was largely ignored by those economists and the media as “Dr. Doom, “the naysayer who only saw the bad while so much good was going on.  And that is human nature.  If you aren’t in the tribe of believers you are a barbarian, an outsider, who can’t be trusted and must be demonized or destroyed.

This is of course very bad for the discovery of non-expected results, unless of course you ARE a barbarian trying to hack your way into the group in which case you should be destroyed.  Trusting what you know, where it came from, where it’s going, and who’s going to know it and do something about it will require new forms of transparency and self-governance.  George Orwell wrote about the alternative, and we don’t need to follow his example.

Because what we want is Trusted Information that empowers Doubt.  Doubt about what information means is essential to effective decision making.  And this is where I think a new Information Governance discipline, one that focuses on the Information needs of Governance as well as the challenges of Governing the use of Information is needed.

That’s at least what I learned from my son on the tennis court last week.  We’ll see what he teaches me today.

photo by: Cyberdees