Anyone who’s  been to London, knows the phrase “Mind the Gap” which warns people riding the Underground to watch their step as they go from platform to train.

As I watched The Gap’s logo “update” unfold last week,  “mind the gap” seemed apropos as a caution for businesses: watch your step or you might get hurt.  In this case, The Gap has taken some steps with their logo that may hurt their brand.  It’s too early to tell how their brand will be impacted, but one thing is for sure, other brands can and must learn from it.

If you’ve been watching, you’ve seen how the story has been shaped by the public on platforms like Twitter and The Gap’s Facebook page:  The Gap introduced a new logo last week that received overwhelmingly bad reaction from both their customers and from the design community.   The overall reaction can be summed up as “how could they?”  How could Gap change their logo without getting approval from their market place?   Those in the brand world know this is reminiscent of another similar incident with Tropicana.   The good news for Gap – people have grown up with the Gap logo and have developed a very strong connection to it.  The bad news -the masses aren’t happy and that puts The Gap at risk of losing loyalty and brand respect.

There are three lessons that all brands can stand to learn from what The Gap is going through.

Lesson #1 – Don’t change your brand in a vacuum

Like it or not, the days of companies independently crafting and broadcasting their brands are over.  As more companies open themselves up, consumers are now empowered and increasingly expect to be involved in the brands and products they feel strongly about.  The silver lining is that crowd-powered insight and rich market understanding represents a great untapped asset for brands and can bring them closer to their marketplace. This direct input can dramatically lower the risk of backlash, and enhance the probability of a successful rollout for new products, ad campaigns, and yes, logos.

Lesson #2 – React quickly, get involved

Kudos to The Gap for getting this part right.  They were watching and very quickly saw that market reaction to their new logo was not positive.   They immediately recognized the misstep and embraced it as an opportunity.    This is a key skill all brand managers need to develop:  reacting quickly and getting involved with both positive and negative threads in the social media world.  Done well, negatives can be turned into positives, but you have to act fast.

Lesson #3 – Get it right the second time

Here’s where the jury is still out for The Gap.  When you trip, people will scrutinize your next steps closely.    In my opinion, they have already stumbled a bit by announcing last week that they would open themselves up to crowd input for a new logo, but today announced they’re just going to stick with the old logo.   I believe they are passing up on a tremendous opportunity.   Rather than turn this episode into a positive, they are condemning it  go down  in history as just another highly visible marketing failure, a la New Coke.  The Gap  had the world’s attention, and probably hundreds of thousands of people ready to get involved.   Instead, they are just walking away from the opportunity of  using it as a springboard for greater market interaction and involvement.

Today brands are a two-way relationship. Take advantage of the crowd’s desire to contribute and keep you relevant to the market and your brand will benefit.   If you still think you can steer your brand without market participation, well… mind the gap.

@liman from SAP joined @shelleykuipers for the day at CrowdConf (Chaordix had a panel slot and sponsored the event)

The planned keynote was Jeff Howe @crowdsourcing but he unfortunately missed the event – Lukas Biewald (CEO, CrowdFlower) @l2k from @CrowdFlower did a great job of kicking off with Leila C. Janah (CEO, Samasource), who spoke of the opportunity to “tap 4 billion global super computers in developing and underdeveloped regions.” Crowdflower said their crowd members earn 5X the average wage through their community.

Liveops, CEO Maynard Webb was next on stage… “we are just at the beginning, only 4% of commerce happens online…work is the next killer app”. Webb shared some interesting stats: 22% of employers can’t find the right resources, even with 9.6% unemployed. 30% of employable workforce are working on their own terms as freelancers. Somewhat shocking was the research finding that most high school students do not expect to work for a corporation. Recommended read – “The Future Arrived Yesterday.” Maynard shared his view on the new rules of engagement – meritocracy, transparency and accountability.

1st panel – Possible vs. Impossible: Determining the Power of Crowdsourcing moderated by Dan Scholnick (Principal, Trinity Ventures). In talking about challenges, Barney Pell (Partner, Search Strategist and Evangelist, Microsoft) said what’s not quite nailed is demonstrating the benefits of learning and the incentives to make it happen – need to integrate for the big win. Today, the learning curve presents a problem – people gain mastery over time, then grow bored and move on to something else. Successful organizations may be the ones who excel at getting members of the crowd to share their knowledge before leaving for the next level task, enabling the crowd to advance up the learning curve. Sharon Chiarella (VP, Amazon Mechanical Turk) noted that transition from outsourcing to crowdsourcing is a challenge for organizations that don’t know their workers – geographically and politically. Loved when Ville Miettinen (CEO, Microtask) talked about our role as practitioners is ‘collective evangelism’. Leila Janah said the biggest challenge is that organizations aren’t looking to buy crowdsourcing but rather the output and power of the crowd…we need more LiveOps – where people can earn a real living — where they live. Martijn Lampert (Research Director, Motivaction International) said the real opportunity is when micro networks can self organize on the available platforms.

Wolfgang Kitza (CEO, Clickworker.com) shared with us Crowdsourcing in Europe.

Okay, now onto the super smart researchers…

John Horton (Harvard), spoke about the challenge of finding a fair price for work, when work can be done anywhere and wages differ greatly within each geography. How does a single buyer negotiate price in a microtask context, when there are many workers? Mass haggling is challenging. The solution? The Hagglebot — simplified bargaining using Algorithmic Wage Negotiations. (we’ve asked him for a blog post! )

Adam Kapelner (University of Pennsylvania) and Dana Chandler (MIT) presented their findings in “Preventing Satisficing in Online Surveys” said surveys of the future must increase perceived value, force a slow down of information/questions and attract attention to what’s needed. An interesting finding is: for best survey results, target women 25 years and older – you will get lots of feedback!

Lauren Schmidt (Headlamp Research) spoke about “Crowdsourcing for Human Subjects Research” the need to make policies clear, provide participant anonymity, provide ethical compensation, protect vulnerable populations, offering fair compensation, not to cross the line into coercion were some of the through-provoking topics she introduced.

Next up was David Alan Grier, Author of “When Computers Were Human” David’s presentation is a must watch. Social aspiration is a powerful force — everyone wants to be recognized as special. He shared what it takes to get a crowd to work — well.

2nd Panel - Make it work: Big ideas and great successes moderated by Ethan Kurzweil (Bessemer Ventures) (BTW, did you know that Ray Kurzweil’s movie, “The Singularity is Near“ - is touring the globe?). Brian Goler (VP, Marketing oDesk) discussed strategies for tapping global talent, making work transparent, the importance of building long term relationships, and the impact of guaranteeing payment. The formula? Seed (micro marketplaces of skill sets), feed (PHP developers, etc.), and weed (programs and policies). Doron Reuveni (CEO, uTest) discussed how they maintain quality with a crowd of 30k testers by building a community to test their own software as they were developing it. Expert software testers from around the world are now engaged. Each gets a profile, and uTest on-ramps them by helping them build their rating up in a way that is visible and makes potential customers confident that the tester has the skills they need. He spoke of the need to ensure incentives are aligned with the direction you want to go. How to compensate a team that works together to accomplish a goal vs. each individual? Fabio Rosati (CEO, Elance) has been crowdsourcing since 2001. The 1998 paper “The Dawn of the E-Lance Economy“, discussed the devolution of the large corporation into “flexible, temporary networks of individuals” – amazing that this trend was already visible over 10 years ago. As an early entrant, Elance had to educate potential buyers to get them comfortable hiring online. With a useful and easy UX, and great perseverance, earnings have now topped the $300m mark. Wyatt Nordstrom (CEO, Maven Research) get high quality people into the fold by building friction into the hiring process, and having this challenge serve as the litmus test for joining. By passing the “test,” uTest learns something about them. They continuously refine their understanding of their population to understand micro communities – 50 measures plus feedback. Patrick McKenna (CEO, Keniks) spoke of 3 types of crowdsourcing: transactional, relational and creative. Shared his “formula” – (1) find a pile of cash with transactional tasks. (2) understand how you add vale to the transaction – lowering cost, increasing quality, increasing the speed of answers, (3) build a process that leverages the crowd and an interface that enables the crowd to optimize the transaction.

Jonathan Zittrain, Professor, Harvard provided a fascinating and often hilarious perspective as he talked about “Minds for Sale“. This talk was the best-in-show at CrowdConf. In his view, we are all treading into ‘illegal’ employment law territory – though he encouraged us to drive on and keep innovating. The generative enterprise is now running on the crowdsourced operating system. How might we match the marginal time of people who are passionate about the work potential employers are trying to crowdsource? How much context do we disclose for micro tasks? What the task is for may be important – e.g., might someone use mechanical Turk for bomb making? What is the impact of pseudonyms? And what about the implications to do with the form of payment? Will this result in a tax on virtual currency? He sees more crowdsourcing in civic realms next. Flash mobs for protests, anyone?

3rd Panel – Distributed Creativity: The Softer Skills of Human Intelligence moderated by Tim Ferriss (author of The 4-hour Work Week) new friends, Jason Aiken (Community Director, 99 Designs) spoke of the need to be sensitive to personal interests in crowdsourcing design work, and creating a climate where designers wouldn’t be giving away their work on spec. John Winsor (CEO, Victors & Spoils) thinks the next big thing in crowdsourcing is reliable reputation information for individuals and teams. Keith Kegley (VP, X Prize Foundation) spoke of the shift to designing systems for addressing systemic problems vs. designing things. Saad Khan (Partner, CMEA Capital) is interested in moving from crowd sourcing to crowd action. Chaordix CEO Shelley Kuipers shared cool projects they are doing in collaboration with Orange for mobile activism and Oxford for maternal health.

Some thought provoking questions:

• “If you had 10,000 people, what would you use them for?”
• “How might we make work look and feel more like gaming to incent behaviors we want?
• “How do you find people with fresh perspectives that are orthogonal to problem space?” (critical for new innovation spaces, like those of the X Prize)
• “How does crowdsourcing fit into the global economy?”

Thanks to CrowdFlower for an amazing conference, we look forward to participating again next year!

Way back in February we were invited by Matt Thompson at Mozilla to present to the Drumbeat community about our experiences with crowdsourcing technology ideas from initial concept through to development. (For those of you who aren’t familiar with Drumbeat, it’s a Mozilla initiative to crowdsource the design and development of things that will enhance and sustain the open web.) We then posted a few lessons we thought Drumbeat could benefit from hearing.

Fast forward to last week – Shelley and I had a chance to catch up with Matt to hear how things are coming along and find out what they have learned. Matt was happy to share and much of what he has learned will be of value to anyone who is looking to crowdsource technology development.

Matt said they had a set a goal for their first few months of identifying a few projects and getting organized behind those projects. So far so good they’ve identified three areas in particular: Universal Subtitles for online video, Web Made Movies, which will showcase the power of new open video tools and HTML5, and the P2PU School of Webcraft, a totally free curriculum of training and certification for open web developers, which (as you might expect) is peer-developed, led and delivered.

They’ve also been able to attract a starter community of skilled contributors, and so far the actual output has exceeded expectations, which is very encouraging. People who see the initial work are excited by it, which according to Matt is a much better way to communicate the power of Drumbeat than trying to explain it!

And as expected, there has been lots of learning along the way;

• They’ve found their initial online collaboration platform, which was admittedly a temporary “lets get something in place quickly” effort, is not sufficient to support their initiative. It won’t allow them to scale the projects to the extent they need to, and ironically makes it hard to accept all of the offers to help they receive.

• They’ve also found that helping projects move forward and succeed has been more high-touch and labor intensive than they first anticipated. (This is something we commonly hear from companies trying to do it the first time themselves.)

• Lastly, they’ve found it’s not trivial to break a larger task down into smaller tasks and create the mini-milestones needed to shepherd the whole process along.

Overall, from what we heard from Matt, we’d say that Drumbeat has made some nice progress and like most of the companies we work with, sees more than enough value to keep plowing ahead and increasing their own crowdsourcing sophistication. (We, of course, have offered to Matt our help in giving some advice and insight on how to evolve their platform, and recruit crowds, as that’s what we live and breathe each day.)

Out at the GROW2010 conference in Vancouver (not to be confused with grow events of the horticulture variety), we got to hear from Lane Becker, Co-founder and VP Strategy of Get Satisfaction talked about “well that didn’t work – startup lessons learned.”

He talked about Adaptive Path, MeasureMap (acquired by Google … Inspired GoogleAnalytics), and Get Satisfaction all with cheery cynicism.

Get Satisfaction is a peer to us – as Lane described they offer “Customer service communities online – getting customers to engage with and support each other.” Chaordix has a different focus on innovation and insight communities. Our members through crowdsourcing are collaborating with each other, but also with the company personally and via our moderation team. We generate innovation and insight for companies, where Get Satisfaction offloads work from companies, reducing customer support costs.

Early on we looked at Get Satisfaction and thought “great idea but that won’t work.” Why? Because it’s not a one way input world anymore and people contributing online expect more sometimes useful help from a non-invested stranger. They want connection, appreciation, and a near real-time response from the company on the feedback shared. Participation is the new brand loyalty.

Ta da! Turns out Get Satisfaction came to same conclusion. Now they bundle in moderation to their service.

There’s a lot we’ll all discover as online communities mature. At Chaordix we’re working hard to create the human and online expeience to trigger product co-creation, technology or research breakthroughs, open up new markets and predict future opportiny for world-leading brands we work with.

What do you think human behaviour tells us so far about how people participate and invent online, and what companies find most valuable about customer and other crowd input?

Crowdsourcing can be controversial. Nowhere is the debate more lively than in the world of advertising where who best to generate creative, who decides what is great, and how everyone involved should get paid is all up in the air. Join us March 31st, as we host a panel of industry experts from Victors & Spoils, AdHack, GeniusRocket, and Tongal to discuss some very different perspectives and approaches on crowdsourcing in advertising.

Join the live panel debate on crowdsourcing in the creative realm

When: Wednesday, Mar 31st, 11am to noon EST
What: Free online panelist discussion
Who: Peter Lamotte, Genius Rocket; James Sherrett, AdHack; James DeJulio, Tongal; John WInsor, Victors & Spoils. Moderated by Edward Boches, Mullen.

Questions we’ll try to tackle:

• Does crowdsourcing in advertising need to involve “spec work”?
• Is crowdsourcing about saving money? If it isn’t, what is it for?
• What does the future of work look like for creative professionals, and for creative amateurs?
• Will the ad agencies of yesterday hold the same prowess tomorrow?
• How do we best include customers in brands they are passionate about?
• What’s it take to make crowdsourcing work for marketing?

Learn more and register to attend here: http://www.chaordix.com/advertising-and-the-crowd-invasion

Check out this short video for a primer on crowdsourcing and the world of advertising. While down at SxSW Sarah had the opportunity to have a chat with Peter Lamotte and John Winsor.

]]> http://www.chaordix.com/2010/03/advertising-and-the-crowd-invasion-online-panel-march-31st/feed/ 0 http://www.chaordix.com/2009/12/an-online-gov20-conference-not-all-talk/ http://www.chaordix.com/2009/12/an-online-gov20-conference-not-all-talk/#comments Thu, 10 Dec 2009 23:40:05 +0000 Sarah Blue http://www.chaordix.com/blog/?p=420

I attended the Gov2.0 online conference this morning and listened to 5 success stories on open government. I was really impressed with the quality of speakers and feel pretty inspired by all of the initiatives around web2.0, social media and the government. Jeff Nigbur, summarized this shift in thinking well during his presentation of the Utah.gov site, “Rather than having the media be our enemy, the social media portal has allowed them to be our friend.”

Here are 3 things we enjoyed from O’Reilly online gov2.0 conference this morning:

1. Unicef’s Merrick Schaeffer talked about the Malawi SMS campaign to fight malnutrition some of his tips were: always work with Open Source, follow agile principals, partner on every project, & develop local capacity. More info about what Unicef is up to can be found at www.unicefinnovation.org

2. Michelle Viotti talked about Nasa’s Be a Martian program around the citizen mapping of Mars. NASA has several crowdsourcing initiatives on the go including one with our friends over at Top Coder – an experimental programming competition to develop algorithms which would help NASA’s flight surgeons make better decisions on what might be included in the medical supplies kit of future long-term human space missions.

3. Melissa Jordan talked about the Bay Area BART and how a small investment led to increased traffic and more fan interactions. bart.gov shares data to let third parties build useful apps for Bart riders. She also taught us that “cupcaking” means constantly kissing and being all over someone in public places in cool-kid speak.

People we now follow on Twitter

I appreciated the comments and tweets from the following people during the conference. I suggest checking out

@unimps –  UNICEF developer focused on mobile phone /SMS development

@GEOpdx –  Geospatial Professional, Community Building Partner, Metro GeoGeek, Government 2.0, Father and Husband

@cheeky_geeky – Co-chair of Gov 2.0 Expo. Voted class pessimist (1993).

@laurelatoreilly –  Editor at O’Reilly Media focusing on various topics, including Microsoft and Gov 2.0. Co-chair of Gov 2.0 Expo 2010.

And @OReillyMedia, of course! By the way, O’Reilly Media tweeted this, “Thank you #gov20 online folks: Get 40% off with the discount code 4cast on print books and 50% off ebooks from oreilly.com” and you should take advantage of the offer. This was a free conference and we hope to see more of the same, but everybody’s gotta make a living, so buy a book.

Tim O’Reilly asked Gov 2.0 Summitters to imagine small govt with big impact

Web 2.0 summits have long been respected for bringing bright minds together to explore what’s working and what’s next in technology. The man behind the summits, Tim O’Reilly, hosted the first Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington DC Sept 9-10. Two of us from team Chaordix went to check it out. O’Reilly framed the conference around the idea of government as a platform – not just a body that pushes policy at people.

O’Reilly talked about meeting government leaders that surprised him in terms of their intellect, passion and desire to truly do the right thing. I’ve had that same experience. O’Reilly challenged presenters and attendees to think of the move to “transparency in government” not just as enabling watchdogging of government activity but as a new opportunity for government and the private sector to better exchange services and data.

Clay Shirky summed it up saying “the government needs to have a wholesale relationship with people, not retail.” Shirky used the Apps for Democracy community initiative as an example of getting it right. DC’s Office of the CTO offered up raw government data and invited residents and software developers to make something of it with apps to improve city service requests with $50,000 prize money up for grabs. The crowd contributed 47 web, iPhone and Facebook apps in 30 days. Contenders included apps like everyblock.com which let citizens see crime, construction and business license information by street address, the always popular pothole and more fix and monitor app FixMyCityDC, and the ultimate winner an Open 311 app that allows users to submit city service requests via iPhone (buy the app on iTunes) or as a Facebook app.

It was an interesting time to be in DC with Obama’s back to school address and speech on the US Healthcare Bill. It felt like people at the Summit, regardless of political stripes, were striving to be hopeful about possibilities for US govt openness. O’Reilly cast out the challenge ‘Could we get government to be smaller with an impact that’s bigger?” It’s an idea worth taking home to Canada.

The silence on David Rohde’s kidnapping has made a considerable amount of noise on the internet this week. The New York Times asked Wikipedia to keep news of Rohde’s kidnapping off the site. After printing an article explaining why, the rest of the blogosphere chimed in.

Stan Schroder, from Mashable, weighed in with his thoughts, including pointing out this is exactly the opposite of what Wikipedia stands for. He also raises an important question, “who judges what news is dangerous and what’s OK to publish?”

Mathew Ingram posted his view that it was wrong of the NYT to conceal the kidnapping. Judging by the comments, this hasn’t made Ingram popular, but he raises important questions.

Does transparency trump lifesaving privacy? What is the role of the editor in crowdsourced journalism? How does a community manager know where that line is in social media? We often talk in the office about whether citizen reporting makes people more accountable, or just always “on,” but what’s the other side of it? Is transparency as harmful in some situations as it is it beneficial in others?

We’re actively exploring answers on these, and other questions, but for now, we’ll take a moment to appreciate Rohde’s driver, Asadullah Mangal, who did not escape, something everyone else seems to be less interested in discussing.

First, open your kimono

The Xprize incentive 2 innovate conference was this week in New York, with Don Tapscott and Reid Hoffman among the speakers. Companies like Johnson & Johnson, Pepsi and Procter & Gamble as well as well as Unicef, USAID and the US Department of Energy were in attendance – all looking to better understand the future of open innovation and how to apply it as leaders.

We sent Claudia Moore, our VP of Marketing, to check it out and report back to us. First, she mentioned how the location set the tone of the conference. Being at the UN would be a pretty cool experience. Below are some standout points from the conference that really resonated with me.

So what does it take to create an open innovation culture? Reid Hoffman emphasized the need for tolerance of failure (learn and play again) and leaders walking the talk. Martin de Beer of Cisco emphasized the need to tie people’s compensation to innovation. And Judy Estrin called for leaders to translate the issues our companies faces into challenges for all employees to help solve.

Crowdsourcing done well follows all of the principles of open innovation: transparency, embracing failure en route to answers, rewarding innovative acts, fostering critical thinking, connecting people and breaking down hierarchy.

The ingredient for an open innovation culture that had us saying “huh” came up in the conference’s opening remarks by Keith Ferrazzi, author of “Never Eat Alone.” He looked out at attendees sitting in the not-so-casual UN and said “nothing innovative can come out of this if you don’t loosen up… if you don’t open up.”

That got us recognizing that crowdsourcing is also a modern means to foster trust.

Crowdsourcing online makes it comfortable for more than the few outgoing, comfortable-in-the-boss’s offices, group talker types to chime in. Crowdsourcing within organizations like Intel, Procter & Gamble, Cisco, British Telecom and Dell have all proven that online open innovation draws a bigger crowd of employee contributors than traditional group brainstorms, or other big-think meetings. The preference to type versus talk shocked cell phone companies when they first launched texting and noticed demand quickly overtake voice use. It’s simply more comfortable to contribute online than it is to contribute live and in person. (In fact even at the conference, discussion on Twitter was more thought-provoking than the live break out sessions, search twitter with the hashtag i2i to see for yourself).

So crowdsourcing is enabling a trust shift. Great leaders know the critical questions to ask. Great leadership comes from trusting employees to contribute innovative answers.

Photo by Martin Haesemeyer

The planning dinner was at the Foreign Cinema Café, definitely one of the coolest venues around. Great food and a room packed with about 150 interesting people. 

I thought the event would be more of a collaborative discussion of what Web2Summit should look like this year. Instead, there were three questions for us to answer at our tables. I sat with Greg Kerwin, of TechWeb; Wadooah Wali and Joe Perez, from Demand Media; and Bill Harris, the former CEO of Paypal and Intuit. 

Here were my thoughts on the discussion… 

1. What is the coolest thing – project, service, gadget – you’ve seen in our industry in the past few months?

The coolest thing I’m seeing is all of the projects, services and gadget coming together to form real-world applications. The convergence of all the things we’ve been working on in our web2.0 bubble going out into the world and meeting up with others. People and corporations really understanding the internet and coming up with new uses for what we’ve built.

Example: AWS improvements – Amazon now has scalable servers. Cloud technologies are beginning to completely eliminate the deployment and scalability issues companies previously had.

2. Who would you like to see added to the Web 2.0 Summit speaker line up?

A mix of thought-leaders, I want to be inspired. They don’t need to be all about Web2.0, they need to be intelligent, innovative and have a strong desire to change the face of the world, and this is why I love attending Web2Summit.  There might be an opportunity to bring the ‘bad guys’ to the summit and have them discuss how they are using Web 2.0 to revolutionize their industry – SEC regulatory (crowdsourcing SEC reporting requirements), banking (transparency in how assets are being managed, view into personal credit files), government (how are all expenditures being shared publically – the CDN government is a good example of this – we could get them lined up to attend), big oil (ditto, we could also get them to attend too).

3. Other feedback or suggestions for us on the event?

Make sure the Wifi is top notch so we can blog in real time and share with everyone else.

As for what’s on deck for 2009? Themes I picked up were a call was for real solutions to real problems, whether energy, health care, government or the environment.  There was also plenty of chatter about the utilization of the ‘crowd’ to be part of these solutions, i.e. collective intelligence will be a big part of solutions in our future.

What are your thoughts on these questions?

Shelley