The Winter Solstice is the time for Data Governance Predictions.  And here are mine for 2011:

1.  Systemic Risk Councils will proliferate.  The Dodd-Frank Bill established a Systemic Risk Council in the Federal Government to aggregate financial data from across the economy to detect patterns of exposure that can impact macro-economic policy.  All Financial regulated entities should follow the leader and do this themselves.  Some, like JPMC and Goldman Sachs have been doing it for years.  Everyone who is not doing it should get on the wagon and replicate.The Federal Government will take eons to gather all the data and make sense of it.  And even if they do it, there will be political considerations with regards to how the data is used and disclosed.  And forget about counter-cyclical policy-making.  So if you want your firm to escape financial ruin in the next Sub-prime, Sovereign Debt, Greek, Irish, Portuguese, or Spanish Debt Crisis, go and get a Risk Council and start sifting the data yourselves.  Processors and storage are cheap, data is widely available, what you need is the organizational structure, decision-making system, and a sound Data Governance program.  Get it going now, because with all the debt the world has accumulated there will be many more crises to predict.

2.  Health care will join the Information Revolution – Today, many doctors use the Internet to look up symptoms, anatomy, and, of course, pharmaceutical remedies.  Yet as an industry, there are so few information resources that document the comparative performance of doctors and hospitals in how they treat patients and the results.  In 2011, thanks to US health care reform, this will start to change and I foresee a nationwide movement to aggregate vast amounts of health care data to analyze and report on what works, what hurts, and start building plans to make care more efficient and more effective so that people live longer.  Data Governance will play a huge role in this effort, which will start next year and consume the next decade.

3.  National Incident Detection – Like it or not, the days of the Internet Wild West are numbered.  While the new Republican Leadership in the House is opposed to the Net Neutrality Bill, it seems certain that some form of national security oversight over Internet incidents and threats is going to happen.  The government has been trying to corral business into sharing incident information since 9/11 and I predict they will succeed at some point because nation-sponsored cyber-warfare can not be resisted by private enterprise alone.  In some as yet to be determined form, new information sharing regimes will need to be designed that aggregate threat information from businesses across the nation to develop early warning systems and protect national Internet assets.

4.  Self-Governing Commons – Human beings can, in fact, govern the use of common resources more efficiently than hierarchical or proprietary solutions.  The Information Governance Community is a demonstration of this fact, and in 2011, similar demonstrations will proliferate around the world and Social Networking itself will mature into online meeting places where people do more than talk – they will govern themselves to produce common work products.  An aggregation of people without a deliverable is a media channel.  Those same people collaborating on common ideas to produce work are self-ruling corporations and this phenomena will change how people are organized around the world.  Any idea or project can be accomplished by self-organizing groups of people with common interests, a governance model, and an incentive structure designed to produce an outcome to effect change.

Five years ago, we formed a Data Governance Council to change organizational behavior and effect change.  Achieving Semantic Consistency, Data Quality, Single Views of the Truth, Trusted Information, and Security & Privacy are all IT goals necessary to achieving any one of the above Predictions.  Information is changing the world and with information we can change ourselves.  However, without Governance, all we have is Data Management and none of what I described above is possible or probable.

Happy Holidays.

From our friend Niel at Trada… awesome blog post which offers excellent insight, particularly the seven crowd learnings. A key point from our perspective: “In our model, we want the crowd to work together”… something Chaordix continually strives to make happen. – SK

Trada recently celebrated its second birthday. It’s been an amazing ride helping our company grow and learning – in real time – about the product that we’re making. Any good organization these days is a learning organization, and I think in general we have a pretty humble attitude about how far we’ve come. While we think we’ve innovated dramatically in the paid search space, we have many things to refine in the subtleties of our marketplace, advertiser onboarding, optimizer engagement, and service delivery.

One of the things that makes Trada both beautiful and complex is that it is multifaceted: it’s a marketplace, a crowdsourcing platform, a collaboration system, and a community.

And each of these elements has at least two sides: buyers and sellers in a market, the crowd versus the consumer, etc. This means that the interactions and incentives between each party must be perfected. The more types of parties or diversity of desires of each party you have, the more complex it becomes.

Since day one we’ve fundamentally believed that we could align paid search experts’ goals and advertisers’ goals to create a positive incentive system. I think we’ve done a good job of pointing people in the same general direction. We‘ve also had to invent – literally – mechanisms to overlay an incentive system on a complex paid search ecosystem – for example, how do you deal with differing bid prices in AdWords auctions? How do you deal with shared keywords or organize ad groups in a collaborative campaign? But while we’ve innovated a great deal, we have been learning. And today I want to announce the second generation of Trada and a concept we call Crowd Mechanics.

By now nearly everyone in the tech space is familiar with the term game mechanics. While it’s existed for a long time in various forms (video games, education systems, etc.) it has re-emerged in technology through location-based check-in services like Foursquare and SCVNGR. The basic concept of game mechanics is that human beings enjoy and are incentivized to keep engaging in a known system of achievements, rewards, levels, and other statuses. I call this technology dopamine – the constant small infusion of adrenaline into an experience that becomes addictive and behavior-changing. At the same time, crowdsourcing has emerged as a new and powerful way of getting things done and the industry has matured at a lightning pace. As an industry, we’re about five years old now (setting aside early outliers like Wikipedia, etc.) and we’re growing hugely. Trada and about 35 other crowdsourcing companies launched the Crowdsortium last month and I believe 2011 will see the first (if not many) crowdsourcing IPOs with LiveOps. An amazing run in just 5 years. But as an industry we’re learning a lot. How do you get crowds to work together? What incentivizes them? What is the right payment system for them? Do they need their own form of game mechanics? What happens when you introduce real money into an incentive system?

Yes, things are different when you’re dealing with real money and when you have a crowd. This is what I call crowd mechanics. The brief definition of crowd mechanics: the incentive and engagement system designed to drive outcomes in a crowd through individual and group incentives that include both monetary and non-monetary rewards, levels, and achievements.

I know this sounds like I’m throwing the kitchen sink into my definition, but its very important to understand how each element of crowd dynamics makes it very different from game mechanics. I’m not suggesting that one is more difficult than another to do well, but there are different variables in the mix that have to be considered. To start, let me explain what I think is the same between the theories:

I fundamentally believe that game mechanics and crowd mechanics share the same basic underlying DNA: they should understand and work with human behaviors. Humans are not one-dimensional, and thus motivation systems (just like the workplace) shouldn’t be one-dimensional either. I wrote a longer blog post about this, or you can watch a video of me talking about crowd motivation.

Now let me outline some differences that need to be considered:

Crowd Mechanics: Money

There is a lot of research that says, “people act differently when money is included in the incentive system”. What’s interesting is that the answer is not always “they work better”, nor is the answer “they work more poorly”. There’s a great TED video where Tad Pink talks about this, and Clay Shirky addresses this in his book Cognitive Surplus. Any way you look at it, money changes behavior. Crowd mechanics systems must contemplate what behaviors they may expect and think through how their crowd is compensated. When money is involved you broaden the general spectrum of behaviors you can expect to see.

On the positive end, you’ll get some people who live and die by working in your system. On the other end, you’ll get some abuses where people try to ‘game’ any incentive system you create. This isn’t any different from designing a sales comp plan or any other traditional comp plan. The comp plan must be designed to make it easier for someone to do what you want them to do (and make what they expect to make financially) than to skirt the system or abuse it. This dynamic doesn’t exist in game mechanics, so the spectrum of uses is much more constrained.

Crowd Mechanics: The Crowd

Depending on the type of crowdsourcing model a business uses, the final product is either the combination of work of other people (e.g. uTest, Trada, Wikipedia) or the best individual contribution from someone in the crowd (like Crowdspring). In our model, we want the crowd to work together. This is something we spend a lot of time on, and we’ll be introducing new features around this soon.

The best way to understand the dynamics of incentivizing the crowd over (or in combination with) the individual is to understand the ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ problem. For a survey on this topic and some suggestions about how governance systems are evolving to handle these situations, read the fantastic Governing the Commons by Elinor Ostrom.

What we’re learning about the crowd:

1) The crowd needs information about itself. Game mechanics has included this mechanism publicly, in the form of leaderboards, because it encourages people to compete with each other.

2) The crowd needs information about its goals. These goals are applicable at both at the individual level and the group level. This is a very subtle point because crowd mechanics gets interesting when some individuals in a crowd are hitting the goal – but some are not.

3) The goals need to be realistic. At Trada, the goal is an advertiser’s CPA. If this CPA is simply unattainable (you can’t get a 50% conversion rate to sales for visitors are your website on a $1000 product) then everyone loses. We’re learning a lot about making sure the advertisers’ goals are achievable as part of the “social contract” that exists between the crowd and its patron.

4) There need to be known group incentives that are substantive compared to individual incentives. For example, a “group win” should not pay someone 1/100th of what they make when they win individually. As much as possible, the group win should be more lucrative than an individual win.

5) Group wins, like individual wins, must reinforce a very small set of core incentive principles. In Trada, the CPA is king and almost all the rewards, achievements and levels are a reflection of this. Group rewards must be based on and reinforce the same core incentive structure.

6) Groups must be able to anonymously socially regulate themselves. We call this the “shoulder tap” – a mechanism where someone in a group can effectively say to someone anonymously “please check your work, it’s way above the goal”. This form of social regulation goes on all the time around us. As a matter of fact, I’m writing this from the ‘quiet car’ on an Amtrak train to NYC. A “shhh” on the quiet car is an example of social regulation and in most cases is anonymous enough that someone in the group is willing to do it.

7) There must be a rules-based regulator that can be called to enforce group behavior. Any group must know that there is a 3rd party regulator (e.g. the SEC, Wikipedia administrators, CJ’s network quality group) that has the power to enforce, in a non-subjective and rules based way, final arbitration policy when someone’s behaving badly in the group (including the patron – e.g. the advertiser – in our model).

There’s a lot going on here and part of the trick is to make the experience relatively seamless. One should be able to perform their work, expert or otherwise, relatively unencumbered by this infrastructure of crowd mechanics but also aware that it’s going on. This is one of the most difficult elements of any game mechanics or crowd mechanics system: that it should be a passive interface underneath the experience, not an interactive part of the experience. Part of what makes Foursquare work so well is the discovery of badges. This discovery element keeps you engaged and exploring the virtual landscape they have created. This applies to anything the crowd engages in.

I think we’ve come a long way at Trada and in the crowdsourcing industry. Our crowd mechanics release is just one of many steps we’re going to take to conquer a massive challenge and opportunity, and we’ll keep learning how to make it better for everyone. We hope everyone that interacts with Trada will give us feedback. We’re not standing on ceremony – and we’re definitely not standing still.

Crowdsourced B-Roll

First up was “b-roll”: images & footage to be shown briefly, so that the entire video didn’t entirely consist of Nenshi addressing the camera. For a mayoral race in Calgary, iStockPhoto isn’t a bad choice (their headquarters being in Calgary), but iStock requires a release form to be signed by everyone in the photo frame. This would have meant no busy streets or crowded spaces in our video.

So we put out an open call to all  Nenshi campaign volunteers, describing the video’s timeline, and what types of b-roll would help make the video more dynamic.

Note that not every moment on the timeline called for a specific image, some were simply stating the topic being discussed by Nenshi, in hopes that a volunteer could find an appropriate image.

We weren’t expecting to receive b-roll for every topic, just a handful to give the video a more dynamic feel.  The volunteers provided far more than we could use, resulting in this feedback of an early edit of the campaign video:

Some folks think the sequence of images at 0:40, are too fast. Is it possible to slow it down, maybe remove every second image? -Nenshi

Sometimes having too much choice is as dangerous as too few choices!

Why was this exercise in crowdsourcing so successful?

Because we were looking for photos all around Calgary. Given the large pool of Nenshi volunteers, pretty much any Calgary landmark would have a Nenshi volunteer living next to it or walking past it. One volunteer even had access to a plane! (Look closely at 2:04.)

Just as programming can benefit from multiple participants (what is a challenge to you is obvious to someone else), volunteers gathered only the b-roll convenient for them and left distant landmarks to others.

What differentiated this exercise from simple “teamwork”, was our open call to action. We didn’t try coordinate who was collecting which b-roll. To delegate specific b-roll in advance would have meant less duplicated submissions, but also would have involved massive communications overhead.

Crowdsourcing benefits from spontaneity and flexibility. In the time b-roll delegation would have wasted from every volunteer, they could have all stepped outside, snapped their nearest landmark, and be done with it.

Nenshi’s platform video was released on August 12th, and currently is the most viewed mayoral candidate video. (Determined by performing a YouTube “Calgary Mayor” search, and sorting by “View Count”). Was it Nenshi’s detailed policy proposals? …or was it the crowdsourced b-roll?

Sadly, there is no way to answer that question, so we’ll just let our crowdsourcing process take all the credit!

…Except that The Google knows all. The moment when viewers are least likely to stop watching Nenshi’s video is when he’s speaking about Calgary’s City Council failure to address city contracts going over budget. No b-roll is shown at that moment.

Still… we’re keeping the crowdsourced b-roll.

Crowdsourced Close Captioning

YouTube is an amazing platform for supplementing video production. It allows videos to be uploaded “unlisted” so that it is excluded from any search results and playlists… the only people who are aware it exists are the creator, and whoever they decide to share the video’s URL with.

In this way a video can be shown to team members by sharing the URL to an email list or posted to a private forum. Everyone involved doesn’t need a YouTube account (as was YouTube’s older security model).

Another fantastic feature is Close Captioning… subtitles so that a video can be consumed by a deaf audience. YouTube assists in the creation of subtitles by offering a rough machine translation based on Google’s automated speech-to-text conversion. Of course the quality isn’t that great, so I corrected the mistakes by hand…

Still, Google has made the process vastly more efficient. Though the English may not be correct, the time-codes are. The creator does not need to identify when a word was spoken, only verify what that word was.

Providing an English transcription isn’t just a benefit to Calgary’s hearing impaired voters, it provides meaningful information to YouTube’s search engine. All of Naheed’s dialog is now indexed! So searching for “without needing lifetime subsidies” returns Nenshi’s platform video as a top result, even though that phrase was never entered into the video’s meta-data.

The existence of English captions probably spurred this exchange via YouTube comments:

To crowdsource language translation, a Google Docs Spreadsheet was created, containing (corrected) English transcription, and foreign language suggestions (1 tab per language):

Shown above are English, machine translated French, then human translated French. While we didn’t receive translations for every language we could think of (one user playfully began a “pirate translation”)…

…it certainly allowed for easy participation, and eliminated bottlenecks. In fact multiple volunteers could translate a single language simultaneously, since their changes were instantly visible to everyone else. Volunteer-A could start at the top, and Volunteer-B could start in the middle.

The get ‘er done nature of Nenshi’s campaign allowed independent AdWords campaigns to be launched, specifically targeting Calgarians who do not search the web using Canadian-English Google, and directing ad clickers to various non-English subtitled versions of the Nenshi Platform Video on YouTube, using URL parameters “hl” (language) and “cc_load_policy” (close captioning)…

www.youtube.com /v/89bzyRXK9nQ?hl=fr &cc_load_policy=1&autoplay=1 www.youtube.com /v/89bzyRXK9nQ?hl=ko &cc_load_policy=1&autoplay=1 www.youtube.com /v/89bzyRXK9nQ?hl=es &cc_load_policy=1&autoplay=1

Crowdsourcing extended into ad campaigns, with test ads being run independent of campaign headquarters (such as the pilot ads linking to non-English captioning). These ads had tiny spend, and were used to investigate the targeting of smaller target markets. Volunteers emailed successful campaign details to Nenshi HQ, which could then be rolled into the official ad campaign (and be given a larger spend). No coordination was needed from the top to initiate these investigations, since anyone can launch an AdWords, Facebook or Bing campaign. See a target market the campaign is overlooking? You want to help? Get ‘er done.

Lessons Learned

Acquiring b-roll saw greater participation, probably because everyone has access to a digital camera. And you know exactly what you’re getting with b-roll… if an image can’t be used, it is simply discarded.

Once translations started appearing for Nenshi’s platform video, volunteers who could only speak English (such as myself) weren’t sure how to gauge quality. I had made mistakes myself with the English captions, what were the chances a volunteer had done a perfect job translating the captions into another language? (Fortunately, it takes far less time to review a translation than to write one.)

And it became clear very quickly, this endeavor succeeded because Nenhi’s campaign consists of a large number of extremely motivated volunteers. My own broadcast requests for help outside of Nenshi’s volunteer channels resulted in minimal participation.

The campaign already had motivated volunteers who actively monitor Naheed’s posts via the campaign’s Facebook page, iPhone app, Twitter feed and email subscriptions. Given such a “crowd”, it wasn’t hard to find simple mechanisms to allow crowdsourced participation.

Crowdsourcing isn’t the future of political campaigning. It’s already here. In 2008, Obama’s campaign used an iPhone app to help facilitate phone and street canvasing. That enabled volunteers to be spontaneous with their canvassing.

In a new neighborhood? Got a spare moment? Here’s who you can visit nearby, and who you can call!

Such open calls to action will never replace traditional campaigning… there will always be phone banks of volunteers, organized funding drives and… stock photography. But the dynamic nature of crowdsource participation models allow volunteers to leverage their unique assets and skills, instead of having to communicate those skills to the campaign headquarters, and waiting (hoping) to be assigned a task which best leverages those skills.

And that makes volunteering more fun.

Originally posted at SimonMainwaring.com.   Follow Simon on twitter

As more brands embrace social media as a marketing strategy, many are racing to establish a sizable social footprint. For their marketers, that translates to creative briefs like, “How can you get me to a million Facebook fans fast?’ or “What bots can I use to fast-track my followers on twitter?” This inevitably begs the question: “What good are a million Facebook fans if they are not engaged and won’t do anything for the brand?’

Brands must work to inspire fan action, not merely seek fan acquisition. A thousand fans that share the same core values, that find a brand’s communications meaningful and that are willing to do, say or buy something for the brand are far more valuable than one hundred thousand passive members. In fact, if a brand is only after numbers, they are not only wasting their marketing dollars but the dynamics of social media will work against them. Consumers now look to brands for transparency, authenticity and accountability . That means a brand must show genuine interest in their community as Zappos, Ford, Dell, Nike, Pepsi, Old Spice and Starbucks have done. If they treat Facebook as yet another broadcast medium and twitter like direct mail, the only thing they will demonstrate is their total lack of understanding of social media dynamics.

The reason a brand builds a social community is to provide a fair exchange of value. The company offers something meaningful whether it’s product, service or cause related, and that generates goodwill and loyalty that effectively puts the community to work for the brand through word of mouth advertising. Yet if a brand is simply rushing to hit a “magic number” and has no intention of genuinely engaging with their community, that’s what consumers will share with their friends and peers doing more harm than good.

Social media is not a numbers game. It’s a relationships game. If you’re not interested in your community, they won’t be interested in you. So work out what’s meaningful to your brand and share it with your community. What consumers want is an emotional connection. Once they get that, they’ll build a community for you.

Do you think most brands are building communities the right way? Of are they simply managing perceptions?

(Chaordix editor’s note: We believe that crowdsourcing is one of the best ways to invite fan action from your community members.)

Originally posted at 100% Open.

We are excited to announce that we are launching our latest project with Orange called Mobile Volunteering which brings together a healthy and expert mix of technology developers and social entrepreneurs and NGOs.

On the site we are creating everyday opportunities for social action, kick-starting a new movement. Through an app on their mobile phone, people could for example volunteer to map and tag wildlife photos, make an audio map for the blind, or complete a charity’s survey. Imagine the potential of millions of people regularly contributing in this way.

The project itself is an collaboration between Orange, Chaordix, 100%Open and Good Business which has been lots of fun so far too. See below a short video about the project.

Else do keep an eye out on the site and start sharing and building your ideas or apps.

Originally posted at Innovate on Purpose on August 31th, 2010.

I’ve just finished reading a book called Intangible Capital (more on that in another post) by Mary Adams.  The book does a good job describing the value and importance of knowledge, intellectual property and other intangible assets, and why innovation is key to the creation of those assets.

But that’s not the subject of today’s post.  Today’s post deals with the fallacy that innovation “starts” with idea generation.  I’m picking on Mary’s book because it was at hand and the latest to suggest that innovation starts with idea generation.  I know this because it says so on page 85, but Mary’s writing does not stand alone.  Far too often I hear people suggest or read that innovation starts with idea generation.  Sorry, no – and my apologies in advance to Mary for calling out this small problem in what was otherwise a very good book.

Idea generation is at best the “mid point” of an innovation process, because by the time you start generating ideas you need to have:

1. A good sense of the strategic goals and direction of the organization
2. A good sense of trends and the unfolding future
3. An understanding of unmet or unarticulated needs

Only when you are armed with this knowledge can you generate ideas that are worth anything.  We at OVO call this “ideating in context”.  The obvious alternative to “ideating with no context” which is what many teams do, and why idea generation and brainstorming have such poor reputations.  Let’s examine why all three factors need to be complete before you can brainstorm effectively.

First, you need to understand the strategic goals, direction and strategic intent of the business, and how it will remain constant or change.  This aspect forms the “framework” for your idea generation.  If your firm has the goal to be the best at customer intimacy or experience, then that should inform your idea generation – you’ll want to spend far more time focused in those areas than in operational excellence.  Too often there are no clear guidepost or guardrails to shape your thinking and in those cases all ideas and all strategies seem equal.  They aren’t, and if you present ideas out of sequence or out of context with strategy then you’ll find that out.

Second, you need to understand something about the future.  After all, the average time to market for an idea in most large firms is between 24 and 36 months, idea generation to commercialization.  That means an idea you generate today will be birthed into a world two to three years from the one we are in today.  How much change will occur in that space?  If you create an idea today that assumes the world will be the same as it was when the idea was created, you’ve shot behind the curve and the idea will seem dated from the start.  Not to mention the fact that observing trends and understanding where the future may evolve is important. You may spot entirely new opportunities by spending time understanding the future, and your products or services may arrive at exactly the right time.

With those two factors safely covered, you can also understand what customers want and need.  You do this through many different qualitative exercises – voice of the customer, observation, lead users, ethnography, etc.  What you are seeking are the unrecognized, unmet or unarticulated needs that align to your strategic goals and to the unfolding future.  At the intersection of those three converging factors are ideas that will be relevant, valuable and in line with your capabilities.

These factors create the “context” that identifies customer needs in line with future trends and aligned to strategic goals.  Within that context or framework, generating ideas becomes far more easy and far more robust – actually becomes safer, since you are generating ideas you know link to strategic goals and to customer needs.  It’s less arbitrary since you know the goals, potential futures and customer needs.

Innovation doesn’t start with, and doesn’t end with, idea generation.  In fact we should place far less emphasis on the idea generation phase than we do, but it seems to get the most focus, probably because it is the easiest to organize and any one can participate, while the other tasks require real thinking, real planning and real work.  Generating ideas should be the outcome of good strategic thinking and careful assessment of customer behaviors and needs.  If that work is done well, idea generation is almost an afterthought, but it certainly isn’t the first step in the process.

Originally posted at rediff.com on August 16th, 2010.

Social media is no more a buzzword today. Given the rate at which it is growing and the impact it is making in our everyday lives, we will soon see the answer to this question: ‘Why should I care about social media?’

Over the last three years, I have closely observed and actively used this medium, as one of the most powerful tools to solve and address multiple business challenges, ranging from hiring an employee to acquiring a new customer.

In the following pages are my learnings and points of view on why should a business pay attention to and invest in social media.

Statistics speak loudly: Given the volume of action on social media web sites, as measured by some of the key statistics mentioned below, it is evident that social media is no more a small or niche medium:

1. Radio took 38 years to reach 50 million users, TV took 13 years, Internet took 4 years, iPod 3 years and Facebook reached over 200 million users in less than a year.

2. The top two Twitter accounts — Ashton Kutcher and Britney Spears — have more followers than the entire populations of Sweden, Israel, Switzerland, Ireland, Norway, Austria and Panama.

3. Wikipedia has more than 15 million articles out of which over 75 per cent are non-English.

4. There are over 200 million blogs.

5. YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine in the world.

6. Social media has overtaken pornography as the most popular activity on the web.

There are endless reasons to use social media: Contrary to normal belief, social media is much more than just a channel to acquire new customers.

Here are some of the key business objectives, which can be met using social media:

CRM (Customer Relationship Management): Whether you want to continuously engage with your customers, take their feedback or provide them support, social media is a great tool. Dell is a classic example of using social media (especially Twitter and Blogs) to transform their customer’s experience.

ORM (Online Reputation Management): Social media has given the power of media in the hands of an ordinary user. More and more people will continue to express their opinions about a brand, a product or a service on tools like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn. I don’t think that brands have a choice to not listen to the conversations about them. ICICI Bank is an interesting example of a large Indian brand, which is doing a great job in effectively managing its reputation in the digital world, especially through Twitter.

Brand Building and Promotion: Social media is all about ‘word of mouth’, ‘building relationships’ and ‘conversations’. Where else can a brand get an opportunity to promote itself than on social media? Ching’s Secret is a great example of leveraging social media for brand promotion.

B2B Lead Generation: Given more and more professionals (LinkedIn has over 75 million users in over 200 countries) will continue to spend their precious time on social media, almost every organisation has an opportunity leverage this medium for lead generation. Evalueserve, a company who coined the term KPO (Knowledge Process Outsourcing) has highly effectively used Social Media as a great B2B Lead generation tool to acquire global customers.

Crowdsourcing: What can be a better choice than to include your customers and users in the creation of a product or a service? That’s what ‘crowdsourcing’ refers to and that’s what Social Media makes available. Among various examples, Starbucks asking their community members to provide inputs on the next coffee flavour, is an interesting one.

Human Resources: In addition to employee engagement (like CRM), social media is a great medium to hire new employees. It is not surprising that LinkedIn Profile is increasingly replacing conventional resume.

Timings can’t be better than today: The last but the most important reason to care about social media today is the timing. Given that only a few brands in few industry verticals have started to give a serious look to social media, the opportunity for early movers is immense.

I would like to share a personal example here. We happened to use search engine optimisation (SEO) way back in year 2000, for our first business. Today, I would know ten times of what I knew about search engine optimisation in 2000 but the returns on investment then were ten times more than what we get today.

Why? Obviously for the timing; we were among the early adopters of SEO. So, can be you for social media!

Do you need more and better reasons to start embracing social media?  Honestly, I don’t think so! You will not get a better opportunity to leverage social media than today. Embrace this medium before it’s too late.

Pradeep Chopra is CEO and Co-founder of DigitalVidya

http://www.linkedin.com/in/pradeepchopra

Originally posted at 15inno on August 9th, 2010.

One thing that defines a strong, innovative company in the future is the interaction it has with its stakeholders and in particular with its customers.

Not many companies do this as well as Lego as you can tell from the below impressive list of fan communities, market places and more.

Dive in and get inspired…

Communities:

Lugnet.org: 3,844 Lego User Group members in 53 different groups.

1000steine.de: The biggest German fan site with 969.000 hits on Google. This community holds the annual 1000steineland exhibition that draws more than 10,000 Lego fans.

Brickshelf.com: A community concentrated on MOC’s (My Own Creations) with 3.2 million files.

Brickish.co.uk: A paid membership with their own magazines and special events.

Magazines and Clubs:

Lego Club: Three million kids that receive the Lego Magazine and participate in local events.

Brickmaster: A subscription-based club where members receive six magazines and six Lego sets a year and get discounts on other Lego buys.

Brickjournal.com: A fan-driven magazine with 8 annual issues at $8.95 each.

Enthusiasts:

MasterBuilders: 10-15 employees who build models for exhibitions and Legoland.

Lego-certified professionals: 9 Lego certified brick artists who do not work for Lego, but has created their own Lego-based businesses.

Fans: AFOL’s of ALE’s stands for Adult Fans of Lego or Adult Lego Enthusiasts. KFOL is the same for kids. AFOL Lego results in 387,000 hits on Google.

Lego Ambassadors: The current program has 42 adult volunteers from 26 countries. They help test and develop products.

Lego Education Centers: In the US, Spain, China, Korea, Japan and Australia.

FirstLegoLeague.org: A partnership with FIRST, a technology-promoting and charity organization with more than 140.000 kids in 56 countries.

Lego Learning Institute: Virtual research lab that focuses on children’s play, creativity and development.

Designbyme.lego.com: Here you can download Lego’s own design program, build a Lego model online, design your own box and have it send to mailed. It has more than 1500 unique design creations made by Lego fans.

Market places:

BrickLink: An unofficial Lego market place with more than 131.000 and more than 42 million visitors.

eBay: More than 41.000 Lego articles are on sale at eBay.

We need to give lots of credit to Tage Otkjer, who first created this list in Berlingske Nyhedsmagasin, a Danish business weekly. Thanks for your work…

Tage Otkjer also did some Google searches. Lego came up 41,1 million times, Barbie came up 53,4 million times and Coca-Cola came up 37 million times.

Lego is a very impressive company. Now the question is:

How can your company get closer to your stakeholders?

photo by Andrew Becraft

While many businesses are excited about opportunities to reach their customers on the social web, few actually believe they have done so successfully. According to a recent Social Media and Online PR Report from Econsultancy, 86% of companies surveyed planned to spend more on social media marketing in 2010, but only 25% say they have gained “real, tangible value” from the medium.

While the willingness to invest indicates that businesses recognize the potential to develop deeper connections with their consumers in the social sphere, many are still uncertain as to how to best join the conversation. To improve performance, firms may benefit from looking at the medium through a broader lens, recognizing that expanding their influence by enabling customers to connect with one another may be as effective, if not more so, than interacting with them directly.

Building Long Term Relationships

While it’s true that the web has made building individual relationships cheaper and easier than it used to be, this doesn’t mean that businesses can necessarily expect to build deep connections with their entire customer base; in many cases, this is neither feasible nor cost effective. However, if a firm focuses on building brand loyalty with a small subset of customers, they may find that it has an exponential impact.

Let’s look at a few examples of companies that have done this successfully:

Yelp’s Elite Squad: Yelp operates a social networking, user review, and local search website for members to post reviews and get user feedback on local businesses and restaurants. The Elite Program is a way for the Yelp to reward its most passionate users for making their site “funny, useful and cool” by providing them with exclusive offers and members only events. This allows Yelp to strengthen loyalty among Elite Squad members, offers an impetus for wanna-be-members to post additional reviews; and, makes the site content stronger – keeping the broader community active and engaged.

The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s Team In Training (TNT) Program: The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society is a charitable organization focused on fighting blood cancers. To raise funding, they developed a variety of programs to expand their outreach, including The Team in Training Program, which offers group training to those interesting in running a marathon to raise money for the cause. TNT encourages trainees to leverage the power of their personal networks, by providing participants with a personal, customizable microsite for reaching their fundraising goals by getting donations from friends and family. The microsite functions much like a Facebook Page – marathon participants can share their goals, visitors are able offer supportive messaging on the participant’s wall, and donations can happen directly on site.

Lion Brand’s Lion Brand Notebook: Lion Brand is a yarn company that has been in business for over a century. To build their online presence and appeal to passionate knitters, Lion Brand developed a bi-weekly podcast and corporate blog, They also helped to facilitate offline “knit-alongs” (shared knitting projects), by helping interested parties to find others in their local area looking to get involved. Lion Brand Yarn found that their customer outreach strategy drove impressive e-commerce results – those who visited the company’s blog were 41% more likely to buy at the Web site.

Securing The Commitment

You may have noticed that these three companies have very different business models: the first seeks a passionate and active user base, the second is looking to increase in donations and the third wishes to stimulate sales volume. Yet, despite the variance in their goals, they still share a number of similarities in their approach to the social web.

Each firm:

Inspires Their Most Passionate Customers – Then Puts Them to Work: By building strong connections with the most passionate segment of their customer base, firms such as Yelp, Lion Brand and the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society can create strong individual connections that can lead to exponential results – ideally, as customers spread the word through their personal networks, they inspire additional customers, who, in turn, pass the message along and begin a powerful ripple effect.

Does More Than Test the Social Waters: Like all long term relationships, building real connections with customers requires a certain level of commitment, and each of the three businesses above are clearly willing make the investment. Similarly, the Social Media and Online PR Report indicates that there may be a baseline level of social media involvement necessary for a generating tangible return: more than half (52%) of firms that were ‘heavily involved’ with the medium believed they had gained tangible results from their marketing efforts, while, in comparison, only 13% of those “experimenting” believed they had gained real value from the channel.

Avoids Getting Mired in Tactics, Metrics or Technology: The successful firms above recognize that social media should be used as a tool for achieving business goals. Recognizing that a social strategy is a means, rather than an end, they don’t waste time counting their Facebook fans, instead, the focus is on creating social communities that delivers a value add to their users, allows them to connect with one another, and, ultimately, increases brand engagement.

Blurs the Lines Between Online and Offline: Understanding that the customer exists both online and offline, these firms are finding intelligent ways to deliver an experience that incorpates the best of both worlds. The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society’s Team in Training helps participants to solicit donations from offline connections online, Yelp rewards Elite members with exclusive access to offline events and The Lion Brand’s Brand Notebook allows community members to connect with others in their neighborhood to participate in “knit-alongs”.

Do you know of other companies that are leveraging their customers to grow their businesses exponentially?

Yael Davidowitz-Neu is a Sales Strategy Analyst at Google responsible for analyzing consumer behavior, search trends and market dynamics. She is deeply curious, loves all things marketing and blogs less frequently than she would like at Stickystimuli.com.

Originally posted at Trends in the Living Network on July 26th, 2010

MyCustomer.com has just published a nice article based on an interview with me, titled Ross Dawson: Six tools to kickstart your crowdsourcing strategy.

After beginning with some background on the topicality of crowdsourcing, the article goes on:

But suddenly crowdsourcing seems to be reaching some kind of critical mass. From reports that Microsoft crowdsourced the making of Office 2010, to David Cameron asking the UK’s civil servants for money-saving ideas via the Government’s Spending Challenge, it’s not just that interest in it is peaking, it’s that organisations are already bringing crowdsourcing plans to fruition.

This all comes as no surprise to Ross Dawson, a globally recognised futurist, strategy advisor and best-selling author – and at last month’s Creative Sydney event he delivered a keynote entitled ‘The Future is Crowdsourcing’.

“We are now at the opening phases of what is a global talent economy,” he explains. “Talent is now everywhere and far more available. We’re seeing professionals increasingly working independently rather than necessarily in large corporations; we are seeing retired people who are interesting in continuing to be engaged and entrusted to projects. And clearly we have access to people around the world. So we are moving from a world where the talent was all inside big organisations to a very fluid world where the talent is available globally. And there is now a whole host of tools and platforms to be able to access all of this talent in a wide variety of ways.”

After running through some of the examples I gave in the interview, including Procter & Gamble’s embrace of open innovation, IBM’s alphaWorks initiative, and Dell’s IdeaStorm, the article goes on to highlight six of the 14 categories of crowdsourcing described in my recently launched Crowdsourcing Landscape, quoting me extensively from our interview and mentioning companies that were covered in our landscape.

Here are the six types of crowdsourcing mentioned in the article, together with excerpts of what I was quoted saying about the category. See the excellent article for complete details.

1. Distributed innovation platforms
“They find more than half the people that solve the challenges on Innocentive and these other distributed innovation platforms already know the answer. So why should they solve that problem again when they can find someone else who already knows the answer?”

2. Idea platforms
“These sometimes go under the guise of idea management software, but these are ones where people inside organisations – often – submit ideas or proposals for cost savings, or new products, or new services, or process efficiencies, and then they collectively assess and rate and vote on and select and evolve and refine and build on those ideas to become the innovation that will drive that organisation forward.”

3. Innovation prizes
“Anybody anywhere can enter their own projects and ideas, others can vote on them and build on them and use the wisdom of the crowd to make them more effective, and from all of those submissions somebody wins a quarter of a million dollar prize.”

4. Content markets
No direct quotes from me - Threadless and Red Bubble are mentioned.

5. Prediction markets
“For enterprise software companies it is notoriously difficult to forecast sales. For many reasons, the sales pipeline that is put into CRM systems is often inaccurate. However, if you then ask the salespeople to predict what the sales are going to be for that quarter and you aggregate all of their opinions, you can get a far more accurate view of what the actual sales are going to be.”

6. Competition platforms
No direct quotes from me - DesignCrowd, CrowdSpring and Guerra Creativa are mentioned.

Ross Dawson is a leading futurist, keynote speaker, author, and Chairman of the Advanced Human Technologies group.