Those of you who have been following Chaordix know we worked with our partners 100% Open and Orange last fall on a crowdsourcing project called “Mobile Volunteering” in which we asked the crowd to brainstorm ways in which mobile devices could help people volunteer their time in five minutes or less, when they are on the go. There were hundreds of great ideas submitted and thousands of participants.

Orange just launched the results of that crowd enagement in a free iPhone app called Do Some Good which has 12 of the top ideas that came from the Mobile Volunteering crowd. We think it’s a great example of how crowdsourcing can help fast-forward new product/service innovation. And in this case, the application really fosters crowdsourced volunteering, by encouraging lots of people to donate small amounts of time, for example while they are waiting for their bus, or riding the train to work. In aggregate, all of those small contributions can add up to make a huge difference.

The Do Some Good app is available now from the iPhone App Store, and in the future will be on Android, Blackberry and Nokia. Definitely check out and download Do Some Good and tell your friends to join the crowd.

If you are among the many people and companies that are considering using crowdsourcing for the first time, after a bit of research you’ve probably started to realize that there are many considerations that you need to take into account. The good news is that while it may seem daunting at first, we’ve seen and worked on many, many highly successful first-time crowdsourcing projects.

But we’ve still seen too many companies get off on the wrong foot with crowdsourcing. Usually these are companies that make the assumption that crowdsourcing is as easy as setting up a site and asking a question. This leads them to make some poor decisions that affect the success of their crowd engagement.

If you are an open innovation champion (or market research or brand leader) in your organization, the goal of your first crowdsourcing initiative should absolutely be to generate a strong proof-point of how crowdsourcing can bring value to your organization. Companies who are successful with crowdsourcing are finding that it can drive incredible value. A recent study by McKinsey and Company concluded that there is high correlation between market share gain and companies that have adopted social collaboration techniques such as crowdsourcing with their internal and external networks.

So, it’s essential that your first step into crowdsourcing be designed for the highest chance for success. To help that happen, here are the top ways we see companies shoot themselves in the foot when getting started with crowdsourcing… so you can avoid them:

Focusing on cost rather than results. Rather than focus on achieving the desired outcome, people often focus on trying to do as a lowest cost pilot. Sure, in times of tight budgets, saving money certainly makes sense, but if you save money on something that doesn’t set you up to show success, doesn’t that work against you?

Assuming crowd recruitment is easy. Crowdsourcing doesn’t work without the right crowd; attracting your stakeholders (customers, employees, partners, general public) to participate is as important as anything else. Your crowd doesn’t have to be huge – many programs are highly successful with just a few hundred participants. But the world is noisy – people are asked to donate their time constantly, so even if you have an existing relationship with a potential group of participants, how you invite them in, incent them and keep them involved is very important. For your first program, it’s often better to work with someone who has experience with crowd recruitment.

Choosing the wrong first crowdsourcing topic. We’ve seen companies pick, as their very first topic, a challenge that has stymied their experts for years, or requires specific expertise that only a small number of people have. Sure, you want to hone your ability to use crowdsourcing to eventually address those demanding needs, but your initial goal should be to make it easy for lots of people to get involved. Pick a topic that almost anyone who works in your company, or is a customer, or a key stakeholder of your company can participate in, and one where the likelihood of showing value is high. These are topics such as ideas for new products or enhancements to existing products, new business models, ways to improve internal operations, or even better, something fun such as how to improve the corporate culture to make it a more enjoyable place to work. That’s something everyone will want to participate in, and add value!

Overlooking daily moderation. Crowd moderation is a critical ingredient of successful crowdsourcing. We’ve seen some companies get off to a good start, only to lose momentum because they tried to do it all themselves, often assigning the task of daily moderation to someone who has never done it before and already has full time responsibilities. What invariably happens is that essential moderation steps such as prompting discussions, answering questions and sending periodic updates to participants to keep them informed and coming back doesn’t happen, and participants come once but don’t come back again. Leaning on an experienced moderator can absolutely make the difference between gaining momentum and losing it.

You may have to do some significant lobbying for approval and budget to undertake your initial crowdsourcing program, and certainly you won’t want to negate all that hard work with a program that’s not likely to show the results you want. So when you sit down to think about that first campaign, align yourself with someone who has done it before.

For internal champions in larger organizations, we recently wrote about how to overcome resistance to crowdsourcing in enterprises , with some tips that have helped some to break through the resistance often put up by the legal departments or conservative senior management teams.

In a recent chat with a crowdsourcing-knowledgeable innovator within a large enterprise, he shared good honest dialog about the open innovation benefits he’s seen in his organization, and also the challenges he faces.   The two biggest challenges he mentioned are:  1)  getting other organizations inside the enterprise to embrace the concept of open innovation and get engaged, and 2) dealing with the resistance in the legal department in their organization.

These are common issues that we hear about frequently from innovation champions, and these issues beg the larger question:  How do you get rolling with open innovation in a large organization given the resistance?

I’m going to wager that if you have “innovation” in your title and you are in a larger enterprise, you have been contemplating just this question (and facing these challenges).  You’re not alone.

Start off with the right mindset:  Think of your initial crowdsourcing project(s) not so much as ones that will drive that “breakthrough idea” but more  to build the proof-points on which you can build.  You want to be as sure as you can that your initial crowdsourcing projects are successful, and it helps you to build that internal support you need to share the benefits of crowdsourcing enterprise-wide.  So how to you stack the deck in your favor?

Here is some guidance we often give to our clients and prospective clients with regards to their initial open innovation projects:

Start small

One of the major sources of resistance to open innovation inside of an enterprise is that it is unknown.  People don’t understand the open innovation process, and they don’t know what to expect from it.   So, to reduce that concern, start small.   For your first crowdsourcing initiative shoot for 300 – 500 participants, over a limited time period of maybe one to two months.   One of the things we’ve learned over the past five years is that you still can drive great results from a small but engaged crowd.  In fact, if done correctly the quality of the results would be difficult to surpass even with a much larger crowd.  More ideas aren’t always better.    Smaller crowds are easier to recruit, easier to motivate and easier to moderate, and will often display much higher than average participation levels.

Start simple

There are likely all sorts of potential applications for crowdsourcing and open innovation within your organization.  Some of which might involve solving complex problems that you’ve been having trouble with; problems that may be preventing business growth. So the potential payout is high.  But these types of open innovation challenges often have a lower success rate, and can require some specific expertise on the part of the crowd.   They are still worth doing, but not as your first open innovation challenge.  Rather think of challenges that have a much higher rate of success – such as challenges to enhance current products or services, improve business operations, or identify new business models, for example.  For each of these, a well-designed and executed challenge is almost guaranteed to yield valuable results, and provide the proof point you need.

Start Inside

As we’ve noted in past posts, crowds almost always behave very well in a crowdsourcing site, and respect IP and legal terms (we have yet to hear a report of a “stolen idea”).  Yet, we understand legal departments tend to worry about protection of IP and difficulties in transferring IP created to the company.   So we suggest you start “safe” by reaching out to an internal crowd.   Your company presumably has an existing relationship regarding IP ownership with your employees, and this can be reinforced with the terms of the challenge engagement itself.   While the IP relationship with external crowds is well understood at this point and the legal worry isn’t really justified, its usually much easier to get legal to bless an initial project with a “safe” internal crowd.   Plus you get the added benefits that internal crowds often participate at even higher rates  and you’ll build internal goodwill by allowing wider employee participation in something of meaning to the company.

Since you’ll be learning a lot from your first open innovation project as well, keeping it small, simple and inside means that you have to worry less about the project and can focus more on enhancing your own experience and expertise.   If you’ve followed Chaordix for a while, you know that another thing we’re fond of saying is “We make crowdsourcing simple”, and we mean what we say.    What ideas do you have for first steps with open innovation in 2011?

So, we’re not all that surprised to see Pepsi Refresh in the news again, only this time with allegations of voting fraud, as covered in The New York Times.

If you’ve been following Pepsi Refresh since the beginning, you remember that it was initially conceived as an alternative to doing Super Bowl ads.  In other words, it was conceived as a marketing and awareness program.  And most of the articles I’ve read mention that the program has been a “huge” success, not only because they’ve given away more than $20M to charities,  but because,  as Fast Company put it last week,   “Pepsi has received more positive PR than it ever could have by spending the same amount of money on advertising.”

Now don’t get me wrong.  I think it’s wonderful for a company to build its brand and get market awareness for doing good and being socially responsible.    Throughout the Refresh program though,  I’ve wondered if Pepsi has put enough thought into where the money goes, how it’s used, or even if it’s given fairly.

To do crowdsourcing “right”, it’s critical to care about the outcome and make it priority number one.   Also, if you run a campaign with a big prize you must recognize that, unfortunately, there is high likelihood that someone will try to game the outcome, and be prepared beforehand, not scramble to cover after the fact.

It’s important to care about the outcome because the entire design and execution of the campaign flows from there.  We always start by identifying the desired output from the crowd and work backward to design.  It just doesn’t work to do it any other way.  The model you use, the incentives, the crowd you engage, and many other considerations all flow from the desired outcome.

When it comes to gaming, your technology should have safeguards in place and reporting alerts to identify any suspicious activity so you can address immediately.  Yes, with good data access you can always eliminate the votes of suspected “gamers”, but its always better to nip it in the bud and either prevent gaming altogether or eliminate it when it starts.

One of the most fundamental concepts of crowdsourcing is that crowds can be remarkably intelligent.  So, if the playing field isn’t level for your crowdsourcing campaign, you should count on your crowd figuring out that it isn’t.    Better yet, make sure your campaign is designed right up front, with the right safeguards in place to help ensure that the playing field is level, otherwise it might come back to haunt you.  Pepsi might be finding this out the hard way, again.

While adopting crowdsourcing for innovation certainly can lead to breakthrough ideas, solutions and crowd efforts, I believe there is too much focus on the breakthrough and not enough value assigned to the many other benefits of engaging your stakeholders using crowdsoucing methods. In fact, even if a breakthrough is unlikely, there are still ample reasons to begin crowdsourcing. Here are a few:

Seed concepts: If you are looking for that next great idea or solution, crowdsourcing will help you get there even if the crowd itself doesn’t come up with it directly. The crowd will definitely spur your thinking, get you out of your rut, and perhaps plant the seed of a new idea or concept that will blossom into the breakthrough idea you are seeking.

Market validation: All companies have hunches – but often don’t have the proof of whether their hunches are right or not. At a bare minimum, crowdsourcing will confirm some of the hunches you have, and even better, help you refine your hunches into market proven data points. Or it will warn you that your hunch is wrong and prevent a potentially costly mistake.

Organizational learning: Edward Boches of Mullen put it best when he said “The consumer has already decided. They are creating content. Any brand or marketer that doesn’t take advantage of that in a way that will work for them is crazy.“ Consumers are wanting to have a say in the brands and services they consume and that trend is only increasing. Recent episodes like The Gap’s logo re-do fiasco show that companies need to hone their ability to engage their crowds and benefit from the input they WANT to give you. If you don’t get good at it, your competitor will for sure. So start early and start now. Begin figuring out how your organization can tap its crowds, perhaps starting with your internal crowd, for competitive advantage. As with many things, with crowdsourcing improvement comes with experience, so jump in, and maybe seek the council of someone who has experience to make your first effort successful.

And there are other benefits such as gaining a much deeper understanding of your crowd – how emotionally connect to you brand are they? Building goodwill with the marketplace for seeking input and acting on it is another benefit. Establishing a connection that you could potentially re-use over and over again for different innovation and research purposes.

Certainly don’t stop seeking the breakthrough or game-changing ideas, but also don’t fully measure your innovation efforts based on whether it delivers that breakthrough. Look beyond to the other benefits, communicate them widely, and you’ll see how your open innovation efforts are propelling your organization forward.

In line with Earth Day 2010, Humanity Calls ran a two-month tournament to encourage support of environment-focused non-profits based on their worthiness as determined by the crowd. Ebay seeded the donation pool with $50,000 from their Ebay Green Team initiative. The donation pool was split among over 45 non-profits, with the top recipient receiving almost $10,000.

Non-profits could register for free and anyone could cast a vote for a non-profit just by logging in. Additional votes were earned by making donations and inviting others to participate. The tournament ran for two months and in that relatively short time had over 39,000 votes cast and managed to attract an additional $25,000 in individual donations to augment the seed pool.

Humanity Calls is a volunteer effort of 50 people (based out of Alberta) and Veer said they encouraged volunteers to take on roles that they were passionate about and leveraged their skill sets to make the best use of their volunteer crowd.

Veer said their aim was to deliver an easy way for non-profits and NGOs to benefit from crowdsourcing without having to do it on their own. They took inspiration from other programs such as Pepsi Refresh and Chase, but with a focus on making it micro, nimble and repeatable. He stressed that different crowdfunding and crowd philanthropy sites appeal to different people, so it’s important to have a variety.

Participating non-profits were encouraged to get out their votes from their supporters using social media – and it seemed to work – Humanity Calls had almost 200,000 visits during the month of June alone.

In the “what worked well” category, Veer thought the fact that they were able to quickly get 120 non-profit organizations involved without significant outreach, that they received a very positive response from all participants, and that they successfully made it easy for individuals to make a contribution were all signs that the model works.

Moving forward, he believes the approach could be improved by providing more information about the non-profits involved, essentially a short education element about each non-profit, so people might vote for a non-profit they were not familiar with before coming to the site. Similarly, he thinks that providing tools to allow participants to compare non-profits would be helpful in driving that same result.

Looking to the future, Humanity Call’s vision is to run a number of these types of tournaments with different non-profit focus, always with a large brand as the sponsor. Veer sees sites like Indigogo really picking up, the fact that its cheaper to start companies especially on the web, and that its easier for people to fund what they are passionate about as indications that many more efforts like Humanity Calls will spring up in the future. He advises individuals wanting to learn more about crowdfunding to look at the types of projects you want to fund, and the different means of funding available to you, such as Kiva, GrameenBank and MicroPlace.

Without a doubt, pioneering projects like Humanity Calls are blazing a path for new initiatives and with each project we learn more about best practices for tapping the crowd. What are your thoughts about how crowdfunding for non-profits organizations might be improved?

Consumers are speeding product development & reducing market failures

Heading into Christmas buying blitz 2010, it’s fun to try to predict what will be the bestsellers. Remember last year it was Wii everything? What will it be this year? Sing-a-Ma-Jigs?

It’s interesting to hear in January what’s sold most, but it’s game-changing for retailers to be able to predict demand.  Consumer-driven product co-creation and crowdsourcing are both leading the way and  and leading to more profit all the time.

It used to be that retailers and manufacturers would do their best guessing on what would be popular with focus groups or surveys used along the way and deep analysis of historic buying patterns. But looking backwards to guess what will be hot next – that’s seriously risky!

And why guess? A 2010 Forester study reported: 61% percent of all US online adults are willing co-creators.  One of the upsides of the participative brand phenomena is consumers are getting in at the product ideation and product concept stages to advise on and filter out the hot and not. This is old news to Dell and Threadless, but still catching on industry wide.

The resulting revenue opportunity is large and propelling a shift: a consumer community of about 400,000 members came up with the Muji Body-Fit Sofa that racked up $15.5 million annual sales – 5 times revenue average for the sofa category.

One group we’re working with is inviting consumers to dream up and co-create products that it will manufacture and distribute across a retailer network. Genius Crowds is starting with college room product ideas – think Memory Foam Lounge Chair – and moving on to home, pets and so on.  Check it out - www.geniuscrowds.com.

What’s promising about Genius Crowds is that they share the wealth with their crowd of inventors – either in crowd favourite earnings or long-term royalties (this is what has kept Threadless thriving). Beyond that – they are freeing people to talk about not one brand of products – like Dell or IKEA – but any brand, which can make the exchange really interesting. And in the age of competition for the crowd – interesting matters big.

So the race is on for retailers and manufacturers to open to consumers. The next Zhu Zhu pet… here we come, and faster!

(I love the spike in 2006 right after Jeff Howe’s Crowdsourcing book was published. )

So for all this hype, expectations are perhaps getting a bit out of hand.    Yesterday I read a blog post saying that crowdsourcing really isn’t all that useful for humanitarian efforts.   Isn’t it just a bit early to declare that?   That’s kind of like concluding in 1990 the Internet isn’t all that useful.

We all hear daily about great examples of success with crowdsourcing (and some not as successful) but let’s remember we are still very early on.  I’ll be the first to say we don’t have all of the answers, yet.  There is so much more to discover, learn and improve on for tapping collective wisdom.  We constantly come up with new crowdsourcing models, adjust incentives, voting styles, and find better ways of analyzing the data that results,  and there is just SO much more room for growth.

That’s what makes what we do here at Chaordix so exciting.   Not that there is so much hype, but that we know the best is yet to come.  So maybe Ushahidi isn’t that useful for the relief aid worker on the street today, but in the future, I’m positive relief agencies will learn how to use this valuable crowdsourced information and network for their benefit,  and the benefit of the victims of natural disasters.   Just as I’m equally sure for everyone reading this post, your company or organization will also soon be benefiting from some sort of crowdsourcing in the not too distant future. (even if it’s just to design your next donut.)

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.

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.