Fansourcing for Your Book Tour

As the marketing blurb states on the Togather website, speaking to an empty room is not much fun ( although actually less scary than speaking to packed room ).

So, they came up with a way packing the room with people to hear you speak about your new book.

Look What We Found with a QR Code

Look What We Found is actually the name of a good quality convenience food suppliers who use natural produce from British farmers

The QR Code led me to the very engaging TV Ad that I hadn't seen previously

I particularly like the way that they used the Facebook page to learn more about their consumers through a survey to explore why these ready meals were being bought

And to get feedback on their packaging redesign

Crowdsourcing by Any Other Name

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One area of Social not always top of mind is Crowd Sourcing.

Defined ‘as a process that involves outsourcing tasks to a distributed group of people. This process can occur both online and offline, and the difference between Crowdsourcing and ordinary outsourcing is that a task or problem is outsourced to an undefined public rather than a specific body, such as paid employees’ (Wikipedia)

When we think Crowd Sourcing, the favourite examples pop up such as mystarbucksidea, Wikipedia and so on
The industry website crowdsourcing .org  gives access to literally hundreds of Crowd Sourcing initiatives. The different business models  tend to cluster around big buckets such as Crowd Labour, Creativity, Distributed Knowledge, Open Innovation,Tools and  Crowd Funding.

BizMedia's infographic on the right here,has it's own interpretation of crowdsourcing.

Of course leaving it to the 'Wisdom of the Crowds' was highlighted in James Surowiecki's book.

Here James talks about his book in an interview from 2007

But of course Crowdsourcing goes beyond Google, the markets etc, but actually is part of our daily lives without us realising it


Here are a few examples of what I mean

Minster FM

My local radio station uses crowdsourcing to dictate what music is played on the station by letting listeners vote for their favourite and least favourite tracks

ASDA

Chosen By You, is the name of ASDA's range of products where 200,000 UK customers taste and benchmark the products

Andy Clarke, Asda CEO, says that customers are an integral part of Asda’s business planning and the redevelopment of the range.

“In launching Chosen by You, we’re making a bold statement about Asda’s quality and we will drive as hard on quality as price.”

“We’re empowering our customers in a  way that no UK retailer ever has. From today  ‘our’ own brand becomes ‘your’ own brand,”  said Andy Clarke ASDA's CEO

Taxi Advertising

Taxi Advertising.com allowed visitors to the site to choose the best on Taxi advertising, and allowed the voter to have their vote put out on Twitter

Channel 4seven

Launched on the 4th July ( 4/7) Channel 4seven is Channel 4's attempt at re-broadcasting its most popular shows based on actions ( viewing figures) and sentiment ( most talked about).

David Abraham, the chief executive of Channel 4, said that "With so much choice out there, viewers are increasingly saying they sometimes just miss the best stuff, despite their PVR and VOD. 4seven will give viewers more chances to catch the most popular and talked about Channel 4 shows from the last seven days."

He added: "It will schedule the main channel content that is creating noise – amongst social media, bloggers, commentators and of course via contact our viewers have directly with us – and incorporate this buzz into the look and feel of the channel."

X Factor

The X Factor is a British television music competition to find new singing talent . Immensely popular it now has now variants across the world

There are five stages to the competition:

• Stage 1: Producers' auditions (these auditions decide who will sing in front of the judges)
• Stage 2: Judges' auditions
• Stage 3: Bootcamp
• Stage 4: Judges' houses
• Stage 5: Live shows (finals)

In terms of Crowdsourcing, it is during those live shows that the public gets to vote for their favourite performers. Still a popular show as highlighted in the massive viewing figures

 

X Factor Viewing Figures from Wikipedia

Voting can be done via Text, App, Interactive TV, Phone, Online, Twitter. The number voting has hit 10 million ( Series 8) with actually many voters being influenced by Twitter and Facebook  - interesting piece from the Daily Telegraph

Crowdsourcing 300 Years On!

60 years ago one of Madonna's favourite drinks was named via Crowd Sourcing

As I sat and enjoyed lunch on Saturday to celebrate my father's birthday, I stumbled across the local paper, the Keighley News. Keighley is my hometown, but I hadn't read the paper in a few years so I had a quick flick through

I came across an article about the local brewery, Timothy Taylor and their Jubilee Beer ( to mark Queen Elizabeth II 60th year on the throne) 'Raise a Glass to a Diamond Ale
The article talks about how their famous Competition Ale, Landlord, gained it's name this way;

“The new ale was based on Taylor’s BB, a beer occasionally brewed in the 1930s to a superior bitter recipe, and was launched onto the market as ‘Competition Ale’.

“The competition was for drinkers to come up with a suitable name for the new beer. It was won by the steward of the Drill Hall Club in Keighley, who won £500 – £10,000 in today’s money – for naming it Landlord. Little did anyone realise that Taylor’s had given birth to a beer that was later to achieve virtual cult status and even become a favourite for celebrities, including Madonna.”

In fact this year the brewer is running a similar competition . 

So of course that got me thinking about the true history of Crowdsourcing - after all it didn't come into existence purely as a result of the excellent book,  The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few.

So as fast as you can say, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few, I came across this infographic

And there's many of the digital natives thinking they had invented it.

There are free chapters of the book available at www.resultsfromcrowds.com 

And this reminded of me of a post I wrote last year on Crowdsourcing from which there is a useful link to crowdsourcing.org where there are some very useful lists of crowdsourcing projects and infographics

Twitter and the Art of Storytelling

I recently had the pleasure of meeting John Sadowsky again at an event run by the DMA and Emailvision.

For those of you who don't know John, he is a great exponent of the importance of Stories and Storytelling for both Leaders and Brands.

At the recent event, he highlighted how the Hero of the Story is often the key difference between a Brand Story that is successful and one that is not. He cited the Facebook pages of Dunkin Donuts and Starbucks. The former having fewer fans than Starbucks but more highly engaged ones.

And the main difference was Hero of the stories being told. In Starbucks' case it was the brand, while with Dunkin Donuts it was the Customer. This makes sense doesn't it? I am more likely to share a story that has me at the centre of it than a Brand.

So this brings me to Twitter. Now you might say that a story can't be told in 140 characters or less. True But what Twitter have done very cleverly by launching Twitter Stories, is to talk about the Stories behind the Tweets.

Here's how Aaron Durand saved his mom's bookstore with a Tweet.

Aaron Durand’s mother was in trouble. She had run an independent bookstore for nearly two decades when an economic downturn hit that threatened to close the shop. Aaron wanted to help his mom, but wasn’t sure what he could do. He wrote about his mom’s plight on his blog then tweeted it out, adding at the last second an offer to buy a burrito for anyone who bought $50 worth of books during the holidays at his mom’s shop.

The story took hold. The Tweet was passed along from person to person across Portland’s art and design community. It was retweeted and retweeted until hundreds of people had read the story.

Overnight, new customers started to arrive and business began to pick up. The story continued to snowball on Twitter. The bookstore went on to have its best holiday season ever, and has continued to thrive each season since.

 Twitter is not the story. Brands are not the story. People are the story

What's your Twitter Story?

From Benign Dictatorship to True Democracy

That was the title of the very interesting after dinner speech at the Digital Leadership Dinner given by The Marketing Society on Tuesday evening.


Read a summary here  and listen to a snapshot from speaker John Grant, author and co-founder of  Ecoinomy here 


My own view from a marketing perspective, is that even with many marketing models where we believe that we are moving towards true  democracy we are still just painting Benign Dictatorship in a different colour. The recent example of Subway for example allowing customers to choose between a variety of new sandwiches for the new product launch is limited democracy. They were given a choice from a selection from Subway.


If we are looking to see how widespread democracy through crowd sourcing is, the take a look at over 1000 crowdsorcing and crowdfunding sites listed here . 


Of course it depends on how we define democracy. If we believe that all brands should be run by consumers, then quite frankly I'm not sure there is a future in that. But if we believe that democratic barnds are ones that allow consumers a say in new product development including suggesting new products and services ( eg Starbucks) , or allow consumes to openly cast a vote on how good a product or service is ( eg Amazon ) then I'm a believer!

From Crowd Sourcing to Crowd Tapping

A new way for Brands to connect with and reward consumers
Essentially it allows rewarding of actions like completing surveys, voting polls, participating in a live-online discussions or sharing brand-related content with a few friends via social media and the Crowdtap platform. The reward points  can be redeemed for things like  Amazon gift cards, or  donations to a charity. 


 


www.crowdtap.it