For my first assignment in the Quirk eMarketing course we where asked to write an essay on the way the internet is changing advertising models with regards to crowdsourcing. 
I took a critical view to crowdsourcing and by accident came to the following points that need to be taken into consideration before undertaking a crowdsourcing campaign:
Take aways for successful crowdsourcing:
• Be where the community you intend to crowdsource is, don’t build a new platform to draw them in. If your community is on Facebook then you start your crowdsourcing commission from Facebook.
• Small scale crowdsourcing is a great start. For example reward great suggestions given to your twitter profile.
• Compensate great ideas, don’t anger the mob by offering even less than you would have paid an agency for the creative.
• Context is key, give a full brief and where ever possible offer insights into the strategy. Too easily crowdsourcing can lead to poor executions driven by untrained people. Critically evaluate whether the winning concept actually fits with your brand strategy.
• Offer a moderator to monitor the environment and guide the path to successful on point submissions.
• Keep poor products and exploitations away from crowdsourcing models, you will be exposed for what you really are.
And a good essay it was, Chris
I think that you’re right – there are definitely some approaches to crowdsourcing that are better than others. But, as a concept, it can’t be wholly dismissed or blamed for the death of strategic thinking. Consider your assertion that a full brief and strategic insight will ensure that winning ideas will fit better with the brand in question. This surely has the underlying assumption that strategic thinking is still necessary?
Hi Chris,
Like Lyndi I would agree with you that there are some approaches to crowdsourcing that are better than others and even with in these approaches there are certain products, brands and services that it is always going to work better for than others.
I think you point about strategy plays directly into this – You are right in saying that crowdsourcing cant provide you with a strategy for your brand. But I dont think this means the death of strategy – infact brands and briefs that have a well worked strategy behind them often work better. Case in point would be the recent brief from Peperami that we hosted on Idea Bounty. The Peperami brand is very well established and their strategy for the next year has been developed by a strong team, the brief was a part of this strategy.
I think it would be very difficult to start a brand from scratch using crowdsourcing – for this you really do need the expertise and guiding hands of an agency. Again I refer to Peperami which is brand that has been steadily built by the same team for 15 years and once established enough it was possible to put the brand out there and let other come up with the creative without the fear of loosing direction in terms of the strategy… infact if I was part of the team that created the Peperami brand I would extreamly happy to have created something that you can put out into a pubic space with so little fear of it loosing direction.
Ultimately I think that a lot of thought has to go into the strategic needs of a brand before any crowdsourcing project is undertaken and then what ever the project is needs to play directly into that brands strategy.
Awesome thoughts and great to see the conversation growing!
Warm regards,
Daniel
Thanks @Lyndi and @Daniel for your comments. I have to agree with your comments that crowdsourcing certainly can have a lot of strategic input and play well into an overall brand strategy when conducted well.
I do still wonder what percentage of crowdsourcing attempts are failures, at a random guess I would expect it to be a very high (scary) ratio.
I love crowdsourcing, the capability of the collective community certainly are powerful.