Crowdsourcing - genius from the masses

Crowdsourcing. The term is cropping up all over the place, but is it just a short-lived ‘buzz’ phrase or is it a genuinely useful business tool?

In a world where it is increasingly difficult to achieve cut-through – both from a marketing perspective and a product differentiation point of view, anything (within reason of course) which can set you apart from the crowd is a good thing. So how can crowdsourcing help?

Firstly, what is crowdsourcing?

Brought into the spotlight by Dell’s innovative use of the concept, crowdsourcing is a technique that empowers your audiences to help solve your business challenges, innovate in product development, evolve the business to meet consumer needs and much more. It draws upon the input of the ‘crowd’, posing questions, requests for ideas and general input. The crowd could be made up of a group of brand fans, subscribers or followers who have a level of interest in the improvement of a product, offering or service. By gaining input from the masses, the brand achieves a great number of viewpoints and inspirations in a short space of time and potentially covering a wider selection of viewpoints and abstract ideas.

So, we know what crowdsourcing is, but does it work?

Crowdsourcing does require investment for it to be of value. But this doesn’t necessarily have to be financial. You could begin with a simple approach to crowdsourcing and empower a member of your marketing team to create and then leverage a following, for example, via Twitter. Communication is real-time and you can generate a relatively large number of followers fairly quickly if you have a known brand.

Many brands are now investing in crowdsourcing for a variety of reasons, some of which are cited as examples above. And many are finding great successes from doing so. A recently publicised and unintentional crowdsourcing example comes from Air New Zealand, with its latest ad campaign inspiration being taken from a customer tweet – you can read more about it on Brand Republic – it’s a nice idea, and a different take on the usual airline ad messaging.

There are a host of other brands successfully using crowdsourcing for various benefits – check out the list below (courtesty of Open Innovators) for examples of real brands making embracing crowdsourcing:

• Dell IdeaStorm - external idea sourcing
• P&G Open Innovation Challenge - external idea sourcing in Britain
• Ideas4Unilever - corporate venturing
• BMW Customer Innovation Lab - in german
• Staples Invention Quest - idea contest - site no longer live but you can read more about it here
• Kraft - innovate with Kraft
• Vocalpoint - P&G’s network for women
• Betavine - Vodafone’s mobile app community
• My Startbucks Idea - shaping the future of Starbucks
• Nintendo Wiiware - nintendo embraces crowdsourcing
• LEGO Factory - LEGO co-creation tool
• Nespresso - design contest for coffee machines
• Muji - improving and suggesting new designs
• Fluevog - open shoe design

So is crowdsourcing for you?

This may well sound obvious, but it depends on your brand, product/service and objectives. Crowdsourcing brings a number of marketing benefits such as brand awareness, consumer engagement, the building of a community and potential press coverage. Alongside this, it also brings with it genius from the masses – it is effectively a giant brainstorm. If these benefits work for you, then you should probably consider investing in a crowdsourcing programme…

Jocelyn Kirby
Marketing & Business Development Manager
Twitter @ JocelynKirby

Online Communities

What is it all about?

Community is at the heart of so much of the internet – it is what builds and drives the internet. So much so that the communities spread beyond the online world to become as significant in the real world as things we are all used to in everyday life.

Over recent years, big players have invested a lot of money into social areas of the internet – by and large leaving many in the business asking “why?” After all there is no obvious immediate return, but there must be something to get from it – the levels of investment show just how serious large companies are about getting involved. Like a great many things on and off line it becomes a ‘bandwagon’ and everyone jumps on board, quite often with no real direction and no idea what they want to do. This results in a lot of big announcements that fail to add up to much.

At Bluhalo we approach things differently – community and social development takes time and trialing, and more often than not goes off in directions that no one even considered at the start of the project. That however, is the key to being successful online with communities and social offerings. The best way of achieving this is to give the project time to breathe – this gives the client the chance to learn from the community and establish what works best and what people would actually like to have. The one thing that has been proven time and time again is that internet communities like to have a say, to feel like what they say matters and they definitely do not like being dictated to.

Is it right for your business?

The short answer is – maybe. The longer answer is; yes, if you are prepared to engage and put the time in. Engaging with people is at the end of the day what communities are all about – allowing customers and companies to communicate, find out what they really think and want, provide new ways to interact with your brands, new ways for customers to tell others how much they like your brand and new ways to find and share information.

Having a direct link with your community can achieve more for your company than the best focus group or most in depth research. Suppliers of technical products have long been aware that forums and newsgroups are the best way to identify bugs and issues so that new releases can be made available to the community. This advantage does however come at a cost and companies have to invest time to allow individuals to interact with and learn from the community. This can be slow at first to yield results, but to companies who make the effort the rewards are extensive and long lasting.

The options

There are many ways for companies to interact with people online. From ‘old fashioned’ forums to Facebook applications, and more often than not a combination of several different channels. Within Facebook alone there are several different ways of creating an online presence and engaging with people. What works for a company depends on the products they sell, what demographic they are targeting and how fast they can respond to ideas and comments. For brands Facebook offers a great way to allow fans to engage and make statements about themselves within their own Facebook profiles – allowing them to show what they are interested in whilst as the same time increasing brand awareness for the a company.

Of course the best things about building communities online is that the technology to do it is available and built by the wider internet community. These tools only exist because a handful of individuals wanted them to and took the time to create them, by utilising them companies are giving something back to the users of their products. There is no clearer way of a company saying that they like their customers than taking a step into the world of their customers and joining in.

What next?

Simple. Start talking. Have an internal brainstorm to see what your employees think you might be able to do – then with even just a few vague ideas find some time to talk to someone like Bluhalo who can not only help you decide on direction and meaning but implement and maintain your solutions as well. Of course there are many companies out there – but here at Bluhalo we are proud of the ideas and enthusiasm that we can bring to a project, so why not pick up the phone or drop us an email and talk to us first.

David C
Programmer

Sports Website Design

It's all about engaging fans.

We know sport, we’re fans ourselves. We know how fans think, what they want, why and how; and when we’re not a fan, we become one. We get inside the minds of fans and we work out exactly what makes them tick.

We don’t just design a website to how we think it should look, and we don’t just design a website that follows the crowd, we design a website that sets you apart from the crowd, encapsulates the essence of your brand and most importantly, excites your fans.

Exciting your fans isn’t just about giving them a website that has that ‘wow’ factor, although that’s important too, of course. It’s also about giving them the basics that they are going to need, such as real-time results, updates and news. The ‘wow’ factor obviously helps and gives them something to talk about too. But there also needs to be more depth, things to keep them coming back, we don’t only give you a way to talk to your fans, we give you a way to interact with your fans.

Fan interaction is great. They love you, they want to be associated with you and they really want to be listened to by you. By creating ways for the fans to interact, not only do we get you even more fan-love, but we also get you a great resource for research, feedback and the halo effect – they’ll spread the love. We give them a place to belong, a place of passion and community.

But it’s not all about cool features, communities and the latest downloads. There’s also a bit of theory behind the way we do a great job at engaging the fans via your website. We focus on user experience - a clear layout, intuitive navigation and compelling calls to action; we ensure you are accessible – after all, up to one in five visitors to your site will have some form of disability; we keep it simple – the less clicks to where they want to go the better; the list of what we do is pretty long, but the long and the short of it is – we help our clients engage their fans and we do a good job of it too. Which is why we are the agency of choice for the UK sporting sector.

You can check out some of the sports websites we've created by visiting our clients page.