I am a passionate advocate of crowdsourcing, which for the uninitiated is a brand or organization taking and using content or suggestions from the crowd that constitutes its audience.
One of the originators was Maxine Clark, founder of St. Louis-based Build-A-Bear, who years ago realized she could allow her customers – little kids – to customize her products to their specifications. More commonly recognized examples are Dell’s “Idea Storm” or Starbuck’s “My Starbucks Idea,” both providing opportunities to submit product ideas or improvements and each having brought much-deserved kudos to their respective brands. Continue reading →
Marketing and PR continues to become more complex as there are more and more accessible methods for consumers interact with brands and with each other. Making sense of all the possibilities is a daunting task. Everyone is familiar with the basics like Facebook and Twitter—but what else is there? While Facebook and Twitter are regarded as engagement tools, the clutter of many-to-many conversations does diminish a campaign’s impact and effectiveness. This is precisely where crowdsourcing can fit in as a way to cut through the noise and build meaningful connections with your consumers or community.
Crowdsourcing, or co-creation, is a fun and engaging marketing and PR tool to get a community of participants activated and engaged leading up to an event or as part of a campaign. Building a campaign around crowdsourcing can be a quick and easy way to mix things up and get people talking with little or no cost. Continue reading →
Recently the Web Analytics Association announced it published social media measurement definitions on which it wanted the public to comment. I bet y’all realized I’d be excited about this since I’ve been so adamant about crowdsourcing (and not!) in the past.
I am eager to see how this works out and whether many in the social media community contribute thoughts to this. We all claim to be experts and have opinions on just about everything we possibly can, and this is an amazing opportunity to come up with definitions that are not forced upon us but that we create ourselves. Continue reading →
…..a chance to start the day off right.