Outside Innovation

Crowdsourcing Condom Advertising—Will This Work?

You may have noticed this article in the New York Times, A Hip-Hop Contest to Promote a Brand. Trojan, the manufacturers of the Magnum brand of condoms, has grown revenues and marketshare for the Magnum brand, not through traditional advertisements, but through word of mouth: mentions in Hip-Hop music lyrics by artists such as Ludacris, Kid Rock, Lil Wayne, and Eminem. The NYT article doesn't make it clear whether the Magnum product manager engaged in product placement activities or simply fanned the flames. I suspect there may be some mutual promotion underway. ("I'll mention your product, you tell the world about my song.")

Now Magnum is building on the Hip-Hop momentum by launching a "Live Large" marketing campaign in the form of a contest soliciting more hip hop or R&B songs and lyrics from anyone, not just professional musicians.

You can go to the contest site, MagnumLiveLarge.com, download music tracks to use and/or use your own, and submit your own songs and lyrics about "living large." Fans can vote on the submissions and, of course, spread them around virally. The winner will receive a $5,000 prize and a trip to a hip-hop festival in mid-June in Atlanta, where they’ll be congratulated by Ludacris.

Enterprise 2.0: Take the Plunge!

By Matthew Lees, VP and Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group


While the term “Enterprise 2.0” looks like what the rebuilt Star Trek space ship might be called, it’s also the name of this week’s just-concluded conference in Boston on the sociological, operational, and technological changes in the way people are working and companies are conducting business.

Although the focus of our work at the Patricia Seybold Group is on engaging and collaborating with customers, partners, and others outside your organizational walls, most of the sessions at the Enterprise 2.0 conference were geared toward internal collaboration and productivity…how “social tools” can be used to help employees do their jobs more efficiently and effectively, make information and knowledge more available and findable, and increase innovation.

Most Compelling Application—Socialtext’s new wiki-based, collaborative spreadsheet, SocialCalc, developed with Dan Bricklin, co-creator of the blast-from-the-past spreadsheet VisiCalc (http://www.socialtext.com). The SocialCalc spreadsheet engine is also a project on the One Laptop per Child Program.

Most Astute Observation on How People Use Social Tools—Paraphrased from David Marshak, Program Director at IBM / Lotus (and a former PSGroup colleague): “Most instant messages in the workplace are like this: We want to say ‘Can you please help me with this problem, which is important to me, but probably not important to you, although I’m hoping you’ll stop doing what you’re doing to do this for me?’ But we don’t want to type all that, so we just abbreviate it by writing ‘Hi.’”

COMMUNITY 2.0-Leveraging the Wisdom of Crowds

Crowdsourcing 2.0

Kathleen Gilroy, Otter Group
Sylvia Marino, Edmunds.com
Michael Sikorsky, Cambrian House

Kathleen:
Wikipedia definition: relies on a combination of volunteers and low-paid amateurs who use their spare time to create content and/or to solve problems.

Examples of crowdsourcing:
Zazzle I use it to generate stamps as presents for my nephews and nieces.
Goldcorp -- Took its data and made it public and encouraged people to analyze the data and suggest mining opportunities for a reward. (Written Up in Mavericks at Work.)
Threadless--T-shirt design

This notion of earning credentials from crowdsourcing is great.

Community 2.0-Lessons Learned from Non-Business Environments

PANEL DISCUSSION

Craig Newmark, Craigslist

In 1994, Craig was working at Charles Schwab evangelizing the Internet. It's an information-intensive business. He began to comment on arts and cultural events. His buddy Jim Buckmaster is the Webmaster. "We pretty much do one thing well. We prefer not to screw it up. I pretty much do full time customer service. I still do. "

Scott Meyer--About.com

Bought a year ago by the New York Times. Our audience is so different than

We're now about the 10th largest on the Internet in terms of business services. We're a distributed publishing network. We're also a technology company... we've developed search optimization and other technologies that are propagated around the company. I didn't start this business. About.com started as a human search company.. rebranded it as About.com to be a full-service portal. We retrenched as search took off.. We made all the people who were organizing content into journalists. and organize communities around those pieces of communities. We've got 600 sites today, each one captures. 60,000 topics. We have the biggest pregnancy site. We also have one on Tatoos, cats, etc. Help you find information and people who share the same interests...

Alexandra Samuel, Social Signal
My previous life was in politics and social science. We worked on on the internet--helping political organizations do grass roots outreach. There were limited ways to mobilize the passion. A couple of years ago, Web 2.0 tools made it easy to mobilize -- A community at the March of Dimes for parents with children who are in neonatal intensive care.

Lessons Learned:
Alex: You have to connect with people who are  passionate about your brands. The approach we use is "Reflective Glory Marketing".. create a community of something that people do feel passionate about. Example: You can Change Everything if you change your bank..Vancity credit ... let's you list all the things you'd like to change in your community... you can't sign up for a credit card there. You can declare what you care about in the community.

Craig: We are a community service to a degree. If you focus on being a community service, you tap into that human social need to connect and to help. Newspapers used to perceive itself as community services, which is important in a country that is trying to be democracies. But in recent years, they've focused on profit margins; they've fired investigative journalists. That's a mistake. There are now folks who are helping journalists get paid for doing investigative journalism. For example, what lobbyists are paying what congressmen for what legislation. It all comes down to community service and trust. It's an interesting observation that the most trusted name in journalism in Stephen Colbert and John Stewart.

Alex: Right, Colbert really gets 2.0.He lets his  fans build and maintain the Colbert Nation web site and he just plays with them on it. 

Scott: I Told the Boston Globe--guys here's the fundamental problem with traditional publishers, I just rented my vacation cottage on Craig's List. You need to decide what you're trying to achieve. If you're a news organization, you have to decide what you're trying to achieve. The NYTimes doesn't want citizen journalism. Lots of people talk about OhMyNews in South Korea. They have 12 or 15 editors, all the content is sent in from folks out in the field.

Craig: Companies should engage their communities to provide better customer service and to improve products. If you have customer company reps on discussion boards where they're helping customers solve problems and have company people visibly listening, to actually change the products and services. Provide discussion boards, engage your community thru them, take some chances. If someone says the wrong thing, it may haunt you, but it's worth the risk. We should also have internal discussion boards. The people on the front lines know a lot more about what's going on... Everyone tells their boss what they want to hear. Internal discussion boards offer the possibility of breaking the internal communication failure.

Scott: About is actually a pretty small organization... 600 people. A lot of our content is generated by contractors. They have their own internal discussion site to share what's going on. It's incredibly valuable. Talk about Control: We did things with NBC for the Olympics.. it's all about the Control of the Olympic Committee. We had a blog that allowed people to sound off about what wasn't working in the NBC coverage of the Olylmpics, which they wanted so they could get out from under that control.

JOHN HAGEL's KEYNOTE at Community 2.0 Conference

This is the inaugural Community 2.0 conference being put on by Shared Insights. It's being held in Las Vegas March 12-14th.

Conference was kicked off by Barry Libert, CEO of Shared Insights, and then by Francois Goissieaux, the conference chair, who both stressed the mood of informality and strategic conversations.

JOHN HAGEL'S KEYNOTE

John Hagel led off with the keynote. See his blog. Edge Perspectives. 

Here are his remarks:

I'm very encouraged about the commercial prospects of online communities.

My book NetGain was published in 1997, was one of the first to focus on online communities in business. Every business plan in 1998 claimed to be about virtual communities.. the result was a lot of wasted investment and backlash. Most of the virtual community initiatives have operated under the radar screen.

In the past 12 months, I've gotten a series of phone calls from blue chip execs asking for help with virtual communities. So my personal barometer says that there's a time for climate change.

Community 2.0 is heralding a rebirth of online communities.

One lesson learned from my book: people focused on the opportunities, not the challenges..
The first challenge has to do with language. What are virtual communities? (anything that involves conversations among people?

Hagel's definition of Virtual Communities:
Establishing connections among people with common needs on shared networks.

1. Shared Discussions among people over time.
2. Shared relationships.
3. Shared identity with one another and with the community.
4. Shared meaning that grows over time.

The resurgence in virtual communities? They respond to deep needs we all have.

Virtual communities take a couple of different forms. Some started in physical space and became electronic. Others started electronically and added the physical community aspect.

THE CORE CHALLENGES

Diverse Skills and cultural challenges:

1. Combining published content with interactions
2. Social Interaction -- How do you catalyze and sustain relationships
3. Economic business models --

Every community starts with a  spike in one of  these three areas.. but don't do a good job of combing all three.

Three key shifts in mindsets:

1. Move from a benefit to sponsor focus to a participant focus
2. Move from short-term, get rich quick focus into long term value creation focus
3. Move from a top-down, imposed organization view to a bottom up emergent organization view.

You can't control them. You want to enhance the initiatives of the participants. Most large companies bring mindsets  that are

Organizational Challenges and Organizational Frameworks required

1. Organization-Who's accountable? Do they have the status and influence within the organization to mobilize the resources and talent required to foster community? Are they too narrowly focused in their interests? Marketing/Customer Support/Product Development or any other functional area? If the person has a narrow view, the community's focus will be narrowed.
2. Systems-What is being measured and what is being rewarded? How will they define success? What are the relevant operational metrics? Are there systematic reviews? Do we reflect on how we're doing?
3. Skills-Who has the relevant experience? Are they being mobilized into the virtual communities?