In Defense of Crowdsourcing

The legend of King Canute is a well-known one.

As the story goes, Canute was a wise but powerful king who was widely believed to have authority beyond reproach. One day, to prove he was mortal, his highness took his throne down to the beach, planted it at the water's edge, then ordered the tide to stop coming in. To the dismay of his public, it did not. Some things, were beyond even the divine influence of their legendary King.

The story of King Canute is used as a cautionary tale to remind us that sometimes things take place without regard for our opinions of them, and arguing their rightness or wrongness doesn't change the fact. As it went with the waves, it's doubtful King Canute would have had much luck today against the inexorable force of crowdsourcing -- it will happen regardless and is happening as we speak.

Despite its meteoric rise, crowdsourcing’s nature is polarizing and it’s fast becoming a topic that everyone must add their own two cents about. Additionally, it stokes the emotional fires like those other dinner party bugaboos -- religion and politics.

But why? After all, crowdsourcing is not a new concept. In 1715 the British Government held a crowdsourcing contest to find a maritime navigation solution –- the Longitude Prize. Several high profile companies have recently used crowdsourcing in their marketing campaigns. Mountain Dew’s “dewmocracy” and Starbucks’ mystarbucksidea.com are examples of this. More tellingly, companies like Threadless and Apple’s App store are reliant on crowdsourced creativity to sustain their business models.

Perhaps it is simply a matter of semantics. First coined by Jeff Howe in 2006, the portmanteau “crowdsourcing” smacks of “popularized exploitation” –- the way complex legislation is reduced to simplistic sound bites, or how cheap labor is outsourced to sweat shops in the developing world.

Semantics aside, it's worth mentioning that the most effective form of marketing, word of mouth, is founded upon the process of crowdsourcing opinions from our personal networks. We frequently solicit advice for recommendations on restaurants or bars in our personal lives. In this hyperconnected age it seems not just prudent, but sensible to do so. Why then is it ok to tap our network for a trivial recommendation, while it’s taboo when creative agencies solicit creativity on an as needed basis?

Its critics would have you believe crowdsourcing commoditizes and cheapens creativity, driving down the quality of work in the process. This in turn can jeopardize the livelihood of many professionals that make their living spruiking their creative wares.

Its supporters, most notably trailblazing agency Victors & Spoils, claim that we have moved from a world of scarcity to one of abundance, meaning that the capacity to crowdsource is here to stay whether we like it or not. V&S CEO John Winsor believes crowdsourcing is a voluntary, self-selecting process whereby people choose to participate or not based on their own set of beliefs. To me this seems like an inherently fair and pragmatic approach. To their credit, V&S also rewards the participants who were runners-up in each contest. This model of “compassionate crowdsourcing” paired with the creative bona fides of the V&S team will prove to be a powerful competitive advantage. Sure, other agencies could copy their business model, but how many can claim the brains trust of the V&S C-suite of John Winsor, Evan Fry and Claudia Batten?

SUMMARY
Like King Canute and the waves, the outcome of the crowdsourcing conundrum is not good or bad, it just is. Your opinion will differ depending on your own point of view and professional position. As a final word, I think it’s hard to go past the measured assessment of the ever-quotable Clay Shirky:
“The spread of cheap and widely available creative tools is sad for people in the advertising business the same way that movable type was sad for scribes -– the loss from this kind of change is real but limited and is accompanied by a generally beneficial social change.”

What do you think?

* For a more comprehensive take on crowdsourcing. Check out Rick Liebling’s great e-book, “Everyone Is Illuminated.”

Focus Group Fatigue

Mitch Joel’s Six Pixels of Separation is a great read. Whether for your business or personal online presence, it underscores the importance of harnessing the web’s hyperconnectedness to build your brand. A former music journalist, Joel himself is a poster child for the book’s material, giving several examples of how he used today’s digital channels to open doors to many rewarding career opportunities.

Joel cites WIRED editor Chris Anderson’s maxim that brands are fast becoming defined by their first page of search results. With so much customer interaction and feedback taking place online, many traditional market research techniques are becoming antiquated. For example, Joel believes focus groups, so long a mainstay of qualitative research, are much less useful than they once were. He writes: “The web provides the ultimate focus group (and it’s free). It’s authentic because you’re not locking people in a room and feeding them pizza to get their opinion. They’re expressing themselves (good, bad, and neutral) without being solicited, and they’re talking online with passion. Can you really put a price on that? Can you really afford not to be listening?” (p. 63).

Critics of focus groups have long argued that their legitimacy can be compromised by several factors; groupthink, biased or unrealistic questioning, even the interrogatory nature of discussions to name a few. But what does the nature of today’s growing digital realm mean for the future of groups? Will researchers conduct more online “chat” style groups? Will brands incorporate more feedback sites like Starbucks’ hugely successful mystarbucksidea? The java giant has created a fast, cost-effective method of mining the consumer brain trust for useful insights and opinions.

What do you think? In this digital age where consumer behavior and interaction is more easily measured, is there still room for traditional focus groups? Are they headed towards oblivion, or can they still serve a purpose?

Starbucks: Re-inventing an Icon.

Starbucks doesn’t receive a whole lot of credit these days.

Whether it’s the stock price heading south or the blogosphere whining about the quality of coffee, many take delight in the sticking the boot into the Seattle java giant.

But rarely today does Starbucks get credit for creating a category that has so profoundly affected human behavior. Throughout the nineties and naughts, it not only changed Americans attitudes to coffee, it packaged the concept of the “third place” and made it mainstream from Seattle to Shanghai. Today, you can find a Starbucks in any major city in the world, usually accompanied by a cacophony of copycat stores.

But herein lies the problem -- its sheer popularity has made Starbucks a victim of its own success. Board members and shareholders demand efficiency and if this means selling CDs, storing coffee beans a little longer or having fewer armchairs in stores then so be it. As CEO Howard Schultz wrote to the company’s top brass in 2007, "We have had to make a series of decisions that, in retrospect, have led to the watering down of the Starbucks experience and what some might call the commoditization of our brand."

So how does Starbucks re-invigorate its brand? When your business model has become so widely cloned, re-establishing its nineties era cachet means taking the lead in strategic vision, not just market share. Where once the idea of an afternoon venti-caramel-non-fat-frappuccino might have seemed exotic, it is now blasé. Where once the customer was satisfied with the “third place”, they now seem to need a fourth, fifth and sixth to tweet, socialize, strategize -- often all at once!

Since Schultz’s return last January, the pundits have been scouring every tidbit trickling out of Seattle HQ for insights into future strategy. The three hour nationwide store closure to re-train baristas; the folksy hand-written chalkboards in stores; reintroducing the original mermaid logo; studying how an icon like The Beatles reinvented themselves; the new logoless concept store - “15th Avenue Coffee and Tea”; and most recently, asking the best known design firms in the world for a re-imagination of the Starbucks identity and store concept.

So while speculation is fun, what the future actually holds for Starbucks is anyone’s guess. Evolving in its own way seems the birthright of the company that in changing our attitudes to coffee, managed to change the cultural zeitgeist in the process.

The Starbucks of Social Media

If I didn’t know better, I’d say Twitter is taking over the world.

The microblogging platform has entered the mainstream conversation at an alarming rate. Last Sunday, several streams of “traditional media” were scouring Sarah Palin’s tweets of 140 characters for further insight into her sudden retirement. Last week, controversial Bengals receiver Chad Ochocinco lauded Twitter as his retaliatory weapon against pesky reporters. Guy Kawasaki has said he could live a week without his cell phone but not a week without Twitter.

This begs the question, why? Facebook is still going gangbusters with no sign of slowing, and Linkedin continues to add thousands of users each day. Each of these sites is terrific at enhancing its users’ professional or personal connectedness, but Twitter’s genius lies in successfully combining the two. By appealing to so many, so often, for so many different purposes, Twitter has become the Starbucks of social media.

Marshaling the confluence of personal and professional is no mean feat, but Twitter pulls it off with aplomb. Like Starbucks’ now famous concept of “the third place”, Twitter provides an environment for college kids to share study notes, soccer moms to host book club sessions, and business people to meet and network. Sound familiar?

Just as Starbucks’ popularity exploded with practically no advertising, Twitter’s success has come via the road less traveled. We often hear how clarity and focus are paramount for a brand, but Twitter is a model of ambiguity as to who uses it and how. A murky strategic premise of any brand usually sounds its death knell (Pontiac anyone?), but Twitter seems to thrive on being all things to all people.

That said, the credit for this online juggernaut cannot be placed solely at the feet of Evan Williams and co. Since its launch in 2006 Twitter has evolved significantly, driven largely by user behavior. The advent of @replies, hashtags, URLs and re-tweets were the brainchild of the collective community rather than the C-suite. Furthermore, user engagement is constantly being improved by third party applications -- in doing so adding increments of improvement to the user experience.

Only time will tell if the Twitter juggernaut can continue to flourish. But for brands looking to get their fingers dirty in the chaotic maelstrom of Web 2.0., the lesson we can learn is a valuable one. As David Armano says -- the collective has become the focus group. Brands need not compromise what they stand for, just because they take an intimate interest into how user preferences can shape functionality.

The Evolution Of Apple

The graphic on the left is meant to depict one thing – that a brand has very little to do with a logo.

Sure, iconography is important – the instantly recognizable Coke bottle silhouette or the Nike Swoosh are testament to that. But any logo itself is an inanimate shape – its meaning is derived from the sum total of what the brand stands for.

Apple was not recently listed by Fortune Magazine as the most admired company in the world for having a sexy logo, but by embodying a set of values and beliefs that its users find cool and aspirational. So while its logo and products have evolved over the years (I'm sure its designers would prefer to forget its notorious beige phase!), the values that define Apple have stood the test of time.

So just what is Apple? How do you distill the essence of the Apple brand? Many people talk about its sleek design or its user intuitivity. These are important attributes to be sure, but they are not what make the Apple brand admired.

The answer lies in the message behind the famed 1984 and Think Different TV spots. Not unlike its pugnacious visionary Steve Jobs, Apple is a fierce independence symbolizing a free-spirited creativity. This is the reason people have Apple bumper stickers and tattoos of the logo - because they are a member of the Apple "tribe." What the brand stands for resonates with them.

However, with growing popularity comes a host of new challenges for Apple. How does a brand remain cool as it becomes as ubiquitous as white ear buds on a college campus? A former periphery brand used by a niche market of designers and creative professionals, the Apple juggernaut continues to gain market share across all its categories. Going forward its greatest challenge will be to avoid becoming commoditized - like Starbucks before it - a victim of its own success.

For some reason, I wouldn’t bet on it...