Brand Republic reports that Manchester United is planning to launch a social network for its 350 million plus supporters worldwide. If only 50% of them sign up, it will rival the current size of LinkedIn. Not all businesses or organisations have what it takes to launch a social network. These networks are best nurtured in certain conditions, for example if your customers or fans feel some special bond, often some shared sense of identity. Sports and especially football clubs tick this box quite neatly. If they design this right, we predict the start of a trend.

Paying by Saying

That incredibly disruptive company founded by Jack Dorsey, Square, has just rebooted reality again. And this time you're bound to notice it. Enter Card Case – Square's latest product. How does it work? You enter a store (with your mobile phone in your pocket). You pick up what you want to buy, and say your name at the checkout point. That's it!

How on earth does it work?

Stores will have to integrate Card Case into their point of sale. Users add stores where they want to buy on their mobile phones. When they're within 100 meters of the store (measured by their mobiles), the system allows them to buy there. When they say their name, the cash register attendant enters it, and their photo pops up. The attendant verifies this. This is brilliant, because not only is it way more usable than credit cards, it is also more secure. Voila!

Weekend workers

A new study suggests that marketeers are often engaging when the moment is least opportune. Social Media, especially B2C is often best done out of work hours:

• B2B marketers get 14% better engagement on Twitter during the week
• B2C marketers get 32% more engagement on Facebook during the weekend

Moleskine apologizes

Last week we reported on how Moleskine angered the design community, who claimed the brand's efforts to crowdsource their new logo would generate hours of work at a fraction of the cost. Moleskine has responded by way of an apology on their blog. An apology that will go some way to mollify some designers – but not all. One comment on the incident makes a telling point:

I think where the dichotomy comes for most of us is that while yes, in the past you have stood for quality, consumer relationships and authenticity – creating a contest in which we (your consumers) spend hours of our time creating a logo for which we may or may not be paid that may or may not be used, all the while having the handicap of being unable to communicate with you directly about your specific needs … that's neither quality nor good for your consumer relationships, and it feels pretty inauthentic.

Science proves: Work Sucks

Sentiment Analysis on Twitter has had its ups and downs. Well, more like, a BIG up and then a BIG down. The reason for this is obvious: sentiment analysis cannot take into account more subtle uses of language, like irony or sarcasm, which abounds on Twitter. Despite the fact, a recent analysis by sociologists at Cornell University has revealed very interesting sentiment graphs. According to that, we use the most positive words around breakfast time. This tapers down to a low late afternoon, and then picks up from there until bed-time. Furthermore, we're supposedly more perky over weekends.

Peer Review goes Crowdsourced

If there's one place where one would expect open access to information, its in the realm of academic research and publishing. But until now what we've had is what George Monbiot describes as a form of rentier capitalism. Remember back in September, some scientists at CERN caused headlines by measuring neutrinos travelling faster than light? And then, less than a month later, some random guy pointed out the mistake on an online platform called arXiv? This could be the new future of online review. Instead of letting new discoveries be peer-reviewed for extended periods of time before publishing it, the scientific community is increasingly adopting an approach of "release early, release often". By letting peer review happen freely online, both the quality and speed goes up tremendously. Which is the effect of Crowdsourcing at is best.

Smart Phones are Exploding

No-one disagrees with the fact that mobile is the next big thing anymore. That argument has changed. The question is, how many of these mobile platforms can qualify as smart phones, thus unlocking all the potential that comes with it (apps, geolocation, cameras, movement sensors, etc)? Nielsen has the answer. At least for the US – 43% percent of mobile users below the age of 44, and 62% of those between 25 and 34 have the smarts in their pockets. There you go – now chew on that over the weekend …

Creative of the Week – Andy Baio

One thing that YouTube has enabled, is to give bedroom creatives the chance to mash-up existing videos into new remixes. One sub-genre of that phenomenon is the 'supercut': fast-paced edits that combine short clips, all around the same subject. Think: all the 'Dudes' from the Big Lebowski, cut together in one 2-minute video. Andy Baio is the supercut-nerd extraordinaire. Earlier this year, he worked with artist Michael Bell-Smith on a randomized supercut browser called SuperSupercut and now the Supercut.org URL has been developed into the be-all-and-end-all home of the supercut database.

In the past we have explained why good content – so called Linkbait – is the best Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategy. This week we've seen a burst of – er … content – fly by our timelines announcing that content Marketing is now where it's at in more than just SEO.

Like this one by Entrepeneur mag:

When it comes to marketing strategies, content marketing has just been crowned king, far surpassing search engine marketing, public relations and even print, television and radio advertising as the preferred marketing tool for today's business-to-business entrepreneur.

They explain what content marketing is:

It's the creation and publication of original content — including blog posts, case studies, white papers, videos and photos — for the purpose of generating leads, enhancing a brand's visibility, and putting the company's subject matter expertise on display.

Mashable – a blog that is in itself an example of effective content marketing – carries on in the same vein explaining new more sophisticated forms of content marketing:

Lately we’ve witnessed the intersection of content and commerce, an emerging breed of retail site that features magazine-like editorials, photo spreads and inspiring video, all designed to instruct and, ultimately, sell a product.
 

If content is king, why are newspapers struggling?

Good question. General news (should The Telegraph write about rugby at all if there exists specialist vertical sites like Planet Rugby?), the high costs of print and distribution, the rise of expert amateur content and the erosion of cash cows like classified advertising to sites like Craigslist, have all contributed to the malaise.

The UK Guardian has been at the forefront of attempts to arrest this decline, first by launching an API a year ago (We explained what an API is here). And now USA today are following suit. This is the platform play. Open up so others can build on your content or service.

But yesterday the smarts at King's Cross fired another shot across the bow of the Grim Reaper. Reports Nieman Lab:

But it doesn’t follow that, in 2011, Craigslist has completely cornered the market on classified advertising — or, for that matter, on community messaging overall. Today, a major paper is getting into the community messaging game: The Guardian is launching n0tice, a social news platform that draws a little from Craigslist, a little from Foursquare, a little from Ning.

 

Put the Hacker into the Hack

N0tice is a platform play (the content is user generated) which also neatly encompasses a ready made business model newspapers know – classified advertising. But to conceptualise and build this kind of tool you need a different kind of journalist, the hacker journo. Explains Poynter:

The process of becoming a hacker journalist is different for everyone, but the pattern is common. Eventually the tools of writers cease to be enough: Microsoft Word gives way to Excel, which gives way to MySQL. And then, almost without knowing it, you’re creating the tools yourself.

And just to show their hacking credits The Guardian also launched a little bot this week that runs on their API. Tweet it a search term and it will scour the Guardian for content based on that term and bring it to you.
 

Content comes in many forms

Apps can be content. Content that can be particularly useful even as a customer support tool. Apple's Stores have just launched a location aware one which most stores could emulate to provide in store updates. Reports TNW:

…it looks like the app knows exactly what store you’ve walked into, what workshops are coming up, lets you ask for help, tells you how many people are in line ahead of you, and gives you the opportunity to set up a Genius appointment for your Apple devices.
 

Crowds with thin skines

Two cautionary tales to note this week. Moleskine thought it a good idea to crowdsource a new logo. But designers baulked at the prospect at spending hours working on a project where they stood little chance of getting rewarded. And a US brand Chapstick committed a basic but grave sin: Deleting critical comments from Fans on their Facebook page. This generated loads of 'content', but of the negative kind.
 

No shortcuts – Content is hard

One of the most clicked-on Tweets we posted on Twitter this week is this study that shows that links one third into a Tweet, gets more clicks. (Notice where our link is.) If only doing content was that easy as following a few rules. Far more important is curating good content. Like we mentioned last week, you'd probably need to change the skills of the people in your business. Hire journalists, bloggers, programmers or other creatives that make or build compelling … you guessed it.
 

Creative of the Week – Matt Reed

Alcohol has inspired many a great conversation. How many great ideas have we all scribbled on beermats? But developer Matt Reed has taken the beer-bull by the horns and developed a Siri-controlled, Twitter-activated beer-pouring system. You say "pour me a beer", the robot does the job. Nuff said; watch the video.

Something to mull over

Is there a difference between content marketing and social media marketing? Or are they flipsides of the same coin?
 

In the 80s movie, Tron is a computer program that fights on behalf of humans.

This week Robert Scoble, our favourite geek, tweeted a clarion call that would have sent shivers down Google's spine.

This is why Facebook will eventually monetize better than Google: I trust my friends. I don't trust algorithms.http://nyti.ms/f5XU9c

The article behind that link happened to be one of the best pieces of investigative journalism to see the light of day for quite some time. To summarise, a thuggish specs dealer used his notoriety to garner inbound links to his website, making him rank higher on Google (if you forgot how Google's rankings works, read our primer on PageRank).

Clearly this was a failure of Google's system. But less than a week later Google responded with a tweak to their algorithm. This is why we like Google. They fight for users.
 

Why do people share stuff?

This week we take an in-depth look as to why people pass on or share content and what marketeers and website builders can learn from that.

Clue, people don't share your content because they love your brand, they do so because the love their friends.
 

Social funding gets free

You know by now we're fans of Kickstarter. And we were excited about Fundbreak's move into the UK. But here's a third top player that could well change the social funding market.

Ulule is a France-based platform that does the same as the others – enable people to source funding from anyone who is interested in a project – but unlike the others they don't take a cut from the funds raised. Although there are plans to introduce paid-for features.

Visionless news

A week after the Editor of the Guardian proclaimed that no news organisation can match Twitter, the Telegraph announced that the Twitter CEO has no long term vision. Dick Costello had made the mistake of answering a question about their plans for Twitter like so:

I am working on clarity around that at the moment. I am currently trying to define what Twitter’s purpose is in the long term. We will be able to be more specific on that answer in the near future.

This honesty obviously astonishes a paper that is used to the world of spin. Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s co-founder, added that it was difficult to try and define Twitter’s function and purpose, as so many of its uses had been defined by its users over the past four years.

In other news The Telegraph is considering introducing a partial paywall.
 

Crowdsource the snow

In a very good example of active Twitter data mining, if not downright Twitter data creation, Ben Marsh, a web developer from Leicestershire, wrote the UK snow map. It urges people to use custom tags in their Tweet messages along with the hashtag #uksnow (another reason why we can't wait for Twitter Annotations) to indicate how much it has snowed in their area. These tweets are then mined to display the snowfall on a google map.

The only downfall of this is the fact that it is very much volume-dependent, so at a first glance, it seems as if most of the snow has fallen in London!
 

Take On Ted – the video

Take On Ted, the world's first Twitter styling event we did with Guided a few weeks ago, really was a success. Even We Are Social said it was "brilliant work".

If you missed the event, here are 2 videos that give you a good idea of how it worked.

A/B testing or To be poetic or clear

In case you're not familiar with the term, A/B testing is when you test two versions of a website to see which performs better. Well WordPress has a new plugin that allows you to do A/B testing on your pithy headlines.
 

Another new agency model – the Paypal button

Our good friends from Knotoryus pointed us to this rather intriguing item in ad agency Wieden+Kennedy's online shop: book a phonecall with a creative team for 10 minutes.

Which got them thinking (they do that quite well). Imagine a Paypal button on your agency site that lets you book a quick session with someone. No invoices, no briefs, none of that 'we should talk'. Just instant creative input.

Don't be surprised if you see it soon on the Knotoryus site.
 

The RAAKonteur gets some praise

We made a list of all the positive comments we've been getting on this weekly newsletter. Thank you so much. If you enjoy this newsletter please do send it on to people you think might enjoy it too.
 

Our world is so 360

This week we used a lovely new iPhone app to take a 360 panorama of the RAAK offices.
 

Creative of the week – Harald Geisler

Here's a lovely project that also celebrates the beauty of randomly combined letters, just like our logo project.

Harald Geisler is a typographer who's developed the 2011 Typographic Wall Calendar. Basically it's a calendar constructed from 2011 individual keyboard letters. The keys are arranged manually in a grid and if you read them, they read each day of the year in sequence.

You can order your print through Kickstarter, which Geisler used to fund this lovely project.
 

Tech insight of the week – Klout is broken

We've managed (on our first try) to build a Twitter bot that, within 80 days, managed to get a Klout score of 50, and 336 Twitter followers. Should this be possible? We think not, unless Klout is broken. Read more >>

It was BBH Labs’ logo project back in April 2009, where they got 1,700 logo submissions and chose one, that got us fired up about including the public in the creative process. Since then we’ve learnt a thing or two from using the crowdSpring platform and did our very own logo experiment, where we got ordinary people to design us an R, an A or a K without them knowing what it was for  (using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform).

Now we’re taking it a step further: a never-ending RAAK logo project that integrates individual letter submissions into a perpetually changing logo made by (hopefully)  hundreds of people.

A company for everybody – A funny take on corporate logo design

We were inspired by designer Phil Seddon’s enthusiastic feedback on our initial branding experiment. So this time, we are setting restrictions as to what people can do. After many discussions about grid patterns and freestyle, Phil has created a framework for design that we think will integrate submissions in our new website look and feel.

Still, if an identity is about making a fancy logo, then we’ll probably fail. But if branding is about

• 1. making you stand out
• 2. making people remember you
• 3. communicating the core values of the business

then we’re doing quite ok.

We want our brand to reflect what we’re about:

open, social, digital, participatory, creative and constantly changing.

So this branding exercise is as much about the process of open collaboration as about the result.

And all the designs will sit in our Logo Archive, with links to the URL of choice of their creators.

You can find more practical info about how it all works and submit your design on the Logo Project page.

PS: We reserve the right to delete really egregious designs.

Really, the title shoud read: Koblin, Milk and the people that participated in this project. Because rather than cut together some archive footage of the Man In Black, Milk & Koblin developed a drawing tool that allowed the public to draw their own version of each frame of the film. And a stunning 250,000 people took part.

In technique it’s very similar to this Belgian ad from a while ago. But what makes this project work so well are the creative restrictions that are built into Koblin’s drawing tool. They make sure the overall look & feel is consistent.

There are lovely add-ons. From a social point of view, each drawing for each frame can be rated and the most popular frame will become part of the video.

And the drawing tool is so advanced that it will let you play back exactly how a person has drawn their frame.

We can only look forward to what these guys do next.

Social Media spend is set to double

So says Brian Solis quoting a study of marketing spend in the US this year. If anybody has seen similar figures for the UK, let us know.

“Social Media offers tremendous growth potential and as such, budgets are multiplying. As reported in the research, social media budgets will spring from 5.6% to 9.9% this year. However, over the next five years, social media budgets will swell to 17.7% of the total marketing spend.”

Newspapers show further decline as source of info

A further study (again in the US) showed that newspapers have declined further as both a source of information and entertainment.

“Only 56 percent of Internet users surveyed agreed with the statement that newspapers were an important or very important source of information, while 68 percent said that television was, and 78 percent said that the Internet was.”

Pay with a Tweet

The value of Word Of Mouth in the online world is enormous. A recent UK survey stated that 70% of people trust online recommendations from strangers. And a visitor coming from a Social Media site is 10 times more like to make a purchase.

This simple tool taps brilliantly into that distribution potential. It’s called Pay With A Tweet and does exactly that. In exchange for downloading a bit of content for free, you have to tweet about it.

Zed is dead & flip-flopping Anderson?

Remember Chris Anderson? He of Wired Magazine, ‘The Long Tail’ & ‘Free – The Future Of A Revolutionary Price’ fame? Rumour has it that he is preparing a Wired magazine front page declaring the open Web dead. It’s been killed by apps and platforms like the iPad.

“Anderson is much less glowing about the web and Wired’s place on it in particular. In June local newspaper, the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, reported a talk that Anderson gave around Wired’s $4.99 iPad app, which sold 80,000 copies in 10 days.

He said that reading Wired on a tablet is fundamentally different than going to Wired.com, which he said looks like many media websites and “carries little content from the magazine”.

He added that while reading any magazine is supposed to be an immersive experience, with the design and long pieces keeping readers’ attentions for prolonged sittings, none of those aspects translates well to the web.”

It looks like the web is under assault from all sides. Just this week another post appeared about how Facebook is killing web sites. A lot of the content on Facebook is not readable by Google. And even the bits that are, are ‘social objects’. Little bits of text and video, and not pages – the unit that Google likes (see RAAKonteur 2).

But at RAAK we’ve never seen content, social objects or pages as the epicenter of the web. People are. People have never been more easy to connect to. Flipbook, the social iPad magazine which we wrote about last week refutes Anderson’s new ideological trajectory. SEO research shows that long form web content is most successful as so called ‘Linkbait’. And open API’s, which enable apps like Flipbook, have never been more ubiquitous.

Collaborating for Social Good

We’ve been thinking a lot about creative collaboration platforms and crowdsourcing (see what we did with Guided Collective). So we were intrigued when innovation agency IDEO this week launched OpenIDEO, a platform that enables people to collaboratively design solutions for social good.

They’ve made a nice video that explains how it all works. You can get involved on different levels (important), but what struck us most is how they developed a ‘Digital Quotient’, a badge of honour that is defined by your activity on the platform. Glory plays a major part in Social Media (as it does in real life), so we’ll definitely keep a close eye on how this creative reputation score pans out.

Respect my Authority!

Speaking of reputation. Last week Robert Scoble broke the story of Flipbook. This week he interviewed (video) Azeem Azhar of PeerIndex, an authority system similar to Klout (see RAAKonteur 1). But PeerIndex claims to be different from Klout in some ways.

Firstly it only tracks people and not brands. And it differentiates on topics. This means that you can have a high score for the topic of Sustainability, but score low on Cloud Computing.

Do check out the video, they touch on a number of important issues, including how smart people who don’t use social media will eventually lose out.

I Tweet therefor I am

“I came late to Twitter. I might have skipped the phenomenon altogether, but I have a book coming out this winter, and publishers, scrambling to promote 360,000-character tomes in a 140-character world, push authors to rally their “tweeps” to the cause. Leaving aside the question of whether that actually boosts sales, I felt pressure to produce. I quickly mastered the Twitterati’s unnatural self-consciousness: processing my experience instantaneously, packaging life as I lived it.”

The New York Times had an fascinating piece this week by author Peggy Orenstein on how Twitter changes who we are and how we express ourselves (note: NYT sign up required).

Another cool tool – you dork

The other day we saw a Social Media course that sold social media as an alternative to email. No kidding. Email is social too! Social Media isn’t an alternative!

Which brings us to Rapportive, a service that pulls in data from your contacts’ social profiles into your Gmail. Outlook already has a similar service in Xobni, all making the inbox more social.

Creative of the week – Meet Saga

Our pick of the week is Icelandic photographer Saga Sigurdardottir, who’s an example that proves that Social Media allows talent to shine.

East London Blogger Suzie Bubble is one of the UK’s most influential fashionistas. Her blog is so big that she regularly ranks higher in Google Trends than Dazed & Confused, the magazine she once helped edit.

So when Suzie started enthusing about Saga Sigurdardottir’s photography, we took notice. This young Icelandic creative – now resident in East London herself – does not only take other-worldly fashion pictures, she paints and makes haunting films, collaborating with fashion illustrator Hildur Yeoman.

Follow Saga on Twitter.

Tech insight of the week

Ever since Facebook’s implementation of the Open Graph Protocol, the Facebook Like button has been spreading like wildfire.

In this week’s tech column we write about the downside of the Like Button for users, and the upside for thrifty Marketeers.

Crowdsourcing is a reality that won’t go away just yet and instinctively we’ve always leant towards to the first group, but divisive issues need to be tried and tested.
We already used crowdsourcing techniques very succesfully in our RAAK logo experiment, but that project was of course of a more personal, a more creative nature.
So when we got the chance to apply the concept on a commercial project, with a real client, we jumped at it.
And this is what we learnt.

The job was to design a website and a brand identity for a start-up consultancy agency called Consultifi. Because of our plug-in model, we don’t work with in-house designers and normally we would tap into our network and instruct the most suitable designer for the job. But this time we decided use the Crowdspring service, boasting more than 45,000 designers.

After a good 10 days, we ended up with no less than 218 entries. Some of them were variants on the same theme or re-workings, but we did have about 120 unique designs. Not bad for an unglamorous, serious business consultancy company.
The client was happy and we thought it was quite a success, so below are a few things we learnt from our experience.

* Consider paying more
We analysed the mean and average of the budgets of similar concepts. We decided to stretch our budget a bit. Because by doing so, we would sit in the top 5 of ‘logo and stationery’ projects and not amongst those other $500 briefs.
Also, we do believe in the motto “you get what you pay for”, so by increasing the amount we were hoping to reach out to better designers. Crowdspring says their stats confirm that: the more you pay, the more entries you get.
But of course, more doesn’t necessarily mean better.

* Include things you don’t want in your brief
Saying that the brief is important is stating the obvious, but I was surprised to find how few people include what they don’t want.
Creatives will only send in a design if they think they have a chance of winning. Remember: they see this as a competition. They’re up against 45,000 other designers. So the more doubts you can take away from them, the more likely it is they will have a shot at your brief. If you don’t want black-and-white, spell it out from the start. If you don’t want capital letters, tell them.
The brief for a boring immigration law job did just that and despite the relatively low budget, they got over 200 entries.

But won’t that close off certain routes, I hear you think? Nah.
Even though we briefed the creatives to create a logotype and ignore a non-text logo, some of them still sent one in. And even though we asked them to avoid the word ‘consultifi’ in all lowercase, some still used it.
If creatives feel strong about their idea, they will go off-brief. I’ve experienced this with music video directors, with graphic designers,…: if they think it works, they will try and convince you.
In this project, one of the designers even wrote a long email about why he thought we were wrong.
You can’t always predict what will work and what not, so we did consider some of these entries.

* Set aside enough time for feedback
On that immigration law job I mentioned above, the client also gave lots of feedback on each design. Another a reason of the quality of their entries, I think.
Crowdspring recommends you give ratings. One, because it’s only fair to the designers and two, because it will improve the designs. Other designers go and read your feedback on other entries and learn what you want and -again- what you don’t want.
As a comparison: a more creative, exciting project (for a media agency) with a similar budget only got 60-odd entries. But they did stop rating and giving feedback after a few days.

I found the rating system quite hard to manage, because a 3-star rating in the beginning might only have been a 2-star later on, once we got better entries.
But the feedback opportunity is very useful. It does give you the chance to finetune designs directly with creatives. And it does make the process more human.

* Don’t end your project on a Monday
Simply because there’s a chance you will receive a massive amount of entries in the last few days. In our case, a good 40% of the entries only came through in the last day. Not sure if this is because creatives fear being copied or simply because deadlines are there to be pushed.
But it does leave you with little time for feedback. Especially if those last days are a Saturday and Sunday and you don’t want to spend that time rating almost 100 designs.

* Be prepared to make quick decisions at the end
Especially if you work for a client. We sort of missed that you’re meant to make a decision within 7 days. And we hadn’t anticipated our client going on holiday. We were open about it and told the creatives, but then realised Crowdspring’s terms state that they have the right to chose a winner on your behalf if you take too long. Admittedly, when we contacted them, they got back to us really quickly, assuring us that we were doing the right things. So I’m not sure if they ever apply that power.
From a functionality point of view, Crowdspring could make the decision-step a little bit easier by adding a shortlist functionality. That way you can compare all your ‘shortlisted’ designs on one page; and share that page with your client.

* Buy the URL from the company you’re working for
A lesson we learnt the hard way. While we were running the project, someone bought the dot-com and dot-net urls for the company and then tried to sell it to us.

Is the Consultifi identity the best logo since the Swoosh? Probably not.
Will we use it again? Probably, yes.
Is it a replacement for design agencies? I doubt it very much. I would think that developing a brand identity that really makes a difference does benefit from a more traditional, in-depth (and thus more expensive) approach.
But it does offer a good opportunity for smaller companies or start-ups, who get the chance of getting a very decent design done for a very decent price.
And for creatives from all over the world (our ‘winner’ alexe is from Romania) to be exposed to briefs.

So it’s definitely a force to be reckoned with.

In a recent well-argued article in Forbes – The Myth of Crowdsourcing – Dan Woods claims crowds don’t innovate, individuals do.

Crowds and uniquely talented individuals

“There is no crowd in crowdsourcing. There are only virtuosos, usually uniquely talented, highly trained people who have worked for decades in a field. Frequently, these innovators have been funded through failure after failure. From their fervent brains spring new ideas. The crowd has nothing to do with it. The crowd solves nothing, creates nothing.”

He goes on to point that what are often called crowdsourcing platforms really are virtuoso search platforms.

Apparently Dan Woods accosted Wikipedia-founder Jimmy Wales at a conference last year and asked him about how articles were created.

“He said that the vast majority are the product of a motivated individual. After articles are created, they are curated–corrected, improved and extended–by many different people.”

I agree with Dan Woods to an extent. Just like much of the sharing on social platforms is actually just egotistical self publishing, crowds are often driven by a few talented individuals. I have discovered brilliant individual photographers on Flickr, but you do have to wade through quite a bit of mediocrity first.

The LA Times’s experiment with a Wikitorial – an attempt to have a user-created and contributed editorial on the Iraq War – is proof of how the crowd can get it wrong.

“On Friday, the paper introduced an online feature it called a wikitorial, asking Web site readers to improve a 1,000-word editorial, “War and Consequences”, on the Iraq war.

Readers were invited to insert information, make changes or come to different conclusions.”

It did not last.

“A Los Angeles Times experiment in opinion journalism lasted just two days before the paper was forced to shut it down Sunday morning after some readers repeatedly posted obscene photos.”

Want to see something not very cool that sounds awful? Then look at MTV’s Amplichoir below. It’s part of a marketing campaign and billed as the world’s biggest crowdsourced choir. Users are incentivised to take part via a competition prize.

It screams fake, sounds horrid and its pastel coloured iPod-esque backgrounds look contrived. Mr. Woods I’m sure would agree that this proves his point. It does not work because there is no talented individual(s) to make something of it.

But my agreement with Mr. Woods only goes this far.

YouTube is full of bad user-submitted videos – and the odd good one , but as a whole it is collective effort. Most quality Wikipedia articles may be driven by an individual user, but the whole is a “crowdsourced” phenomenon.

And both YouTube and Wikipedia have been increasing mechanisms that make collaboration and reaction to others’ contributions possible. This allows us to feed off, incorporate and build on ideas.

Curveball! Kutimans splicing together of YouTube videos into fantastic new ones, is that not evidence of a crowd of virtuoso’s being used and orchestrated by a virtuoso?

Where the crowd’s contributions stop and the virtuoso’s starts is not always so clear cut.

Creation vs Evaluation

There are of course two kinds of ways to tap into collective intelligence. And perhaps that’s where Mr. Woods confusion arises.

The one – like Wikipedia and like Flickr is where people – yes individuals – create.

But there is another form. i.e. to evaluate existing ideas and creations – and this often happens anonymously.

It’s when we look at the power of collective evaluation – like with voting mechanisms, market prediction systems or systems like Google’s Pagerank (effectively a voting mechanism that counts links to predict web page importance), that we can see a more pure form of collective intelligence in action. Google does an amazing job of finding good websites based on our links.

In other words, where we use collective methods for large scale evaluation and not ‘just’ for ideation or creation we have more pure examples of ‘crowd’ intelligence. But even these lines are blurring.

Digg and the Starbucks and Dell idea platforms allow users to submit ideas, and others to vote on them. Eat your heart out Mr. Woods.

Why? Crowd to me sounds like just more jargon – a bit like oft used tribes. And Source? Well, this a sibling of that other contentious word – outsourcing. Many of the most successful platforms in this area – like Wikipedia – are not commercial in nature at all. “Crowdsourcing” is so much more than just a management strategy to cut costs.

We know “crowdsourcing” is powerful (our logo came via a “crowd”), but how do you fully harness this power? How do you decide what functionality to have to maximise contributions?

We have just been asked to help conceptualise and build a “crowdsourcing” platform. A platform for collective ideas generation. It should produce better creative ‘concepts’ and get the right people to execute them. Importantly – unlike similar solutions out there – it is different in that it would not be open to everybody.

So I’ve been looking at many online examples to see what’s out there in the ‘wild’. That’s important because as an MIT’s Sloan management review study – Decisions 2.0: The Power of Collective Intelligence – acknowledges: practise is still some way ahead of the theory.

Of all these platforms, the ones that have impressed me most for the purpose of what we are building are – in no particular order:

CrowdSpring – Focused on design (graphic, web, product), it already has a big community of designers and people requesting designs. The requester or buyer can interact directly with creatives and picks the winner. Anybody can be a buyer or a creative, and portfolios are public. A whole set of metrics are visibly published so buyers and designers can make decisions based on reputation. This reputation dashboard also serves to regulate behaviour.

Eyeka, a French platform, is a social network for creatives. It also allows brands to run design competitions. Each competition gets its own URL so the creative process and the selection of a winner becomes a marketing exercise in itself. The community picks the winners through a voting system. Anybody can join Eyeka.

InnoCentive is one of the most talked about collective platforms. Here seekers post sophisticated challenges they want solved – like a computational problem. The challenges are public and so are the profiles of the solvers. All challenges have monetary incentives. Anybody can join InnoCentive.

And then there’s the Dell and Starbucks Idea platforms built on top of Saleforce.com platforms. These two have been discussed in many good social media books, from Forrester’s Groundswell to Jeff Jarvis‘ What would Google do, and many more. For a reason. They are very active and work. Anybody can post an idea and others can comment or vote on it.

There are also some much smaller networks. London is the home of Radar Music Videos, a small social network for video directors, which also allows commercial briefs to be posted. You have to pay a small membership fee to access briefs and post videos. The network seems quite active, but alas it does not have that many briefs.

It is worth noting that there are many platforms out there that look like they are on their last legs, virtual tumble weed is blowing across interfaces barren of users.

I don’t need any convincing about the power of digital media to harness sharing of all kinds of things. So what did I learn?

Incentive is the key issue. People’s motivations as to why they take part in these things will determine the platform’s functionality, its mechanisms. As the above mentioned MIT study says:

“An application that taps into collective intelligence for improved decision making may be simple in concept, but it can be extremely difficult to implement. As with many systems, the devil is definitely in the details.”

The devilish details

The so-called devil’s in the detail. So what are some of these details?

How much control do you exert?

Jeff Jarvis says give up control, the users will take control and run with it – more often than not in a good way.

But do you give your ‘crowd’ the ability to choose winners (for example)? What if you don’t agree? If you manage to build a platform where a number of people have contributed to a creative approach, do you split the rewards between them? How? Do you let them decide? Should brands be able to interact with the community directly? These are just some questions we will have to face shortly.

Diversity vs expertise

You have to get the balance right. If your collective is not open, how do you choose participants? If it’s a small group of experts, how good will they be at evaluation (studies show diverse and large groups are better at evaluation – and I will blog about that tomorrow)? If your members don’t like each other, are they likely to stay?

Engagement

What motivates people varies wildly – the MIT report explains:

“Incentives such as cash rewards, prizes and other promotions can be effective in stimulating individuals to participate in activities like prediction markets, for which explicit rewards seem to matter greatly. With other applications — for example, submitting T-shirt designs to the Threadless Web site — cash rewards seem to matter less than recognition. Value-driven incentives can also be important. As the open-source movement, Wikipedia and other similar efforts have shown, participation in a community, the desire to transfer knowledge or share experiences, and a sense of civic duty can be powerful motivators.”

Another problem is keeping people engaged over time. And if your users are primarily incentive-driven and there’s too many competing for a limited pool of cash, then what?

So how do you measure success?

Well it obviously depends on the goal of your platform. But there is one important way to measure success. Is it being used?

“Engagement should not to be taken lightly. Indeed, for a large fraction of Decisions 2.0 projects that have flopped, the primary cause of failure appears to be a lack of engagement. Participants expect to be treated in a certain way and, more often than not, they also want the organizers of the application to be engaged as well.”

With a little uncommon sense, a little theory and many examples of what has worked and what not, you should have as solid a start as you can hope for.