We're two months in to the Victors & Spoils adventure and learning a lot. Going forward I'll share some of what we're learning.
The first thing we've noticed is that there are lots of different ways to use co-creation and crowdsourcing to solve marketing and product design problems. We've run projects on Crowdspring, 99designs and GeniusRocket. All of these platforms are good for different things. They get a lot of people involved in a project. But it's easy to get overwhelmed by the number of entries. And, Sturgeon's Law, that only 10 percent of any large group of creative output is good, definitely applies. In these large community crowdsourcing projects it takes a lot of creative direction.
Another way we've been using the community for projects is by selecting small groups of people from our 500+ strong creative department. In these projects we've been inviting 50-100 folks to participate in a project, selecting between 6 and 12 finalists to compete. In these cases, the finalists get a fee for participating. There is then another fee for the winner of the competition. These smaller, swat team efforts have been working well with all kinds of projects from more complicated design projects to strategy and brand platform projects. One of the advantages has been the ability to keep projects more tightly controlled confidentiality and the ability to creatively direct more complicated projects. But, unlike the larger public projects, the sheer number of ideas is more limited. There are lots of tools in the tool box and surely more coming.
2010 will prove to be even more disruptive with even more platforms and more options for public and private collaboration. It still comes down to the strategic and creative direction to make sure the work produced by any crowd accomplishes pushing the work forward in the right direction to accomplish a client's objectives.

yuRuQr Kudos to you! I hadn't thought of that!
Posted by: Mccayde | April 10, 2011 at 01:44 PM