Programming Blog

The Behind the Social Media Campaign Series is supported by Oneupweb, an award-winning agency specializing in search marketing, social media and design for mid-to-enterprise level brands. Download Oneupweb’s free whitepaper, “Measuring Social Media’s Contribution to the Bottom Line: 5 Tactics.”

Those who came of age during the social media revolution may take it for granted that you, the consumer, are often called upon to be an active participant in your favorite brand’s marketing.

But it wasn’t always this way. Until very recently, marketing was a one-way conversation. That’s how advertising always worked. Can you picture Don Draper saying, “Let’s just have consumers come up with the next campaign”?

Of course, a lot has changed since 1965. Technology now lets you do your job from home or wherever you happen to be. Clients, aware that ad agencies can now cut their overhead, are pushing the shops to do more with less. “The old full-time, employee-based model is going away,” says John Winsor, the CEO of Victors & Spoils, a crowdsourcing agency. “The incentive when you’re full-time is to take longer and put more people on the work.”

Victors & Spoils employs 17 people full time, but has relationships with 6,500 people who are on call for advertising work of one kind or another. It’s a unique model for the ad industry, but one that shows how far you can take the idea of crowdsourcing. The term itself refers to an umbrella of activity. There’s crowdsourcing that consumers don’t see, like the work Victors & Spoils does on behalf of clients like Harley-Davidson, and then there are campaigns that are partially crowdsourced, like PepsiCo’s “Crash the Super Bowl” contest in which consumers see the participation.

Those who carry out crowdsourcing campaigns, though, don’t draw a great distinction. Guidelines remain constant. Here are a few basic rules they offer to those considering crowdsourcing campaigns:

1. Be Very Clear in Your Brief

Whether you’re doing behind-the-scenes crowdsourcing or asking consumers to pick the next flavor of your soft drink, you need to be very specific about what you’re asking them to do. “Write a super-tight brief,” says Winsor. “Be super-clear about what you want.” Wil Merritt, the CEO of Zooppa, a crowdsourcing agency in Seattle, agrees. “You’ve got to get it right,” he says. “Once it’s out in the community, it’s all systems go.” That doesn’t just mean clear writing, though. It’s also important to keep things pretty simple.

Merritt says that a brief that asks consumers to mention too many features will often result in work that can look like a PowerPoint presentation. “Keep it high-level and aspirational,” he says. “And it doesn’t have to be funny.”

Setting clear guidelines in a brief will also help you avoid a disastrous situation in which consumers are trashing your brand. That’s what happened when Chevy ran a crowdsourced program in 2006 asking consumers to make videos for its Tahoe SUV. Consumers seized the chance to criticize the vehicle for its environmental unfriendliness with lines like “It’s Global Warming Time.” (See above.)

2. Offer Good Incentives

When it comes to crowdsourcing, cash is king, says Mike Burlin, marketing manager for Zooppa. If you want high production values, you have to open up your wallet a bit. Don’t dangle a trip as a prize since consumers may not be able to take it for one reason or another. The magic number for prize money seems to be $5,000. Any less than that and you won’t get serious submissions.

The other thing to consider are second prizes. “Is there just one?” Burlin asks. “People look at the odds.” A decent second- and third- place prize may be worth the money just because it convinces serious candidates to give it their best shot.

3. Don’t Overwhelm the Consumer

Ad agency JWT tapped the online community of its client Smirnoff as a source of ideas, but it didn’t go so far as to ask them to create ads. “People are busy enough as it is,” says Matt MacDonald, executive creative director, JWT New York. “The last thing they want to do is to work out your marketing campaign for you.”

The Smirnoff Nightlife Exchange Project, detailed in the video below, is less about getting consumers to do the vodka brand’s marketing and more about participating in it. That’s a fine distinction.

4. Prepare to be Overwhelmed by Ideas

The difficulty in crowdsourcing a campaign often is not getting the ideas, but keeping track of them all. Ignacio Oreamuno, president of Giant Hydra, a “mass collaboration” agency (he abhors the word “crowdsourcing”) says that on any given campaign, he gets 10 times more ideas than a standard ad agency would.

Victors & Spoils is taking its own approach to wading through the ideas — the agency plans to introduce a software product in August that simplifies the process, though it currently uses software programs including Crowdspring and PopTent to execute campaigns.

5. Remember: Crowdsourcing Doesn’t Equal “Unprofessional”

Winsor rates his 6,500 freelance employees using a “reputation algorithm,” which he calls a “new kind of meritocracy” for the industry. Oreamuno stresses that his employees may not be full-time, but they are held up to a high standard.”The creatives that work in Giant Hydra have all been pre-selected and they are all being paid for their time,” he says. “Most of the Hydra Heads that work in Giant Hydra projects do it on a constant basis. One day, we’ll have the world’s largest creative department working at all hours of the day across the world.”

Of course, “professional” is a term that has been sorely tested in recent years, thanks to crowdsourcing. There are industries, like medicine and engineering, where it would be unthinkable to have a stranger come in off the street and do the job you’ve been working at for 20 years better than you, but advertising isn’t one of them.

As Winsor notes, those Pepsi Super Bowl ads routinely show up in USA Today’s AdTrack as consumers’ favorites. “The professionals say they’re not as good,” says Winsor, “but consumers like them better, so who’s right?”

The Behind the Social Media Campaign Series is supported by Oneupweb, an award-winning agency specializing in search marketing, social media and design for mid-to-enterprise level brands. Download the Oneupweb sponsored Marketing Sherpa free study, “Measuring Social Media’s Contribution to the Bottom Line: 5 Tactics” to learn how to cut through the clutter and be sure to catch up with them on Facebook and Twitter.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, AndreasKermann

Image courtesy of Flickr, Tony Peters

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