When we study prosumers, one of the reoccurring themes is how to create incentives to get people to contribute their valuable time to an initiative. Increasingly, consumers are challenging the notion that the Internet is recruiting ground for free labor that will willingly engage with your brand, contribute ideas, and co-innovate with you—consumers want some sort of value in exchange for their time. Contrary to what is being proclaimed in popular social media echo chambers, most consumers actually don’t want to co-create with companies; the vast majority of Internet users are happy to be passive consumers and observers, with only a small fraction opting for prosumerism.

This brings be to the main point of this blog post, which is the notion of playbor. I first came across the term—a combination of ‘play’ and ‘labor’—on the Web site for a conference on digital labor hosted by The New School in New York. The Internet as Playground and Factory notes that, “Today, communication is a mode of social production facilitated by new capitalist imperatives and it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish between play, consumption and production, life and work, labor and non-labor.” The simple idea driving the playbor discussion: What happens when we collapse the often conflicting interests of work, personal ambitions, and entertainment into a single activity?

We already see examples of this happening on the Web. Consider Google’s Image Labeler, which creates a game out of the legitimate task of tagging and creating metadata for Web images. A less contentious example is Free Rice, which hosts a word game and has sponsors donate 10 grains of rice to the World Food Programme for every right answer submitted by players.

Recently, my colleague Jeff DeChambeau wrote a case study about the dating site OKCupid. Unlike eHarmony and other dating sites where the company determines the question set used for matching couples, OKCupid relies on questions submitted by its users. The notion that the users know best about what characteristics make a suitable mate makes sense. Why this is novel from a playbor perspective is that users, through actions that are apparently self-serving, are also contributing to the growth of the site and the effectiveness of its proprietary matching algorithms. What’s more, the actions of users create value for the company in the form of new data and analytic possibilities (for fun examples, see how OKCupid number crunchers use member data to determine what makes a good profile picture, or why dating an older woman might make sense).

For enterprises, these examples raise the question: How can we make work more interesting, more curious, and more playful so that users willingly play to create value? How can we align incentives in a way that lets us harness free labor? What is the appropriate division of labor across a diverse and fluid ecosystem that includes customers, prospects, partners, and competitors?

There are troubling consequences as well. How can consumers be sure of the authenticity of their experiences? Child labor is a discouraged practice, but what about video games that could be designed so that game-play elements actually contribute to the production of a commercial product like a new chip, program, or piece of software? As our environments become highly-instrumented with and capture data from our activities, how are users compensated for, or even made aware of the commercial value of their data? What does it mean for the broader economy when waged and unwaged labor collapse and are often indistinguishable? What does it mean for society when we debase the notion of pure, innocent play? The Internet as Playground and Factory has a great Vimeo page with clips from leading thinkers that are considering and debating these and other issues that arise from playbor. It’s a lot to digest, but this is a great starting point for people interested in the topic form a social studies perspective.

Groupon.com – a web 2.0 version of collective buying power, where local merchants offer up special deals so long as enough people sign up for them- wasn’t what the founders originally envisioned. They launched a site called “The Point”, where groups of people could form around specific causes and drive social change. Many of the people that came to the site seemed more interested in getting group discounts on products and services. Seeing the opportunity, Groupon was launched, and from a dead start in August the company now has a top-2000 rating on Alexa, is expanding rapidly, and reports to already be profitable. In short, the future is bright.

City Streets was a online version of the classic Monopoly game that Hasbro developed as a marketing tool. It absolutely exploded in popularity – 1.5 million registered players by November 2009, and 1.5 billion page views, made it the 12th most popular massively multi player online game on the web. Amazingly, it did so without incurring any direct marketing costs, and benefited from – among other things – some very engaged prosumers helping them co-create value. However, the future here isn’t so bright – Hasbro shut it down.You can read why, from their perspective, on the site.

Now obviously the two stories come from very different starting points – notably, one company was launching an entirely new business, while the other had a legacy business model to consider. But it’s fair to say that, we believe, this difference is not enough to explain a way the different responses. In both cases, a surprising new business opportunity emerged that the company didn’t originally envision, as the customers led the company towards the type of experience they wanted. In both cases, signs were everywhere that a lot of money could be made (in Hasbro’s case, the multi-billion dollar online game business is kind of flashing in the background here). But in only one case did something good come from it.

That’s a shame. Without getting into all the reasons why, it’s important to remember that when you ask your customers to dance, let them lead – because they might just teach you an interesting new routine that many of their friends enjoying doing as well.

The Rally Fighter was built for racing in the desert, and after checking out a few other designs I quickly realized that each car was built for specific geographic preferences. Other designs include the The Miami Roadster, The Green Apple (for The Big Apple) and my favorite The Boston Bullet, described below:

For “a city that gives innovation in a spirit of tradition.” The Bullet is Boston’s car, designed for narrow streets and a smooth ride while managing to capture the city’s cultural and ideological heritage.

Local Motors is challenging how new cars are created, holding design contests for each piece of the car from overall design, to the electrical systems, to the interior, to the name. The community prioritizes the ideas and develops those designs that have the most support. My favorite part is that once a full car design is complete, people order them online and the actual manufacturing is done by the new owner. Did you hear that? The new owner builds their own car! With help from the Local Motors team, owners learn how and then actually build an engine, put in windows, craft a brake system, everything! So not only is Local Motors offering designers a great way to collaborate around an exciting concept, they are offering their customers a very personalized experience. Taking the prosumer concept to the next level is no doubt creating a loyal following and a significant group of lifelong customers.

So, what about the major auto manufacturers? Is Local Motors planning to compete with them? How would that work? While the concept is most likely too specialized to ever take off in the mass market, Local Motors is hoping to work with major automakers. They see an opportunity to fill a niche that the major players just can’t fill as it is too cost prohibitive. I anticipate seeing some type of partnership, but given the innovative nature of this company it will most likely be structured like nothing we’ve seen before.

I can’t wait to see what new product development concepts and of course really cool cars come out of this company. As you can imagine the Local Motor’s website is central to its business model, and it is built to keep you interested. Everything from the live shop camera to the design wall to the community and forums are designed to get you thinking, wanting to learn more and maybe even participate. The newest contest launched January 27 and closed February 9 was for a Texas hunting truck described as

a vehicle for Texas that could easily meet the demands of hunters and could adapt depending on the requirements of the different types of game — white tail deer, quail, dove, and javalina to name a few. Essentially, design a base vehicle that could have various modules easily attached to it depending on the needs of the user.

Did you happen to notice how fast this contest is? 2 weeks from launch to close…not bad turnaround time for innovating new ideas. That efficiency is what the collaborative enterprise is all about.

So…what aspects of this model could your company use to improve innovation? What new products or services could be developed in this rapid, community-driven approach? Who among us will jump in and become the next cool car designer? One thing is clear, it will be really fun to watch!

There are a lot of reasons for this success – but the one I want to focus on today is around the strategic use of purchasing thresholds. Like Woot.com, Groupon.com applies a maximum threshold to create urgency for customers – buy now before it’s too late! But the more interesting thing Groupon does is use minimum thresholds - the offer is only valid if enough people sign up.

There are two things that make this interesting. The first, and more obvious, ties to viral marketing. It’s typically hard for a company to “make” a marketing message, or sales offer, go viral. But by putting a minimum threshold on the offer (i.e. only valid if 50 people sign up), Groupon creates a natural incentive for interested customers to promote the offer through Facebook, Twitter, the blogosphere, and other channels.

The second ties to the ability to test price discrimination strategies. In these early days, Groupon members represent new customers for most merchants using the platform. In a typical case, if a company wants to test offering a discount to draw in new customers, they do so rather blindly. If (say) only 2 people take you up on the offer, it probably wasn’t worth the effort – let alone the cost if you have to communicate the message through traditional media channels. The minimum threshold gets around this – merchants can select whatever price / quantity combination makes sense for them, and walk away (without paying a penny) if the threshold isn’t met.

There are many other interesting aspects of the Groupon story I’ve been following in our research (you can read about a couple of other companies I’ve been watching closely here), as well as interesting challenges and opportunities the company will soon have to deal with. Given that Groupon has been so successful in using the Web 2.0 to create business around collective buying (while hardly being the first to have tried), they are definitely worth paying attention to.

But there is a bright spot on the horizon for online marketers. Apart from the point that online advertising seems to have reached its bottom and will now rise up (according to Yahoo), there is a great push to make online ads more relevant and user specific. And now a new service has stepped up to achieve that. Bedrock.com – a start-up by the same people behind gumgum.com – makes use of the prosumer movement in an effort to make online ads more profitable. Their tagline is:

“Don’t spend time tweaking your creatives.
Allow incentivized publishers to work for you instead.”

Acting as an intermediary between the advertiser and the person or organization publishing the blog or magazine, Bedrock works with the publisher to create an ad that is not only relevant to the content and overall theme of the site, they also allow publishers to design and place the ads to ensure that the overall feel of the blog or magazine is not negatively impacted.

Then using a real-time auction platform for online advertising, Bedrock simply sells the key word to the highest bidder for a fixed period of time. After the period is over, the word is auctioned again and in this manner, a single ad can lead to different products.

The challenge for Bedrock is two fold:

1. Will brand managers actually use their service if they have no control over the visual aspect of the brand? Firms work hard to breed familiarity amongst users and often the image of a product is what draws the user to click on the ad.
2. Will enough publishers actually take the time to personalize the ads? The large publishing houses and companies already see such a small margin on their online offerings, that it is unlikely they would spend time on working to create page specific ads. They may prefer the regular advertising simply for the convenience of it all.

I continue to follow Motley Fool closely, and wanted to point readers towards a recent interview (on Forbes) with co-founder Tom Gardner. There are three particular elements I believe should be interesting to Wikinomics readers – their community approach to developing investment ideas (which started in 1994), the meritocratic approach to their Caps community (as opposed to a democracy or “pure” wisdom of crowds), and the importance of transparency.

The first comes in response to the third question, which was focused on what distinguishes them from their competitors. Key quote:

“…we brought that subject to the Internet in 1994 and we did so by basically saying, “We want to hear your ideas. We want to talk together. We want to learn together.” And we’ve ended up attracting a lot of very bright minds to The Motley Fool.”

The meritocratic approach is described in detail on the second page. There’s interesting comments riddled throughout his response, including the fact that not only does the bottom 25% have no influence on rankings, they thought of making them a negative indicator before deciding that was too mean. But the key quote for me was:

“The difference for CAPS is it’s actually wisdom in the crowds because it’s a meritocracy. It’s not one person, one vote. We’re weighting it toward the better players. So the system can’t really be gamed. And what I’ve learned is that top quintile is very much worth studying. I mean, our five-star stocks have dramatically outperformed the market. One-star stocks have dramatically lost to the market. And so I take the five-star rating on our CAPS system quite seriously.”

Finally, the issue of transparency comes up towards the end of the second page. Key quote:

“So, transparency, even if we didn’t believe in it, the very nature of having an open community, which must be a shock to Wall Street system, the idea that your customers can talk to each other, and you actually want them to do so. It’s, we can’t hide, and we don’t want to hide.”

There are many other interesting tidbits riddled throughout the interview, so I strongly recommend Wikinomics readers take a look – particularly if they have an interest in investing.

The next logical step would be to give buyers complete discretion in the design of their condo. For example; a buyer could decide where to place walls, cut out kitchen windows, install arches and redistribute space among rooms and move in to a space that is truly their own and completely unique. The only inflexible components would be the support beams and sanitation system.

This concept is not entirely new. It is essentially the decision making power afforded to those who build independent homes, loft-style apartments and, more recently, buyers in the luxury town-home markets (). There is no reason it could not be applied to promote sales of residential condos targeted at buyers in other segments that are larger in terms of market size.

For buyers this means:

• Greater sense of ownership from having engaged in the design as alluded to here
• Increased customer satisfaction and higher resale value due to increased uniqueness.
• Though the overall cost may rise a little the modifications, are relatively cheaper as a developer has better economies of scale than an individual buyer
• Less time and effort is needed to make it suitable for occupancy

For developers:

• Higher booking rates translate into; greater cash inflow from deposits; higher likelihood of securing financing due to fulfillment of the financier’s occupancy criteria, and a stronger sales pitch to the later clients – E.g. we sold X% within the first 2 months etc
• Improves viability of small and mid-scale developers who see larger proportions of unfinished projects
• Lower likelihood of buyers abandoning the deposit and/or balking
• Easier accommodation of excess demand of a particular type of condo. E.g. buyer can adjust walls to create extra rooms or change the layout to match another one
• Take advantage of prosumer engagement to gain insight into customer trends. (read more about prosumers, here)
• No delays in matching demand, when faced with the process of amending floor plans to accommodate more of one type of condo – i.e. buyers can self-serve their needs by modifying their space on their own

What of the technology?

That too exists, and can be applied as is to suit this purpose. Moreover, the design software is even available as free-ware in some cases. The developers simply provide a customized version to buyers as a CD with their particular floor plan on it.

Looking ahead it is not hard to imagine the concept being applied to the building in general and develop sites with flexible exterior design to allow inexpensive additions in case of excess demand. Examples of such design principles can be seen in other countries and a similar policy for independent residences is actually being actively promoted by the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC). When such technology becomes popular in the residential markets, it would be possible to build buildings that offer the above benefits to every future owner as well, and likely increase the re-sale values of such property.

I started looking at Yahoo! Answers quite awhile ago because it’s a type of prosumer platform – people ask questions, and the community provides the answers. Sadly, most of the answers are terrible – and the only time people I know find value from it is when they’re looking for a laugh. Why this might be is a subject for another time. Today I want to focus on how terrible answers from the platform are bubbling up to the top of Google Search.

The last time I was reminded of this was when I googled “average baby size”. It seemed like a straightforward request for some factual information. But the top link was from Yahoo Answers. The “best answer” highlighted at the top (as chosen by voters, with a grand total of one vote) noted that the average was 6 to 8 pounds, which is quite a large range. Other answers, of which there were 5 (each with zero votes), included a variety of guesses in the same range, and a very helpful Coco who answered “Don’t know, but all the babies I’ve seen ranged from 5 to 8 pounds”, and helpfully listed his or her source (worked at group home for teen mothers).

It’s something that’s very hard for me to reconcile – how does the world’s best search engine cull through the 13,800,000 sites that have some information on this topic, and provide a top link to a site that not only fails to provide a good answer, but doesn’t appear to have very much activity related to it (i.e. the grand total of 1 vote placed on the answers)? Are that many people linking to it?

For a more humorous example, you can google “how to defuse a bomb”. Yahoo Answers is again #1 for me, and like in the previous example the question has been declared “resolved”. Which seems odd, given the best answer (as chosen by voters, with a grand total of two votes) is “Why do you have a bomb?”. At least I’ve heard a hypothesis behind this one – the site pops up on a number of “check out these funny answers” type sites, which might lead to a lot of traffic.

But still, it seems very odd. I’m curious to know if someone can explain how these sites are getting to #1 in the face of both common sense and the fact so few people have bothered to vote on the Yahoo answers. And I continue to be convinced that there must be a better way to search for things waiting in the wings so long as results like this keep popping up.

In turn, today I wanted to go back and re-visit what is probably my very favorite example of Wikinomics in action- Motley Fool (investment advice), which launched the Motley Fool Beta Caps community in the Spring of 2006. It’s a site that represents how a company with a “traditional” business model can embrace the principles of wikinomics, community and collaboration in a very thoughtful way – while actually making money in the process. The key is that they have used the insights from their community to enhance their core value proposition, rather than replacing it. (Note: you can read Don’s original post about it from December 2006 here).

So some people believe in the efficient market hypothesis (EMH), which says everything that is collectively known about a stock is already priced into it – thus you cannot beat the market, which is the ultimate example of the “wisdom of crowds” in action. But many investors think otherwise (such as the most famous of all, Warren Buffett), and it’s important to remember that on the stock market opinions are weighted by capital – the “vote” of somebody managing a $100 Billion pension fund counts for a lot more than mine.

The Motley Fool is clearly not a believer the EMH, and built a business selling investment newsletters – basically their expert stock picks, which tend to focus on companies out of favor with the large funds and popular analysts. Given they were/are selling this unique expertise, one might think they would be highly resistant to any notion that a community – or the “wisdom of crowds” – might be able to identify the best stocks, as it could theoretically crush their business model (i.e. why by a newsletter when you can get the best ideas for free?). There are many, many companies that have reacted just that way to wikinomics-type developments. But instead, Motley Fool decided to embrace the notion, launching the aforementioned Caps Community in the Spring of 2006.

This community now represents the aggregated intelligence of some 130,000 investors (according to the press releases – it looks more like 60,000 on the site, with a subset of that being very active). The heart of this intelligence is a transparent stock picking process – when you picked it, at what price, and what you expected to happen, over a given time frame, with some description of why if you so choose. All if this information can be aggregated by user, by groups of users, and by the community at large. And the beauty of this community is that the knowledge created, and how it is shared, can be valuable to every investor – no matter what their mindset. This is something people often miss.

True believer in the “wisdom of crowds”? Obviously what the crowds is saying is of interest to you so you can do the same. Believer in the “madness of crowds”? Well then, it’s in your best interest to know what they’re thinking, so you can do the opposite. Believe that only a couple of people are likely to be great stock pickers? Then you can check out the top performers on the site over time – a luxury hardly available with (say) most mutual funds. If you want to get a feel for some of the different ways to slice the data, check out the Top Tens Lists page.

But that’s just within the community itself. Where Motley Fool gets really interesting, to me, is the tie-in back to their investment newsletter service. Every abundance creates a new scarcity, and the abundance of information available on Caps highlights the scarcity of time – it takes a lot of time to sift through all of that information on a regular basis. Moreover, my sense is that most investors are likely still a little hesitant to bet their retirements on the information from the community – whether it’s the crowd, EveryDayInvestor (the top-rated Fool), or some sub-group in between. Even with track records established, reading through the generally VERY short explanations for why particular stocks are chosen can give you pause – and we’re talking life-changing decisions here.

This is where the company itself jumps in, melding the community intelligence into their own offerings. Their staff regularly write blog posts and news stories that highlight potentially interesting stocks based on a combination of their own research, and the wisdom of the CAPs community. This one is a typical example – 5 Stocks Making Cash. They looked for companies generating free cash flow growth of 25% annually over 5 years, and cross referenced it with a intelligence of the CAPS community to generate a list of 5 potentially interesting stocks. They then provide a brief overview of one or two, while disclosing any of their own holdings. Similarly, you can check out their “4-Star stocks poised to pop” published on MSNBC a week ago, and many others can easily be found.

Wait a second you say – that’s still free information! Well yes, but it is fairly limited (they’ve done a little of the heavy lifting of sorting through the community intelligence for you), and very little context is provided. If you read through 100s of such stories and posts (as I have), you’ll note that most highly encourage you to use them as a base for your own research – or alternatively play somewhere between $79 and $199 for a newsletter that will do it for you. A typical example would be their Motley Fool Inside Value, which offers up two new ideas a month, and continuing, detailed coverage of all past picks. The more time you spend on the site, from my experience, the more interesting this offer is.

So if you tie it all together, it’s a compelling mixture. The community itself is valuable to the members, but also generates a lot of intelligence for the firm to leverage (and keeps potential customers coming back again and again). Those that never buy a thing  (preferring to do it all themselves) likely didn’t before either, and would be engaged with a different company if Motley Fool hadn’t done this, so there’s not much of a loss there – and there’s at least some advertising revenue here, plus the value of their contributions for everyone else. All the while, anyone that is a little hesitant to just taking that community intelligence on it’s own, or are too time starved to effectively do it, has the opportunity to pay a relatively small amount to have the rest of the heavy lifting done for them. <$200 a year is a mere pittance compared to, say, a 2.5% MER for most investors the Motley Fool would target. Pretty cool set-up.

Of course, the REALLY big underlying message here is that the Motley Fool better be damn good at what it does – this is all very transparent, so the whole model breaks down if the picks aren’t good. Simple as that. According to their comparison chart, Motley Fool does (and I feel more comfortable with it then other comparisons I’ve seen done in the past). And as far as I can tell, it’s one of the best examples of how a company can take all of this community and collaboration stuff to really enhance an already strong value proposition in a compelling way.

(Full Disclosure: I remain a “lurker” on the Motley Fool Site, after briefly testing out being a community member and deciding it wasn’t for me for various reasons. I am currently conducting an experiment where I purchase – with real money – stocks that emerge from some of these posts that meet 4 criteria: price has crashed recently, the story sounds logical and makes sense to me, it has CAPS community support, and one of the newsletters discloses ownership. I’m comparing the results to advice I steal/ borrow from the likes of Warren Buffett, The Ontario Teacher’s Pension Plan, John Dorfman, and a variety of others. If it performs well, I will very likely become a subscriber to at least one newsletter, strictly because of the time issue).

Although this innovative campaign has been very successful, I question Tourism Queensland’s choice to retain almost entire control over the candidate selection. A key strategy in the campaign was to engage the public through their interest in the candidates, and there may have been more engagement if they had allowed the public to choose the 10 finalists, instead of a single wild card, from the 50 shortlisted candidates. By shortlisting candidates and by choosing the final winner of the competition from the ten publicly chosen candidates, Tourism Queensland would still be able to ensure that an appropriate candidate was chosen. In addition, allowing the public to be more involved would result in a winner that has great charisma and would be able to create a large following for his/her blog. Would the campaign have been even more successful if the public had been more involved? The question of how much control should be retained by a company and how much should be left to consumers is becoming increasingly important as more companies begin to include consumers in the development of their products and services.

Another interesting example of an organization incorporating public opinion is NASA’s contest to name the new module for the international space station. The name that received the most votes was Colbert, after the popular comedian, Stephen Colbert. Although NASA did ask for public opinion, they reserved the right to name the module themselves and decided on Tranquility, one of the top ten suggestions from the public. In recognition of the winning name, NASA did name the new space station treadmill the “Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill”, or COLBERT for short. I think that in this case, NASA made the right decision in not allowing a module of the international space station to be named as a result of a joke, but to incorporate the winning name in NASA’a own joke. In other cases, however, it is not as clear, and it will remain a difficult judgment call to decide how much control should be retained by a company working in collaboration with the public or its consumers.

But I thought I’d bring them up again because they sent me an email (because I’m kind of a big deal I’m on their email distribution list as a past buyer) about a very cool contest – LG Mobile Phones has opened a “Design the Future” competition, with more than $80,000 in rewards for people that can come up with the most “revolutionary” LG mobile phone designs. You can find all the details about it here – and join the competition if you’d like, as long as you are American. I’m hoping they have a similar, less ambitious, and more self-depreciating for us Canadians in the near future .

There’s also another neat element to this – the competition is sponsored by AutoDesk, “a world leader in 2D and 3D design software.” All participants will get a 15-day free trial to SketchBook Pro, a powerful design application. Very cool co-branding initiative, and another example of how “professional” tools are increasingly getting in the hands of prosumers.

It’s going to be a great contest to watch – and coupled with other recent developments like Doritos Guru, it’s nice to see companies starting to get creative with their rewards. In the Doritos case, it was a share of all future product sales for the winner of the brand name / commercial contest – which could be quite a lucrative reward indeed. This competition (at least partially) deals with another complaint often levied at crowdsourcing platforms – the ‘winner takes all’ model. The prize structure is that the winner gets $20 K, 2nd $10 K, 3rd $5K, and then 40 awards of $1 K each. 43 winners is a pretty good start to encourage participation.

But wouldn’t it be cool to see those two models mashed together? Perhaps the winner getting $20 K + X% of future phone sales? Or maybe even everyone in (say) the top-10 getting a share? I think that would work very well – and I’d bet that we see a company do something like that fairly soon…

However, this line of argument isn’t meant to say that “wisdom of crowd” applications don’t exist – and I continue to look for examples that I find compelling. One that I find quite interesting right now is the NBA Team Ranker. If you launch the application, you are presented with a simple question – “Which team is better?”, from two options (say, the Raptors and the Lakers). It takes only a second to toss your opinion into the ring. But as the application does this micro polling over and over again, rotating through the 30 NBA squads in a series of binary choices, it adds up to a “collective wisdom” – a ranking from #1 to #30 for the entire league.

What’s interesting about this, in my opinion, is the micro-polling component. An alternative for gathering collective wisdom would have just been asking people to rank the 30 squads, than averaging it out – but this is a very time consuming process for individuals which would limit participation. The question, of course, is how “good” the results are that roll up from the micro polling process.

Now it’s hard to create a definitive answer to this, but if you are an NBA fan and scan the list you are almost certain to say it’s at least close – teams like the Lakers, Cavs, Celtics, Spurs and Magic at the top, and teams like the Wizards, Clippers and the Kings at the bottom. In fact, it’s very similar to Power Ranking lists like this one from NBA.com. The only big argument people may have is the Spurs position at the top – but given recent history (the Spurs winning the NBA title in odd years – 2003, 2005, and 2007), this might just turn out to be pretty smart.

So at minimum, it looks like an interesting approach. I wonder how many other micro-polling possibilities – where you ask simple, binary questions to a massive audience, rather than a detailed question /poll that each person must answer – are out there?

• T-shirt
• Go on tour with Josh for a few days.
• Have Josh write, record and release a 5 song EP about you and your life story.
• Take home any of his drumsets (only one but you can choose which one.)
• Take shrooms and cruise Hollywood in Danny from TOOL’s Lamborgini OR play quarters and then hop on the Ouija board for a while.
• Josh will join your band for a month…play shows, record, party with groupies, etc….
• If you don’t have a band he’ll be your personal assistant for a month (4 day work weeks, 10 am to 4 pm)
• Take a limo down to Tijuana and he’ll show you how it’s done (what that means exactly we can’t legally get into here)
• If you don’t live in Southern California (but are a US resident) he’ll come to you and be your personal assistant/cabana boy for 2 weeks.

Thanks to Phil Hood for the tip.

I won’t bother re-telling the whole story about how Frito is “literally handing over the brand to the consumer”, but rather acutely focus on the incentive model. The winner of their contest to promote the new product will take home $25,000, and more importantly 1% of sales into perpetuity.

I love this. As I’ve noted before, almost every wikinomics example that came out of the original research was tied to one of two extremes – either asking customers to get engaged “for free”, or a simple contest model (like the $25,000 prize). This next step towards rewarding top prosumers with a share of lifetime income/ sales could, in my opinion, unleash an extraordinary wave of creativity and innovation over the coming years… and yes, I think I may just spend the weekend trying to see if I can come up with something for them.

You can read the rest of this post here.

You can read the rest of this post here.

Because of this when I speak about prosumerism, I like to start by looking at some questions around a very special Dilbert cartoon. Dilbert cartoons, as most people know, poke fun at society and particularly workplace culture, usually highlighting some absurdity that people can relate to. But in this case what I’m saying is that, for perhaps the first time in history, we can argue that companies need to start acting more like Dilbert cartoons, rather than less.

The reason I can say this (and long time wikinomics readers certainly already know this) is because last year, Scott Adams made a major change to the Dilbert.com site – they turned it into a Dilbert Mash up platform. Every day when Scott publishes his new cartoon, an alternate version goes up. In this alternate version,  the images are present in each of the three boxes, but the text in only the first two. Anyone could then login and add their own punchline to the cartoon (it’s since evolved to include Group mash ups and other things I’ll talk about later).To tie it back to the opening lingo, the site is now a prosumer platform.

I was participating in this quite a bit last year, so effectively Scott Adams and I were co-creating cartoons, such as this one:

Please, hold the applause… and the laughter is becoming overwhelming .

Back to the story. So this looks like a cute, fun little example – what could the possible business implications be? Well, let’s start by looking at the perspective of Scott Adams and United Media – why would he/they do this? And would you do the same thing in their place? Would your company – and how would the decision get made?

Read the rest of this post here.

Like a lot of new parents, I had a huge number of digital photographs of my daughter over the first two months of her life. While I was originally thinking of a simple picture book, I’ve always liked the look of sketch drawings – but I’m not really a great sketch artist. However, I stumbled upon a very cool site called befunky.com, where any photo can be turned into a sketch using the cartoonizer. I did about 40 of them, saved them to my hard drive, and I think the results were pretty impressive. Here’s an example of the output from my daughter’s first few minutes of life:

Read the rest of the post here.

However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that prosumers aren’t an important part of the site. I got to thinking about this again when I read the recent NY Times piece YouTube Videos Pull in Real Money. It’s a story about how some of YouTube’s partners are now starting to make serious money from ads served on the original videos they create – with the feature story being about Michael Buckley, who has created his own celebrity chatter show.

Michael’s story looks like a classic case of prosumerism – he was an administrative assistant at a music production company who started producing a thrice-weekly (self described) “silly” show, after investing $2,000 in a camera, $6 on a piece of fabric for a backdrop, and bit more in a couple of lights. His silly show became quite popular after a full year of concerted effort, and he now receives an average of 200,000 views per video, while the most popular get millions. Now a funny thing has happened – he’s becoming so successful, and making so much money, he’s quit his other job and is now devoted to it full time.

So this leads to a simple question – is Michael a prosumer or not? I would personally argue that he was, but he isn’t anymore. After all, it’s now his full-time job – there is no fuzzy line. In turn, this brings an interesting dynamic to prosumerism on YouTube – as the business model sorts itself out on the site, it might not so much empower prosumers (because most aren’t popular enough to make an real money), but to allow the most popular prosumers to turn into full-time producers – a subtle but important difference.

As I note in my research, this is leading to an interesting dynamic. It’s a common belief that YouTube represents a shift away from the “few to the many” broadcast model to a “many to the many”, or even “many to the few” (each with their own piece of a long tail). However, combine the views for these popular prosumer-turned-producers with the traditional media content on YouTube, and the model continues to look a heck of a lot like “few to the many” to me.

And that’s not a bad thing – in fact I think it’s great, as YouTube effectively creates a meritocracy where anyone with a good idea and presentation style, a couple of thousand bucks to invest, and the willingness to dedicate themselves to building an audience, can earn their just rewards. Though it is not neccesarily so great for established media companies of course…

The reason that I am writing about it here is blatant self-promotion two-fold – we are attempting to build chTONGUEeek by sticking to the principles of wikinomics, and do so at an absolute minimum of out-of-pocket expense. From what we’ve seen so far (with this project and the research), these two things often go hand in hand.

As of right now, the total expense incurred has been a little over $200, and outside of a few plans we have for rewarding contributors, we don’t expect this to go a penny higher for the foreseeable future. About 1/4 of this expense was unavoidable – domain name registration. The rest was for the logo design, and to get us off on the right wikinomics foot we decided to go with crowdSPRING for what eventually became this:

Regular readers may remember I wrote about my interview with the founders of crowdSPRING back in June. The idea behind the company is simple – anybody can post a description of creative project, the reward that they are offering, and the end date. Interested artists within the community then submit designs (the company guarantees a minimum of 25), and the buyer can continually provide feedback as they flow in to guide the community towards what they want, before finally selecting a winner. crowdSPRING takes care of the payments, legal issues, etc.

We decided to post our project for the minimum amount – $150 – with a one week time frame, providing a brief description and an absolutely terrible graphic representing what we were thinking. Over the course of the week we received a total of 69 submissions, with quality ranging from pretty bad to quite intriguing. In order to get the most out of the platform, we provided feedback (at minimum a rating) on every submission in timely fashion, and it was the work of Peg770 that was clearly rising to the top. We sent her a couple of personal message for some final tweaks, and in the end declared her the winner, receiving a portfolio of different logos she had created for us (you can see some of them in the box marked with the award tab). We thought it was a great experience, and absolutely brought home the power and value of crowdsourcing.

From there, we’ve built the initial site through Word Press (free), borrowed some hosting for the time being (free), and had the more skilled of us (not me) get the site designed and “live,” while we both focus on creating some hopefully entertaining content in our spare time (of which there is very little). Next steps include the launch of our initial store through CafePress (either free or $6 / month), figuring out our incentive plan for attracting a community of contributors (probably not free), and most importantly building our social media marketing strategy (free, but what will be the most time consuming). It is the latter I am most interested in, and will be reporting back time and again if something interesting comes up. In the meantime, seats are still available on Twitter and Facebook – but they are going fast .

That’s why I was so happy to come across this story about Ukoonto when I read the Globe & Mail over lunch. The article is about a young entrepreneur (and soon to be former sound engineer) named Hans Eich, who builds eco-friendly wooden building block toys from his St. Catherine’s based workshop. While I can’t say that I’ve tested the products myself yet, they look great – and from a wikinomics perspective what’s most interesting is how Hans has developed and promoted his company.

As the article notes, outside of an occasional trade show, Hans relies solely on Web 2.0 tools to spread the word about his products. When he started up, he had practically no money, and no big business plan – just an idea to create a toy company. He launched it under the domain of “my toy needs a name”, created a framework online, and asked people for ideas and feedback. From there, to quote Hans:

It was all about interacting with people and trying to set up meaningful relationships. The business evolved out of that.

If you go through the article, you can read about all the interesting lessons he’s learned – from use of things like YouTube and Twitter, to why it’s so much harder to create “fans” on Facebook than create groups, to backlash he received when he tried to push his products to hard in communities he joined, rather than really engaging with the people. To quote Hans again:

You have to listen first before they start listening to you. Traditional media is about telling, but Web 2.0 is all about conversations. It’s very much about letting go of control and engaging with people.

I’ll let you learn the rest from the Globe article, but I found it just an extraordinarly refreshing read – particularly when the three articles on the previous page were “EU to get call for stimulus package”, “Easy credit, public spending fuelled boom”, and “Lost auto jobs pegged at 15,000.” Amidst all the doom and gloom, it’s important to remember that there is an extraordinary opportunity out there for entrepeneurs that can create a good product they are passionate about, and learn to leverage social media and the web 2.0 in a compelling way. As Hans noted, given that most of the tools he’s leveraging are free, his out-of-pocket costs have basically been limited to website design costs. Think about how different it would have been if Hans tried to launch his company twenty years ago…

I’m blessed with having a wonderful 7-month old daughter at home, and her equally wonderful mother taking care of her. The latter has some very strong opinions on parenting, and in particular when companies try to send messages that dissuade mothers from doing certain things that, say, thousands of years of history and an extraordinary number of experts indicate are good things to do. In turn, I don’t really have to imagine how she might have reacted to the growing Motrin Mom controversy. (Editor’s note: Said mom has since read this post and viewed the video, and the words “pissed off” were prominently featured in her response).

For those that might have missed it, the video ad (which can be seen on YouTube) presents the following text (bold added by me): Wearing your baby seems to be in fashion. I mean, in theory it’s a great idea. There’s a (whole bunch of different types of carriers), and who knows what else they will come up with. Supposedly, it’s a real bonding experience. They say that babies carried close to the body cry less that others, BUT what about me?  Do mom’s that wear their babies cry more than those who don’t?  I sure do. These things put a ton of strain on your back, your neck, and your shoulders. Did I mention your back? I mean I’ll put up with the pain because it’s a good kind of pain. It’s for my kid. Plus, it totally makes me look like an official mom. So if I look tired and crazy, people will understand why.

Motrin, of course, is pain medication. The message above is not-so subtly trying to indicate that carrying babies is a “fashionable”, badge-of-honor type sacrifice to make – perhaps like drinking a Starbucks Vente latte, but with, er, sacrifice. As referenced, I know at least one person that’s VERY well educated on this subject that would probably object to this message (two if you include me) – let’s just say we’d drop things like “supposedly” out of the sentences above. Based on the brewing reaction described in articles like this one, we are hardly alone. After a big PR disaster, the commercial has since been pulled from broadcasts, apologies have been issued, etc. Rather cutely, on the Motrin site the ad has been replaced with the message “we have heard you.”

If you read my posts over the last few months, the intersection with my work here is obvious – I’m keenly interested in how the world of social media is affecting advertising, and the role of particularly important “N-Fluencers” in driving community action. I also wrote about an AdAge story earlier today, and I was happy to find AdAge also has the best account of how a few influential bloggers and twitters suddenly galvanized to bring this ad down – amazing details of how the message and uproar spread, and interestingly quite a long time after the initial ad was launched. And the following quote from story speaks directly to the media question I was asking earlier:

“You don’t have to have thousands of followers to start something like this. Many people with small networks have just as much influence as a few people with large networks.”

I suppose I should also note that I first stumbled upon this story reading something called a “newspaper” over lunch – I’m telling you this thing was coming at me from all angles!

So I agree with all the articles and commentators who are noting that this is a great example of the power of social media, and how it’s becoming increasingly impossible for companies to ignore. Though I do find one other thing to be interesting here. In truth, we’ve been through a ton of different baby carriers at our house, that we both use all the time. In truth, a lot of them (but not all) actually do cause my back to hurt a bit, and I think the realities of strapping a 21 pound and growing person to my stomach and carting her around for hours will lead to a little more pain now and again. In turn, why on earth would a company promoting pain medicine want to run a sequence trying to position baby carrying as a “fashionable” thing you should “supposedly” do (i.e. stop doing it)?

Me thinks the mistakes on this campaign run quite deep, and a fair bit of damage has been done. But how much I wonder? And does a company that presents a poorly thought out ad, but retracts it and apologizes after a storm of responses (i.e. shows they are actually listening), end up better or worse off than before?

For example, today Dan Herman forwarded me this AdAge story where Ted McConnell, GM of interactive marketing and innovation at P&G, speaks out against it. Very early on he offers up an interesting quote:

“What in heaven’s name made you think you could monetize the real estate in which somebody is breaking up with their girlfriend?”

This statement really gets to the heart of what people are struggling with. They’re called social networks for a reason – people see them as a social space to interact with friends. In turn, is it an appropriate place for advertisers to try to engage with them?

But here’s where it’s not really cut and dry. Yes, some people do use Facebook to break-up with their girlfriend (or at least announce the break up to their network of friends if their privacy settings haven’t been changed). I think most people would agree that advertisers may want to tread lightly here. But it’s also a piece of real estate where, for example, many of my friends play games with each other – is it inappropriate for advertisers to engage here? And as I’ve noted in recent posts, not only have many Facebook users created self-organizing groups around particular brands, but often hundreds of thousands opt to join company-controlled fan pages for the same brands. Are such people not implicitly inviting companies to engage in this real-estate?

While there might be implications for the type of advertising that is appropriate, saying that all of the Facebook real estate is inappropriate for advertisers seems a bit off. For example, I would probably agree with him that buying a banner ad on Facebook isn’t the best idea right now… but there are many other current and potential options.

McConnell also digs into the issue of “consumer-generated media”. To quote him again:

“I think when we call it ‘consumer-generated media,’ we’re being predatory. Who said this is media? Media is something you can buy and sell. Media contains inventory. Media contains blank spaces. Consumers weren’t trying to generate media. They were trying to talk to somebody. So it just seems a bit arrogant. … We hijack their own conversations, their own thoughts and feelings, and try to monetize it.”

So let’s dig into this a bit. McConnell’s first “requirement” for defining media is “something you can buy and sell”, arguing that “consumer generated media” isn’t, in fact, media. But here’s the definition of media from Dictionary.com:

The means of communication, [such] as radio and television, newspapers, and magazines, that reach or influence people widely.

Now personally I would argue that this definition is out-dated due to the use of traditional examples. You can simply the definition to The means of communication that reach or influence people widely. I would also argue that consumer generated media can, but not always, fit this definition. As noted in the YouTube research, while the vast majority of consumer generated media is niche / long tail content hardly viewed by anybody, some of it does have great reach and influence.

But perhaps the bigger question is whether this adjusted definition is still flawed. Does an individual piece of content have to reach or influence a “wide” audience? And what is considered “wide”? Again, this definition developed at a time when a mixture of technology limitations and oligopoly industry models dictated that only a scarce few people could ever get their message out to more than an immediate circle of people that they spoke with regularly, so it worked quite well. That has changed. Should the definition of media change with it? Might a thousand people that each have an audience of a hundred more “influential” than one company reaching 100,000 people? And what is it that dictates these people don’t want to allow marketers to monetize the conversations, so long as they get a share?

Where I 100% agree with McConnell is in the notion that while marketing dollars will continue to flow online, it won’t necessarily be a boon for online publishers. He elegantly describes the reason as fragmentation thwarts artificial scarcity – online display inventory continues to grow faster than the demand for it. I would actually take this a step further – not only does fragmentation thwart artificial scarcity, but what we consider marketing to be is fundamentally changing.

As a great man once said, the medium is the message. Social networks and consumer-generated “media” represent a new medium where the message is one of collaboration and engagement. Traditional advertising models are built on broadcast messaging, a notion that things like banner ads try to carry over. But the importance of these is declining (because they don’t match the medium/ message), while the importance of companies actually engaging with customers (and leverage N-Fluence networks) is increasing. And what I think companies are going to increasingly find is they don’t neccesarily have to pay for this engagement – at least in terms of the CPMs and the like.

I stumbled upon this thought as I came across this WSJ article about how Facebook is trying to woo marketers using “engagement ads”. The focus of the article is how, despite it extraordinary popularity, Facebook is struggling to sell ads. These new engagement ads are supposed to help by “blurring the line between marketing and social networks.” They do so by appearing on the main screen when you first log-in, and prompting you to take an action – provide a comment, RSVP to an event, add something to your personal list of events, etc. If you take the action, Facebook then shares a notice with your friends about what you’ve done, and BAM! A viral buzz ensues.

So it sounds great – but it got me thinking. Facebook (and other social networks) are now one of the foundational tools to be leveraged by viral/ word-of-mouth marketers. Sure, an ad on the main page might be able to help with that, and potentially draw in new customers. But at the same time, as I’ve referred to in some earlier posts, many established companies have their own fan pages (and associated groups) with thousands upon thousands of people voluntarily associating with them. Somewhere in these groups, in all likelihood, are the key “N-fluencers” – those who are willing, and influential enough, to spread your message around Facebook if it is attractive enough.

So if your a marketer for one of these companies, might the best play be to spend $0 on ads, and focus your efforts on creating a truly viral buzz / word-of-mouth campaign around your offering? And if so, does this create a bit of a conundrum for Facebook as they try to grow their ad revenue?

Over 300,000 people have viewed the “If you vote, Starbucks buys you a coffee” video on YouTube. While a lot of people have given credit to Starbucks for coming up with a good marketing idea, they didn’t actually come up with it – BillMac did. And who is BillMac you might ask? Well, he is the person who posted the idea on MyStarbucksIdea on October 7th, 2008. I know this because mguiste, who works for Starbucks, wrote about it on Starbuck’s Idea in Action blog – while noting that a “similar theme was echoed by JavaOcha, Geraldo, rsj211, epiphanygalore, and a few others.” The idea rocketed to into the top-10 based on community votes, and Starbucks decided to go ahead and do it. They kicked off the initiative with a 60-second spot on Saturday Night Live, and the video was uploaded to YouTube on November 1st.

So how successful was the campaign? Well, let’s go back to Facebook Lexicon for an indicator. The picture below shows how many times “Starbucks” appeared on people’s walls over the last year. As you can see, there has been a steady and consistent decline throughout 2008, until all of the sudden there is a MASSIVE spike. On November 1st.

Pretty interesting example of a company starting to piece it all together- though it would have been really interesting to see what would have happened if they’d skipped on the SNL broadcast altogether. It would probably have also been good if the campaign wasn’t illegal .