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Don’t know what “crowdsourcing” is?  It’s a way to get feedback on an idea/problem from a group of people who share a similar interest.  Pose an issue and the crowd offers solutions.

My favorite recent crowdsourcing example comes via Springwise, where they describe how London’s L’Anima restaurant crowdsourced their wine list selection.  The restaurant first employed six wine experts, who were grouped into three teams. When the experts couldn’t agree on what to recommend, the restaurant uploaded videos of each team pleading their case for their recommendations; members of the public who had been given advance notice of the wines in the running were asked to vote.  This Time Out “Best New Italian Restaurant 2009″ won by getting lots of buzz on Twitter and engaging a new customer pool; “average” people were made to feel they had entered the domain of wine experts; and one lucky winner, selected randomly via Twitter, was given a tour the restaurant and a prize of free wine.

As marketers, you’ve probably been doing a form of crowdsourcing for years:  customer studies.  Want to bounce new product ideas off of existing customers?  Need to refine the next generation of a logo for a well-loved brand among its loyal customers?  Both are versions of crowdsourcing.

What makes crowdsourcing more broadly defined today is that we’re able to use technology to find people with similar interests more easily.  We can get people to engage with us even if they’re not our customers.  Post something on the appropriate social-media website and get mothers from all over the country to comment on a new changing table design.  Want to determine which promotional idea is likely to create the greatest buzz?  Again, find the right venue and you can quickly and easily get some needed insights.

Is crowdsourcing the final frontier in market research?  It certainly does offer great opportunities for unfiltered feedback – at very affordable prices.  Think of it as “instant gratification research.”  Yet, it does have its limitations, as do all methods.

Are you thinking about using crowdsourcing?  Let’s talk it over and see if it’s your best course of action.

Before Malcolm Gladwell, there was, among others, John Naisbett.  Naisbett’s Megatrends was a must read.  My favorite was the “High Tech/High Touch” trend.  His theory was that the more technology impacted our lives, the more we would strive to find balance with human interaction.  We are social creatures, after all.

High tech/high touch has been going on with humans since the advent of technology.  My view is that this is a three-step adoption/integration process.

Take the wheel.  Great new technology.  Took awhile to figure out how to use it (Mastery).  First used it for work (Utility).  When it became easier to make wheels (and more “cost effective”), someone probably thought “let’s hook up a mule and go visit some friends”  (Social Usage).

Or the pen, after paper became plentiful (costs had come down).   Mastery again came first (practice for legibility), utility came second (use for business or lessons), and social usage came third (write a letter to a friend).  High tech to high touch.

Social usage is often linked to lowered costs and a distribution system or infrastructure that’s in place.  Take the telephone.  Initially, it could only be mastered by a few as distribution was more limited.  When the infrastructure was built, bringing phones into homes, costs were still high, and usage was more local and limited – but business usage soared.  Over time, and as people moved further apart,  the telephone allowed people to “visit” without making a trip; they could do so more often and without the time and expense of a real trip.  High tech to high touch.

Name your technology and it follows this basic  mastery-utility-social usage adoption process, if the infrastructure is in place.

Video games:  learn the rules –> a fun way to spend free time –> play with others online

iPod:  learn how to use it –> build library –> share tunes with others

So social media networks are the logical manifestation of becoming comfortable with the Internet and cell phones and the other technologies of today.  We’re comfortable now, so we’re socializing them.  Facebook makes it visual.  Twitter makes it fast.

I wonder what’s next!

Last month, Brian Powell blogged in Ad Age about cause marketing.  This isn’t a field I’m familiar with, but we’ve all heard the news that charitable giving is down due to the recession and I thought there might be some interesting innovations coming from this discipline.

Brian’s main point was that “cause marketing should be ideas with business and social impact.”  He believes this discipline is so important it will eventually be fully integrated into a company’s overall marketing efforts.

Just a couple of days ago, I looked into the SocialVibe widget that’s available on many of the social networking sites, such as Facebook.  It’s simple:  pick a charity from their list, pick a sponsor (aka advertiser), place the “badge” on your social network or blog site, and earn charitable donation points.  In other words, if I can drive traffic to one of my sites, and people click on my badge, my charity gets a donation.  The catch?  Every visitor who clicks the badge sees a short ad or request by the sponsor (e.g., rate an ad, pick a baseball card, etc.).

Interactive cause marketing?  A radical new twist on the old customer brand loyalty programs?  Whatever it’s called, I like it.  People can “do good” with the assistance of brands, while brands get attentive watchers of their messages.   In this day of people skipping commercials due to DVR recordings and with print publication readership down, this is really quite inventive.

How is your brand helping customers to “do good”?

I just finished listening to a webcast entitled “From Brainstorm to Firestorm:  Creating an Environment for Viral Marketing Success” hosted by SmartBrief and moderated by one of my favorites, Guy Kawasaki.

In Guy’s opening take, he stated the obvious:  you get more followers with any social media tool by being more interesting; and you’re more interesting by providing interesting links and information.  The three tools he uses are Objective Marketer (for email campaigns), TwitterFeed, and TwitterHawk.  Another tool, TweetMeme, he felt to be the single most powerful way to get followers.

Andy Sernovitz had a slightly different perspective.  He felt that allowing people to participate and share however was best for them was the key.  Rather than TweetMeme, he would go the ShareThis approach where people could “share the love” for you/your brand in whichever they wanted.

Stacey Kane of California Tortilla (voted best burrito in D.C.) said they leveraged their TacoTalk email newsletter into effective Twitter campaigns to drive store traffic.  One example:  providing a “secret password” on Twitter for a free taco in-unit; conversion rates were much higher than when the same thing was done via newsletter.

Brendan Hart with National Geographic talked about the importance of connecting with the brand.  For instance, on Twitter, they’ve invited people to solve a puzzle of Mount Everest at their website; as someone improves upon the time, NatGeo posts that result on Twitter, keeping it fun and interactive.  On their website, people can post photos they’ve taken and a couple are selected for inclusion in each issue of the print magazine.  Involvement on all fronts.

Stephanie Miller of ReturnPath summarized things this way: Use Twitter when brevity over clarity is desirable, email when content is king, and Facebook when a brand wants to be more engaging.  She gave an example of Oreo, which has 1.3 million fans on Facebook and where nothing has been posted since early March vs. Coca Cola, with 3.4 million fans, who seem to be so engaged that every few minutes one of its fans is posting something.  Do people love Coke more than Oreo?  I’m not sure.  But what’s clear is that Facebook is more important to Coke and its fans know that.  In short, she said whatever social media we use, we must commit the time and resources.

As with any form of marketing, no matter the way in which we connect with our consumers, we must be channel appropriate and engaging.

Your thoughts?