The Evolution of Crowdsourcing (and how my husband roped me into watching a basketball game last night between two teams I’m not even remotely familiar with)

Yesterday, an interesting thing happened on the internet.  As reported today by Trey Kerby from Yahoo (courtesy of previously mentioned husband):

“. . . going in to the Phoenix Suns' matchup with Ginobili and the Spurs, Jared Dudley knew he had to do something. Somehow, he needed to shut down this scoring machine. Desperate times call for desperate measures, so Dudley did what we all do when we need answers — he took to Twitter.”

Jared Dudley crowdsourced his strategy against another player for a professional basketball game?  That has to be a first, right?  Check out the tweets and the following results (again from Kerby):

“Amazingly, it worked. Ginobili scored only 10 points on 5-14 shooting, made no three-pointers, and had two turnovers in the Spurs loss. It was his worst game in a month and third lowest scoring output since the All-Star break.”

Amazingly is definitely the right word - even I know enough to say that's good!  Kerby goes on to share his hopes for the future of crowdsourcing in his domain:

“Hopefully, crowdsourcing game plans is the next big Twitter craze. I don't know about you, but I anxiously await the day when you can look at Twitter's top trending topics and see "#howtostopLeBron" and "#thisishowyoubeattheNuggets" alongside "#JustinBieberRocks." It's a pipe dream for now, but this is a good first step.

Since crowdsourcing’s introduction to the social media lexicon, of all the promising Web 2.0 technologies, it has made the least amount of headway into the way humans interact.  Social networking sites like Facebook have fundamentally changed the way we socialize with each other.  Twitter and blogs have changed the way we get our news and information.  Why hasn’t crowdsourcing changed the way we get knowledge and work on collaborative projects?  Why does it still feel experimental and not familiar?

Sure, there have been any number of successful crowdsourcing projects, one notably where I work.  But why are they still projects and not just the way stuff is done?

In the interest of crowdsourcing, I’d love to hear from the crowd on this one.

The State of Social Media

Last weekend we endured the Hypiest of Big Hype release with the launch of the Apple iPad. A few days in and there’s some talk of drastically overoptimistic first day sales estimates, some genuine buyer’s remorse, and of course the inevitable backlash from trendsetters looking for the New Shiny Object.

The official host of the iPad Honeymoon turned Hangover party is Hewlett Packard, which seems to have a lead on gaining the sought after “iPad killer ” moniker for it’s offering in the space, the iSlate.

What’s interesting for social media marketers is the anatomy of HP’s campaign to win back some mindshare from the savviest consumer electronics company in history: pure social media. Leaked photographs through Engadget and Gizmodo, and a blog launch you can find on industry blogs but not from HP’s homepage (at the time of this writing), etc.

This isn’t a huge surprise considering the demographic and technographic HP is targeting but it is somewhat of a milestone. This is the most important product launch HP has had in years and the cornerstone is a video blog? Although we would expect there to be a big budget Old Media campaign to debut later in the year once the iSlate is closer to release, it’s notable that the medium HP chose to highlight its New New Thing is a blog that’s not even two years old.

One way to spin this is that HP is making a clear case for what they think is most effective at this stage of their campaign. The other is that they’re making a clear case for what they think is not effective. HP didn’t integrate social media elements into an old media campaign. They just went all in.

Everybody's doing it, so why don't we?

This is a video (courtesy of justin.tv) of the Social Media Club panel I was on titled, "Everybody's doing it, so why don't we? The event was moderated by Jennifer Lindsay and joining me on the panel was Violet Blue, Janet Fouts and Erin Robbins.

One of the more interesting topics was around personal vs. business brand where we talk about the recent Forrester announcement that prohibits employees from blogging about business outside of their corporate blog. The video clip of this conversation was caught on video by Michael Brito here!



Watch live video from richreader on Justin.tv

Awesome Video on Measuring Social Media ROI

The Evolution of a Social Media Marketing in a Product Launch

Here's a presentation that Melissa Mines, Marketing Manager at Cisco and I did with BrighTalk showing how we evolved our social media marketing tactics from the Cisco ASR 1000 launch to the the Cisco ASR 9000 launch.