At present most employers review potential candidates Social Networking pages in order to make hiring decisions. Does it not also make sense that Potential Customers to your business will begin to seek out those businesses which provide them some social networking interaction. They gain confidence, review your other clients, keep up to speed on your promotions and specials. This is how long term business is built.

One the other side, the business with no SMM to speak of is relying solely on SEO ranking which is already a time consuming proposition. You can use SMM to grow your SEO, grow your client confidence in your product and create Viral Consumer Confidence. However, neither method will make it alone so be smart about how you market.

thanks for the offer, I would like to check out your site in more detail at some point. I will let you know, since I am on a project the next 2 weeks.

Its a pleasure – always keen to discuss a topic like this.

1) You are right to a certain extent here – But I dont think it does away with the need for a creative agency all together. I think the key thing to understand is that a brief on Idea Bounty will only work for a brand or product which is already established and has had its brand and image created and established already. This is where I see the creative agencies true roll being – there is no way you can get the public to create a brand from scratch for you and I still believe the foundations of the brand need to be built by a team of professional creative people.

The Peperami brief is almost a case in point here. Lowe spent 15 years doing a brilliant job on building one of the strongest snack brands in the UK – however having the same team working on a brand for 15 years has to come to an end at some point. No matter how good you are sooner or later you are going to run out ideas for a brand that you have been working on for that long. Unilever felt that they needed some fresh minds to work on the brand. I think the key point here is that crowdsourcing is only going to be effective for existing brands and campaigns – starting something from scratch requires the input of a professional creative agency. The question I ask myself is why have agencies, like Lowe, not thought of this route themselves? If an agency managed a brand to such a strong point and its felt that new and fresh ideas are needed I can see a perfect opportunity for them to suggest that clients make use of crowdsourcing platforms like Idea Bounty – they then have the opportunity to execute the idea (and perhaps even develop it further)

There is a really nice Q&A with Noam Buchalter – the marketing manager of Peperami – on this topic on Econsultancy: http://econsultancy.com/blog/4511-q-a-unilever-s-noam-buchalter-on-crowdsourcing-peperami-ads

2) In terms of a suitable model – No I dont think its for all brands. Established brands will defiantly get better results off a project like this than a relatively unknown brand. The reasons for this I think purely come down to the fact that the public will already be familiar with an established brand and will have their own ideas and emotional connections with the brand that will allow them to generate great ideas. Infact this is why the ideas we receive are often so fresh – the public will have different ideas and insights that others might not have purely by virtue of their perspective.

In terms of people getting bored – I believe that as more brands start making use of the model the people submitting ideas will be users who have a natural liking for the brand anyway – call them your brand fans. Personally I would love to work on ideas for an Apple campaign as I love the brand. These are the people who are going to want to be engaging with anyway and they are more likely to have better ideas. It is an interesting point you raise and im not too sure how it will play out – with that one I guess we will just have to see what happens.

3) Idea Bounty is an independent platform – we have hosted briefs for brands such as Red Bull, BMW and WWF in the past. More here -http://www.ideabounty.com/what-is

Thank you for kicking off this debate – I think we are living in interesting times and its always awesome to see people engaging on topics like this. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

Cheers!

Cool idea though … but what the hell could I start????

many thanks again for your comment, and I will be curious to find out more about your thoughts to my points above.

Thanks for your comments. I represent Idea Bounty, the platform that the Peperami brief is being hosted on.

Just in answer to some of your points. Unlike the Pringles and Doritos competitions the brief for Peperami on Idea Bounty is looking for just the idea or concept for a new campaign not a complete TV ad which is what Pringles/Doritos were looking for. Once the best idea has been chosen it will be handed over to a creative production company based in London called SmartWorks – they will take the idea and craft it into a executed campaign.

Yes, this route is cheaper than going through the same process with an agency but its not the main motivation for crowdsourcing – The biggest attraction is defiantly the wide range of creative ideas that brands open themselves up to receiving. There are also limitations to this route – the first being that it will only work for specific and well defined tasks that everyone can take on without ’screwing up’ on it. These briefs usually come from well established brands that have had the benefit of a dedicated team of people working to build and craft it to a point where the public (who in some arguments end up accepting the brand and therefore making it truly what it is) can identify with it so strongly that it is possible to crowdsource. Infact to me this is the point of creating a brand and any agency that manages a client to this point should be, in my eyes, proud about it.

Again I say this is not a competition looking for a finished bit of work – crowdsourcing might work for small things like a logo but we dont expect the public to have the professional skill to execute and develop an Idea. We still need professional creatives for this task – In Unilever’s case SmartWorks. The briefs on Idea Bounty look for the Idea, the concept behind a campaign, not a complete product.

I might also add that if you think about it there is no way you as an individual working in an agency get paid $10 000 for a single idea – so I cant see why there are creatives complaining. Especially when the legal system behind Idea Bounty registers your submission as your own IP, by accepting the $10 000 Bounty you are selling your IP to the client. Unless this happens the Idea remains yours.

Ultimately I see this is just the next stage in the evolution of marketing: it is inherently more sensitive to market-forces, it levels the playing fields as far as creatives are concerned (giving them the opportunity to communicate their ideas to well developed global brands) and it opens brands to a limitless number of new, innovative marketing ideas. And it doesn’t remove the need for traditional agencies, as the ideas generated will still need to be implemented – and on top of that the brands created and developed in the first place.

Thanks again for the comments – If anyone would like to contact me to find out more, or get stuck more into the crowdsourcing debate please feel free to mail me – daniel@ideabounty.com

Cheers, Daniel

when seeding “dofollow” links to sites, you should use proper html syntax
I approved you comment unaltered just for a laugh…

Jacob