2.5 BILLION HEADS ARE BETTER THAN ONE

Crowdsourcing has become a valuable tool

While the term crowdsourcing may sound new, the concept is not. It’s been common for centuries for governments and companies to ask the masses for help, either by force, by contest, or by appealing to the volunteer spirit.

Way back in 1714, the British government knew the necessity for the country to participate in sailing the globe for exploration, invention and trade. However, sailing can be a dangerous business. So, the government offered up a contest asking the public for a solution. That’s how the marine chronometer came about. John Harrison invented a way for sailors to navigate using the stars.

Fast forward to 1858 when the Oxford English Dictionary was created. When a group of scholars was crafting the dictionary, they needed help with the thousands of entries and relied on volunteers to create entries based on their areas of expertise.

The idea of reaching out to the public to help solve problems isn’t a new one, but it wasn’t until the Internet became widely used that companies began using the concept so much there needed to be a term for it. “Crowdsourcing” was born.

There are more than 7 billion people in the world and Nielsen Online reports that 2.5 billion of those people have access to the Internet. While large companies may have 150,000 people working for them and small companies could have as few as five, there is a large margin of untapped talent that could provide services to companies who find value in using crowdsourcing.

Crowdsourcing doesn’t sound as big and scary as the term might suggest. It can be as simple as sending out a Twitter question or creating a Facebook post asking for feedback on a product. Police crowdsource when they ask for “anyone who may have seen something to come forward.” News outlets even use crowdsourcing when they ask readers or viewers to share information, breaking news video and even pet photos. (Check out this new app the Guardian in the UK is using to crowdsource.) In a more advanced sense, companies can use crowdsourcing websites to solicit innovative ideas for products, logos and other things a company might want to think outside the box on.

Companies such as Amazon, Netflix, istockphoto.com and DuPont have embraced the idea of tapping into talent outside the company’s workforce. According to bizmedia.com, companies have paid between $1-2 billion for ideas and products generated from crowdsource solicitations.

What does Netflix need with crowdsourcing? Something they were willing to pay $1 million for. Netflix offered the prize to anyone who could write an algorithm that could outperform the one the company uses to make recommendations to consumers. In September 2009, the company paid out the prize. Team “BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos” beat out more than 41,000 teams from 186 countries.

And while the Netflix prize is on the high end of payouts for a request that could only be complete by people with a highly-specialized skill set, there are many contests and contributions that can be made by amateurs. Crowdsourcing can certainly provide an avenue for up-and-coming innovators and creative minds that might not be able to make a connection with a company due to location or other circumstance.

Threadless may be one of the most popular businesses in the crowdsourcing world. Freelance designers submit T-shirt designs and customers vote on the artwork. The most popular submissions result in a cash payment and the T-shirt being manufactured by the company. While it’s not a mega pay out, it’s money made from the comfort of wherever designers happen to be. The Threadless website reports that the company has paid more than $7 million to about 1,500 artists for a total of about 274,000 T-shirt designs. It’s win-win for the company who doesn’t have to hire designers, pays a minimal amount for artwork and also makes money off of the sale of T-shirts.

There are many benefits to crowdsourcing. It affords an opportunity for companies to hear from their consumers, or potential consumers. Crowdsourcing can keep company overhead low. Also, since many products, such as T-shirts produced by Threadless, are voted on or commented on prior to production the idea is already tested.

But while there are many positives to crowdsourcing, there are also downsides. Because ideas are thrown to the masses, there is no guarantee that the right person with the needed qualifications will see the call for help. Many times crowdsourcing opportunities don’t pay much, companies may not see repeat submitters who are qualified. There’s also been some push back from skilled professionals. While photographers have previously charged $100 and up per stock photo, companies such as istockphoto.com enable companies to find photographs for less than $5. That’s great for a company’s budget, but bad for the professionals who have made their living off of a particular skill. Crowdsource responders are also working on their own time, so companies who have rush projects might not find the method valuable in that sense.

Finding a balance between using qualified company employees and utilizing crowdsourcing requires planning and balance.

One example of a company has been able to integrate crowdsourcing into their business plan successfully is Proctor & Gamble. According to the company, 50 percent of company product ideas were coming from outside the company by 2010. P&G reports there are now 1.5 million people in the company’s extended network. P&G calls their crowdsourcing program “Connect & Develop.” Through the program, P&G has created 137 products, including Olay Regenerist, Swiffer Dusters, and Crest Spinner Brush. Through Connect & Develop, the company was even able to find a way to print text on potato chips. A bakery in Italy was already using the technology and P&G licensed it from them by way of the company’s crowdsourcing program. The product was on store shelves within a year.

Crowdsourcing will no doubt continue to change and shift due to emerging technologies and innovative ideas on how companies, governments and other organizations can put to use the collaborative efforts of the public. Are there ways companies could be utilizing crowdsourcing that they aren’t? Please share your thoughts. (See what I did there? I just attempted crowdsourcing, myself.)

ACCURACY OVER SPEED

Pressure from social media causes news organizations to slip

Social media and blogging have opened the doors offering almost instantaneous access to world news and events in real time.

The average Joe on the street can now upload videos to YouTube directly from a phone, Tweet photos and post firsthand accounts on Facebook faster than most reputable news sources can make it to the scene of an event. All of that evidence and all of those accounts were once utilized by news agencies to tell a story, painting a picture provided by both witnesses and authorities. However, now, everyday people can send their own stories to the masses without the aid of media outlets.

The Osama bin Laden raid and his death broke on Twitter, along with Whitney Houston’s death, the announcement of the royal wedding and the Hudson River plane crash. Schools.com pulled information from news sources and research outlets to find that about 50 percent of people hear about breaking news from social media, not news outlets.

While people, including myself, were fiercely searching Twitter hashtags and YouTube videos for information about the bombings on April 15, news organizations were struggling to keep up with the amount of information that was free flowing with reckless abandon from the public.

That sometimes pushes news organizations to be sloppy in their efforts to be first and fastest.

Take for instance CNN, thought of as one of the more credible 24-hour news sources available in broadcast, online and social media avenues.

At 1:40 p.m. CT on April 15, in the aftermath of the bombing at the Boston Marathon, CNN exclusively (if there is such a thing anymore) reported that police had a suspect in mind. A mere six minutes later, CNN reported authorities had arrested a suspect in connection with the crime. Fox News and the Associated Press were shortly behind CNN in the announcement.

Wow! That’s great! I didn’t see THAT on a blog or tweet anywhere prior to the announcement.

The problem? As we all know now, the Boston Marathon bombing suspects were on the run until Thursday night and Friday night when one suspect died after a shootout and being run over by his brother, and the other being taken alive after a homeowner found bloody evidence the suspect was hiding in a boat in the backyard.

On April 15, even with the CNN announcement, CBS and NBC hung back, insisting that their sources said no arrest had been made.

An hour after CNN’s rush to let the world know the bad guy had been caught, they retracted the statement, noting that they believed the information to be true based on both state and federal sources. The FBI issued a statement that “contrary to widespread reporting, no arrest has been made,” noting that the past few days has seen “a number of press reports based on information from unofficial sources that has been inaccurate.”

And this isn’t the first time in recent events that, in an effort to be first, the media outlets got it wrong. The New York Post reported 12 people were dead in Boston after the bombings, even though authorities were reporting two, at that time. Think back to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Connecticut when the shooter’s brother was first identified as the suspect police were looking for. And CNN and Fox both reported (CNN later offered apologies) that the Supreme Court had struck down President Barack Obama’s healthcare mandate, although the court had actual upheld it.

Is this just what we can expect from a world where consumers demand immediate information during a 24-hour news cycle?

Paul Levinson is a journalism professor at Fordham University and said he believes errors are a result of the demand for continuous news. “The public wants to be informed, and the price of being continually informed is that wrong information comes out,” Levinson said.

While that might not be a cause for concern for people craving the latest news, it is a cause for concern when it comes to credibility of trusted news sources. What makes news outlets different from blogs and social media is that the journalists who work there remember their ethical and legal obligations, as well as their training to check and double check facts and accounts.

Public Policy Polling rates the credibility of news sources each year and it’s no surprise that 24-hour network ratings are declining. Fox News took the biggest hit at a nine percent drop. CBS, ABC, MSNBC and CNN saw percentage decreases. (Interestingly, but not necessarily relevant to this discussion, Fox News was also recognized as both the most trusted and least trusted news source by the 800 people who took part in the telephone survey.)

Why the drop? People have found other ways to get news. That means A) they are not as accepting or trusting of big outlets and B) outlets are struggling to keep up with information disseminated in non-traditional ways.

About 31 percent of adults now have a tablet and 45 percent of adults are smartphone owners. That’s a large percentage of the population who craves immediate open-source news. Accessing news is one of the most popular uses for those products, according to the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. A little more than 60 percent of tablet owners say they get their news on devices on a weekly basis and close to 40 percent say they do so on a daily basis.

Also on smartphones and tablets are social media applications, used more by consumers than news apps. Seventy percent of a Facebook users newsfeed is dominated by friends and family. That number is 36 percent on Twitter. The odds are against news organizations when it comes to news consumption and the pressure is on to stay relevant.

“In the Twitter age, the pressure is worse than ever to be fast — it’s become more difficult,” said Greg Brock, senior editor for New York Times standards. “Some of the pressure is coming from readers. If they see a headline on a Web site, they start looking for a complete and fully reported story from us, and they protest if they don’t find it.”

It’s important for credentialed journalists to remember what sets them aside from citizen journalists – that’s reputation and credibility. While anyone can pass along information, it is up to media outlets to vet that information, supplement it with facts and make sure to present the news in a fair way. Perhaps in this new age of technology, journalists need to slow down and remember that while gossip and unconfirmed information can fly around swiftly, it is a media outlet’s job to take a step back and make sure journalists work with integrity. It is then that news outlets will stay relevant – not by beating social media users in a time game, but with facts and credibility, providing a service that other sources cannot. It’s time to embrace accuracy over speed.

A TIME TO TWEET

Social media presence is a must for communicators

I’ll admit it. I was slow to jump on the Twitter ship bound for the island of social media bliss. I couldn’t understand what I would say in 140 characters on Twitter that I wasn’t saying already on Facebook? And why did I need one more social media site to check?  No embedded art, no embedded photos, no fun.

These days, I’m not only on the ship, I’m rowing with three oars. I have a Twitter account for work, one for my personal life (if there is such a thing on social media), and one that I help manage for the newspaper where I work.

When it comes to news applications, I think of Twitter as the equivilent to the CNN Headline News scrolling news bar. There is just enough information to let readers know what happened. The difference is, with Twitter, news tweets are immediately accessible and and twitterfeeds are highly customizable. If consumers only care about local news, they only have to follow local news outlets.

Pew Research released data back in 2011 regarding how news oulets use Twitter. 2011 is a long time ago considering technology updates and increased user familiarity with the product, but researchers take a scientific approach which seems to leave data lagging a couple of years behind. Pew used 13 major U.S. news sources for the study. Researchers took a look at 3,600 tweets over a week and found that the outlets studied tweeted links back to their own website 93 percent of the time. Six percent of the time, tweets contained no links and the remaining two percent was split between tweets that linked to other news sites and tweets that linked to non-news sites.

How the outlets organized tweets was also interesting. Companies such as The Washington Post had 98 different Twitter accounts associated with the business while The Daily Caller, a news and opinnion website based in Washington, D.C., only used one Twitter account in 2011. While organizations were sending out one to 100 tweets a day, those messages were mainly to disseminate information. Outlets and reporters rarely used tweeting as an interactive way to gather information to report.

For a small community newspaper, like the one I work for, Twitter is an important tool we use to stay relevant and not forfeit readership. We have a main newspaper account and each editorial staff member has their own Twitter account. We post breaking news, calendar information, community photos and also offer a way for readers to interact with us by asking for input for stories via tweets. Also, at a time when newspapers are reinventing themselves, it’s important to keep up with the immediacy of broadcast and online media. By covering a story in print, posting supplemental coverage to Facebook, posting online videos and tweeting breaking news and enterprise content, we keep up.

Last week an elderly woman with Alzheimer’s was reported missing in a rural area that our newspaper covers. Before an online presence and social media, it would have been impossible for our readers to have depended solely on us for updates. When I got to the scene where first responders and volunteers were mounting a search, I was able to tweet a description of the woman, a photo of the briefing given by a local sheriff and provide updates on the search. Instead of being the last to get the information out, newspapers can now compete in terms of breaking news by way of outlets such as Twitter and Facebook. While the television crews left to find a signal to broadcast, or went back to a bureau to edit video, we were on the scene and sent out the first report that the woman was found, safely, at 9:01 p.m.

For public relations professionals, Twitter has become equally important. From following journalists and making informal connections using social media, to using hashtags  to get in on trending discussions and crisis management, social media matters in terms of public relations and marketing.

While positive public relations efforts are important, using Twitter for crisis communication is an important part of any crisis communication plan. Prevention is prefered, but there must be a plan in place to reach consumers and community members in real time in ways they will see the fastest. No longer can public relations professionals wait for the next television broadcast, or the next print edition of a newspaper to address a toxic spill, product recall, or other emergency. Consumers will be talking about it as soon as it affects them, or as soon as they become concerned about it. Company’s must have a social media presence.

The time to create a Twitter account to represent a company is before a crisis. And it’s important to look around and see who may be using a similar name. As if BP didn’t have enough to deal with during the Gulf oil spill, their delay in social media presence and an account falsely representing the company added to the pressure the company was under. Within a week, the account @BPGlobalPR had accumulated 42,000 followers whle BP’s actual account @BP_America only had 5,700. The fake account holder was also clever enough to create the hashtag #bpcares. The fake account for the company tweeted statements such as, “Catastrophe is a strong word, let’s just call it a whoopsie daisy.”

Chick-fil-A is also a company who didn’t spring to the social media front during a storm of criticism after the company’s founder made statements that he was against gay lifestyles and marriage. Bad move. Silence is not golden when it comes to crisis management.

Think that you can’t reach a significant number of people on a social networking site such as Twitter? Think again. Twitter was estimated to have about 500 million total users and 250 million active users at the end of 2012. A lot of guesswork is involved in those numbers and officially the company lists more than 100 million active users. In addition to Twitter audiences, more than 14 percent of the world’s population has a Facebook account – that’s about a billion active users ready for either the message of a company, or the misinformation distributed by a company’s opposition.

So, now you’re convinced that Twitter is a valid tool for communicators in fields of both journalism and public relations. Let’s talk some strategy. Bitly has done a little research and discovered that more Twitter users check their feeds between 1 and 3 p.m. Monday through Thursday than any other day. Facebook posts should be made between 1 and 4 p.m. Monday through Thursday. Got Friday news that can wait until Monday? Hold it. Tweets and posts after 3 p.m. on Friday won’t reach much of an audience.

 What are you waiting for? Get to tweeting! You can follow my work account @messenger_rb. Some of my favorite follows are @apstylebook, @CNNbrk, @washingtonpost, @alyankovic, @aliciasilverstone, @jimmyfalon and @janemarielynch.

TIME TO MOBILIZE!

Companies should reach customers where they are – on the phone

The first form of advertising dates back to 2000 B.C. when Egyptians carved public notices into steel.

We create new print and online advertisements every day at the newspaper where I work. Advertising representatives visit with the creative editor to share their thoughts for an ad and convey what clients had in mind. Then the creative editor designs a first version to be taken back to the client. Hopefully, the client loves the design and all is well. If not, the ad rep comes back, visits with the creative editor again, and the process begins another cycle.

Even with the time involved in the back-and-forth to create the perfect print ad, I can’t imagine what the Egyptians went through!

Mashable posted an interesting timeline by infolinks that shows the evolution of advertising. Fast forward from the Egyptians to 1472 when the first print ad was created in England that advertised a prayer book for sale. Even further down the timeline, 1835 marked the appearance of automobiles and the idea of billboards.

After that time, the evolution of advertising began to move even more rapidly with innovative trends happening years and decades apart instead of centuries.

Photo | Robbyn Brooks
The first electric sign in Times Square was place there in 1882. Since then, the square has become the IT place for flashy billboards and advertisements.

In 1973, Jules Verne used the first product placement when he named shipping companies in Around the World in 80 Days. In 1882, Times Square received its first electric sign. Sears began direct marketing in 1892 when the company sent out postcards and received 2,000 back with orders. In 1905, celebrity endorsements began, followed by “sex sells” advertisements, political propaganda, false advertising, television advertising and infomercials.

Jump ahead, once again to the magical 1994. Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan became household names. Major League baseball players went on strike. O.J. Simpson drove his white Bronco as the nation watched. AND, Internet advertising was born.

AT&T, Sprint and other companies began using banner ads. Pay-per-click advertising also appeared the same year, followed the next year by key word ads and then finally, mobile ads in 1997. The infolinks timeline ends in 2011 at a time when online advertising became the second budget priority for advertisers, worldwide.

Advertising clearly evolves to fit the lifestyle of consumers. We began driving, advertisers figured out how to get their messages across even on the open road. Cell phones became convenient. We can be reached at almost anytime by friends, family – and advertisers.

ComScore data shows that 50 percent of mobile users have smartphones. Showing, even further, the importance of the shift to digital and mobile advertising, 37 percent of website views happen on mobile devices instead of desktops.

Advertising Age interviewed the chief executive of Safeway, the tenth largest retailer in the country, who said the company thinks so much about digital advertising that they hope to be paperless in the future. In 2010, the company spent about $33 million in newspaper advertising. Safeway cut that amount to $20 million in 2012 in order to focus more on digital advertising. The company reported that sales are up, customer loyalty has increased and solidified and online coupon use has also increased.

Looking at how users are accessing information, both on desktops and mobile devices, it is not a surprise that advertisers are seeing success with digital ads. A report by ComScore out just two months ago shows that mobile only users are increasing over desktop site users or combination users. Pandora, ESPN and Twitter are the most accessed sites by people who are using those services exclusively on mobile devices. Also on the list are The Weather Channel, Gannett companies, NBC Universal, Walmart and Amazon.com

ComScore also notes that more than 50 million consumers have tablets and more than 125 million Americans now have smartphones. With that knowledge, it would be fatal for advertisers to ignore the digital market.

Cnet reports that Facebook is proof in the pudding. The social network is forecasted to garner more than $1 billion just from mobile ad revenue this year. That’s according to market research firm eMarketer. The research firm reports that Facebook has become the second greatest ad publisher in the United States. But even greater than Facebook is Google. Google is expected to attract more than 50 percent of all mobile ad revenue this year. Pandora is in third place and Twitter came in in fourth.

eMarketer also shared that U.S. mobile ads increased by about 178 percent last year and should rise by more than 77 percent this year. The projection by eMarketer is that about $27 billion could be spent on mobile advertisements by 2017.

But still, even with the obvious pros to mobile and digital advertising, not all businesses are willing to take that plunge. I’ve seen that on a personal level. Many of the businesses in the city where I work are owned by traditional or older business men and women. The idea of online advertising, to them, is still a futuristic and untested idea. On the flip side, younger business owners believe that they can create their own digital advertising through social media announcements that will have the same impact as online advertising with another company. So far, the way we’ve been able to expose clients to digital advertising perks is to include online advertising as part of an ad package. Exposure increases, page clicks are tracked, but there is still little interest in advertising outside of the print product. Perhaps that’s because advertisers on a local level still aren’t sure what measurements mean when it comes to clicks and views. They hear from customers that they saw an ad in the paper, but customers rarely mention they saw an ad on a website.

National companies have embraced digital advertising with success, but it looks as if it will take time for smaller companies to trust the brave new world of advertising possibilities. But, mobile marketing makes sense. Customization is easy, it costs less to produce digital ads, and they are easier to track. Mobile marketing is also instant. Friends and family can reach consumers quickly via smartphones – and so can advertisers. There’s no lag between the time an advertisement is uploaded to the time a mobile user could come in contact with the ad. Potential customers and clients usually have their smartphones with them most of the day. Also ,since mobile users are skilled at sharing, they’ll likely share good deals and company info they come in contact with.

What’s next? Corporate “Bat signals?” Shadow ads on the moon? What will be the next evolution of advertising?