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[audio] Hello, everyone. Last slot before tea, and I’ll try to do it very quickly. One thing I’ve learned about the biggest challenges in social media this year is trying to do a presentation in seven and a half minutes, but let’s give a will. So, skip the head. I take it everyone here knows what crowdsourcing is. It’s about using the power of the crowd to come up with some good ideas for a business problem or a marketing brief, in our case. Jeff Howe coined the term in, actually, in 2006 in Wired Magazine, and our site, which is called Idea Bounty, uses the principles of crowdsourcing to try to solve creative briefs from clients, from marketing organizations. Right, but it’s not anything new. In fact, the Oxford dictionary, in the 19th century, was put together by people coming in and handed in words that they thought should be included. But today with social media, the crowd is much larger, it’s better connected, and there’s a lot of different ways that people can submit their ideas or their opinions.

So, how does it work? Really, a company has a problem, they [xx] that problem online, the online crowd is asked to give solutions, the crowd submits their solutions, the crowd vex(?) the solutions, the company rewards the winner and solve this. The company then earns the solutions and, hopefully, the company profits from those ideas. So, that’s a really quick aids tip guide to crowdsourcing.

There’s quite a few businesses out there that are doing some sexy stuff in the space. Most of you probably have heard of Threadless, which is a t-shirt company and they would design t-shirts based on the crowd’s ideas. But they range everything from wikipedias through to 99designs and CrowdSpring, which does graphic design and logo development through crowdsourcing.

So, what do we do? We try to solve clients’ marketing problems by using the principles of crowdsourcing. So, clients can upload a brief or problem that they have on to our website, they set a bounty or reward, and the community of creatives that we’ve developed over time, respond with their solutions. Then, the client then goes through those ideas, decides which ones they like, and hopefully pays a winner.

What do these all got to do with social media? Well, we wouldn’t be standing in front of you if we didn’t use social media to develop the community that we built around Idea Bounty. We’ve spent all of about $200 in marketing so far, but we’ve managed to build a community of about 8,000 people. We’ve done so through a variety of social media tactics. We have a very active blog and Twitter screen, where we don’t just try to promote ourselves but we try to give as much value to our community as possible. So, we know we talked to a creative audience so we write about anything from Sex Toys through to Stopmotion through to the latest ads and reviews of the latest creative products. That really have built a community over time that are very involved and enthusiastic about what we’re doing.

Our site has caused quite a shake-up in the industry. I’ve actually spent most of my morning commenting and reading comments on Amelia Torode’s blog. Amelia is the head of Scrap Planning at VCCP, and she wrote a fairly scathing review of Idea Bounty and accused us of exploiting the creative community and a few other things. I think a lot of her points were valid, but interestingly, within putting up that post and I’ve been active in following her in the back in the room, there’s now been almost 50 comments since she’d put it up, from a wide variety of audiences.

I think we’ve actually changed the way we’re thinking about our business based on the comments that people got in. They’re all the challenges that some of the people have responded has really made us think about how were going to go forward with the business. So, I think, social media has not only built our community that we belong to source ideas but very importantly helping us evolve our business to be more meaningful to the people we’re trying to communicate with.

It definitely isn’t easy. From our perspective, we get a lot of flak online, Amelia is not the first person to give us a hard time. We have to try and pick up those things as a socially aware brand and respond to them as quickly as possible. But also try to not to only have our own Idea Bounty had fun as we do it, but you try to see their opinions and take them seriously, and trying to, as a business, run your actual business and follow all those conversations and respond to all of them appropriately is really challenging. I’m sure it’s a challenge that many of you are experiencing. Modest piece of advice from this is invest in some kind of monetary and software, I think that makes your life a lot easier. There are some very good ones out there, and they can help cut down a lot of your workload.

So, I thought it would be interesting in terms of this audience to talk about what kind of brief work in a crowdsourcing platform. I think it’s very important to make clear that probably the vast majority of marketing or creative [xx] with for crowdsourcing. Either because the product hasn’t been launched yet and it’s confidential or you don’t want your competitors to know or the problem is so complex that someone would need to have a strong, strategic knowledge in order to get a head around it and solve it.

But there are some problems that are well suited to crowdsourcing and to social media applications. These are some of the clients we’ve had on our site so far…four minutes, I’m doing well then, I’m way ahead. So, Levi’s put up a brief on our site asking for ideas for activations and music festivals. They sponsor a number of them and they were looking for what could they do at a music festival to help raise brand awareness and push out the brand values. They’ve got some very good solutions, I’m not actually at liberty to say what they are because they haven’t implemented them yet, but that’s the kind of brief that works very well.

WWF was our second from last brief that we had on the site, and they ask to let us help make the planet a better place. They were actually blown away by the communities in response to this, we’ve got close on a thousand ideas, and they really struggle with time to work out which one they were going to pay for and implement.

So, our most recent brief, and probably our most controversial, has been for Peperami, the Unilever salami product. Most of you know this talking salami chap and his name is the Animal, and they’ve been running this campaign for about 10 years, and in fact, 15 years now. Lowe was their advertising agency and then actually got the can, unfortunately, in order to use Idea Bounty to source their new TV commercial and print campaign.

What we did was try and build the community’s interest into this product through social media. So, not only did we go and speak in creative forums and respond to bloggers and tweeters who have a creative interest, but we also went to look at mommy bloggers and at kids who actually eat the product and tried to get them to get involved and respond to the brief, of which many thousands did.

So, to give you some top line result from this for your interest, we had, all in all, about 1,200 campaigns submitted for this brief, which was far more than we expected and ended up causing a lot of late nights for myself and the team. And, Unilever have actually recently just picked a winner. In fact, they were so blown away by the quality of submissions that they’ve taken more. They were planning to reward one print campaign and one TV campaign, and actually now are rewarding three and paying out more money that they had originally plan.

But, again, without the social media input on to this brief, I don’t think we would have gotten the level of submissions we had. Also, how we actually ended up choosing the idea, we looked to our community in terms of what process we would use to vex(?) and control those ideas. So, making sure that they were both along with us in the process.

And, that’s me, thank you very much, everyone.

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