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8 Tips for Managing Social Media Overload

By Christoph Plamper on January 8, 2010

Have you ever felt burned out from con­stant status alerts, hun­dreds of new posts on your twit­ter pro­file or drown­ing in new e-mails? It’s easy to get over­whelmed when enga­ging in social media. In this post I’ll show you how you can effect­ively man­age your social media pres­ence and avoid burn-out.

1. Keep it simple

Whatever you do, keep everything simple.

A large part of any engage­ment in social media is listen­ing to other users and decid­ing and act­ing upon the value of new con­tent and mes­sages. In social media there is a high amount of noise and it’s easy to miss rel­ev­ant con­tent and mes­sages if you’re not focused.

How to keep it simple:

  • Use tools and tech­niques which are not dis­rupt­ive and can be used easily.
  • Use indir­ect noti­fic­a­tion tools, such as Google Alerts, to send you news and hap­pen­ings via E-Mail or RSS for fur­ther processing.
  • Aggreg­ate tools and con­tent streams of sim­ilar value and func­tion. Use tools, such as Hoot­suite or Tweet­Deck, which enable you to post to sev­eral net­works at the same time from one application.
  • When you have a choice between tools and net­works of sim­ilar func­tion, usage and value, choose the one which is the most simple and most effect­ive to use.
  • Look out to where data is access­ible and can be eas­ily extrac­ted for fur­ther use.
  • Try to avoid tools and net­works which try to lock you into their own plat­form and which make shar­ing and extract­ing con­tent a hassle.

2. Auto­mate carefully

Do you still have the time to thank every new fol­lower of your Twit­ter pro­file by hand? Or would you rather send an auto­mated mes­sage to thank your new fol­low­ers and give a link to your homepage? Auto­mat­ing your com­mu­nic­a­tion streams in social media cer­tainly seems attract­ive, as a lot of time could be saved and many tedi­ous steps can be avoided. To many people auto­ma­tion seems to be the answer to cope with social media overload.

How­ever, you should be very care­ful with what you auto­mate: Too much auto­ma­tion defeats the pur­pose of social media and that of a social brand. Social media exists, because people wanted to con­nect dir­ectly to other people, insti­tu­tions and brands in a per­sonal, fast and ful­filling way. Auto­ma­tion is break­ing this social media con­nec­tion. Social media con­ver­sa­tions are per­sonal com­mu­nic­a­tions. Mar­ket­ing aims for brands to stay con­nec­ted with cus­tom­ers and to get to know their ideas, needs and thoughts intim­ately to offer bet­ter products and ser­vices. Auto­ma­tion to some extent defeats this pur­pose as it detaches you from your tar­get groups.

So, auto­mate care­fully. Use auto­ma­tion primar­ily to listen, to fil­ter con­tent and to plan and pri­or­it­ize your engage­ment. For send­ing, auto­mate small status mes­sages only to rel­ev­ant tar­get groups. Use auto­ma­tion to quickly answer recur­ring and gen­eric ques­tions, such as sup­port issues, which demand little involve­ment. Don’t auto­mate per­sonal con­tacts and con­ver­sa­tions. Make sure that most of what you say is per­sonal and dir­ec­ted to a single per­son. Make sure that your com­mu­nic­a­tion is relevant—don’t spam and avoid noise. Your cus­tom­ers and your fol­low­ers will thank you for this.

Some ways how you could auto­mate your social media presence:

  • Use a typ­ing repla­cer such as Tex­tEx­pander for the Mac to quickly answer to recur­ring messages.
  • Send out per­son­al­ized status mes­sages across many net­works to sim­ilar and highly seg­men­ted tar­get groups.
  • Use smart folders and fil­ters in your tools, such as your e-Mail pro­gram, to col­lect and fil­ter input.
  • Aggreg­ate con­tent auto­mat­ic­ally on defined keywords, searches and ori­gin to fur­ther pro­cess and fil­ter for eval­u­ation and priorization.

3. Use an RSS reader

RSS helps you to extract and read con­tent quickly. For example when you use a mod­ern browser such as Moz­illa Fire­fox or Apple’s Safari, you see a RSS–but­ton for this page in your browser’s address bar. When you click it, you can eas­ily be noti­fied of new con­tent of this blog and read it quickly. RSS frees you from vis­it­ing many pages manu­ally for new con­tent. A good RSS reader also offers addi­tional fil­ter­ing and pur­ging cap­ab­il­it­ies which helps you to quickly identify rel­ev­ant con­tent and mes­sages. If a ser­vice or net­work offers you an RSS feed, you should use it.

Picture of adding an RSS feed from plamper.info

Some good RSS read­ers are:

4. Have a social media mar­ket­ing plan and goals for each network

Always define spe­cific goals for your tar­get groups and net­works. Define what you want to achieve and gain by enga­ging in social media. You need to have a plan and stick to it, oth­er­wise it is easy to get dis­trac­ted and feel­ing lost. Without a plan it’s also dif­fi­cult to set pri­or­it­ies and to recog­nize what’s valu­able and what isn’t.

How to plan for social media:

  • Real­ize the tan­gible bene­fit for your busi­ness. What do you hope to gain by join­ing a social net­work, by fol­low­ing a spe­cific twit­ter user or by cre­at­ing a Face­book page?
  • Who is your audi­ence? Who are your tar­get groups?
  • What are your goals? Define goals for short-, medium– and long-term time­frames for each tar­get group and social network.
  • What is your capa­city? Do you have the capa­city and tools to pain­lessly engage in social media and scale your efforts?
  • What is your com­mit­ment? Do you want to focus on social media or are other mar­ket­ing and com­mu­nic­a­tion chan­nels (such as e-Mail, events or advert­ising) a bet­ter fit for your brand and tar­get groups?

5. Employ repu­ta­tion management

Your repu­ta­tion is your most import­ant asset in social media and you should pro­tect it at all costs. Bad news travel quickly and it’s dif­fi­cult to undo dam­age. When man­aging a brand for your­self or for your cli­ents, you should make mon­it­or­ing, pro­tect­ing and meas­ur­ing the brand’s repu­ta­tion a pri­or­ity. When assess­ing this inform­a­tion, it becomes clear where to focus your efforts. Good repu­ta­tion man­age­ment helps you to man­age your social media engage­ment (and vice versa) and lowers your stress level significantly.

Some more tools to mon­itor your reputation:

  • Free:
    • social­men­tion is a real time search engine which searches in blogs, net­works, book­marks, com­ments, images, videos and oth­ers. I use it all the time and recom­mend it highly.
    • Back­Type is a real-time, con­ver­sa­tional search engine. They index and con­nect con­ver­sa­tions from blogs, social net­works and other social media.
    • Boardreader is a search engine for for­ums and com­munit­ies. See what’s being talked about you or your brands.
    • Twit­ter Search searches Twit­ter for posts, men­tions and conversations.
    • Google Alerts & Google News help notify you about what’s being talked in the web based on keywords you define.
  • For-pay:
    • Radian6 scans over 100 mil­lion sites and sources, from blogs and com­ments to pho­tos, videos, for­ums, pub­lic Face­book groups, and Twit­ter, for con­ver­sa­tions and sen­ti­ment. They offer great tools for research and analytics.
    • Syso­mos provides busi­ness intel­li­gence tools and ser­vices for social media. Syso­mos provides instant access to all social media con­ver­sa­tions from blogs, social net­works and micro-blogging ser­vices to for­ums, video sites and media sources.
    • Nielsen’s BuzzMet­rics ser­vices aim to deliver trus­ted brand met­rics, mean­ing­ful con­sumer insights and real-time mar­ket intelligence.
    • Webtrends provides Enter­prise Cus­tomer Intel­li­gence for offer­ing extens­ive web ana­lyt­ics and social media tools and services.

6. Pick rig­or­ous sched­ules and stick with them

“Oh, just let me check my twit­ter feed again before I start writ­ing on my new blog post!” It’s easy to get lost and miss dead­lines when enga­ging in social media.

Here’s how you man­age your time wisely:

  • For busi­ness usage stick to defined sched­ules, while you can be a bit more leni­ent with your private profiles.
  • Don’t update com­mer­cial pro­files on the week­end. This is espe­cially import­ant for freel­an­cers and small busi­nesses. If you update your busi­ness pro­files on the week­end people often think that you’re oper­at­ing a busi­ness out of your bed­room. This can actu­ally harm your reputation.
  • Keep the week­end free. Take at least one day off from any social media activ­ity to free your head.
  • Align your sched­ule with your social mar­ket­ing plan and your goals.
  • Use a time man­age­ment or pro­ductiv­ity sys­tem like “Get­ting Things Done” or the “pomodoro” tech­nique.
  • Real­ize that no mat­ter how hard or how long you work, there will always be more status updates or more mes­sages to answer. Don’t worry about it. Pick a time in the even­ing to quit. When it’s time to quit, quit.

7. Dis­card what isn’t needed

To keep your stress level down you quickly need to identify new con­tent and mes­sages of value to you or your brand. You can’t answer to every mes­sage, to every tweet or to every post on your Face­book page. Identify the most rel­ev­ant mes­sages quickly by aggreg­at­ing your con­tent streams, by fil­ter­ing for keywords and by stick­ing to your goals and social media plan. Don’t be afraid to rig­or­ously dis­card what isn’t need. It’s the only way to handle an enorm­ous load of mes­sages and input.

Here are some tips on dis­card­ing unne­ces­sary inform­a­tion efficiently:

  • Ignore, block and delete posts by people who troll, are rude, mean. It’s just not worth your trouble and every­body loses. Some people are just out there to fight.
  • Ignore social media con­tent which is not rel­ev­ant to your interests or those of your brand or organization.
  • Ignore con­tent which, con­sid­er­ing your capa­city con­straints, is too time con­sum­ing to engage in.
  • Ignore con­tent which is not in line with your social media plan and goals.
  • Dis­card most auto­mated mes­sages as most of the time they have little value over per­sonal communication.
  • Turn off on-screen noti­fic­a­tions, such as new mail noti­fic­a­tions, and stick to fil­ter­ing, batch read­ing and answering.
  • Use smart folders, fil­ters and search quer­ies to quickly indentify rel­ev­ant and action­able content.

8. Make it a habit

Above all, make your engage­ment in social media a habit. Once it becomes a habit, you learn to quickly dis­tin­guish between rel­ev­ant and not-so-relevant con­tent and you become much more productive.

What do you think? How do you stay con­nec­ted without being overwhelmed?

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Crowdsourcing done right: A primer for companies, design and marketing agencies, participators and platforms (Part 2 of 2)

By Christoph Plamper on December 13, 2009

Apo­lo­gies for the late post, this one took me a bit longer to write up than I had anti­cip­ated before.

As I have argued before, a design crowd­sourcing strategy with the single focus on sav­ing money com­pared to pro­fes­sional design­ers or agen­cies case can harm and in worst case des­troy a brand’s reputation.

Non­ethe­less I feel that crowd­sourcing done right can be a viable and prom­ising mar­ket­ing strategy if the focus is on engage­ment, inter­ac­tion and viral com­mu­nic­a­tion.

Thus any crowd­sourcing strategy should always be part of a mar­ket­ing strategy and coupled with addi­tional goals, such as rais­ing aware­ness within a tar­get group. The design res­ults should not be the sole focus; what mat­ters is the deliv­ery of a mar­ket­ing and brand mes­sage along meas­ur­able Key Per­form­ance Indic­at­ors (KPI) (e.g. trough social media mon­it­or­ing). A good mar­ket­ing strategy cre­ates sus­tain­able engage­ment and con­ver­sa­tions between the com­pany, tar­get groups, part­ners and an inter­ested pub­lic, in order to max­im­ise aware­ness, to sell more products or ser­vices or simply to research a mar­ket. With crowd­sourcing care needs to be taken to ensure that the brand’s repu­ta­tion and strength is not weakened or damaged.

There­fore

  • the rendered and ulti­mately selec­ted design work must be in line with the company’s cor­por­ate mis­sion and val­ues, their products and ser­vices, pub­lic and employee sen­ti­ment and cor­por­ate identity.
  • par­ti­cip­at­ors, part­ners and future cli­ents must not be ali­en­ated by lan­guage, design and strategy.
  • as with any mar­ket­ing strategy, a crowd­sourcing strategy must be meas­ur­able and be measured/controlled.
  • the internal mar­ket­ing, PR and sales depart­ments ideally should be involved from the start and form cross-functional teams to speak with “one voice” across all channels

A suc­cess­ful crowd­sourcing strategy which focuses on qual­ity inter­ac­tion and com­mu­nic­a­tion is a huge amount of work. So let’s look at the roles of each party in a crowd­sourcing strategy.

Roles for cli­ents (com­pan­ies run­ning a crowd­sourcing strategy)

The client’s role in a crowd­sourcing strategy is a very import­ant one. Not only does he put his repu­ta­tion and brand very pub­licly on stake, he also needs to be strongly involved in the design process.

One word of cau­tion: Design crowd­sourcing is often viewed as “spec­u­lat­ive work” by the AIGA and other design asso­ci­ations and viewed very neg­at­ively among design pro­fes­sion­als. These sen­ti­ments should be taken ser­i­ously by the cli­ent and steps should be intro­duced to explain the inten­tions behind the client’s crowd­sourcing strategy. Ideally a design or advert­ising agency is con­tinu­ously involved in steer­ing and man­aging the crowd­sourcing strategy. This way they can provide often miss­ing design expert­ise to the cli­ent and work with win­ning design­ers to improve the results.

There­fore the client

  1. must focus on engage­ment, which is about inter­ac­tion, con­ver­sa­tion and vis­ib­il­ity, and not on sav­ing money.
  2. should identify and act upon com­mon intrinsic motivator’s within tar­get groups to max­im­ise the amount and qual­ity of con­tri­bu­tions (e.g. “save the kit­tens!” – just kidding)
  3. should treat and integ­rate any crowd­sourcing strategy as a mar­ket­ing campaign.
  4. must have expert­ise (oper­a­tional and stra­tegical) at hand in run­ning and mon­it­or­ing the crowd­sourcing strategy.
  5. must make sure that it has neces­sary expert­ise avail­able to assess and improve upon the qual­ity of rendered design works either by employ­ees (pro­fes­sional design­ers) or by part­ners like design and advert­ising agencies.
  6. should be pre­pared to quickly scale resources dur­ing and after the crowd­sourcing strategy.
  7. must be pre­pared to give highly spe­cific, yet read– and action­able briefs and be heav­ily involved in the cre­ation process.
  8. should cre­ate a goal and break it down as spe­cific as pos­sible. E.g. the cli­ent wants to com­mis­sion the cre­ation of a logo. What are the goals, what prob­lems should be solved, what mes­sages need to be con­veyed through a logo?
  9. should identify rel­ev­ant tar­get groups and cre­ate spe­cific goals for each tar­get group.
  10. must acknow­ledge and address the silent “lurk­ers”, too.
  11. should motiv­ate con­tri­bu­tion, motiv­ate peer review/revision, col­lab­or­a­tion, and con­sol­id­ate the community’s feed­back into single chan­nels, e.g. through award­ing user badges, giv­ing front page cov­er­age, or cre­at­ing a feed­back page which addi­tion­ally integ­rates twit­ter, Face­book com­ments etc.
  12. must closely meas­ure the strategy’s suc­cess with pre­defined KPI, such as page views, num­ber of posts, traffic, con­ver­sion rate to own pages etc.
  13. must closely track and mon­itor it’s repu­ta­tion (via repu­ta­tion man­age­ment), the brand’s men­tions and sen­ti­ment across all chan­nels (clas­sic media, social media, per­sonal rela­tion­ships, employees).
  14. must screen all pro­posed designs for pla­gi­ar­ism (no exception).
  15. should work with the win­ning designer to improve the work to make sure it reflects the company’s core val­ues and goals perfectly.
  16. should also award the other par­ti­cipants to avoid true “spec­u­lat­ive work”
  17. should util­ise the crowd’s know­ledge to also search for innov­at­ive applic­a­tions of the product or new mar­ket ideas.
  18. should make con­trib­ut­ing fun and stimulating
  19. should be as trans­par­ent as pos­sible and always dis­close sources and rela­tion­ships when enga­ging in conversations.
  20. above all should think before post­ing anything!

The cli­ent should not

  1. solely focus on sav­ing money.
  2. neg­lect par­ti­cip­at­ors, they need con­stant feed­back and guidance.
  3. com­plic­ate sign-up pro­cesses or the involve­ment in feed­back and engage­ment channels
  4. under any cir­cum­stance allow any pla­gi­ar­ised work

Roles for pro­fes­sion­als (agen­cies, con­sult­ants and pro­fes­sional designers)

The engage­ment in crowd­sourcing strategies of pro­fes­sion­als could be dif­fer­en­ti­ated in three ways:

  1. Part­ner, sup­porter or man­ager of a client’s crowd­sourcing strategy
  2. Deliv­er­ing design ser­vices to a crowd­sourced pitch (I’ll cover this issue under “participants”)
  3. Deliv­er­ing design ser­vices and addi­tion­ally provid­ing other sup­port­ing or man­aging roles for a client’s crowd­sourcing strategy

In regard to design pro­fes­sion­als (design­ers, agen­cies) espe­cially it has to be noted that most of their income is built around ser­vices, such as provid­ing neces­sary IT infra­struc­tures before­hand e.g. for a web design, or pic­ture and IP man­age­ment, con­sult­ing or simply being a spar­ring part­ner, whereas the cre­at­ive pro­cess, the graphic labour is not the main focus of the agency or designer. While they ulti­mately sell a logo or cor­por­ate design as the end product, most deliv­er­ables are ser­vices to the cli­ent. I men­tion this, as my point is that by par­tak­ing in design crowd­sourcing strategies there is an oppor­tun­ity for these pro­fes­sion­als to build and offer addi­tional rev­enue gen­er­at­ing ser­vices which they wouldn’t have been able to provide in the tra­di­tional busi­ness process.

The pro­fes­sional

  1. must be able to influ­ence the crowd­sourced results.
  2. should try to identify and offer addi­tional ser­vices along a crowd­sourcing strategy, e.g. build­ing an accom­pa­ny­ing web­site or writ­ing a brand book.
  3. should try to build and provide much of the plat­form used for crowd­sourcing itself (thanks to Mar­tin Sor­rell for the hint)
  4. must build vis­ible roles within the crowd­sourcing strategy both to par­ti­cip­at­ors, his own cli­ents, future cli­ents and his employees.
  5. should cre­ate a goal and break it down as spe­cific as pos­sible. E.g. he might want to search for new trends—then what are the res­ult­ing goals, stra­tegic implic­a­tions, steps to do and prob­lems to solve?
  6. should identify rel­ev­ant tar­get groups and cre­ate spe­cific goals for each tar­get group. E.g. he might want to pos­i­tion him­self for follow-up pro­jects for another cor­por­ate office or brand. Who are the key decision makers? Of what value are cur­rent con­tri­bu­tions within the crowd­sourcing strategy to them?
  7. must closely meas­ure the strategy with pre­defined metrics.
  8. must closely track and mon­itor his repu­ta­tion (via repu­ta­tion man­age­ment), his brand’s men­tions and sen­ti­ment across all chan­nels (clas­sic media, social media, per­sonal rela­tion­ships, employees).

Roles for par­ti­cipants in crowd­sourced design projects

In line with AIGA’s pos­i­tion on “spec­u­lat­ive work”, I don’t recom­mend or pro­pose to join most “reg­u­lar” design crowd­sourcing pro­jects as a designer. Some warn­ing flags for not join­ing a pro­ject are where

  • it is obvi­ous that the cli­ent is simply look­ing to save money com­pared to a pro­fes­sional designer or agency
  • it is obvi­ous that the cli­ent is lack­ing the neces­sary expert­ise in assess­ing the qual­ity of design work
  • the cli­ent is not valu­ing the import­ance of a solid cor­por­ate design and iden­tity for his products and services
  • the cli­ent does not provide back­ground inform­a­tion and feedback
  • the client’s products and ser­vices don’t seem to be reput­able (no mat­ter how reput­able the crowd­sourcing platform)
  • the crowd­sourcing plat­form doesn’t seem to be reput­able (no mat­ter how reput­able the client)
  • the terms and con­di­tions require that upon entry all cre­ated designs, not just the win­ning designs, have all rights trans­ferred to the cli­ent or the platform
  • the terms and con­di­tions require to also give up source files, such as layered Pho­toshop files, to the client
  • the crowd­sourcing plat­form doesn’t screen the entries for pla­gi­ar­ism and in worst case doesn’t accept respons­ib­il­ity if a ripped-off design should be selec­ted as the winner

Most fees for design crowd­sourcing are sig­ni­fic­antly below what pro­fes­sion­als would usu­ally charge for. On what basis should pro­fes­sion­als choose to enter in crowd­sourcing pro­jects? One pos­i­tion is:

[T]he answer is simple. Is the ROI (Return on Invest­ment) in such a project—mostly attention—for you as a pro­fes­sional enough to engage? Is the recog­ni­tion big enough to boost your port­fo­lio in such a way to find pay­ing cus­tom­ers for other pro­jects? If not don’t do it…

Non­ethe­less, a participant

  1. should con­sider crowd­sourcing strategies backed by pro­fes­sion­als and com­pan­ies who fully under­stand the risks and advant­ages of crowdsourcing
  2. should like­wise under­stand all risks and advantages
  3. should con­sider pro­jects where addi­tional tan­gible bene­fits for par­ti­cip­at­ing are offered, such as expert­ise, busi­ness or mar­ket inform­a­tion or cred­ible exposure
  4. should cre­ate addi­tional goals and break them down as spe­cific as pos­sible. E.g. he might want to offer addi­tional ser­vices such as print test­ing, design­ing a brand book or to simply pos­i­tion him­self for future gigs—then what are the res­ult­ing goals, stra­tegic implic­a­tions, steps to do and prob­lems to solve?
  5. should closely read and under­stand the terms and con­di­tions of the crowd­sourcing platform
  6. should never be required to give up source files without addi­tional compensation
  7. should closely mon­itor his and his client’s repu­ta­tion dur­ing the contest
  8. should never pla­gi­ar­ise any work, ever

Roles of crowd­sourcing plat­forms in crowd­sourcing strategies

I think crowd­sourcing plat­forms can only make a last­ing dif­fer­ence and dif­fer­en­ti­ate them­selves if they enable cus­tom­ers and their part­ners to integ­rate crowd­sourcing within a mar­ket­ing strategy.

There­fore platforms

  1. should offer com­pan­ies to mon­itor and track the campaign’s suc­cess and social media buzz, e.g. by offer­ing an access­ible for-pay–API for social media mon­it­or­ing and the platform’s rank­ing system
  2. should offer easy and flex­ible cus­tom­isa­tion of pro­ject pages by the client
  3. should offer simple and easy to use pro­ject man­age­ment fea­tures for cli­ents, their part­ners and the participants
  4. should offer strategies and incent­ives for cli­ents to reward par­ti­cip­a­tion, e.g. by offer­ing status badges (“premium user”), by rank­ing entries, by offer­ing spe­cial soft­ware bundles or inform­a­tion to the participants
  5. should offer addi­tional integ­rated ser­vices such as hand­ling the full billing process
  6. should check all sub­mis­sions for plagiarism
  7. should provide design expert­ise to cli­ents and participators
  8. need to solve the “winner-takes-it-all”-problem, thus avoid­ing to pro­mote exploit­a­tion and the cre­ation of “spec­u­lat­ive work”

Con­clu­sion

A suc­cess­ful crowd­sourcing strategy which focuses on qual­ity inter­ac­tion and com­mu­nic­a­tion is a huge amount of work. But executed and meas­ured cor­rectly, it can cre­ate a last­ing impact. Now go and experiment!

What do you think?

Recom­men­ded reading

  1. “Crowd­sourcing, motiv­a­tion and agencies”
  2. What’s being ignored in the Crowd­sourcing debate
  3. Crowd­sourcing 101
  4. Why logo con­tests don’t work
  5. The real prob­lem with design contests
  6. The real­ity of logo design contests
  7. Why logo design does not cost five dollars
  8. The ‘Pros’ and Cons of spec work
  9. Why you should crowd­source your logo

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Crowdsourcing done right: A primer for companies, design and marketing agencies and participators (Pt. 1 of 2)

By Christoph Plamper on December 10, 2009

In my last post I high­lighted prob­lems I feel that exist with many design crowd­sourcing strategies and platforms:

  • Poor qual­ity of rendered ser­vices due to often unqual­i­fied par­ti­cipants and a “winner-takes-it-all”-mentality
  • Com­pan­ies not under a pro­fes­sional design guid­ance have dif­fi­culty assess­ing the qual­ity of rendered ser­vices and catch­ing sig­ni­fic­ant design mistakes
  • Often the prom­ised fee to the win­ning design is sig­ni­fic­antly lower than what pro­fes­sional agen­cies or design­ers are char­ging. This leads to cut­ting corners and omit­ting crit­ical steps such as cre­at­ing a brand­book or test­ing a logo on dif­fer­ent areas of applications.
  • Also, often the import­ance of a solid cor­por­ate design and cor­por­ate iden­tity as major brand ambas­sad­ors are not recog­nized by par­ti­cip­at­ors and cli­ents alike. In worst case a weak, pub­lic design work can harm a company’s brand and repu­ta­tion (e.g. if a chosen, crowd­sourced logo incor­rectly cap­tures the company’s estab­lished cor­por­ate mis­sion and core values.)

In my opin­ion, the (short­sighted) appeal of crowd­sourcing to primar­ily save money is due to four reasons:

  1. There is an abund­ance in pro­fes­sional design­ers but also many more hobbyists.
  2. There are fairly inex­pens­ive digital tools avail­able to cre­ate digital work. Tools such as the open source graphic editor “Gimp” or the com­mer­cial Adobe Pho­toshop have sig­ni­fic­antly lowered the bar­ri­ers of entry to cre­at­ing design work.
  3. The rise of the social web makes it easier to con­nect to design enthu­si­asts and pitch for design works.
  4. The web has the repu­ta­tion of fast deliv­ery and rapid iteration.

Non­ethe­less I also feel that design crowd­sourcing done right can be a viable and prom­ising mar­ket­ing strategy if the focus is on engage­ment, inter­ac­tion and viral com­mu­nic­a­tion with tar­get groups and an inter­ested pub­lic able to act as mul­ti­pli­ers. The chal­lenge here is to get high pro­filic tar­get groups and design­ers into the brand’s con­nec­tion chan­nels, such as Twit­ter, Face­book, com­pany events etc. and both cre­ate a last­ing engage­ment as well as viral aware­ness. Thus crowd­sourcing should be included as a viable tool in the social mar­ket­ing toolbox.

In this post I will high­light some advant­ages for com­pan­ies, design and mar­ket­ing agen­cies and par­ti­cip­at­ors in crowd­sourcing strategies. Tomor­row in part II I’ll describe best prac­tices for com­pan­ies, agen­cies and par­ti­cipants in design crowdsourcing.

The per­ceived advant­ages of crowdsourcing

While design crowd­sourcing is noth­ing par­tic­u­larly new (design plat­forms and online job boards have exis­ted for a long time) the ubi­quity and ease of col­lab­or­a­tion, inter­ac­tion and con­ver­sa­tion through social media and net­work­ing have greatly fueled the demand of crowd­sourcing ser­vices. One not­able example was the Uni­lever brand drop­ping it’s long-term agency Lowe to pur­sue a crowd­sourcing ad cam­paign for their Pep­perami brand.

But what are the per­ceived advant­ages for com­pan­ies (cli­ents), tra­di­tional design and mar­ket­ing pro­fes­sion­als (agen­cies and pro­fes­sional design­ers) and par­ti­cipants (design­ers) alike to par­ti­cip­ate in crowdsourcing?

Advant­ages for companies

Advant­ages of design crowd­sourcing for com­pan­ies are mostly func­tional not strategic:

  • Lots of dif­fer­ent designs and input to choose from com­pared to fewer iter­a­tions from a single agency or designer
  • High cost transparency—only the pro­posed prize money is paid to the win­ning design
  • Large tal­ent pool to source ideas from
  • Money-back guar­an­tee by the more pro­fes­sional plat­forms in case of low pro­ject attention
  • Sig­ni­fic­antly lower costs than with hir­ing design professionals
  • No need to invite vari­ous agen­cies and design­ers to time-consuming pitches
  • Abil­ity to cre­ate aware­ness and attract new inter­est­ing tar­get groups
  • Abil­ity to fun­nel and redir­ect atten­tion into the company’s other mar­ket­ing engage­ment streams (cor­por­ate web­site, blog, twit­ter pro­file etc.)

Advant­ages for tra­di­tional mar­ket­ing and design pro­fes­sion­als (agen­cies and pro­fes­sional designers)

Advant­ages of design crowd­sourcing for design pro­fes­sion­als are mostly stra­tegic and not functional:

  • Abil­ity to source for design trends and lan­guage, pref­er­ences and feed­back among tar­get groups and an inter­ested pub­lic and gen­er­ate addi­tional value
  • Abil­ity to integ­rate into design crowd­sourcing as part of a company’s mar­ket­ing cam­paign by pro­fes­sion­ally steer­ing, man­aging and improve upon the crowd­sourced res­ults and input
  • Abil­ity to add and build addi­tional rev­enue cre­at­ing ser­vices for the cli­ent, such as ana­lyz­ing social media met­rics, man­aging mar­ket­ing cam­paigns or con­sult­ing on other client’s challenges
  • Abil­ity to gen­er­ate aware­ness and attract new cli­ents by gen­er­at­ing atten­tion along­side the tra­di­tional cus­tomer acquis­i­tion through cold calls, bids and pitches.

Advant­ages for participants

For design crowd­sourcing participants—the people who cre­ate the design work as spe­cified by the client—the advant­ages are both func­tional and strategic:

  • Abil­ity to quickly source among a huge num­ber of pro­spect­ive jobs
  • In some cases the highly com­pet­it­ive envir­on­ment acts as a driver and motivator
  • Abil­ity to source for design trends, inspir­a­tion and cus­tomer feed­back among a broad public
  • Abil­ity to eas­ily pro­mote and advert­ise one’s work and portfolio
  • Abil­ity to fun­nel and redir­ect atten­tion towards own mar­ket­ing chan­nels (twit­ter pro­file, face­book page, own blog etc.)

As I have shown design crowd­sourcing done wrong can have dire con­sequences for a brand’s repu­ta­tion in spite of great poten­tial and advant­ages for all parties.

So how do you avoid these poten­tially dev­ast­at­ing mis­takes and use crowd­sourcing as a power­ful mar­ket­ing tool? Tomor­row in part II I’ll describe best prac­tices for com­pan­ies, agen­cies and par­ti­cipants in design crowdsourcing.

What do you think?

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On Design Crowdsourcing

By Christoph Plamper on November 25, 2009

Recently I was asked what I think about the rise of design plat­forms, such as Crowd­spring, where people can hold con­tests for logos, web design and other design ser­vices for small fees. Crowd­sourcing stands for search­ing for ser­vices or products within an inter­ested “crowd” in the inter­net, be it an online com­munity or a mar­ket­place. Design crowd­sourcing thus stands for search­ing for design ser­vices such as logo cre­ation, web or print design.

The idea of pub­lic con­tests for design ser­vices in addi­tion to a fee paid for the win­ning concept is not par­tic­u­larly new. Plat­forms and design com­munit­ies with design con­tests have exis­ted for quite a while already but it seems that only recently they have really taken off. I think much of this devel­op­ment is due to the small bar­ri­ers of entry (i.e. the men­tal­ity that any­body can design just with the right soft­ware) and the pos­sib­il­ity of a crit­ical com­munity (cli­ents, design­ers and com­munity can inter­act much more flu­ently from rat­ing to feedback.)

You get what you pay for

My per­sonal opin­ion on crowd­sourcing design ser­vices is in most cases a very neg­at­ive one.

Firstly, all too often the qual­ity of the res­ults is below that of a pro­fes­sional design agency or designer. This is due to three reas­ons: The pay for most design con­tests is sig­ni­fic­antly lower than what what most pro­fes­sional agen­cies or design­ers would usu­ally charge for. Also, many con­test­ants are not pro­fes­sion­als but merely hob­by­ists using a cracked copy of Pho­toshop who are hop­ing to earn a dol­lar on the side (sad but true). Lastly many res­ults are often quite sim­ilar to another as with often hun­dreds of com­pet­it­ors only one win­ner takes it all and gets the cash. Thus often each logo is reused for the next pitch with only small changes.

Secondly, the people choos­ing the win­ning design are all too often not design pro­fes­sion­als them­selves. This makes it dif­fi­cult to appre­ci­ate qual­ity work and catch sig­ni­fic­ant design mis­takes, such as the incom­pat­ib­il­ity of a logo in small sizes or dark backgrounds.

Thirdly, when par­tak­ing in crowd­sourcing there is a great danger of unin­ten­tion­ally viol­at­ing trade­marks of exist­ing com­pan­ies which can res­ult in hefty legal fees. A reput­able designer or design agency will check any rendered work for pos­sible trade­mark violations.

In other words: “You get what you pay for.” For little money you usu­ally get work of little value.

Invest­ing in a solid Cor­por­ate Design pays off

A Cor­por­ate Iden­tity needs to be unique and cap­ture the brand and the company’s goals and products per­fectly. Many com­pan­ies seem to think that with cre­at­ing a logo they have done all for what it takes to estab­lish a Cor­por­ate Iden­tity. This is not so. A reput­able and pro­fes­sional design agency or designer will hold sev­eral meet­ings to fully under­stand the company’s pref­er­ences and val­ues and will do sev­eral revi­sions of the work as well as test­ing the logo on as many areas of applic­a­tions such as the web and dif­fer­ent paper types. Like­wise they will also cre­ate a brand book which defines require­ments for logo place­ment, cor­por­ate col­ors, paper recom­mend­a­tions, sup­port­ing pho­to­graphic mater­ial etc. Addi­tion­ally a Cor­por­ate Design not only con­sists of the logo alone, but also of let­ters, busi­ness cards, web design and promo mater­ial and even booth design for trade shows. All of this is not an easy work. In Crowd­sourcing the scope of design work and of a solid Cor­por­ate Iden­tity is often neg­lected and many steps, such as cre­at­ing a brand book, are ommitted.

When cre­at­ing a Cor­por­ate Iden­tity com­pan­ies and design­ers alike should not try to skimp on the wrong end. After all a Cor­por­ate Design within a Cor­por­ate Iden­tity is the ulti­mate face of a brand intern­ally as extern­ally and the most import­ant brand ambas­sador. Thus the cre­ation of a Cor­por­ate Design deserves greatest care and atten­tion. The extra money for a pro­fes­sional, reput­able design agency or designer in the long term is well spent.

Where crowd­sourcing is acceptable

Still, I think there are three excep­tions where crowd­sourcing is accept­able (two more so, one less so):

If you need pho­to­graphic mater­ial just for the web, using microstock ser­vices (such as iStock­photo or stock.xchng) is per­fectly adequate for most products and ser­vices. For small money you can get high qual­ity pic­tures which might be per­fectly suited for your audi­ence. The more expens­ive and pro­fes­sional stock photo pro­viders (such as Cor­bis) have their place in advert­ising, print bro­chures and premium mar­ket­ing material.

For Open Source soft­ware such as Linux and espe­cially Open Source games such as Wesnoth, which is pro­duced by volun­teers, crowd­sourcing is the pre­ferred way to source any input, ran­ging from UI enhance­ments, icons or code. After all the out­put is freely shared to any­body else interested.

Lastly, design con­tests as part of a mar­ket­ing strategy to attract new cus­tom­ers and a young audi­ence can also be an accept­able way of crowd­sourcing. The goal here is not so much to profit from free ideas and design work but more to attract a young audi­ence and estab­lish a cre­at­ive dia­logue. Still great care needs to be taken to ensure that the focus of such con­tests is not cost-cutting design work but estab­lish­ing qual­ity inter­ac­tion with cus­tom­ers, stake­hold­ers and the press alike. Design con­tests become prob­lem­atic for the reas­ons out­lined above when they are simply used for get­ting qual­ity work for free or a very low price.

What do you think?

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Welcome to my new blog

By Christoph Plamper on November 25, 2009

After a long hiatus and much pro­cras­tin­at­ing, I’ll give blog­ging another shot. Expect to find qual­ity art­icles on mar­ket­ing, brand­ing, social media, and web startups.

I’ll try to blog at least once a week though in the begin­ning a bit more frequently.

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