This is the third edition of the RAAKonteur. A smartly annotated compendium of what caught our eye this week in the world of social & digital media.

Social Media spend is set to double

So says Brian Solis quoting a study of marketing spend in the US this year. If anybody has seen similar figures for the UK, let us know.

“Social Media offers tremendous growth potential and as such, budgets are multiplying. As reported in the research, social media budgets will spring from 5.6% to 9.9% this year. However, over the next five years, social media budgets will swell to 17.7% of the total marketing spend.”

Newspapers show further decline as source of info

A further study (again in the US) showed that newspapers have declined further as both a source of information and entertainment.

“Only 56 percent of Internet users surveyed agreed with the statement that newspapers were an important or very important source of information, while 68 percent said that television was, and 78 percent said that the Internet was.”

Pay with a Tweet

The value of Word Of Mouth in the online world is enormous. A recent UK survey stated that 70% of people trust online recommendations from strangers. And a visitor coming from a Social Media site is 10 times more like to make a purchase.

This simple tool taps brilliantly into that distribution potential. It’s called Pay With A Tweet and does exactly that. In exchange for downloading a bit of content for free, you have to tweet about it.

Zed is dead & flip-flopping Anderson?

Remember Chris Anderson? He of Wired Magazine, ‘The Long Tail’ & ‘Free – The Future Of A Revolutionary Price’ fame? Rumour has it that he is preparing a Wired magazine front page declaring the open Web dead. It’s been killed by apps and platforms like the iPad.

“Anderson is much less glowing about the web and Wired’s place on it in particular. In June local newspaper, the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, reported a talk that Anderson gave around Wired’s $4.99 iPad app, which sold 80,000 copies in 10 days.

He said that reading Wired on a tablet is fundamentally different than going to Wired.com, which he said looks like many media websites and “carries little content from the magazine”.

He added that while reading any magazine is supposed to be an immersive experience, with the design and long pieces keeping readers’ attentions for prolonged sittings, none of those aspects translates well to the web.”

It looks like the web is under assault from all sides. Just this week another post appeared about how Facebook is killing web sites. A lot of the content on Facebook is not readable by Google. And even the bits that are, are ’social objects’. Little bits of text and video, and not pages – the unit that Google likes (see RAAKonteur 2).

But at RAAK we’ve never seen content, social objects or pages as the epicenter of the web. People are. People have never been more easy to connect to. Flipbook, the social iPad magazine which we wrote about last week refutes Anderson’s new ideological trajectory. SEO research shows that long form web content is most successful as so called ‘Linkbait’. And open API’s, which enable apps like Flipbook, have never been more ubiquitous.

Collaborating for Social Good

We’ve been thinking a lot about creative collaboration platforms and crowdsourcing (see what we did with Guided Collective). So we were intrigued when innovation agency IDEO this week launched OpenIDEO, a platform that enables people to collaboratively design solutions for social good.

They’ve made a nice video that explains how it all works. You can get involved on different levels (important), but what struck us most is how they developed a ‘Digital Quotient’, a badge of honour that is defined by your activity on the platform. Glory plays a major part in Social Media (as it does in real life), so we’ll definitely keep a close eye on how this creative reputation score pans out.

Respect my Authority!

Speaking of reputation. Last week Robert Scoble broke the story of Flipbook. This week he interviewed (video) Azeem Azhar of PeerIndex, an authority system similar to Klout (see RAAKonteur 1). But PeerIndex claims to be different from Klout in some ways.

Firstly it only tracks people and not brands. And it differentiates on topics. This means that you can have a high score for the topic of Sustainability, but score low on Cloud Computing.

Do check out the video, they touch on a number of important issues, including how smart people who don’t use social media will eventually lose out.

I Tweet therefor I am

“I came late to Twitter. I might have skipped the phenomenon altogether, but I have a book coming out this winter, and publishers, scrambling to promote 360,000-character tomes in a 140-character world, push authors to rally their “tweeps” to the cause. Leaving aside the question of whether that actually boosts sales, I felt pressure to produce. I quickly mastered the Twitterati’s unnatural self-consciousness: processing my experience instantaneously, packaging life as I lived it.”

The New York Times had an fascinating piece this week by author Peggy Orenstein on how Twitter changes who we are and how we express ourselves (note: NYT sign up required).

Another cool tool – you dork

The other day we saw a Social Media course that sold social media as an alternative to email. No kidding. Email is social too! Social Media isn’t an alternative!

Which brings us to Rapportive, a service that pulls in data from your contacts’ social profiles into your Gmail. Outlook already has a similar service in Xobni, all making the inbox more social.

Creative of the week – Meet Saga

Our pick of the week is Icelandic photographer Saga Sigurdardottir, who’s an example that proves that Social Media allows talent to shine.

East London Blogger Suzie Bubble is one of the UK’s most influential fashionistas. Her blog is so big that she regularly ranks higher in Google Trends than Dazed & Confused, the magazine she once helped edit.

So when Suzie started enthusing about Saga Sigurdardottir’s photography, we took notice. This young Icelandic creative – now resident in East London herself – does not only take other-worldly fashion pictures, she paints and makes haunting films, collaborating with fashion illustrator Hildur Yeoman.

Follow Saga on Twitter.

Tech insight of the week

Ever since Facebook’s implementation of the Open Graph Protocol, the Facebook Like button has been spreading like wildfire.

In this week’s tech column we write about the downside of the Like Button for users, and the upside for thrifty Marketeers.

RAAK is proud to announce our latest project. We helped conceive and then built a creative platform (Guided Collective) that we think might just be a major sign post on the road of change creative agencies are hurtling along.

Ever since Unilever’s crowdsourced Peperami campaign, debates have raged (Brand Republic) about the future of crowdsourcing and its potential to encroach on the domain of agencies. On the other side of the pond, people like Bud Cadell have even wondered if the future needs an agency at all (Whatconsumesme).

Guided Collective is a hybrid between a traditional agency and a crowdsourcing platform. It is driven by a collective of top freelance creatives from all kinds of disciplines that use an online collaboration platform to pitch and collaborate on creative briefs.

The platform is invite-only, so we can't show what really is under the hood of Guided. But included in this post are some screengrabs that we made with dummy briefs & content

One of the main arguments for opening up the creative team is the range of skills now required when seeking to speak to consumers. Edward Boches, Chief Creative Officer and Chief Social Media Officer of US agency Mullen recently blogged (EdwardBoches.com):

“You can make ads with a writer and art director. But if you want to
conceive and execute platforms, utility and experiences, you need IA, UX, technology, connection planning and social media working together. This is a significant change for many agencies but one that is absolutely essential. It may come with pain and resistance but what choice to you really have? The post digital days are upon us.”

But crowdsourcing as the panacea is not without its detractors. It is argued that it does not take into account important agency functions, like account management, coordination (in particular with large transmedia campaigns) and long term strategic planning.

A second criticism is that it exploits creatives in a competitive free-for-all environment, where their chances of winning work are slim and the remuneration is paltry.

The Guided platform tries to address exactly these two issues. The platform itself is invite-only and restricted in size. It aims to have the UK’s best creative talent, across a number of disciplines. From copywriters and bloggers, to iPhone developers, social media strategists and directors.

Guided comes with an in-house account management team. Clients are familiar with that kind of dedicated attention and service.

And importantly creatives can earn money three different ways:

1. One is by coming up with a winning concept.
2. Secondly – and this is unique – part of the budget is ring-fenced for collaborating on a winning concept; to make it even better or by giving input that makes the idea go transmedia.
3. Lastly, creatives can win all or part of the actual production of a concept.

Sam Reid, founder of Guided studied research on crowdsourcing when planning the collective:

“When it comes to solving specialist problems, research shows that numbers are not necessarily the solution. They are great for simple yes/no stimuli but become quickly overwhelming for complex tasks. For this it’s better to have a range of different skills within a smaller network.

We have a heterogeneous but small crowd. This is a doubly good, because besides having cross-discipline inputs, creatives who are part of this crowd won’t feel like a number. And happy creatives means good work.”

So what did RAAK do? We helped Sam conceptualise the Guided way of working as well as the Guided platform. RAAK then went and built it.

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The platform consists of two types of functionality. One set of functionality is community orientated, including what must be the sexiest ‘activity feed’ and member profile pages in any social network. But what really makes this platform significant and unique are the collaboration features.

Guided has bespoke functionality geared to make creatives happy, which is too often neglected. When we conducted focus groups, it was clear there was a concern amongst creatives that their peers could steal their ideas. So we included functionality to allow them to make their ideas visible only to members in other specialities than their own. So a director’s idea won’t be seen by other directors, if they so wish, but everybody else will.

Is the Guided platform perfect?

No. But it’s a very good first take on how we might source creative work to engage with customers on behalf of brands in the future. And we’ll be improving it constantly as we go along and discover more about collective and social creativity.

More about how Guided works in this lovely animation.

One of THE buzzwords of 2009 in the creative industries was ‘crowdsourcing’. It divided opinions to say the least.
Some people saw it as a more flexible, more open, more direct (and cheaper) way of getting things done.
Others saw it as a threat, as the death of their industries.

Crowdsourcing is a reality that won’t go away just yet and instinctively we’ve always leant towards to the first group, but divisive issues need to be tried and tested.
We already used crowdsourcing techniques very succesfully in our RAAK logo experiment, but that project was of course of a more personal, a more creative nature.
So when we got the chance to apply the concept on a commercial project, with a real client, we jumped at it.
And this is what we learnt.

The job was to design a website and a brand identity for a start-up consultancy agency called Consultifi. Because of our plug-in model, we don’t work with in-house designers and normally we would tap into our network and instruct the most suitable designer for the job. But this time we decided use the Crowdspring service, boasting more than 45,000 designers.

After a good 10 days, we ended up with no less than 218 entries. Some of them were variants on the same theme or re-workings, but we did have about 120 unique designs. Not bad for an unglamorous, serious business consultancy company.
The client was happy and we thought it was quite a success, so below are a few things we learnt from our experience.

* Consider paying more
We analysed the mean and average of the budgets of similar concepts. We decided to stretch our budget a bit. Because by doing so, we would sit in the top 5 of ‘logo and stationery’ projects and not amongst those other $500 briefs.
Also, we do believe in the motto “you get what you pay for”, so by increasing the amount we were hoping to reach out to better designers. Crowdspring says their stats confirm that: the more you pay, the more entries you get.
But of course, more doesn’t necessarily mean better.

* Include things you don’t want in your brief
Saying that the brief is important is stating the obvious, but I was surprised to find how few people include what they don’t want.
Creatives will only send in a design if they think they have a chance of winning. Remember: they see this as a competition. They’re up against 45,000 other designers. So the more doubts you can take away from them, the more likely it is they will have a shot at your brief. If you don’t want black-and-white, spell it out from the start. If you don’t want capital letters, tell them.
The brief for a boring immigration law job did just that and despite the relatively low budget, they got over 200 entries.

But won’t that close off certain routes, I hear you think? Nah.
Even though we briefed the creatives to create a logotype and ignore a non-text logo, some of them still sent one in. And even though we asked them to avoid the word ‘consultifi’ in all lowercase, some still used it.
If creatives feel strong about their idea, they will go off-brief. I’ve experienced this with music video directors, with graphic designers,…: if they think it works, they will try and convince you.
In this project, one of the designers even wrote a long email about why he thought we were wrong.
You can’t always predict what will work and what not, so we did consider some of these entries.

* Set aside enough time for feedback
On that immigration law job I mentioned above, the client also gave lots of feedback on each design. Another a reason of the quality of their entries, I think.
Crowdspring recommends you give ratings. One, because it’s only fair to the designers and two, because it will improve the designs. Other designers go and read your feedback on other entries and learn what you want and -again- what you don’t want.
As a comparison: a more creative, exciting project (for a media agency) with a similar budget only got 60-odd entries. But they did stop rating and giving feedback after a few days.

I found the rating system quite hard to manage, because a 3-star rating in the beginning might only have been a 2-star later on, once we got better entries.
But the feedback opportunity is very useful. It does give you the chance to finetune designs directly with creatives. And it does make the process more human.

* Don’t end your project on a Monday
Simply because there’s a chance you will receive a massive amount of entries in the last few days. In our case, a good 40% of the entries only came through in the last day. Not sure if this is because creatives fear being copied or simply because deadlines are there to be pushed.
But it does leave you with little time for feedback. Especially if those last days are a Saturday and Sunday and you don’t want to spend that time rating almost 100 designs.

* Be prepared to make quick decisions at the end
Especially if you work for a client. We sort of missed that you’re meant to make a decision within 7 days. And we hadn’t anticipated our client going on holiday. We were open about it and told the creatives, but then realised Crowdspring’s terms state that they have the right to chose a winner on your behalf if you take too long. Admittedly, when we contacted them, they got back to us really quickly, assuring us that we were doing the right things. So I’m not sure if they ever apply that power.
From a functionality point of view, Crowdspring could make the decision-step a little bit easier by adding a shortlist functionality. That way you can compare all your ’shortlisted’ designs on one page; and share that page with your client.

* Buy the URL from the company you’re working for
A lesson we learnt the hard way. While we were running the project, someone bought the dot-com and dot-net urls for the company and then tried to sell it to us.

Is the Consultifi identity the best logo since the Swoosh? Probably not.
Will we use it again? Probably, yes.
Is it a replacement for design agencies? I doubt it very much. I would think that developing a brand identity that really makes a difference does benefit from a more traditional, in-depth (and thus more expensive) approach.
But it does offer a good opportunity for smaller companies or start-ups, who get the chance of getting a very decent design done for a very decent price.
And for creatives from all over the world (our ‘winner’ alexe is from Romania) to be exposed to briefs.

So it’s definitely a force to be reckoned with.

Have we all been imbibing the cool aid? Are the likes of Wikipedia really crowd-powered?

In a recent well-argued article in Forbes – The Myth of Crowdsourcing – Dan Woods claims crowds don’t innovate, individuals do.

Crowds and uniquely talented individuals

“There is no crowd in crowdsourcing. There are only virtuosos, usually uniquely talented, highly trained people who have worked for decades in a field. Frequently, these innovators have been funded through failure after failure. From their fervent brains spring new ideas. The crowd has nothing to do with it. The crowd solves nothing, creates nothing.”

He goes on to point that what are often called crowdsourcing platforms really are virtuoso search platforms.

Apparently Dan Woods accosted Wikipedia-founder Jimmy Wales at a conference last year and asked him about how articles were created.

“He said that the vast majority are the product of a motivated individual. After articles are created, they are curated–corrected, improved and extended–by many different people.”

I agree with Dan Woods to an extent. Just like much of the sharing on social platforms is actually just egotistical self publishing, crowds are often driven by a few talented individuals. I have discovered brilliant individual photographers on Flickr, but you do have to wade through quite a bit of mediocrity first.

The LA Times’s experiment with a Wikitorial – an attempt to have a user-created and contributed editorial on the Iraq War – is proof of how the crowd can get it wrong.

“On Friday, the paper introduced an online feature it called a wikitorial, asking Web site readers to improve a 1,000-word editorial, “War and Consequences”, on the Iraq war.

Readers were invited to insert information, make changes or come to different conclusions.”

It did not last.

“A Los Angeles Times experiment in opinion journalism lasted just two days before the paper was forced to shut it down Sunday morning after some readers repeatedly posted obscene photos.”

Want to see something not very cool that sounds awful? Then look at MTV’s Amplichoir below. It’s part of a marketing campaign and billed as the world’s biggest crowdsourced choir. Users are incentivised to take part via a competition prize.

It screams fake, sounds horrid and its pastel coloured iPod-esque backgrounds look contrived. Mr. Woods I’m sure would agree that this proves his point. It does not work because there is no talented individual(s) to make something of it.

But my agreement with Mr. Woods only goes this far.

YouTube is full of bad user-submitted videos – and the odd good one , but as a whole it is collective effort. Most quality Wikipedia articles may be driven by an individual user, but the whole is a “crowdsourced” phenomenon.

And both YouTube and Wikipedia have been increasing mechanisms that make collaboration and reaction to others’ contributions possible. This allows us to feed off, incorporate and build on ideas.

Curveball! Kutimans splicing together of YouTube videos into fantastic new ones, is that not evidence of a crowd of virtuoso’s being used and orchestrated by a virtuoso?

Where the crowd’s contributions stop and the virtuoso’s starts is not always so clear cut.

Creation vs Evaluation

There are of course two kinds of ways to tap into collective intelligence. And perhaps that’s where Mr. Woods confusion arises.

The one – like Wikipedia and like Flickr is where people – yes individuals – create.

But there is another form. i.e. to evaluate existing ideas and creations – and this often happens anonymously.

It’s when we look at the power of collective evaluation – like with voting mechanisms, market prediction systems or systems like Google’s Pagerank (effectively a voting mechanism that counts links to predict web page importance), that we can see a more pure form of collective intelligence in action. Google does an amazing job of finding good websites based on our links.

In other words, where we use collective methods for large scale evaluation and not ‘just’ for ideation or creation we have more pure examples of ‘crowd’ intelligence. But even these lines are blurring.

Digg and the Starbucks and Dell idea platforms allow users to submit ideas, and others to vote on them. Eat your heart out Mr. Woods.

First, can I just say that I really don’t like the term crowdsourcing.

Why? Crowd to me sounds like just more jargon – a bit like oft used tribes. And Source? Well, this a sibling of that other contentious word – outsourcing. Many of the most successful platforms in this area – like Wikipedia – are not commercial in nature at all. “Crowdsourcing” is so much more than just a management strategy to cut costs.

We know “crowdsourcing” is powerful (our logo came via a “crowd”), but how do you fully harness this power? How do you decide what functionality to have to maximise contributions?

We have just been asked to help conceptualise and build a “crowdsourcing” platform. A platform for collective ideas generation. It should produce better creative ‘concepts’ and get the right people to execute them. Importantly – unlike similar solutions out there – it is different in that it would not be open to everybody.

So I’ve been looking at many online examples to see what’s out there in the ‘wild’. That’s important because as an MIT’s Sloan management review study – Decisions 2.0: The Power of Collective Intelligence – acknowledges: practise is still some way ahead of the theory.

Of all these platforms, the ones that have impressed me most for the purpose of what we are building are – in no particular order:

CrowdSpring – Focused on design (graphic, web, product), it already has a big community of designers and people requesting designs. The requester or buyer can interact directly with creatives and picks the winner. Anybody can be a buyer or a creative, and portfolios are public. A whole set of metrics are visibly published so buyers and designers can make decisions based on reputation. This reputation dashboard also serves to regulate behaviour.

Eyeka, a French platform, is a social network for creatives. It also allows brands to run design competitions. Each competition gets its own URL so the creative process and the selection of a winner becomes a marketing exercise in itself. The community picks the winners through a voting system. Anybody can join Eyeka.

InnoCentive is one of the most talked about collective platforms. Here seekers post sophisticated challenges they want solved – like a computational problem. The challenges are public and so are the profiles of the solvers. All challenges have monetary incentives. Anybody can join InnoCentive.

And then there’s the Dell and Starbucks Idea platforms built on top of Saleforce.com platforms. These two have been discussed in many good social media books, from Forrester’s Groundswell to Jeff Jarvis‘ What would Google do, and many more. For a reason. They are very active and work. Anybody can post an idea and others can comment or vote on it.

There are also some much smaller networks. London is the home of Radar Music Videos, a small social network for video directors, which also allows commercial briefs to be posted. You have to pay a small membership fee to access briefs and post videos. The network seems quite active, but alas it does not have that many briefs.

It is worth noting that there are many platforms out there that look like they are on their last legs, virtual tumble weed is blowing across interfaces barren of users.

I don’t need any convincing about the power of digital media to harness sharing of all kinds of things. So what did I learn?

Incentive is the key issue. People’s motivations as to why they take part in these things will determine the platform’s functionality, its mechanisms. As the above mentioned MIT study says:

“An application that taps into collective intelligence for improved decision making may be simple in concept, but it can be extremely difficult to implement. As with many systems, the devil is definitely in the details.”

The devilish details

The so-called devil’s in the detail. So what are some of these details?

How much control do you exert?

Jeff Jarvis says give up control, the users will take control and run with it – more often than not in a good way.

But do you give your ‘crowd’ the ability to choose winners (for example)? What if you don’t agree? If you manage to build a platform where a number of people have contributed to a creative approach, do you split the rewards between them? How? Do you let them decide? Should brands be able to interact with the community directly? These are just some questions we will have to face shortly.

Diversity vs expertise

You have to get the balance right. If your collective is not open, how do you choose participants? If it’s a small group of experts, how good will they be at evaluation (studies show diverse and large groups are better at evaluation – and I will blog about that tomorrow)? If your members don’t like each other, are they likely to stay?

Engagement

What motivates people varies wildly – the MIT report explains:

“Incentives such as cash rewards, prizes and other promotions can be effective in stimulating individuals to participate in activities like prediction markets, for which explicit rewards seem to matter greatly. With other applications — for example, submitting T-shirt designs to the Threadless Web site — cash rewards seem to matter less than recognition. Value-driven incentives can also be important. As the open-source movement, Wikipedia and other similar efforts have shown, participation in a community, the desire to transfer knowledge or share experiences, and a sense of civic duty can be powerful motivators.”

Another problem is keeping people engaged over time. And if your users are primarily incentive-driven and there’s too many competing for a limited pool of cash, then what?

So how do you measure success?

Well it obviously depends on the goal of your platform. But there is one important way to measure success. Is it being used?

“Engagement should not to be taken lightly. Indeed, for a large fraction of Decisions 2.0 projects that have flopped, the primary cause of failure appears to be a lack of engagement. Participants expect to be treated in a certain way and, more often than not, they also want the organizers of the application to be engaged as well.”

With a little uncommon sense, a little theory and many examples of what has worked and what not, you should have as solid a start as you can hope for.