Crowdsourced Co-Storytelling: Brands Invite Fans to Assist in Idea Generation & Content Creation

One of the advantages of building a large, engaged community is the ability to encourage and collect feedback from consumers about your product or brand. Think of it as a free online focus group, where one has the potential to tap into the minds of (in some cases) tens of millions of people – from all over the world.

An eMarketer report released this week supports the notion that consumers want to build meaningful relationships with brands they care about.  Crowdsourcing is hardly a new concept, but leveraging it for product idea generation and allowing fans and followers to be co-creators presents a mutual value exchange for both the brand and consumer.  Per research from Frost & Sullivan (below), the majority of crowdsourcing is used for idea generation.

Online communities are ideal environments in which marketers can tap into the conversations people are having about their favorite brands. Though there are many emerging social networks, Facebook and Twitter are currently the most effective customer service channels for engaging customers, given their scale and emphasis on real-time communication. A brand might also use social networks to answer product questions and elevate the experience consumers have when engaging with products.

One brand that has leveraged this concept of the “socially driven fan focus group” is USA Network*. When a new opening sequence for the show “White Collar” was released earlier this summer, some viewers responded and vocalized their preference for the original version. USA Network invited fans to have their say regarding which sequence remained, asking them to vote on which title they preferred by visiting http://www.characterchatter.com/. The network revealed the winning spot – the original version – during a subsequent episode and promised to maintain it until the end of Season 3.

Consumer packaged goods companies have also seen success in using their social communities to help guide the direction of their products and services. For example, Velveeta recently polled its Facebook community to determine which new flavor packaging concept would highlight the flavors more efficiently.  With an easy voting system, the post had a high number of interactions and feedback for the growing community. Velveeta then used the poll results to make the final decision on the new packaging.

Another CPG brand, Philadelphia Cream Cheese, leveraged its Facebook community to ask for recipes using the new Philadelphia Cooking Crème product, a “spoonable” version created especially for use in cooking.  Fan recipe suggestions were then sent to Kraft Foods to test in their kitchens and will be released in the future.

On Facebook, Oreo invites fans to submit their own Oreo art to a special Moments gallery housed as an inside page within the community. The brand even features select submissions within its status updates, sharing the user-generated content with its more than 20 million fans.

Marketers can all agree that good content will inspire conversation within a community; and now, more and more of them are beginning to realize that the converse is also true: an active, vocal and engaged community can help create strong content, and sometimes, help to inform the very direction of your products. Today, consumers comprise a huge part of a brand’s overall story – and while brands still should maintain their core truths and mission, inviting fans into the idea generation and content creation processes can forge lasting bonds that encourage loyalty and develop flourishing communities of brand advocates.

*USA Network, Velveeta, Philadelphia Cream Cheese and Oreo are clients of 360i.

Reb Carlson is a Social Marketing Coordinator at 360i.