How Crowdsourcing Put a Mad Gringo Shirt on My Back – and for a Great Price.

What if you’re a tropical clothing etailer trying to sell stuff from your HQ in wintry…Nebraska? (“I wish it was sunny here today in Omahahu, cold with a high of 13,” Mike Markowski wrote me; then…“Yes! Please blog about the contest.”)

So here’s a post about lust. And also combining Facebook and website and email. And crowdsourcing. It’s the Mad Gringo Facebook “Like” contest.

Greg Chambers, the Mad Gringo himself, boosted the use of social media to promote his lines of “Go Slow” clothing. Because I have bought a shirt or two from him, I’ve kept up – as you can see from Signalwriter posts like this one. He announced back at the beginning of January that he was going to offer a limited-time low price on the Mad Gringo shirt that topped the “Like” chart. I of course went right to the loudest shirt I could find on the site, the El Chapin, and clicked that Facebook button.

Participatory marketing is fun. On a discrete scale it’s better (for me, at least) than a giant retail push. So I sat back to await results. But whoa! Midway through the contest period, Mad Gringo’s report on the voting indicated that my fave shirt was running a poor second.

(Here’s where the lust comes in, I wanted that shirt. For 11 bucks.) What to do, what to do? El Chapin needed more votes.

I crowdsourced the problem. You have read about crowdsourcing on Signalwriter. I don’t have thousands upon thousands of people to call on but I do have some friends on Facebook myself. So I sent ‘em a note. Asked ‘em to do just what I did: Go to the specific Mad Gringo web page and click the “Like” button.

They did (thank you!) and a week later, Mad Gringo announced the results via Facebook and email:

…The people have spoken. (Well, they clicked on the Like button a bunch of times on our website.) El Chapin takes the prize and will be on sale today for the low, low, low price of $11 from 10am CST to 4pm CST.

Mad Miguel (the above-mentioned Markowski) filled in some blanks thisaway:

For the contest we had two styles in the running…El Chapin and Jade Scorpion. El Chapin won with 36 likes and Jade Scorpion came in second with 24. We had a total of 39 orders. Which is funny to us because El Chapin is one of the older styles and Jade Scorpion is one of the newer styles. But the public spoke and we put the winner up for sale.

Not everything worked out right for Signalwriter as Markowski relates:

I am sorry that we had to switch out the Kokoberger shirt for you. We didn't expect an older shirt that we didn't have much left in stock. Well I hope that is enough info for you.  We will be running more contests in the future: naming tees, tattoo prints tee, polos and fleece contest as well. All good stuff.

No fear, Mad Miguel and Mad Gringo. Here’s me enjoying a tiki-themed alco-beverage in my new 2X Kokoberger from Omahahu. Lust temporarily assuaged.

I’ll reward my crowdsourcers (see Warning No. 1) with a tiki drink of their choice too, redeemable at our next bar outing. And here’s to the guys and gals on Nebraska’s big island. Oddly, they all want to retire to someplace warmer.

You could support that plan by purchasing a great shirt or even two. Think of it as your own crowdsourcing experiment. Tell them Signalwriter – or if you prefer, Mad Tex – sent you.

Four Crowdsourcing Ways to Multiply Marketing Power – and Two Warnings.

Crowdsourcing may be the “new big thing on the leading edge” or a dressed-up golden oldie. Either way, you can leverage the power of the Internet as a force-multiplier. Here are four ideas to get you thinking but don’t ignore the warnings.

1. Get to new products faster, more cost-effectively. Maybe you’ve heard of Threadless, a community-based T-shirt outfit that uses its public to both source and then evaluate its shirt designs. Loyal crowdmembers log on to Threadless.com to vote for their favorites. The winning entries are then printed and presented for sale – which generates double-digit millions in annual revenues. An Entrepreneur.com article by Emma Johnson gives more detail about how Threadless uses the worldwide web and social networking to grow its revenues. Would it work for products and services with longer development cycles and heavy technical requirements? Sure it does. Procter and Gamble reportedly uses crowdsourcing (among 140,000+ freelance scientists and engineers from 170 countries) to help solve research and development problems with its products.

2. Get a survey online – get smart research data back in a hurry. Is any marketer not aware that the Internet is fundamentally altering how marketing research is done? Low-cost online survey tools like Survey Monkey make it simple for just about any company, institution or organization to design, and conduct survey research affordably. The use of social media for research is booming, too. This is where crowdsourcing ought to take off, especially if you want “smart” data – the stuff that you will be able to use to [a] impress company management and [b] actually use to adjust how you bring programs, products or services to your stakeholders. Aim for a combination of digital and analog answers and you can have your numbers and the psychology to back them up. All from sourcing to the right crowd.

3. Get users into your creative messaging process. You know that ad agencies pretty much hate the idea of “amateurs” making commercials and posting them on Youtube, right? But if there’s a mass market involved, crowdsourcing combines customer passion for your product or service with your prospect demographics and the new ways of distributing messages. Writing on BNET, Jennifer Alsever described how Chipotle Mexican Grill got its customers to make its TV commercials several years ago: Thanks to MySpace and YouTube, the 60 contest videos netted 17.3 million views in just three weeks in November, and one of the ads single-handedly garnered more than 8 million views.

4. Get total campaign production from anywhere in the world. A European crowdsourcing site called Eyeka.com lets big and little companies – even big ones like Canon, L’Oreal, Vivendi and Vodafone to name just a few – the chance to access and use the creative talents of 75,000 “creators.” This is a virtual assembly of semi-professionals in the fields of graphic design, photography and videography who compete for prizes. Right now, Honda in France is looking for a video touting its hybrid cars – this one’s worth €9,000 ($12,000+) to the winning crowdsourcer.

Yes, share success when you succeed. That’s Warning No. 1: Reward your crowd. Threadless design winners get cash and swag. Chipotle YouTube commercial winners earned $50k. Failure to acknowledge your collaborators will result in (virtually) instant outing online. You don’t want your lack of courtesy to show up on Facebook, do you?

Then there’s the time suck. Warning No. 2: Managing crowdsource projects requires a lot of time. One reason companies of all sizes use crowdsourcing is to save money on professional marketing support. But there’s a strong need to manage the crowdsourcing process properly and that could mean hours and days. If you’ve got ‘em to spend, super-duper.

If your work-time is as limited as your budget, well, don’t start something you can’t effectively manage to a conclusion. Go ahead and use your ad agency or design firm instead. Tell them Signalwriter sent you.

Nah, Crowdsourcing Is Old Hat – Pillsbury Has Been at It Since ’49.

Crowdsourcing is being tipped as one of the big things to watch out for in the coming years. In essence, Crowdsourcing websites harness the power of their community to achieve common goals quicker and more effectively. This is a pretty apt description from the Storecrowd blog.

The word itself was invented in 2006 by a Wired magazine editor, Jeff Howe, when he started a blog of that name, to portray work that large, distributed teams of amateurs do, aided by the interconnectivity of the Worldwide Web. His contention is that such involved works were formerly the exclusive domain of corporations or isolated experts.

In this sense, crowdsourcing does seem to be a genuine product of the Internet. I’d probably still be agreeing if I hadn’t spotted the Pillsbury® Create and Easy Wow!™ 2010 calendar that arrived in the mailbox today.

The recipe-filled piece is a timely (and humbling) reminder that advancing technology only makes an activity easier to accomplish while the activity itself has been there and done that.

The justly famous Pillsbury Bake-Off® is the involving national competition that began in 1949. For decades, it has pulled in cooks of all sizes, shapes and sexes from all over the US. They’ve baked, cooked, slaved in thousands of kitchens and shared the winning recipes for more than 60 years. And the company has rewarded home cooks for their efforts – the first winner collected $50,000. Whoever wins the 44th Bake-Off, going on right now, will take home a million. Bucks, not biscuits.

This is crowdsourcing the old-fashioned way; the 2010 calendar features recipes from 2008 (Toasted Tuscan Walnut Squares by Jennifer Harkleroad), 1992 (Lemon Truffle Pie, Patricia Kiewiet), all the way back to 1951 (Topsy-Turvy Apple Pie, Mrs Donald W Gaard).

A recent speaker at amobile marketing seminar reminded the audience that cell phones represent a new distribution mechanism – it doesn’t replace human effort needed to create messages or business opportunities or baked goods. Neither does crowdsourcing. But both make their activities faster and easier.

Maybe that’s why Pillsbury stresses the word “Easy” in this 2010 calendar edition. You can get a free copy – and a lesson in original crowdsourcing – right here. Bake yourself something tasty.