Plenty of brands have been experimenting with Crowdsourcing over the last 2 years…Best Buy asked people’s views on how they could improve Toshiba and HP laptops, enacting the changes through their Blue Label brand; while Dell and Starbucks both set up community platforms to source consumer’s thoughts on how to improve their services. But 2009 looks set to be the year the potential of the crowd is tested even further; rather than simply listening to the crowd a few brands are turning to the crowd to actually create their ware from scratch. 

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Jonathan Salem Baskin points to Wall Street Journal’s piece on web 2.0 marketing, noting its 5 key points

Mashable runs through the winners of the open web awards 

Faster Future blog posts the Music Industry Manifesto 

Paul Isakson writes about ‘advertising that does’

Servant of Chaos talks about learning from failure and points to a great Zeus Jones presentation

• Karl Long points to Lawrence Lessig talking about hybrid economies, where companies co-create value with their customers

• Mashable shows 5 incredibly simple but useful websites

• The brilliant Idriss Mootee writes a piece on modern advertising

• Servant of Chaos writes about Companion Credit Union who invited their customers to help them make decisions about their brand

• Jeremiah Owyany talks to Dell’s head of commmunity about inetgerating social media into their business

There’s a few very good digital tech blogs out there including Cybernetnews, Mashable and ReadWriteWeb, each of them regularly post about the latest apps on the block; here’s one from ReadWriteWeb about a bunch of apps that have stood the test of time and another from Mashable about top sites for web savvy families. The developer community churn out thousands of apps a week, each one claiming to revolutionise our lives for the better, unfortunately the majority of these apps are likely to fail. Having said that a good deal of them will emerge from the market-place victorious, with a few healthy rounds of funding and a few million users to boot.

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As a Leeds United fan I’ve met my share of super-fans, those displaying such a quixotic level of support for their club that it consumes every part of their life - including their moods and general disposition. But, Leeds United is also well known for its intensely loyal and active wider support base (those who love the club but understand it is just a game) evidenced by the weekly gate receipts of 30,000+ and leedsunited.com having the 5th highest traffic in all the land; this is made all the more remarkable when you consider they now reside in the old 3rd division. I think one of the main reasons for this strong support base is actually the existence of a strong super-fan core, which acts as a powerful and firey centre generating a kind of gravitational pull on the wider fan base. 

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On Nov 1st Jim Stengel (ex P&G Global Marketing Officer) launched a new kind of marketing consultancy with an extremely lofty ambition:

 “to accelerate a movement to deeply rethink and transform the roles and meaning of marketing and branding.”

When Mr. Stengel starts to talk about branding needing a rethink people sit up and take notice, but when Mr. Stengel quits his job and sets up a consultancy with the sole aim of accelerating said rethink, everyone in the industry should probably pay very close attention. His central tenet is that marketing should be more about defining what a company does - beyond making money - and how it can make customers’ lives better, he calls it ‘purpose-driven marketing.’  But this isn’t the first time someone has called for a radical rethink of the marketing processes and structures. 

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• Over at Web Strategy by Jeremiah there’s a post about Intel using Digg and Slashdot community to ‘fish where the fish are’ instead of relying on disruptive tactics to coax people to visit their corporate website

• Guy Kawasaki points people to the ‘mother’ and ‘father’ of social media lists - these are the most comprehensive list of branded social media apps, tools and activities.

• Adlab provides the final part of the Burger King games case-study (parts 1 and 2 can be found here too)

• Seth Godin talks about leadership being the strongest marketing streategy

• David Armano visualises Seth Godin’s thinking from his new book ‘Tribes’ 

I spend quite some time reading hundreds of blog posts through my RSS feeder, starring those I find most relevant or useful. From now on, rather than keep them to myself, I thought I’d share them with you here in a regular post.

Here’s the first: read full post »

Not content with providing the world with one truly genius observation Chris Anderson’s new crusade is shining a light on the notion of ‘free’. In a recent post over at one of his blogs Chris identifies 4 models of free that are being used (and have been used for many years) in business and commerce, one of which I believe to be hugely significant to the future of branding.

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Karl Long has an interesting post over at his blog in which he questions whether the web is changing so fast that the “bold, innovative interactive marketers are now the traditional media.” and that the “flash based orgies for the senses” are not properly harnessing the new social marketing opportunities. I agree with Karl’s questioning here and think we’re definitely behind the curve.

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