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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• 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 are loads of new tools that make it easy for anyone to create really slick broadband storytelling experiences and share them online. The quality and sophistication of these was previously available only to those with expert knowledge and resources, like media owners. Now, sophisticated animation and custom video creations are within reach for non-experts. It’s the next chapter of an accelerating process of media democratisation that started with cheap digital cameras and photo-sharing, YouTube and blogging. The newer tools are significantly more impressive than RockYou-style Facebook and MySpace bling. Here are three examples:

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Okay, I’d better start by saying that I was responsible for this site. I’m in no way impartial. In fact, DoggySnaps was probably the most fun of any social site I’ve worked on so far. It’s also been a really useful example for explaining how conversational media works. In every presentation and talk I’ve given since it launched a couple of years ago there has been a ‘DoggySnaps moment’: the slide with the cute doggies on it when even the hardest hearts melt, senior media executives go “ahh” and everyone finally ‘gets’ online community. Now, the site they call Facebark has finally received some recognition by winning Yahoo’s ‘Social Find of the Year’ 2007.

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Marmite lanched their social media based site at the beginning of 2007. As a brand with quite a vocal and passionate user base, it was a natural step to set up forums and also to celebrate the best Marmite-related activity on the web. Unfortunately, it looks like someone has taken their eye off the ball and someone’s worked out that the Marmite forum ain’t moderated and is filling it with dodgy porn links. Oh dear.

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