Week 2 objectives:-Read / View the required media (Crowdsourcing reading and Brand Communities podcast)
-Read ch. 1 of Groundswell
-Read ch. 6 of Digital Engagement
-View Alma Whitten video about Google's approach to security
-Skim The Social Marketing Playbook
I believe viewing all the content for this week will be doable. I did a quick look at the Social Marketing Playbook and it looks long, so I am going to try and skim through it and see what interesting learning it has in store for our class. I have not heard of the term "
crowdsourcing" before, but I can imagine it is engaging the masses to help solve computing, marketing, and other problems using the internet and other social media we learned about in Week 1. I like listening
to all the videos and podcasts so far so the Brand communities will be interesting. I am also involved with some online brands via social sites and discussion forums so I would like to hear what has to be said about them. I am not sure what the term groundswell is or means, so I hope that is an interesting topic. The web video reading from Digital Engagement sound
s like it won't have many new topics that I don't know about, but all of the content so far has had one new story, website, or section that was new to me. I am sure I will get something out of it. I am a big fan of Google and love to read / hear anything about them. They are so innovative and simple at the same time. I am looking forward to that video. The Social Medi
a Playbook sounds like it might come in handy after the course. I hope to get enough out of it this week, but it looks like a long read and I might not get to all of it.
Crowdsourcing Reading
This term was new to me, but after reading only a few paragraphs I understood (and also have participated in) crowdsourcing. The fascinating story is always the young
entrepreneurs who take a simple idea that they love to do and turn it into a multi-million dollar business. After reading about the Two Jakes and threadless.com, I immediately checked out their website. Their shirts are fun and very trendy. All of a sudden I feel like I am a teenager again. I am somewhat in the know. (Side note: the Diabolical Hot Dog T-shirt that I saw on the front page was pretty funny, see below)
Threadless.com is a perfect example of letting the customers choose what they want. What a perfect business model! You don't really need to forecast when your demand comes prior to the final vote of the top t-shirts. Your marketing is all viral and is based of the success of the previous week(s). How do you lose? I must be missing something, but for a simple product that doesn't need physical revisions and adaptations this works so well. The customers don't have to be educated in T-shirt making or design to create a great t-shirt.
Contrast that business with the shared computing or user forums also talked about in the reading and you would expect a failing business model, but this is not the case. The SETI@Home project is brilliant. If you are passionate about Sci-Fi, you don't have to be a scientific wizard to help the real scientists find signs of extraterrestrial life. I myself have participated from time to time in the Folding@Home project through Stanford which helps map the human genome by using your computer's process
ing power when you aren't using your computer.
I loved the comment from the Crowdsourcing reading about Toffler being right that people want to be apart of something and help create their products and help others. I didn't even realize I was really apart of this type of sharing when I use some specific car websites, discussion forums, etc. to get help with replacing items on my car or even offering tips to how to get something fixed after I have done it. I figure I should help because someone helped me get to where I was with the car. I am not even that big of a car buff or a good mechanic, but I like to save some cash and find it fun at times. I think we will see more and more of this in the future. Especially as the teens get older. The older generation now are not used to this type of help and resource availability. We will see more people using open source software and helping build the next best "whatever" because they are passionate about it and have built a community around it. This was a very eye-opening reading.
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