Healthy Conversations
Imagining & Creating New Value For Health Brands & Consumers

What is the next generation of crowdsourcing (of customers and companies working together to create new value)?

Clinton Booner answers this question as the author of this guest post Crowdsourcing: Beyond the Basics, over at Jay Baer’s Convince and Convert Blog.

Clinton offers his 3c’s of next generation crowdsourcing: Co-Creation, Constant and Control:

1. Co-Creation. Allowing consumers to contribute in a number of ways to product and service enhancements.
2. Constant. Multiple initiatives happening in parallel and offering the user a constant stream of new involvement opportunities.
3. Control. Brands viewing open innovation strategies as not ‘giving up creative control’ but rather understanding what this really is – co-created market research that is more accurate – ultimately offering remarkable ways to help deliver happy, impassioned, and loyal consumers.

Would you add any C’s to this list?

There’s a new book just released called Age Of Conversation 3, and it’s the third book in the Age of Conversation series.

A crowdsourced publication, it brings together 150+ authors from around the world, leading marketers, writers, thinkers and creative innovators contributing individual chapters, investigating the roles that community, conversation, experimentation, engagement, and collaboration play in shaping the 21st century’s economy of ideas. I’m proud to be a contributing chapter author.

The book helps readers use social media. Teaches them how to use it smarter, better, more efficiently.  Shares stories, ideas, strategies and observations. And in the spirit of community, all profits from the sale of the book are donated to the Make-A-Wish Foundation.

The book is broken down into these sections:

At the Coalface
There is much to be said for good strategy, but what happens when the strategy is done? This section is about working at the coalface of social media. It’s about the real world lessons that come hard and fast – case studies and the stories and events that are much better in the re-telling than in the moment.

Conversational Branding
What happens when a brand ventures into online conversation. What does it mean to participate in these conversations? Is this earned media? Is it paid for? Or is there an in-between space?  How important is brand in the social media space?  How does the conversation shape or change the brand?

Influence
Much is made of influence, but what does “influence” mean in social media? Who has it, and who creates it? Does influence mean different things to different people?  Is it hype or can it make the cash register ring?  Is influence one of the new currencies?

Getting to work
They say that the best approach to social media is dive in. But getting to work can be harder than it first appears. What have you done to quickly get to work?  Or perhaps this section is about how you use social media to get to work — literally.  Is it a viable tool for networking and job hunting?  Or maybe this section is about how social media is changing the face of work.

Corporate Conversations
There’s plenty of coverage of social media when the focus is on marketing or advertising. But what is happening in other parts of your business? Or if you’re a consultant or agency, how do you introduce social media to the C-level at your client’s business?  How do you make social media more relevant to the bottom line?

Measurement
Can you measure social media? Many claim you can and many claim you can’t. But if you can, should you? And how do you measure it?  In terms of ROI?  Or influence? Or ability to do good?  What are the metrics that matter and how do you get to them?

In the boardroom
Is social media a fad dreamed up by the marketing department to get the attention of executives? What are the hard questions and firm answers that get thrown around the boardroom. And who, if anyone, is best placed to answer?  What role should the C-level executives play in a company’s social media strategy?  

Pitching social media
The work has been done and the late nights are weighing heavily on your shoulders. But it’s time to buck up – to pull it all together and wow your client. What do you do to impress? Is there a new art to pitching social media? Or, if you’re from the PR side of the table, how are you pitching your client’s stories to social media’s influentials?

Innovation and Execution
People make great claims for social media. Is it the long dreamed of silver bullet? Can the tools and techniques be harnessed to drive innovation? How can you take an idea or a strategy and make it work for your brand or your business?  How do you move from idea to actual execution?  

Identities, friends and trusted strangers
Many people are now living much of their lives online.  Who do you call friend?  How do you set boundaries or decide who to let into your circle of influence?  How do you know who to trust when you can’t look them in the eyes? What tools, techniques and sites do you find most useful in creating your online brand?

The book can be purchased from Channel V Books, a company that works with business thought leaders who need to publish books in order to promote themselves and their businesses, enhance their credibility and attract new opportunities.

The more you know about your customers as real people – looking beyond their obvious needs to their hopes, dreams, fears and challenges – the more you can help them achieve.

In turn, the more value you give, the more you’ll receive in return. Ideally, this “return” will come in the form of customers who become enthusiastic fans of your organization. The ones who are more than happy to sing your praises.

Here are eight ways to make this happen through social media:

1. Internal Engagement. Give employees, the ones who power your brand, the chance to shine, e.g. Best Buy Connect
2. Collaboration. Create mechanisms for customers to influence your products and services, e.g. Dell’s IdeaStorm
3. Authenticity. Feature happy customers on video, e.g. Mayo Clinic’s atrium piano
4. Feedback. Create real-time feedback channels, e.g. ComcastCares
5. Participation. Create suggestion boxes and reward customers for their participation, e.g. My Starbucks Idea
6. Experiences. Create new ways of delivering experiences that fit with their lifestyles, e.g. healthierme
7. Conduit. Allowing customers to share with each other through you rather than driven by you, e.g. beinggirl.com
8. Sharing. Allow customers to share their ratings, e.g. revolutionhealth

Are there other good examples that come to mind?

Crowdsourcing is consumer research on steroids for health brands.

The health brand Vitaminwater, through its vitaminwater flavorcreator Facebook page, is inviting friends and fans to pick a name, write the package blurb and design the label for a new product release.

They’re also awarding $5,000 to the creator of the winning package design. In fact, today is the announcement of the winning flavor and vitamin package, that will then mark the start of the label design content.

What are six lessons that health brand marketers can take away from this combined social media/crowdsourcing effort:

1. Opening your brand up to customer participation allows you to create win-wins for your customers and your company. Customers get a product (or service, or enhancement) of their own creation, and your company gets a pre-approved stamp of approval.

2. Follow the “conversational” practices of your customers . Vitaminwater’s fans are heavy users of social media, particularly Facebook. With 963,000+ of them, participation in, and word-of-mouth about this contest will be strong. Where do your fans tend to congregate?

3. Brand actions speak louder than words. Vitaminwater could simply have introduced a new flavor through a traditional new product process. Instead, they let their fans develop the idea, creating much richer interaction with the brand through an engaging experience.

4. Crowdsourcing is consumer research on steroids. Rather than trying to understand what your customers want through traditional research, your customers are bringing their tastes and preferences to bear by actually creating more relevant brands.

5. Ideas not used today, can be stored for the future. If your brand, and your crowdsourcing idea, is big enough to motivate participation, the hundreds or thousands of ideas that you capture today can be stored away for future consideration.

6. We live in a new world of open innovation and collaborative production. Isn’t it better that you leverage the knowledge, creativity and passion of your crowd to your advantage rather than your competitors reaping the rewards?

How can you put the strength of the masses to work for you? How can you harness the insight and passion of your customers to create new and greater value for themselves and your company?

Best Buy is leveraging the power of social media by reaching out to both customers and employees to co-create greater and new value for themselves and the organization.

They’re asking customers to help change the company. Through their bestbuyideax.com site, customers are asked to share ideas, vote for the ones they like and discuss them with the rest of the community.

They’re also asking employees to contribute their “unedited” perspectives through Connected – a new way for people to engage with the actual folks who power Best Buy. Kudos to the company for having the courage and confidence to publish these unedited comments.

What can health companies learn from Best Buy’s social media practices:

• customers are eager to share their opinions, you just need to ask and give them a forum to do so
• these crowdsourcing opinions represent a great pipeline to innovative new products, services and experiences
• business success starts with happy, energized and engaged employees, who believe they are important to the success of their organization (asking them to contribute their “unedited” stories certainly supports this)
• for leadership to encourage employees to share their views for all to see, means more enthusiasm, commitment and passion to contribute to the greater good (and increased profits)
• continuing to drive one-way conversations puts your relevancy at risk, as your competitors are actively and openly engaging their customers and employees in a continuous cycle of co-creating greater and new value

Hellohealth, Humana (through crumpleitup) and Vitaminwater (through its Facebook flavorcreator) are a few companies openly engaging audiences to co-create greater and new value. What others can you think of?

Here’s outside category inspiration for how health brand marketers can see things differently, and thereby think and do different things. In this case, the payoff is an expanded audience base by standing out in the “supposed” strategic group this organization plays in.

As noted on Springwise, London’s Royal Opera House is teaming with Twitter to crowdsource the libretto for a new “people’s opera.” The libretto will consist entirely of 140-character tweets that the ROH has received from members of the public since the project was launched. It will be set to original music composed by Helen Porter, along with some more familiar classics.

How can you creatively use the power of Twitter and crowdsourcing to co-create new value through your audiences?

Read more about this effort on their website and on Twitter.

A lesson to be learned for all health + healthy lifestyle brand marketers…

It’s back-to-school time. Travel a highway and you see parents taking their kids to school, and kids with cars filled to the brim with everything that could possibly fit in them. You also see a lot of Thule cargo racks.

So I went to Thule’s website today. And was saddened when I was there. Because, for starters, this is a brand with a great story, started by a gentleman who sold direct to end users at windsurf competitions on the New England shoreline out of his “station wagon” office. It’s the kind of story that many brands only wish they could tell. But it’s not really being told here.

It’s also a brand that consumers engage with in really important ways, at some really important times of their lives. Memorable times that will be with them, and their kids, forever. This brand makes people’s lives a lot sweeter, in ways that competitors (at least perceptually) just can’t match. Which is the making for great stories to be told!

The site is rich with functional details about the different kinds of Thule racks available for Bike, Snow, Water, etc. But we don’t buy features, we buy benefits. We buy with our guts, based on decisions charged with emotion. And I imagine that there’s some incredibly powerful associations wrapped around Thule that can be leveraged and brought to the foreground. Yes, Thule is functionally a means to help you safely get your things from here to there. But much more importantly, Thule is freedom, enabler, partner, protector, trusted friend…

This is a brand that could be engaging audiences much more meaningfully around their brand. It is a brand that should be inviting (probably very willing) customers to become allies in adding value back to Thule. It is a brand ripe for rich conversations and shared stories, which actually lets Thule spread their commercial messages more effectively.

But Thule is just one example of brands under leveraging relationships, fans and evangelists. What’s important to remember is that you need to let the conversations take place, and let the stories be told and shared around you. In the end, both customers and company will grow stronger.

Case in point as to why it pays (literally) to develop two-way conversation with your customers.

I just found these stats about Dell’s Ideastorm community:

– people have contributed 11,790 ideas
– they’ve posted 84,546 comments
– and the site has been promoted 667,054 times

Most important, Dell has implemented 337 ideas based on customer input.

When people feel like they matter to the company, and when you engage them in ways they value and want, they’ll matter more about you.

“Marketing professionals used to be the high-priest gatekeepers, but now we can all have a direct relationship with the Almighty Brand.”

This quote is from Grant McCracken, author, anthropologist and consultant, who describes this consumer involvement as a kind of branding Reformation, in the Free Advertising article appearing in the NY Times Magazine.  ”The era of the brand that’s blandly constructed and hopes not to offend anyone – to be pleasant – that notion is really dead”, he goes on to say. 

And why do consumers want to be a part of this co-creation. “Because they can,” McCracken says, “as both the technological tools and the knowledge of advertising grammer are now widely dispersed.” 

Citing a number of brands that have sought out the participation of consumers, McCracken also exposes the downside of this strategy. When G.M. solicited input in online ad-making for its Chevy Tahoe, many people responded with anti-S.U.V. messages. 

Still, I believe, a healthy conversation. 

Simple skin care asks its customers to join in to have their say in all things Simple – from trying new products before anyone else to inputting about the Simple brand and product range.  Ultimately, letting go to gain more is a win-win for a brand and its customers.

Simple is an excellent example of a smart healthy lifestyle brand opening up communication channels with its customers to allow for more of their input and participation with their brand. It is evident that the company understands: 

• people are willing to invest their time in the things they’re passionate about
• they’re also willing to expend their time to increase a products (their products) value 
• sometimes they care enough to become a brands advocate; particularly if it’s a skin care brand that plays an important role in their daily lives 
• the act of letting go of their brand and listening and responding to their customers helps grow trust and loyalty 

Do you have additional examples of brands letting go by participating in social media? If so, please share them in the comment section below.