From our ‘What is Crowdsourcing?’ initiative we’ve dug up one wild Crowdsourced project.
A dutch guy is making a Crowdsourced movie on the collapse of DSB Bank in the Netherlands. Zero budget, big screen ambitions, all volunteer, pure Crowdsourcing. See their presentation below -- some useful tips.
And here is the ‘What is Crowdsourcing?’ video. What is it to you?
Pepsi is skipping this year’s SuperBowl ads, instead banking on Crowdsourcing and Social Media with its Refresh Project.
But why?
“Why did Pepsi trade their $20-million Super Bowl commercial for a $20-million social media campaign? Because their Refresh Everything project promises a superior return on investment. Pepsi is banking on the combination of crowdsourcing and social media to extend the life of Pepsi’s ad dollars from 30 seconds in one day to a full year of engagement…”
The advent of a tablet has not been greeted with such anticipation since biblical times.
Yesterday, at 10am in Silicon Valley, eyes from all over the world were on Apple while its boss, Steve Jobs, unveiled the latest, revolutionary Apple gizmo.
Apparently, one of the biggest enthusiasts was British actor and comedian Stephen Fry who said of the iPad:
“It’s transcendentally smooth and fast. It’s astounding. God, it’s beautiful. The display is stunning. I’m drooling with anticipation.”
It’s not exactly Crowdsourcing opinions – but, hey, it’s Stephen Fry after all. So we thought we’d share.
Following Pepsi another big name is jumping on the Crowdsourcing bandwagon this year: The Grammies.
They have developed a series of promotional Crowdsourced videos entitled “We’re All Fans” for the 52nd Grammy Awards on 31st January.
Let the crowd do the talking…or in this case the singing…
The past few years have seen huge changes in the television, music, advertising and marketing industries. At blur Media we asked ourselves “How will the publishing and writing industries be affected by all these changes? And what new challenges will be created?”
In answer to this we launched www.blur-Media.com
blur Media’s offering is simple, from journalists to bloggers, technical writing to narrative adaptations, screenwriting to fiction, we’ve got it covered. blur Media has built a crowd of talented experts and authors ready to fulfil your needs. Do you need writers for your PR campaign? Or maybe you need someone to ghost a newspaper article, or a blog post?
We’re constantly looking for new talent. Professional writers can apply for membership at blur-Media.net and become part of our fast developing crowd.
If you need a writer, the next generation writers’ agency is one click away: www.blur-Media.com
The Guardian has just launched a Crowdsourced platform to facilitate MP expense reviews by its readers.
We all heard about the first experiment to crowdsource a review of MP’s expenses. Now 458,832 pages of documents are getting reviewed by Guardian readers in an unprecedented effort to bust bad usage of taxpayers’ money. 25,000 people got involved with staggering results. ‘Only’ 240,581 pages to go!
The Guardian recently kickstarted the 2nd version of the project with a further 40,000 pages. For your inner geek enjoy this great post by Simon Willison which explains how they developed the platform for this complex project.
Note the part about asking the right question:
“The biggest mistake we made the first time round was that we asked the wrong question. We tried to get our audience to categorise documents as either “claims” or “receipts” and to rank them as “not interesting”, “a bit interesting”, “interesting but already known” and “someone should investigate this”. We also asked users to optionally enter any numbers they saw on the page as categorised “line items”, with the intention of adding these up later.”
It’s snowing in London – but the real news is that you can see Crowdsourced live snow updates on a map.
Last year, when London got snow the hashtag #uksnow started.
Also, @benmarsh had the nifty idea to use the hashtag to crowdsource live updates about snow in the UK. Well it’s back and looks terrific.
If you tweet #uksnow followed by the first half of your postcode (UPDATE: and the level of snow on a 1/10 – 10/10 scale | Thanks Steve) , you can become a real-time snow for your area.
Our tweet is: “#uksnow W10“
We redisigned blur Marketing’s Facebook fan page. Here’s how you can improve yours.
Use this great article on creating the perfect Facebook Fan page. We followed the step by step guide so check how it looks on our beloved blur Marketing fan page.
Using ‘image real estate optimization’ we developed a custom badge for the page.
We also found the Static FBML application handy. The article focuses on how to use it to create an html powered, custom tab for your page.
We chose to make this our default welcome message for the fan page. Take a look.
Give it a go and share your experience.
“I don’t have enough time for twitter, Facebook or blogging.” What if it paid back 200% of your time invested?
Photo by Marchin Chady via Flickr
‘Not having enough time for social media’ sounds like the title of a summer song. You listen to it again and again, without asking yourself why.
Maybe we should question harder where our precious time needs to go. Getting comfy with social networks is a great start. A stimulus for getting more familiar with the ’social Net’ could be the fact that it pays back if done properly. With astonishing results in some instances.
But why do only a few manage to get breakthrough results?
There are 2 reasons:
1. They know how to use the tools.
2. They know that only a few have succeeded to date.
On the latter have a look at some success stories and at 300 social media campaign case studies, you’ll be amazed.
In a handful of years publishing companies will be very different. They will combine on-demand, digital publishing with social media and Crowdsourcing. They will give away Web-based books and short stories in exchange for followers and fans that will then get monetized through physical book sales, Kindle downloads, merchandising and ticket sales.
The future is Media as a Service – with the writer at its epicentre. In the process, writers will, for the first time, garner a direct, scalable relationship with their readers and they will find multiple, diverse mechanisms for monetizing their content. Along the way, they will also gain financial leverage.
A FAIRTRADE for writers.
blur Media is the answer to the question, “How will publishing companies change?”. It is a new, on-demand publisher and book promoter that uses the power of crowdsourcing to discover emerging writers. It provides selected authors with the multi-media platform that they need in this revolutionary digital and social media universe. blur Media combines the wonderful experience of reading a good book, with the community, speed and convenience of the web. Social media style. Centered around the author.
It is what Amazon is not and what Scribd wishes it could be.
By going to blur-Media.net, any writer can sign up for a free, Web-based writer’s studio and get discovered alongside other like-minded, emerging authors, sharing his or her work, knowledge and opinions. They can develop writer and reader groups or promote events. In fact, there is little that they can’t do within this digital writer’s network.
blur Media’s first, emerging author to be plucked from the crowd is Philip Letts, notable artist and entrepreneur, with his debut novel ‘Death in Girotondo’. This fast paced thriller follows Angela’s reckless and alarming ride through the beautiful landscape of the Tuscan countryside and can be read, along with the short story ‘The Last Day’, for free simply by signing up at PhilipLetts.net.
PhilipLetts.net is the first writer’s hub developed by blur Media. It’s the kind of platform that every good writer deserves.
The crowd is flexing its muscles. Take a look at these terrific projects.
We’re constantly amazed by what collectives of talented individuals can now achieve so we banged together this video assemblage for a visual share on how crowds are changing the rules forever.
10. I’ve Got Nothing – a crowdsourced song.
Just hit the UK music charts. A remarkable success.
9. The Eternal Moonwalk
The best tribute fans could give to the King of Pop.
8. The Crowdsourced Haircut
Aka “How to get a free haircut in San Francisco”.
7. The Amplichoir
Read more
The worlds greatest designers are rarely found in large design agencies. They are often freelancers or independents. blur Designs is a new kind of design agency, located in London with designers spanning the globe. Born from crowdsourcing, it is shaking up the agency world with an unrivalled roster of talented and diverse designers. 
With a crowd of over 600 freelance designers, tightly co-ordinated and organized over the Web, blur Designs is already the largest design agency in the world
Nike, Levis, Intel, Coca Cola, FIVE, BBC, Sony and Harrods are just some of the companies our designers have produced work for.
Traditional agencies get bogged down with the limited capabilities and resources that they have. At blur Designs we have an abundance of world beating, creative talent from graphic to product designers, so our creativity is almost limitless. Which guarantees our clients better value, greater choice and continuously fresh inputs for their design work.
blur Designs offering is quite simple: from world-class branding to websites that talk to your customers, not just brochure-wear, we’ll build a community around your web presence. Thought about adopting viral advertising, we have motion designers as well as producers and editors at your disposal.
blur Designs is the next generation design agency: fresh, ready and highly creative. So, out with the old and in with blur Designs.
Have you looked into Facebook Advertising to promote your business?
Photo by ugo90 via Flickr
There is an untold story about Facebook Ads. While most businesses are focusing on Google Adwords for PPC, truth is that those experiencing Facebook are getting positive results.
Seomoz.org recently looked at the benefits of ‘in-depth’ targeting and re-published Nielsen’s interesting statistics about ads:
Source: Social Networking’s New Global Footprint
News is that as the 300 million active user network evolves, so does its advertising.
The improved social advertising platform now allows businesses to push their message even further. Inside Facebook published a great report on the new social functionalities.
If you want to start looking into the possibilities of advertising at Facebook here are 5 resources to get you started:
- Advertising On Facebook
- What I’ve Learned about Facebook Advertising by Spending $1,000
- Tips For Small Business Advertising On Facebook
- Facebook Advertising – Tips to Startups/Small Businesses
- Watch Out Google, Facebook Is Gaining in PPC
You decided that you need a blog to get your brand out there. You’ve figured out how to promote it. Now the time comes to get real productive and post regularly. Where do you get ideas for your next post and the one after that and on?
Photo by zetson via Flickr
Developing a content plan for your blog is vital to protect it from fizzling out in a few months. How often are you going to post? What are you going to post about?
Consistency and coherence are key. Chris Brogan, one of the few real social media experts, shares some great tips on how to get inspired and think about your next post.
Meetup is the world’s largest network of local groups.
It believes that people can change their personal world, or the whole world, by organizing themselves into groups that are powerful enough to make a difference.
This is the main reason why, less than two months ago, we stepped up as organizers of the London Creatives Meetup group.
Well, this and the fact that we are lucky enough to mingle with creatives in our daily routine and to work in a place that has lots of space available for cool meetups.
The group has since become a weekly gathering where people can hang out on comfy sofas, get free Wi-Fi and unleash their creativity with like minded, web-designers, artists, entrepreneurs and digital media people. The objective of the meetings is to create a café style environment where people can discuss, bounce, share, create or simply enjoy the atmosphere and get work done.
We promise to be around every week, and over time we hope everyone will get comfortable enough to start something special. At the Creative Cafè!
blur Marketing is a new kind of digital agency. It is an international agency born of Crowdsourcing – driven by an emerging collective of both skilled and diverse marketing professionals that banded together to create the largest player in the speedy evolution to social media. 
Past: While social media has changed marketing, most established agencies are content merely to create ad hoc divisions to tackle the new digital challenges, resulting in traditional answers to new questions. Exacerbated by the fact that old media all too often talks at its audiences as established agencies talk down to their customers. Perhaps foolish given that the new game is all about how brands ‘entertain’ and ‘court’ their consumers, now found in vibrant, open Web communities such as Facebook,twitter or LinkedIn?
Present: The harsh reality is that in order to truly engage with online communities, it helps to be a community yourself. By drawing together a focused, growing crowd of digital marketers, geeks and event professionals, blur Marketing has positioned itself to rapidly deliver the most innovative campaigns to both large and small businesses fit for tomorrow. blur Marketing is a virtual organization with approaching 500 talented, individualistic marketers that come together under the blur roof to deliver real innovation and choice at lower prices. People and Web technologies are the guts of the agency – optimized to deliver a new generation of truly enticing customer interactions.
Relationships: blur Marketing’s growing client list includes enlightened digital agencies that rely on its trusted and sizable network to bring fresh approaches to their marketing activities. And it is the ‘power of the network’ that has enabled this newborn agency to deliver international briefs for global brands at such an early stage in its development.
Future: Its community hit the trenches with Web 2.0 marketing projects, teaming up to create original campaigns from the bottom up. And to date we have only seen crowds of consumers engaging with interactive campaigns, imagine if that crowd was enhanced to include a bunch of the most dynamic professionals? blur Marketing – the ‘future’ in marketing agency.
We’re pretty confident that we’ve convinced you that blogging is key to your brand, so now let’s talk marketing.
Photo by Bashed via Flickr
You’re set for success, you picked your blogging platform and got it professionally designed.
So what happens now?
It’s highly likely that you’ll only be talking to yourself unless you get immersed in your niche. That means getting out of your cave to go meet relevant people, maybe even bloggers like yourself.
Getting people to notice what you’re about is a tough job. Mainly because there are millions of blogs out there and new doesn’t necessarily mean cool!
So here are 101 tips to get you started and let everyone know just how cool you really are!
Innovatrs.com is a different kind of website for entrepreneurs. Innovatrs.com is an emerging, crowdsourced ecosystem of entrepreneurs, financiers, designers, developers and marketers. It is a center of innovation where each and every one of its crowd members, in one virtual space, compete to launch and develop the next big idea into the wider world knowing that they are surrounded with the advice and guidance that they need – cost effectively delivered over the Web.
What this ecosystem required to get it off the ground and lend it weight was a written-down, systematized methodology for innovation and a startup system. Then everything else could develop around it as its starting point. That is why Innovatrs founder, Philip Letts, wrote Innovate ™, the worlds first true attempt at a comprehensive innovation methodology and business-build system. A step by step guide to how to develop a great idea, launch it successfully and build a cool business. A practical startup system.
Over the last few years Innovate has been tested against a whole host of startups, entrepreneurs and innovation experts. It works.
Today we are ready to opensource Innovate at Innovatrs.net, ready to publicly launch Innovatrs.com and ready to build the worlds first global, Web based ecosystem of entrepreneurs, innovators and their supporters. A place where ideas can become great businesses and entrepreneurs can get rich and famous. A place where investors will gather and governments will listen. A Silicon Valley for the rest of the planet. On the Web. Here for you 24×7.
blur Group gives groups of individuals the power to profoundly shape the future. A digital future, designed by crowds, shaped around crowds, sourced by crowds. blur Group disrupts the status quo and the workplace as we know it. Wiping off the static, analogue culture in order to grant its crowds immediate and direct access to the resources and markets they need to drive this altered state.
The secret lies in a word: Crowdsourcing.
Crowdsourcing means making the most out of collective intelligence. At blur Group it means re-architecting the creative industries. Means enabling buyers of art, digital design, marketing services, media and innovation to get more affordable access to top talent. Means fair deals for their crowds of artists, designers, marketers, writers and entrepreneurs.
We believe that a few, highly qualified managers from an office and small, niche, highly managed-through-the-web crowds, coordinated in the right way, will become the virtual organizations of tomorrow. Why not build a marketing agency solely by crowdsourcing and remotely managing marketing professionals/consultants? Why not organize world artists to develop a new generation art market?
The benefit of doing it with a managed crowd as opposed to legions of full time employees is lower costs, greater flexibility, a more international approach, highly personalized services and, once more, better deals for both crowd member and client. Infinitely scalable intellectual property clouds.
This is the future of business. This is blur Group.
Blogs have become the modern magazine, user-generated and widely acclaimed by the masses. Here are few tips to start yours and get your human brand out!
Photo by Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com via Flickr
Useless to say that if you haven’t started blogging yet, you’re missing out. And if you’re trying to get your human brand out, regardless of what skills you have, a blog is the best tool to shout your potential out loud.
Posterous is a great place to start. Wordpress is where you’ll surely end up!
And here are few tips on how to nail the content plan: 5 things to know when starting your blog
If you take social networking seriously you’ll end up with a personal brand. Here are some tips on how (not) to mange yours.
Photo by bonked via Flickr
If you’re reading this blog we’ll assume you’re experienced with social networks. Personal branding is the result of intensive use of social networking. A field we’ve been having fun with lately.
There are benefits in getting yourself out there, whatever your occupation or interest. Nonetheless, you have to make sure you deal with it in the right way.
Dan Schawbel shared a few interesting tips on worst practices that can get you fired.
Have a look at 10 Ways to Get Fired For Building Your Personal Brand.
A bunch of Star Wars afficionados are getting together to remake the popular saga. Crowdsourcing is the star!
And we get ecstatic at blur when we hear this kind of news.
Long story straight from the website:
You and 472 other people have the chance to recreate Star Wars: A New Hope. Below is the entire movie split up into 15 second clips. Click on one of the scenes to claim it, film it, and upload it. You can have up to three scenes! When we’re all done, we’ll stitch it all together and watch the magic happen.
Follow them on twitter and may the Crowd be with you!
We take a fairtrade approach to managing our crowds.
We also understand what its like for people going out on their own and devised bulletproof processes to make sure that your rights as an independent contractor are taken care of.
Mainly to avoid the following:
Hey singers, actors, artists and performers – are you getting your Facebook promotion right?
Photo by carbonated via Flickr
We recently launched Human Brands which we’re kinda excited about. It combines the vibrant visual effects of our design agency, blur Designs with the strategic influence of our digital agency, blur Marketing.
Expanding a bit on the latter, Facebook has become a vital marketing tool for most online activities. Mainly due to its exponential growth. The chances of you finding your target there tripled in the past few months.
Getting your Human Brand right on Facebook is something we love to do, but have a look at these 3 great tips to get you started.
Photo by Deemonita via Flickr
We were avidly re-reading this article from March about the future of PR by Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester Research.
We felt a bit of an issue with the use of the word ‘agency’. We feel that the future (or the present of blur Marketing) is actually communities representing communities.
The assumption that a traditional (or even connected) agency may represent the diversity of a community is not relevant anymore. We feel that the open source movement and focused crowdsourcing enable a bulletproof distributed agency approach. The best way to represent a community.
Our community of freelancers really gets it because it’s a community itself. As simple as that.
