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Did the crowdsourced concert films by Radiohead and the Beastie Boys ever inspire you to produce something similarly community-driven and creative? Because they definitely had that effect on marketing author and speaker David Meerman Scott.
In January 2011, David was the keynote speaker at MarketingSherpa's Email Summit in Las Vegas. His talk about Real-Time Marketing & PR was captured by at least a dozen members of the audience who later contributed their footage for the creation of a crowdsourced marketing video. This video, as David points out, “pulls everything together and gives you a sense of what it was like to be in the audience experiencing the talk in real-time.”
The crowdsourced video not only includes different angles and views of the speech, but it also features live tweets from the audience. In this way, it highlights what resonated with the public and how people interpreted certain stories. The video combines elements from both the physical and the online space, thus offering a more holistic viewing experience.
We wanted to examine the process of building this type of crowdsource content, in case you want to create a similar project:
1. Coordination on Social Media
In crowdsourcing content, there is always space for social media, whether it will be part of the organization process or used for the final content piece. One can coordinate people through a Facebook group, start a few discussions on LinkedIn or create a Twitter hashtag to build an ever-evolving conversation. Either way, including real-time interaction among your audience members is essential for crowdsourcing.
2. Tools for Crowdsourcing Content
Building a crowdsourced project off of films and images is always a good idea. It suggests the final product will be easy to consume by the general audience. The video tools you want to use, or encourage others to use, don’t have to be too sophisticated. During David’s speech, for instance, viewers used FlipCams or their phones to capture footage. Nothing too fancy, yet intriguing enough thanks to their unique angles and shots.
3. Invest Time in Editing
While you can get video footage, photographs, tweets, and other content by tapping the crowd, putting all of that content together into one package takes time. For this video, David ended up with hundreds of tweets and about 20 hours of video footage. So when embarking on such a project, consider this step and make sure you give yourself (or your video editor) enough time to put it all together.
4. Promotion and Distribution
Lastly, you want to make sure people will have the ability to easily spread this content. Engage the same participants who helped you create the project in the first place. Are they able to blog about it and share it with their networks? Make the piece social media-friendly and share it in your email newsletter.
To reinforce this last point, we want to invite our readers to help with the distribution of David’s crowdsourced video. Everyone who tweets about it with the hashtag #DMScrowd, will enter a random drawing for David’ book, Real-Time Marketing & PR. What is more, the winner will receive a 30-minute telephone consultation with David. Hope you get to share the video and leave your mark!
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