I just arrived back from Singapore and have crowd-coloured visions dancing in my head of what crowdsourcing can be for individuals, companies, causes, financiers and governments.
Attached is my presentation I gave as the opening keynote presentation of the first ever Crowdsourcing Week (Twitter hashtag #csw13). The week was inspiring with 51 presentations across 5 days from heads of companies, entrepreneurs, government spokespeople and media luminaries from 16 different countries.
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I’ll post separately a stream of what I learned, but as for as for me, I had a number of themes to kick off the conference:
1) The need of the most digitally inclined to connect offline (as paradoxical as it may seem) and the importance of community efforts like CrowdWeek.
2) Four great (or infamous) recent examples of crowdsourcing:
- Light Light’s recent example of crowdsourced entertainment “Do Not Touch” – you have to watch this video
- Benjamin Moore’s Main Street Matters crowdvoting effort of imporving Main Street North America with paint
- The $5 million successful crowdfunding effort for bringing back Veronica Mars as a movie
- Gawker’s crowdfunding effort to show a video of our infamous Toronto mayor Rob Ford taking crack
3) The eighth year anniversary of Jeff Howe’s minting of the “crowdsourcing” term and phenomenon through his work on his future seminal book of the same name.
4) The quick pace of crowdsourcing as a movement and as a legitimate alternative to creative, vocations, governance and funding.
5) The common element to the “crowd movement” with a slightly modified quote from the co-founder of Sun Microsystems Bill Joy “No matter who you are, most of the smartest (or generous, or passionate, or committed, or creative, or well-financed) people work for somebody else.”
6) The high ground of crowdsourcing vs. social media in a 2013 context – given its higher order purpose, passion, merit-based model and dollar flow.
7) The evolution of brands over the last 150 years as outlined in my book Wikibrands and how it jives with crowdsourcing efforts.
8) The top 10 industries vulnerable to technology in the near term and how they will be changed by crowdsourcing – particularly interesting the mulit-trillion industries of #1 – education, #4 – health care, #7 – finance/banking and #9 consumer/household goods.
9) The top 13 current meta trends in the world and how all of them support the crowdsourcing movement.
10) The flow of the conference and how it smartly supported the four legs of crowdsourcing’s key stakeholders – marketers, government, business and entrepreneurs.
11) Nine types of crowding covered on the first day:
- Crowd in the enterprise
- Crowd branding
- Crowd innovation
- Crowd creative
- Crowd media
- Crowd art
- Crowd design
- Crowd photography
- Crowd fashion
12) The astronomical 89% growth rate of Crowdsourcing efforts (source: massolution) and how it is becoming a big part of the future.
13) The need for all of us to still keep on learning in this nascent space and never settle.
14) Of course, as a Canadian, Wayne Gretzky’s attributed quote “Skate to where the puck is going, not to where it is.”
15) My compliments to Epi Nekaj of Ludvik + Partners who singlehandedly led and organized this splendid collection of talent.
16) The need for all os us to stay connected and share the best of what we do.
I look forward to developments over the next few months that will drag me happily deeper and deeper into this important sub-space of digital and customer engagement and the distillation of what happened in Singapore to one-day summits held around the world.
