For those who are as yet unfamiliar with the term “crowdsourcing”, it is not new, but its usage as a form of marketing is of a recent vintage. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, it relates to the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people. In the US, marketers are increasingly crowdsourcing campaigns and bring the public to participate into the creative process.

The last Super Bowl was a classic instance of how crowdsourcing is growing. Over 20 per cent of the ads shown that day used some form of crowdsourcing.

Some the advantages include the immediate engagement with the public and means more ideas and participation. Also, it can cut costs compared with traditional advertisement campaigns.

It is important to have a great idea and plan behind such campaigns... otherwise it will not work. It is not all brands that can succeed; the message and the strategy need to be appropriate for the target audience.

The most popular crowdsourcing at the Super Bowl was developed by Doritos. The snack company has made a name for itself through its ‘Crash the Super Bowl’ contest, which allows anybody to record and submit a video featuring the Doritos brand for a chance to win $1 million and have their submission featured during the Super Bowl.

BRIEF

Indians like their Facebook

If the projections by eMarketer are correct, the user base of Facebook should reach 1.8 billion people by 2017, driven by the addition of users in emerging markets. While shrinking in the US, the UK, Canada and Western Europe, the social network still has much room for growth in countries like Brazil, Russia and India.

In North America, the estimated growth for this year is 3.6 per cent - in the Asia-Pacific region it is 34.4 per cent, for Middle East and Africa the prospect is for 31.8 per cent, Latin America’s is 29.5 per cent and in Central and Eastern Europe, it is 29.3 per cent. In Brazil, it is expected that 69 million users in 2013 will swell to 103.9 millions in 2017. The same year, India should become the country with the largest number of users on Facebook - 277.8 millions

(Source: Ad Age)

Google+ usage has a lot of catching up

Despite being touted as a growing social network, Google+ is still not showing signs of heavy usage. Nielsen data show that users spent just 6:47 minutes on Google+ during March as against the 6:44 hours spent on Facebook. But a Google representative dismissed the Nielsen data as “completely off” of reality.

Nielsen also said that Google+ had 20 million unique visitors using the apps for iPhone and Android, and 28 million unique visitors coming through desktops. In the same period, Facebook won 142 million unique visitors.

(Source: Mashable)