Recently i've been seeing alot more social marketing initiatives which have crossed over the border of online and into the real world.
In essence it's crowdsourcing but with a tangible, real world momento attached to it at the end...
Below i have compiled a few case studies:
Project: Food52 (www.food52.com)
Overview: 52 weeks, 52 recipe contests and 1 crowdsourced cookbook....
Conceived in part by former New York Times food reporter Amanda Hesser, the Food52 project celebrates home cooks and their recipes.
Here's how it works:
There are 52 weeks in a year, and each week the Food52 team (comprised of Hesser and her co-founder Merrill Stubbs) select categories that go into a cookbook. Visitors to the site have seven days to submit their favourite recipes for each week's category. Hesser and Stubbs then pick two finalists for each category, testing them and photographing them first; then, for 10 days the contest is opened up to voting.
Winning recipes and author bios will go into the Food52 cookbook, which will be published by Harper Studio; authors will also receive a selection of supplies from Oxo, the project's sponsor.
Runners-up and other entries, meanwhile, will be highlighted on the Food52 site, where users will also have a chance to offer their opinions on the Food52 cookbook's photos, cover design and title.
The site is now on its 13th weekly contest, this time soliciting recipes for "your best beef salad" and "your best fruit tart. It's also currently in invitation-only beta—using, interestingly, but will reportedly open up to the public next week.
I love the fact that it starts as a social project online but delivers a tangible by-product which all participants can enjoy and remember...NB. They've done their social well with a website presence, vimeo, flickr, twitter and across notable blogs...
Project: Ideas Culture (www.ideasculture.com/ideas.php)
Overview: Got a problem or want an idea? Ask the Twittersphere...

Ideas Culture are an Australian company that puts creative thinkers around the globe to work via Twitter to solve a client's problem by morning.
Their "Ideas While You Sleep Service" guarantees an idea along with an evaluation matrix and implementation plan by 10 a.m. the next morning - brilliant!
After registering, they need only submit their challenge online by 4 p.m.
By 6 p.m., Ideas Culture gets the challenge out to its Twitter-based Ideas Agents, who spend 15 to 30 minutes each on the problem. There are more than 200 agents from eight countries on the books, and each earns AUD 100 for four sessions. Problems tackled so far have included recruiting more male customers for a singles matching service and increasing attendance for professional development events.
Again this is a social started project with a tangible deliverable....what could be better!
Project: Threadless Clothing (http://www.threadless.com/)
Overview: People submit designs, others commit to buy them, when enough people commit, they make them and anyone can buy them!

Threadless is a community-centered online clothing store run by skinnyCorp
Members of the Threadless community submit t-shirt designs online; the designs are then put to a public vote where visitors and members of the community score them on a scale of 0 to 5. On average, around 1,500 designs compete in any given week. Each week, the staff selects about ten designs. Each designer selected receives $2,000 in cash, a $500 gift certificate (which they may trade in for $200 in cash), as well as an additional $500 for every reprint.
Although Threadless have expanded in a more traditional direction, adding shirts designed by selected artists, these are known as 'Threadless Select' and are not subject to the voting system.
Once again, a process that starts out in an online social environment delivers a real-world momento...
Crowdsourcing is not an original idea and has so far been done by many a brand such as Nespressos Coffee Machine design contest, Smiths 'Do me a flavour' and who could forget 'My Starbucks Idea'...
However, the idea of giving something tangible and real at the end of a campaign or crowdsourcing project to cement the experience, giving your audience some to keep hold of, really appeals to me...
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