Critical Mass PR

This post also appears in the August issue of “PR Tactics,” published by the Public Relations Society of America.

What do you do when your organization is known for its creativity and you want to turn it up a notch?

For Go Daddy, the Web domain registrar and provocative Super Bowl advertiser asked customers to help.  The company’s “Create Your Own Commercial” contest yielded hundreds of submissions with the top eight videos splitting $250,000 in prize money.  First place winner RedTie Productions learned of their selection by seeing its ad air during ABC’s Indianapolis 500 telecast this past May.

Go Daddy’s contest achieved more than just goodwill and social media exposure.  The company acquired new commercials containing ideas it would not have conceived on its own for much less than it would have cost otherwise.

“The contest was a first for us,” says Marianne Curran, executive vice president of media and communications at Go Daddy.  “Our customers’ creativity generated hundreds of thousands of online views and brought additional traffic to our site.”

She says Go Daddy will air the commercials during national programming and measure results to guide next steps.

Crowdsourcing — engaging people to openly share and develop ideas, often via social networks — is paying dividends for Web-savvy communicators.

Shiv Singh, director of digital for Pepsico North America Beverages and author of  “Social Media Marketing For Dummies,” suggests that you crowdsource every product or campaign before launch.

“Campaigns that do well online do so largely because consumers share videos and information on social networks,” he says. “Consumers now expect to be part of a brand’s creative process. Smart communicators need to make sure their audiences are included every step of the way.”

Singh says public relations can help organizations go beyond customer-created ads by using crowdsourcing to impact real world events.

For example,  Victoria’s Secret mapped out a college tour by asking its Facebook community which campuses to visit and Pepsi’s Refresh Project encourages people to contribute ideas and vote on how it disperses millions of dollars among charitable projects.

Sustaining critical mass
Successful crowdsourcing requires compelling a large audience to take action.

And according to Singh, nobody has a deeper experience collaborating with audiences than public relations. PR practitioners can extend crowdsourcing through a program’s lifespan. He adds that public relations must help balance three challenges when managing audience engagement.

• Realize that engaging customers online invariably means that you will share some secrets about your strategy.  This puts competitiveness at risk, but if you do not share enough details, then customers may not participate.
• Demonstrate concern for customer privacy.  When seeking new ideas, you may need to share more information about customers’ behaviors than is normally in the public domain. Private online communities like Communispace mitigate this issue but may not yield accurate customer representation; and crowdsourcing as a PR angle itself is diminished when public collaboration is removed.
• Consider what you’ll do if customers help design a new product or campaign that you’re not happy with. Do you go forward or pull the plug?

Each challenge involves keeping many people happy and requires making tough decisions when developing your strategies. However, the benefits of finding the right balance can be significant: empowered customers who regularly share fresh ideas at little or no cost to you.

Ryan Zuk, APR, is a media and analyst relations professional and Phoenix PRSA Chapter member. Zuk can be reached @ryanzuk on Twitter. He also blogs at criticalmasspr.com and can be reached at ryanzuk at gmail dot com