Crowdsourcing is a relatively new term. It is what happens when you replace a role normally filled by an individual with many contributors, or a crowd. The idea behind crowdsourcing is that the wisdom of the crowd will always exceeds that of an individual.
One of the best known examples of crowdsourcing in action is wikipedia – the web based, collaborative, encyclopedia. What makes a wiki (an entry in wikipedia) different from a regular encyclopedia is that anyone can update a wiki so it is constantly being updated and monitored by volunteers from their computers.
At Shawn Lam Video I’m in the process of updating my existing website. My old one works (I get work from it) but with the new Windows 7 and Internet Explorer 8, I found that my formatting was a bit off and rather than simply writing a script in my CSS to correct this, I would take the opportunity to replace the entire site. And while I’m at it… I figured I’d take a look at my 6 year old logo and see if I cannot improve on it as part of my new re-launch.
Vancouver's Premier Video Production Company
ENTER CROWDSOURCING
Designbay is an online community for freelance designers. Instead of hiring a local designer and get one person’s vision of my new logo I decided to give the crowd at designbay.com a try. I simply posted a brief outlining what I was looking for, not looking for, and relevant background info on my logo, company, and customers, along with a cash prize, and I let the wisdom of the crowds go to work designing me a new logo.
I am offering at $200 prize to the winner who ends-up designing the logo I decide to use and the contest posting cost me $30 – so much less than what it would have cost me at a local design firm. My contest is for 10 days and throughout the process I can interact with the designers who decide to enter my contest, giving them feedback so they can further refine. All the while my contest is open to the public, meaning every designer can see what the others have designed and my feedback – helpful if they want to design a logo that better fits my needs and likes and win the contest.
At the time of this writing my contest has been online for 1.5 days and I have already received 14 designs. They are fun to look at and because they are all designed by different people, the designs are all over the place. I even have one that replaced my usual check mark/’V for video” logo element with a lamb head, an obvious play on my surname, Lam.
You can have a look at my live list of logo designs here:
Shawn Lam Video logo contest on Designbay
WHY RE-BRAND
I’ve avoided re-branding my company, largely due to the fact that I did a pretty good job in the beginning and my strategy wasn’t as much about going after a specific niche but rather several niches. Along the way I expanded my range of services and I group my video production work into three main areas: Corporate Video Production, Event Video Production, and Technical Services
The challenging part of marketing, through my website, to these three different markets is that they are so different. Corporate video is all about communicating a message, Event video is about documenting a live event, and technical services is about transferring and duplicating videos from events that I wasn’t involved in the making of. In the end I realized that corporate work is what I want more of, I have enough event video and the ones I do want/can handle more of I will contact them directly, rather than have them find me through my website, and technical services doesn’t generate enough revenue to justify taking 1/3 of the top level website attention from my prospective clients.
So my new brand/logo/website will be focuses on my corporate clients, I’ll create a second brand and website for my event clients, and I’ll probably drop technical services all together, or at least it prominence on the corporate site.
So let me know your thoughts. I’ll be picking my new logo by November 4th but the website will still take a bit longer than that.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Would I consider a corporate video production?
The question is can I afford not to!
Its not about staying ahead of your competitors anymore, its about keeping up with them.