Crowdsourcing: Wikipedia vs. The Economist

Two diverse questions came to mind as I read an article on crowdsourcing:

1. Is crowdsourcing losing its appeal?
2. Is journalism threatened by Wikipedia?

Recently, the Economist published an article on crowdsourcing that discussed the past and future of this social medium where idea generation is outsourced to online crowds.

The author illustrated the success of crowdsourcing with examples drawn from Wikipedia, the Library of Congress (using Flikr) and Google.

According to article, the cost savings on crowdsourcing can evaporate when intellectual property such as product designs must be legally verified as to their ownership. In addition, a volunteer model such as Wikipedia would be disrupted should Wikipedia evolve to a for-profit business.

Next I turned to Wikipedia for their perspective on crowdsourcing.

I was interested to see that many of the same success stories and pros and cons on crowdsourcing were shared by the Economist and Wikipedia.

We know that Wikipedia has trumped Encyclopedia Britannica but does this extend to magazines such as the venerable Economist?

As Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams observe in the book Wikinomics, the strength of Wikipedia is the substantial number of edits made by the Wikipedia community of volunteers - an average of 20 edits per article. In a similar fashion to open source software, the community is constantly updating and revising articles.

Given this dynamic state, perhaps Wikipedia is as much to threat to journalism as YouTube is to TV.

What to make of the new Oracle.

You may have caught Kate Maddox of BtoB Online covering the recent Business Marketing Association conference.

According to Kate, the candor of Judith Sim, VP-CMO of Oracle, during her keynote at the BMA conference was quite surprising. Judith stated that Oracle has increased its return on marketing despite declining budgets. That budget is 1.7% of revenue versus more than 5% a decade ago.

From my perspective, we have seen drastic changes to technology publications over the past year (e.g. CMP's elimination of some its print publications). However, it was startling to be exposed to the magnitude of Oracle's drop in print advertising: from 55% of of its ad budget last year to 9% in the upcoming year.

Conversely, online advertising has increased to 36% of Oracle's ad budget this year substantially up from 22% last year.

Judith Sim also discussed Oracle's use of social news releases that has helped cut Oracle's PR budget in half and the posting of videos, blogs and forums on the Oracle website.

I couldn't help but think of the impact on Oracle's messaging in this massive change from offline to online communications and lead generation.

How well will the hard-hitting and competitive print ads from Oracle make the transition to the world of online media and user-generated content?

In the spirit of online camaraderie, I would like to present to Oracle my recommendation.

Let's pit Oracle and against its arch-rival SAP and compare their core websites head-to-head on Web 2.0 media.

• Employee Blogs - Oracle: 162, SAP:0 - The busy bees at Oracle win hands-down.
• Non-Employee Blogs - both websites host many - Let's call this a tie.
• Forums & Wikis - both websites offer robust forums and Wikis - Again a tie.
• Corporate Podcast Shows - Oracle:8, SAP:0 - A slam for Oracle
  
• Digg-style ranking site - Bonus points for Oracle on creating the Oracle Mix beta site
  

There you have it....even in the online world, Oracle can claim superiority!

P.S. I have recently moved my blog to Blogger. Check out the new blog and some of my coverage on the MarketingProfs B2B Forum and the SiriusDecisions Sales & Marketing Summit.

B2B marketers ahead of B2C on New Media Adoption

On August 13, BtoB Magazine announced the results of their research on new media conducted with the Association of National Advertisers.

In June, BtoB and the ANA interviewed 326 B2B and B2C marketers from their respective house files.

The research confirmed a number of tiers of new media tools. The top tier includes proprietary Web sites, e-mail marketing, online ads, search engine optimization, search engine marketing and webinars. The middle tier includes blogs, RSS feeds, podcasts and video on demand. The bottom tier consists of wikis, mobile, viral video, social networks and Second Life.

It was found that B2B marketers allocate a significantly higher proportion of their budget to new media than B2C marketers. While B2C marketers view new media as best suited for brand building, B2B marketers look to new media for demand generation.

As far as I see it, the irony for B2B marketers is that although their solutions require extensive communication (often through a sales force), the budgets and tools at their disposal for marketing are often inadequate. The opposite is true for B2C: humongous budgets to communicate simple messages.

With new media tools and in particular Web 2.0 tools, B2B marketers are bolstered by tools where the cost of entry is the development of content, rather than price of the tools or cost of the marketing medium.

For more details and a PowerPoint summary of the BtoB/ANA research, follow this link to the BtoB website.

A new category of LeadGen Tools materializes

In our research on LeadGen Tools, collaborative and dialog marketing tools made a prominent showing with email marketing, blogging and web conferencing tools leading the way.

Although our research was not scientific in a statistical sense, it does illustrate a trend of B2B marketers to deploy more ‘engaging’ tools. In a consumer-driven world, this only makes sense.

I suspect that these tools, as well as the Web 2.0 tools (e.g. blogging, wikis and social networking) will coalesce to form a new category of tools available to the B2B marketer. Let’s call these tools, LeadCom Tools, a name appropriate given the tools’ positioning between MarCom and Direct Marketing.

Unlike traditional direct marketing such as direct mail or telesales, the linkage to revenue is not as strong for LeadCom tools. And unlike mass media or MarCom options, LeadCom Tools do not amplify the message to the same extent as traditional MarCom but share some of the broadcast quality but to a narrower audience.

Taking the best from both ends of the spectrum, LeadCom tools are measurable, by level of engagement and scalable to niche audiences.

One of the most promising segments for LeadCom are nurture leads who expect a higher level of engagement with more relevant content balanced by a low-cost content delivery model.

As adoption of Web 2.0 tools increase, the use of these tools for LeadCom will be a very encouraging development.