LOCAL CROWFUNDING

In Finland, a crowdfunding platform for community projects

Conceived in Finland, Brickstarter encourages citizens to take civic projects into their own hands, rather than waiting for governments to pick them up.

 17th August 2012 in Non-profit, Social cause.

Following on from our coverage of Smallknot, the US site that enables residents to support their favorite local businesses with donations, we’ve now discovered another similarly community-minded crowdfunding platform. Conceived in Finland, Brickstarter encourages citizens to take civic projects into their own hands, rather than waiting for governments to pick them up.

Like the site it is modelled and named after, Brickstarter invites anyone to upload details of a project that seeks to benefit the local society, the amount of money needed to get it underway, and updates on progress once it begins to turn from proposal to reality. Those visiting the site can search for the projects nearest them, vote for or invest in the ones they like, or arrange to volunteer their time or attend a future meeting. With the slogan ‘Yes, in my backyard!’, the site aims to foster discussion and participation in community improvements, providing a platform for residents to suggest what they would like to change in their area. These desires are reflected in the real-time Dashboard, which maps the topics generating the largest response among locals and compares them with current strategies being pursued by institutions and authorities. Those authorities can also get involved, giving their backing to projects they believe could have traction.

Although currently a prototype, the team are currently working with the Finnish Innovation Fund to help bring the full site to the public. Until then, could this kind of community crowdfunding bring improvements to your region?

Website: www.brickstarter.org
Contact: brickstarter@sitra.fi

SOUPER SUNDAY

FUSE CORP crowd sourcing met ondernemers

Entrepreneurs matched with government leaders on grassroots projects

San Francisco-based Fuse Corps is enlisting entrepreneurial professionals for one-year fellowships with visionary governors, mayors or social entrepreneurs.

 28th November 2011 in Government.

Just as non-profits can benefit from an infusion of outside professional skills, so too can government leaders. That is essentially the premise behind San Francisco-based Fuse Corps, who are attempting to tackle the most pressing problems in the US by enlisting entrepreneurial professionals for one-year fellowships with visionary governors, mayors or social entrepreneurs.

In anticipation of its next March-to-March fellowship cycle, Fuse Corps is currently interviewing professionals from the private sector who have at least eight years of experience, demonstrated leadership skills and a commitment to public service. The 10 to 20 applicants who are selected will begin their fellowship with an intensive, two-week leadership course, equipping them with the core skills necessary to be successful in government and cross-sector environments. Fellows will then be assigned either to “cabinet-level” positions, working with leaders in state and local governments, or to community-based organizations, working on grassroots projects in education, health care, low income housing, economic development, workforce development and green initiatives, for example. Fellows can either be “on-loan” from their employers, receiving salary and benefits as usual, or they can receive a stipend in their Fuse Corps placement. The video below offers an overview featuring Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson, who will have two Fuse Corps fellows reporting to him in 2012 on energy reform and education.

Entrepreneurs far and wide: time to bring your hard-won business skills to the public table?

Website: www.fusecorps.org
Contact: nora@fusecorps.org

HAAGSE LOBBY

TIMORPLEIN COMMUNITY IN GESPREK MET DEN HAAG

De ministers en de wethouders brachten een bezoek aan DE INDISCHE BUURT. 

De dag werd afgesloten met een debat over de thema’s crisis, buurteconomie en werkgelegenheid. Ondernemers, professionals in de wijk, bestuurders en ministers maakten de stand van de dag op – waar gaat het goed, waar zitten de obstakels - en benoemden urgente vervolgacties. Gespreksleider Margreet Reijntjes leidde het gesprek in goede banen en koppelde ondernemers en professionals aan elkaar.

Einddebat met ondernemers uit Oost

F.Factor Friends, Followers, Fans and ...Food

THE F-FACTOR, draait om de rol van vriendschap/relaties in marketing en commercie.

 F-FACTOR:

THE F-FACTOR | consumenten maken steeds meer gebruik van elkaar netwerk en kennis om nieuwe,betere en andere keuzes te maken.  Keuzes op gebied van kopen, dienste, recreatie of werk. Het is daarom heel belangrijk voor bedirjven om te zorgen dat ze de juiste en voldoende F.factor in hun brand hebben.

Waarom is de F-FACTOR belangrijk voor consumenten? Het biedt ze herkenbaarheid, betrokkenheid en affiniteit en is daardoor veel efficienter en relevanter. Consument hoeft hoierdoor niet veel tijd te verliezenmet het zoeken naar de juiste keuze. "Vrienden" hebben die kuezes al eerder gemaakt, dus het voelt vertrouwd om daarop af te gaan.  In marketing geen onbekend gegeven, de beste manier om iets te verkopen is door een andere klant te laten zeggen hoe goed of ekker het is. Als die 'andere' klant ook nog eens een grote F gehalte heeft dan werkt dat nog beter. 

In dit nummer kan je lezen hoe consumenten bijdragen aan het verstreken van brands  11 Crucial Consumer Trends for 2011, 

De E-lites, het behoudnevan de few, gaat  nu over in het delen met de massa  SOCIAL-LITES. Inmiddels krachtige netwerken die de curatoren, ambassadeurs en verspreiders  lvereen voor diensten en producten. Een verandering dat ook vooral veel te maken heeft met de veranderende STATUSPHERE.

(Picture credit: 55His.com)

De macht van F-FACTOR in cijfers:

• The F-FACTOR wordt gedominieerd door Facebook, 500 millioen actieve gebruikers. met een 700 billion minutes per maand aandacht. (Source: Facebook, April 2011)
• Het effect is uiteraard vele malen groter met meer dan 250 millioen mensen actief in relatie met  meer dan  2.5 millioen externe websites (Source: Facebook, April 2011)
• Tde gemiddelde gebruiker klikt 9 x de "I like it" knop (Facebook, 2010)

Nieuwe krachte F-factoren op de markt

• Het is niet alleen Facebook, maar ook de explosief groei van bijvoorbeeld Groupon

5 manieren waarop de F-FACTOR consumenten gedrag beinvloedt:

1. F-DISCOVERY: Hoe consumenten nieuwe producten ontdekken  door af te gaan op hun relaties in het netwerk 
2. F-RATED: Hoe consumenten gevraagd en ongevraagd steeds meer beoordelingen krijgen over producten en diensten.
3. F-FEEDBACK: Hoe consumenten zelf onderzoek doen en het netwerk actief vragen hun aankoop te verbeteren en te bevestigen. 
4. F-TOGETHER: Hoe het shoppen toch in en in een sociaal fenomeen blijft ook al is er geen fysieke gedeelde ruimte. 
5. F-ME: Hoe sociale netwerken op zich zelf producten en diensten zijn geworden.

*  social connections on how they find, decide and purchase: i.e. what happens when consumption is increasingly social, rather than the personalized retailing opportunities on social networks (which is currently still the main focus of F-COMMERCE). For more on this see the excellent Social Commerce Today.

Alles lijkt te dworden gedreven door de obsessie van de klant om te gaan voor the best of the best en hun zucht naar 'toeval' serendipity, opwinding, interactie en community, er bij horen. Dit zijn de pull factoren van  F-DISCOVERY. Mensen zijn nieuwsgierig en geinteresseerd in wat anderen doen, leuk vinden, wat ze eten en drinken, wanneer ze dat doen en met wie. Voor een groot deel omdat we vooral deel willen zijn van de omgeving waar we ons graag zelf in zien.

Een paar voorbeelden

• Polyvore bills itself as ‘a community of tastemakers’, where users can clip products from around the web and compile them into virtual ‘looks’ or sets which can be shared across social networks. The site also features sets from brands and celebrities, with users able to follow, like and buy desired items.
• Boutiques.com is a personalized shopping site from Google where users can establish their own collection of favorite items from around the web.
• Users of Thefind, the shopping search engine, can ‘Shop Like Friends’, and view their Facebook friends’ tastes and preferences.
• A number of extensions make it increasingly easy for consumers to see exactly what their friends 'Like' around the web: check out Likebutton.com, which shows users what their friends have liked across a number of the most popular sites, or LikeJournal, which stores users' and their friends' likes.
• Belgian magazine Flair launched their fashiontag Facebook app in March 2011. The app enables users to tag photos of friends’ clothes and ask them where they had bought them. Within a week, the magazine’s number of fans increased by 35%, from 17,000 to 23,000. (viaAdAge)
• Kaboodle, Svpply, Fancy and Nuji all help users to discover new products from apparel to art that have been selected by fellow consumers.
• Canadian shoppers can use ItSpot’s iPhone apps to discover what fellow shoppers nearby are buying. The apps cover a number of cities, and include details of local promotions as well as shopping tips from local Shoppingistas.

• In November 2010, Gifts.com and Hunch joined forces to create their GiftFinder app, which logs into Facebook and suggests suitable gifts for friends based on the information in their profile pages. The company said the conversion rate was up to 60% higher than when users were shown generic recommendations.

While consumers sometimes enjoy finding the best of the best through discovery, they are increasingly able to access personalized recommendations and reviews on something they knowthey want to purchase. In fact, expect more and more sites to automatically serve up friends’ recommendations, ratings and reviews* next to goods and services that people are researching.

• In April 2010, Levi's was the first big brand to integrate its online store with Facebook, allowing shoppers to view which products their friends had ‘liked’, interact with them and create a 'like minded shopping' experience.

• Facebook’s Instant Personalization project moves this beyond Facebook itself, by enabling users to have content that their friends have liked or recommended highlighted on other websites. Partner sites include local review site Yelp, music site Pandora, Microsoft’s search engine Bing and travel site Trip Advisor. The Trip Advisor tie in, launched in December 2010, means that visitors to the travel site who are logged into Facebook see their friends’ reviews first, as well as being able to quickly view which of their friends have been to particular cites. Friends can also message each other quickly for additional travel tips.
• Amazon launched a feature in July 2010 that allows users to integrate their Facebook and Amazon accounts. The feature allows Amazon to connect through to a user's social network and base recommendations upon the information found in his/her Facebook profile. Moreover, the feature also informs users of friends' most popular books, DVDs and musicians and also reminds them of birthdays and gift suggestions.

• In February 2011, Microsoft’s Bing rolled out their "Liked Results" feature to all users. The update brings Facebook 'likes' and search preferences of friends into the search engine's algorithm.

• Similarly, Google’s +1 feature, launched in March 2011, brings personalization to search results, by allowing users to ‘+1’ results. These are then shared with an individual’s Google contacts, and highlighted in their search results. Google’s stated aim for the project: enabling users to help each other out in choosing the best and most relevant results.

* Privacy concerns are of course the elephant in the room here. Ensuring that consumers maintain control and choice over when and where their information ends up is one of the big challenges for brands. But that’s for another briefing. In the meantime, check out the Wall Street Journal’s excellent (if scary) What They Know feature.

Over the last decade, online reviews have greatly empowered consumers (see TRANSPARENCY TRIUMPH). But anonymous reviews aren’t always what consumers need or want; they can lack relevance and context, and consumers with many options sometimes just want an unambiguous, or finite opinion.

Which is where F-FEEDBACK comes in: consumers actively disclosing their purchasing intentionsand reaching out to their friends and contacts for personalized feedback.

Some indicators:

• Product recommendations from family (63%) and friends (31%) are the most trusted. However 81% of US consumers now go online to do additional research, with 55% looking for user reviews, and 10% soliciting advice from their social networks. However amongst people aged 25-34, this figure rises to 23%. (Source: Cone Inc, June 2010)
• 90% of people trust the recommendations of their Facebook friends (Source: ExactTarget, August 2010)
• 31% of daily Twitter users ask their followers for opinions about products and services. (Source: Edison Research & Arbitron Internet, April 2010)

One more key driver here: with more and more consumers increasingly viewing their online reputation as something to enhance as well as just protect, the quality of answers on Q&A services is rapidly improving. Some examples:

• Facebook Questions was recently redesigned to focus on helping people ask their friends (rather than the whole Facebook community).
• Sites such as StackExchange and Quora allow users to follow topics and other users, building detailed databases of questions and answers that are tagged and publicly searchable.
• LoveThis is a user review website for people to write tips and recommendations to share among friends on their network.
• Travel Q&A sites Gogobot and Hotel Me are trying to bridge the gap between known friends (who are trusted but may not have the answer) and wider audiences.

There are also a whole host of sites for consumers who want tips and recommendations about which products and services to purchase, rather than more general Q&A:

• Visa’s RightCliq is an online shopping tool that enables consumers to save potential purchases in their ‘Wishspace’, which can be shared with friends for feedback.
• Shopsocial.ly offers consumers a platform to connect with their friends and others who wish to share product recommendations or purchases. The website enables users to 'shout' out a question regarding a product in order to receive feedback from their community of trusted advisors.
• Online price comparison site Twenga launched a feature in April 2011 that allowed users to instantly pose questions to their social networks.

Due to the continued spread of smartphones, F-FEEDBACK can happen in real-time too:

• MyShopanion and Scandit are just two iPhone apps that allow consumers to scan items while out shopping and not only see online reviews but get instant feedback via Facebook and Twitter.

Check out these examples of how friends can now come into the fitting room ;-)

• The Tweet Mirror enables customers to send snaps of themselves to friends and followers directly from the fitting room.
• In Spain, Diesel hooked up cameras in their stores to Facebook, allowing customers to post photos of themselves trying on clothes to their profiles for instant feedback from their friends.
• From September to November 2010, Macy’s Magic Fitting Room enabled shoppers at the brand’s New York flagship store to virtually ‘try on’ items via an augmented reality ‘mirror’ and then post the results to Facebook.
• Go Try It On takes this concept one step further, by providing a platform for users to ask not just their friends for feedback, but the site’s community for their opinions on their outfits.

More and more online consumers are also sharing and discussing potential purchases with their friends in real-time:

• WetSeal, the US fashion retailer, has a ‘Shop With Friends’ feature, similar to toy retailerMattel’s ShopTogether
• Shop With Your Friends, a Dutch startup has developed a tool that enables consumers to shop online together in real-time.
• Quorus Discuss is a plugin that any online vendor can install that allows users to chat and discuss products with friends.
• In November 2010, Cisco encouraged consumers to use their WebEx tool to share their desktops with friends on Cyber Monday, the post-Thanksgiving day when many US retailers launch online promotions.

While group-buying platforms such as Groupon are revolutionizing local retail (see our PRICING PANDEMONIUM trend), consumers usually don’t actually know the other members of the group that they’re buying with. So, while consumers get to leverage the power of the web to benefit from better deals, the actual shopping experience frequently lacks the F-FACTOR. Consumers, of course, have strong incentives to share certain purchases, especially for F-FACTOR-friendly experiences such as buying event tickets: what’s not to like about automatically inviting friends to a concert or movie right after purchasing a ticket?

• 83% of consumers state that they tell their friends if they get a good deal. (Source: JWT Intelligence, December 2010)
• Facebook announced in April 2011 that every time a user posts on Facebook about buying a ticket from Ticketmaster, the company estimates they receive an extra USD 5.30. (Source: New York Times, April 2011)
• Eventbrite, the event ticketing site, found that users are 10 times more likely to share details of events they have bought tickets to (than those events they are still considering whether to buy). The ticket sales generated by people who share details of purchased events are 20% higher than if they haven’t yet bought tickets. The site estimates that the value of a Facebook share is USD 2.53. (Source: Eventbrite, March 2011)

So, expect to see more tools that help consumers easily share and co-ordinate relevant purchases with their close friends and family, but for now we’ll just highlight a few:

• Disney’s Tickets Together Facebook app enables users to buy theater tickets directly from Facebook, posts details of the screening on a user’s wall and enables them to invite friends to buy tickets.
• Indian consumers can do something similar with ticket site BookMyShow’s Ticket BuddyFacebook app.
• Ebay’s Group Gifts feature, launched in November 2010, allows users to invite friends to split the cost of a gift. The application integrates with Facebook to allow friends to be privately invited, while information from the recipient’s profile can even be used to suggest suitable gifts.
• In April 2011, Facebookpiloted 'Deals in Facebook' in various US cities including Atlanta and San Francisco.  Facebook users in these cities can find local deals and then easily share, buy and plan them with friends.  Users are alerted to deals through email, Facebook notifications and, if their friends buy the deal, through their News Feed.  Also, when users see deals from a business that their friends frequent (i.e. check-in at), this information will be also be included in the deal.

The F-FACTOR also makes possible personalized products and services based on the activities and output of one’s social network:

• Flipboard is an app that integrates tweets and updates into a single, personalized online magazine. Launched in July 2010, the free app automatically creates a magazine from the user's social content, letting readers quickly flip through the latest stories, photos and updates from friends and trusted sources. Links and images are rendered right in the digital magazine, so users no longer have to scan long lists of posts and click on link after link; instead, they instantly see all the stories, comments and images in one place.
• March 2011 saw the launch of LinkedIn Today, a socially curated news homepage for users that rounds up the stories and links that are being read, shared and discussed by a user’s network.
• Newsle is a tool that launched in public beta in April 2011 that alerts users to public news articles about members of their social networks from Facebook and LinkedIn.
• ‘Personal search engine’ Greplin launched publicly in February 2011. The search engine scans across a user's personal and social accounts including: Gmail, Facebook, Twitter and Google Docs, enabling users to locate any desired information that may be scattered across their social media network, whenever they want it.
• US based PostPost, launched in December 2010, is a free application that turns one's Facebook page into a digital newspaper. Users connect the application via the PostPost site, which enables it to link to Facebook and create a presentation of their news feed in the traditional format of a newspaper.

Oh, and check out these very ‘sign of the times’ F-ME examples of consumers literally turning their friends and followers into actual physical products and services:

• Twournal enables users of Twitter to transform their tweets and pictures into a real-life published journal. In addition to creating their own 'books', users can also buy and sell publications from other users.
• US based CrowdedInk offers an app that allows users to generate mugs filled with pictures of their Facebook friends or Twitter followers. Users only need to enter their username and a preview of the mug is automatically generated in minutes.
• Social Print Studio can provide the analogue equivalent to the online album. The site creates posters generated from Facebook friends’ profile pictures, Facebook photo albums, Twitter followers, and even Tumblr accounts.
• Kunst Buzz, a Dutch art company has started producing Twitter art where users’ tweets make up their portrait.

With the F-FACTOR a growing force in the consumption arena, ultimately the only way for brands to succeed is to be liked (literally ;-) if not loved, and this liking and loving comes from superior performance. In that sense, the Perform or Perish theme is stronger than ever, and underscores that while the F-FACTOR is currently playing out in the online arena first and foremost, this is in the end about business at large.

The F-FACTOR is about being so exceptional that consumers will find and ultimately choose you, without you as a brand having to do anything extra. It’s not about bribing or even compelling people to “Like” your Facebook page. This is something of course, which brands that truly have the F-FACTOR don’t have to worry about.

So, for all ‘F-entrepreneurs', this space is still wide open: simply come up with new tools and platforms that help consumers help each other to discover, discuss and buy the best of the best. For B2C brands, it's time to deliver innovations, products, campaigns and experiences that truly have the F-FACTOR.

In the meantime we’re working hard on our June Trend Briefing, which will cover a dozen ‘mini-trends’ dying to be applied straight away. Do tell your friends and followers ;-)