ExperienceCurve by Karl Long

Kluster.com is an interesting collaborative crowdsourcing decision making platform. They seem to position themselves as a sort of collaborative ideation/innovation platform. It seems that their main marketing strategy is to launch interesting services on it’s platform and the most recent one is called Name This, the main idea being that for $99 companies/entrepreneurs can post products and services to have the community come up with names for. As a demo they are running an initiative to rename Wolf Blitzer, a newsman who is famously on CNN more than any other person.

I particularly like these suggestions:
Garrison Sontag
Stonewall Blitzer
Slartibartfast

Other things they are attempting to rename in this demo are:
Chevy Nova
Zune!
Verizon’s G’zOne

As with all social tools like this I like to look at the rewards and recognition part of the culture, why would people participate in this in meaningful ways. In the case of Name This the primary reward seems to be cash money. Essentially they distribute $80 of the $99 fee to the top 3 names and the invluencecers:

Personally i think cash is a pretty weak motivator, especially when so few are going to benefit, and they need to do a better job of showcasing the top participants and have some non-cash community points for participation.

Via Mashable and my friend the Mad Finn

Another recent branding related crowdsourcing application is of course the runaway success BrandTags.com by Noah Brier

Jeffrey Veen mentioned earlier on Twitter that he was making a big announcement at the Emetrics summit, and there it is, Google has redesigned Analytics, here’s a good little video intro to it and a great write up on the app here.

Jeffrey went to google when they purchased Measure Maps from Adaptive Path, the user experience consultancy, i’m glad to see they contintued to invest in that, as opposed to what happened with Dodgeball. I guess analytics is much more aligned with their business of helping people get the most out of advertising. I’ve been using google analytics for a few years and it provides great value, I can’t wait to try out the new design, although you really need to be selling something to get the most out of google analytics and not just waxing poetic about marketing or t-shirts.

It is the simplicity of twitter that makes it successful and makes it malleable enough for people to do what ever they want with it without the constraint of what it was “designed for”. Take for example what i will call Confessr, it’s really just a web based interface to a twitter account meant for anonymous confessions, brilliant.