The Trouble with Crowdsourcing

Recently we decided to have some flyte bumper stickers made up. Ryan Goan, our creative director, created a bunch of variations (click on the image to the right for a detailed look) for me to review.

I decided to get some additional feedback, so I crowdsourced the review process. According to wikipedia (aka the Word of God according to many geeks):

Crowdsourcing is a neologism for the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people or community in the form of an open call. For example, the public may be invited to develop a new technology, carry out a design task (also known as community-based design^[1] and distributed participatory design), refine or carry out the steps of an algorithm (see Human-based computation), or help capture, systematize or analyze large amounts of data (see also citizen science).

The term has become popular with business authors and journalists as shorthand for the trend of leveraging the mass collaboration enabled by Web 2.0 technologies to achieve business goals. However, both the term and its underlying business models have attracted controversy and criticism.

So I threw it open to my followers on Twitter and my friends on Facebook. When people gave two answers I split the vote. Here are the results:

• 1: 14.5
• 2: 6.0
• 3: 5.0
• 4: 6.0
• 5: 1.5
• 6: 10 

Well, 1, then 6 seems to be the big winners, but there's certainly some variables in there. Personally, I'm not a fan of 6 because the traditional oval bumper stickers have a border. There was also a lot of discussion around whether we could "pull off" a bumper sticker that didn't include our name and had our URL so tiny.

However, I don't think a lot of people make a buying decision based on bumper stickers.

"You know, I was going to vote for Obama, but that 'McCain/Palin 2008' bumper sticker makes a lot of sense. I think I'm voting for them."

I've always felt the plane was a pretty cool icon, and people who see it might be intrested to learn more about the story behind it, a.k.a. flyte.biz.

So, at the end of the day I'm no closer to a decision. I do like #1, although I'm thinking of dropping the www off the URL for additional white space, or even perhaps just leaving ".biz" in small letters below. I also like #3, perhaps with the www-less URL.

Anyway, if you'd like to confuse me further, please feel free to add your own thoughts below. It still hasn't gone to the printer.

Rich Brooks
Consensusless

Comments

[Adam Flaherty]

Despite the low ratings for 3 and 5, I really like the idea of having a large logo, no company name, and a small URL. If I wasn't aware of flyte, just the logo would make me curious to find out more. I didn't cast a vote initially, but I prefer 5 and 6!

[Margaret Lukens]

Big question: what do you want the sticker to do? Is its purpose to start a conversation? send people to your website? make your logo instantly recognizable among Maine drivers? (If you've shared the stickers' purpose in other tweets or posts, sorry that I missed it.)

That said, I admire the design philosophy of E. Tufte, which includes minimizing the use of non-data ink. So, no unnecessary borders, for example. And these days you can dispense with the "www." in most cases; it doesn't add any meaning.

I, too, love your plane. Including the company name in large letters doesn't particularly help the casual driver find you because of your .biz suffix. They've got to get close enough to see the web address, which will give them the "flyte" too, so no need to duplicate it.

So can you tell? I'm the whole person who favored #5.

[Holly Sherburne]

Great post. Very informative. Here's my 2 cents.... I like #1, but to create more white space which you want, how about tucking the URL up close under the t and e of flyte. Align it left next to the y and extend it to the right edge of the e. You could drop the www, but I'd be inclined to leave it b/c it makes it instantly recognizable as a URL, esp since .biz isn't as common to see as a .com. Hope that's useful.

[Carlos Hernandez]

My vote is number 2.

Have fun with the process!