Grown Up Thinking

I’m a huge fan of what Threadless stands for. They were in on the crowdsourcing game from the very start and ensured that the tees they produced had an audience ready to buy them. Fast forward, and other breakthrough fashion brands are ready to follow their lead.

Inc. Magazine recently published an article showing how Modcloth, an online clothing retailer, has tasked consumers with choosing the fashions they’d love to see on the site. This, quite frankly, makes everyone happy. Customers get the gear they want, and ModCloth benefits from taking the guesswork out of buying and creating an even more loyal fanbase.

Mass retailers could take a cue from this and build deeper community by inviting consumers to participate in the buying process through voting, commenting, sharing and demanding a specific product. While sites like Polyvore do a great job of allowing consumers to create and share a look, a deeper level of demand and exclusivity could be achieved. Why not let fashionistas reserve an item before it hits shelves (or screens) and receive a group discount for doing so?

By creating a group savings structure similiar to Groupon.com,  retailers could project inventory needs, thus eliminating a surplus and obligatory price slashing at the end of the season. Those who agreed to buy the product upfront win too, thanks to a savings perk.

The force and immediacy of social media could only amplify demand further through the sharing and voting elements. It would allow both brands and retailers to see if an item was trending high before it was produced or ordered. Who knows? Maybe there actually IS an audience for Duct Taped Prom dresses.

Many companies have long been trying to come up with a way to give people back relevant answers that truly solve the question being posed. Of course there are the search engines, some like (ask.com) even starting out trying to answer search queries posed as actual questions. Other services like Cha Cha have explored ways to use actual people to answer questions, in Cha Cha’s case, a network of paid reps.

The idea of getting an answer to any question  in a matter of minutes or even seconds has always been an dream and as Google has shown, there is certainly money to be had for efficiently answering people’s queries. Now, a startup may actually have found away to make this dream a reality. After recently discovering Aardvark, I may already qualify as an addict. I’ve asked 10 questions over the past few days, ranging from new restaurants in the East Village to the season’s best TV shows to where to find the best UX talent, and in almost all cases gotten extremely helpful answers back.

What’s best is Aardvark is completely crowdsourced and not just by random people. Aardvark uses Facebook Connect to tap into your network and their respective networks to find the best people to answer each question based on their interests, subjects they have added and questions they previously answered. Right in the heart of where social networking, search and crowdsourcing all meet, Aaardvark just might have hit the next gold mine.

Everywhere you look, media properties are looking to bring individuals into the coverage of what will certainly be a historic moment in US history. Just as Obama himself has represented the rapid changes from a one-way communication to an open two-way dialogue through his creative use of Facebook, YouTube, blogs and a variety of social technology, the inauguration itself will serve as a showcase for how new technology has changed the way we create and consume media.

From Twittering with Current while watching the live event to CNN’s partnership with Facebook that will allow views to watch and comment together by updating their Facebook statuses, savvy networks have caught on to the new consumers’ desire to experience events together and be heard. January the 20th and CNN’s ireporters coverage go beyond the main event itself and seek to capture and broadcast personal accounts from individuals leading up to and during this historic moment by making it easy to submit their reactions and observations easily via e-mail, phone, video and twitter. Perhaps most impressive will be CNN’s The Moment, where they are asking everyone attending the event to take a picture the moment Obama gets sworn in and e-mail it to themoment@cnn.com. CNN will then take all those pictures and post a 3D image of the entire scene, with all the pictures combines via Microsoft’s Photosynch technology, within hours.

While such a transformational momemt in history certainly accelerates this desire to share and come together, what we are witnessing is a mere preview of what the mindset of Consumer 2.0 will demand from all media and information they consumer. Millenials have grown up with e-mail, IM, texting and social technologies. They will continue to expect instant gratification, dialogue and a digital soapbox to speak from.

While this unprecendented election and now innaugaration has showcased many of these new technologies, you can’t help but wonder how long it could be till the Super Bowl, gameshows, sitcoms and even commercials latch on to the new mindset and find ways to crowdsource content and create deeper communities around their properties. While 2009 looks to be a slow year for the economy, it certainly will not be in the evolution of media and communications.

So, much has been said about Joe Six-Pack and the newly famous Joe the Plumber but convenient store chain 7-11 actually conceived of an ingenious promotion to use Joe to predict the election. In this case, a cup of joe. The idea is quite simple, 7-11 created red coffee cups with McCain’s name on them and blue cups with Obama’s. They then track the cups that their customers are selecting on a nationwide map on their 7-Election.com web site, which even allows consumers to view results by state. Even more remarkable, the results of this poll were within 1% of actual results in 2000 and identical to final results of the 2004 election. Guess Joe really does play a big role in this year’s election.

A 21st century (healthy, robust, and OFF LINE) romance has become an increasingly difficult feat of balance and skill accomplished only by the most adept. Now, I’m an old-fashioned lass. Doesn’t  take much more than a few adventurous meals and whispered punchlines stolen from The Big Lebowski to get my heart a’flutter, but even I turned to the teeming cesspool of online dating when I first moved to New York. I (without guidance) found almost immediate success, and have hence quelled my misgivings about meeting a mate in cyberspace, but finding (and keeping) love in the new millennium has now gone just a few steps further.

From crowdsourcing your lovers’ spats to tasking the inhabitants of a metropolis to help you find your dream companion, apparently relying on luck in the meatspace just isn’t enough to navigate the tricky waters of love. What’s more, young Japanese women are turning to the web to quell their loneliness via a new dating simulation/ social network called WebKare (or WebBoyfriend) to communicate with one of four anime digital crushes to win his heart through gameplay. 

Now, I’m all for gushy moments of overzealous, cheesy romance, but tracking your process of proposing to an unwitting fiancee is, as the great Walter Sobchek would say, over the line. Right, dude?