Crowdsourcing, Doritos Style

My husband brought home a mysterious-looking bag of Doritos last night. Mysterious because it isn’t labeled. It’s in black packaging, with the label x-13D and a write-in label with instructions to go to their website to “name the flavor.”

Crowdsourcing, I immediately thought. And I just gotta say, a really cool one at it.

So I went to the website to participate, thinking all I had to do was write it in. N’uh. There’s a ton more to do there. All in the name of crowdsourcing.

Not only can you participate in the x-13D experiment by naming the flavor and generating the ad for it (the ad generator launches 5.28), there are other things you can do, like “fight for the flavor,” where you can rate your favorite Doritos flavor (it isn’t Web2.0 if you can’t rate it, no?), and “crash the Superbowl.”

It has a Second Life feel to it but a much controlled environment. But it also isn’t crowdsourcing Dell style where you just make your suggestion, and you get rewarded by seeing a product you will actually want to buy out in the market. There aren’t any prizes, per se (or at least I didn’t see any), but I was definitely rewarded by the awesome user experience starting from ease of use to cool graphics, to knowing that your suggestion just might be on the Doritos label. Kinda like your kid appearing on the Life cereal box, I guess.

My First Idea!

I finally submitted an idea at Cambrian House and let me tell you…it’s kind of addicting. I submitted my Brown Thumbs idea (though someone please help me find another name for it) and I’m starting to refine it. But what’s more…I’m hungry for Glory Points!!!

I need a few good people to help me in my business. Won’t you help me? Please?

I really wanna be

I’m not a techie. I am but a lowly Marketing peon who likes to read technology blogs so that I can talk the talk and pretend to be cool (thank goodness for WYSIWYG editors). I know how to create links and I think I can create a decent webpage but even that’s up for debate.

So imagine how confused I am sometimes trying to figure out how I somehow tricked myself into believing I can create an uber cool widget or mess around with my Ning network’s code. I have no business playing around with PHP.

But if I have anything that’s going for me, it is that I’m determined to do things when I say I will.

So.

I am trying to learn a whole bunch of things and not sure where to start. What skills do I need to make turn myself into a true digerati? How do I go about doing it? What resources can you point to?

Maybe one of these days I’ll publish a book titled “From Urban Achiever to Digerati in 30 Days.”

Oh boy.

Tidbits

There are things I want to write about but feel I can’t until because everytime I start a post I always end up spending more time than I wanted. And the list keeps getting longer and longer and well…I don’t want to lose them.

So here are bullet points for now, until maybe the weekend…provided of course that this boy and his brother go to bed early and leave mommy with some blogging time.

• Wridea. How much I loved it at first and how I eventually forgot about it.

• My ZohoMail wishlist.

• Applications that I don’t want to tell anyone else about because I reaaaaaally want to keep them for myself.
• How excited I am to try out Zude. Because that’s just what I need…another profile to manage.
• How I don’t get UrbanSeeder (perhaps because I am not part of the target market?).

• My Wufoo wishlist.

And some thoughts in my head that I’d like to open up for discussion (I hear crickets…) because I will probably end up writing an incohesive post about them:

• Difficulty of convincing the enterprise to switch — Web2.0 services and applications are mostly free and low-cost, but cost-savings isn’t enough to switch. How would you address questions on reliability (“it’s free/low-cost”…”they might go out of business”…”it’s too new”…”what happens to our data if they go away?”) and security (“it’s web-based,” “it’s managed by someone else,”) ?
• I love it that an individual user can directly impact how an application/service is developed in the Web2.0 space through blogging and other communications and how quickly these companies adopt new direction based on user feedback. Not a question, just a statement, I guess…but your thoughts on this are welcome anyway.

Lisa out.