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The world is your contractor?

Another post based on a Thorney Fallis blog entry (they've got some great stuff going on over there).

They recently launched a site for the City of Ottawa that encouraged citizens to take pictures in the city and submit their photos to the site. Basically creating a promotional / tourism portal for downtown Ottawa. You can view the site here.  It's also a great example of how you integrate flickr, youtube, and twitter.

This brings up the new reality of marketing, that you don't always have to do it yourself. There's six billion people in the world and tons of creative folks who will jump at creative outlets such as contests.

A lot of blue-chip companies have tried tapping in to that potential online with contests of various sorts. The results are usually good.

I think one of the hard things about going down this road is that an organization's biggest fear is that they get little to no response from their contest. Remember, when these types of ideas are launched it's usually a person inside the organization who has championed the idea. The worse scenario is you spend a bunch of money and time launching a contest of some sort, only to find out in the end that no one cares enough about your organization to even bother participating.

That is the fear that prohibits a lot of organizations from dipping their toe in to stakeholder-generated content portals.

Kudos to the organizations who push the envelope though, because if you simply do the same things that you've done in the past, but hope to get different results, well, you know what Einstein said about that.

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