I’m watching a Crowdsourcing Panel from Social Media Week New York on livestream at the moment, and they just said something important (I’m rephrasing):

People spend more time online playing online games than reading press online. They do this for points, for free.

We recently started this call for submissions for the inside of our packaging (that’s crowdsourcing/ open innovation), and the Germans are happily commenting on it on Facebook - but the Americans are quiet. I’m beginning to think that offering a $50 gift certificate reward is not constructive. I have the feeling the creatives here want to be intrinsically motivated, and if we offer an extrinsic reward (- gift certificate), that makes it look like they were not intrinsically motivated (even if they were, since it’s fun - and you get your phrase printed on a packaging sent out to thousands of people!). Hm. Will have to try that differently next time.

EDIT: I just listened to the other crowdsourcing panel, and here’s a quote from it: “If you paid people to make Linux - you’d get Microsoft” (Faris Yakob)