Filed under: Community Building, Marketing & PR, Web 2.0, Web Design
The concept of crowdsourcing - letting a bunch your users create your product, or at least enhance it - is a staple of Web 2.0. Now, we see that European social networking site Mister Wong is crowdsourcing their corporate identity by holding a logo design contest. The contest offers $12,000 in prize money, with half going to the winner and the remainder split between two runners-up.
I like this idea quite a bit. While $12,000 for a logo may not seem like much compared to big corporate logo efforts, Mister Wong certainly could have paid less had they contracted with a small design firm or freelancer. At worst, from such a designer one might get an adequate logo with a generic swoosh or two; at best, the designer might produce something creative and relevant. In my experience, some of these freelancers are actually quite thorough in developing an understanding of what the company is about, and turn out nice logos.
So, Mister Wong really isn’t trying to save money. Rather, it’s all about creating buzz and, perhaps, lucking into a good logo, too. They say they have had over 1000 registrations so far. I’m sure they’ll draw both amateur and professional entrants. The latter would enjoy the publicity value of a win even if they low-probability payday wasn’t that enticing.
The initial crop of entries didn’t impress me all that much. Many seem overly intricate and inelegant. Nevertheless, I predict that they will come up with a few decent entries, and that one of these will be reworked into their final logo. And, like the million typing monkeys, perhaps the hundreds or thousands of entrants will generate one or two really creative concepts. Best of all, Mister Wong will have received more value in publicity and user engagement than they end up paying to the winning designers.
(Thanks to bloggers Stuart Bruce and Drew B!)
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