Wikipedia's most valuable brand asset is trust. For the information portal, which turned 10 last year, to maintain its credibility, and its value, it must cultivate trust with its users, and create trust that self-interested parties are not influencing its product, i.e., its content.

So new questions about Wikipedia editors taking money to change content could combust into the greatest threat the brand has seen to date, bigger than waning interest and wooing academia or even rivals vying for its perch. One Wikipedia watcher suggests scandals are already taking a toll on Wikipedia's bottom line.Continue reading...

The notion of crowdfunding has actually existed for centuries as crowds gathered to hear and support pitches, but digital technology and social media have catapulted that notion to new heights and expanded the playing field and the playbook.

When President Obama signed the April 5th legislation, "Capital Raising Online While Deterring Fraud and Unethical Non-Disclosure Act" a.k.a. the Crowdfund Act, as part of his JOBS (Jumpstart Our Businesses and Startups) Act, the general public became empowered to fund startups and small businesses and receive stock (equity) in exchange, as well as legalized 'general solicitation,' which means that startups and companies can leverage social media like FaceBook and LinkedIn to raise funds.

Kickstarter’s modus operandi of crowdfunding individual projects has iterated to the next level of VC-like funding, which prior to the President’s action, could only be donation-based — making it illegal in the U.S. for a company to raise money from a crowd that would then grow the business.Continue reading...

GutCheck is now out of beta with its latest product, Instant Research Communities, which offers brands and marketers quick access to consumer communities on their websites, Facebook fan pages, Twitter, and Google+.

GutCheck’s automated recruitment engine instantly qualifies respondents from these pools for private platform discussion and review of proposed business decisions.

We first covered GutCheck last year and spoke with Matt Warta, GutCheck CEO when the Denver start-up had just won the People’s Choice award (and $1 million in free advertising) at the DEMO Spring 2011 conference. “We’ve lowered the economic barrier to this kind of research,” Warta told us then.

Now it’s even lower, and the research is more refined. We caught up with Warta, in New York for the launch of GutCheck Instant Research Communities at The Advertising Research Foundation 2012 Re:think conference, and asked about reaction to their disintermediation of traditional Market Research Online Communities (MROCs).Continue reading...

CNN's citizen journalism project, iReport, just celebrated its fifth anniversary with meetups of iReporters around the world. 

Now Lila King, Participation Director of CNN Digital, promises there will be “a more collaborative iReport” with the launch of a "social network for news" to be launched this fall. An Android app is also in development for a “personalized news experience” that will also aid citizen iReporters in their efforts. 

“We’ve absolutely come into our own. We’re turning five, so in dog years we’re in our 30’s, totally adults, and now just shy of 1 million contributors worldwide,” says King of the groundbreaking platform for user-generated content at the forefront of stories big and small, from hotspots such as Haiti to their hometowns.Continue reading...

There are millions of Americans who couldn’t tell you how to use a mitre box if you paid them to tell you. Craftsman is aiming to change that. 

In an attempt to market to those who aren’t so handy, Craftsman, the venerable 84-year-old Sears tool brand that is also now available at Ace Hardware, is casting an online reality show, “Screw*d.”

As the title implies, Craftsman is seeking a participant who's unhandy at fixing things around the house — a human fixer-upper in need of Craftsman's help.Continue reading...

Bill McKibben’s impassioned speech at Power Shift 2011, seen above, began with a call to arms: “All right, listen up. Very few people can ever say that they are in the single most important place they could possibly be doing the single most important thing they could possibly be doing. That’s you, here, now.”

McKibben, the former New Yorker staff writer and author of The End of Nature, among other books, has been called "probably the nation's leading environmentalist" by the Boston Globe and described by TIME magazine as "the world's best green journalist.”

Nowadays, he's busy organizing 350.org in 2009 as a global grassroots movement to solve climate crisis, a name derived from the need to reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere from its current level of 392 parts per million to below 350 ppm.

With Earth Day more or less devolved into a day of appreciating the planet and far removed from the mass protest from which it sprang in 1970, McKibben and his cohorts are hoping, this time, to get the branding of an earth-changing (and -saving) movement right.Continue reading...

With New York Fashion Week behind us, it’s just the right time to put aside those designer duds and embrace one’s inner "foodie" with the launch of Zagat Exclusives.

Tailored to please diners and dining establishments alike, this program will provide regularly scheduled discounts for a limited time, delivered by email, at Zagat-Rated restaurants in New York City, and will soon be rolled out in other major metropolitan areas.

"Zagat is harnessing the increasingly popular group buying model to provide the best possible deals for our customers and restaurateurs," said Tim Zagat, CEO, Zagat Survey. The program, which is powered by Groupon competitor DealOn, offered $30 off a three-course meal at Manhattan's famed “21” Club for its first promotion. This move signifies a bold effort by Zagat to follow Yelp and OpenTable into the highly competitive dining-discount game.Continue reading...

Crowdsourcing, a term coined by Wired writer Jeff Howe and explained in the video above, is without a doubt a key digital marketing trend for 2010. The New York Times suggests that small brands shouldn't shy away from tapping into the public's willingness to share ideas to help spur innovation and feedback, and cites the example of a particularly savvy (and successful) tiny brand as a case study.Continue reading...