The simple fact of the matter is that not every strategy for user-generated content is going to be successful.  Partnering with a company that specializes in user-generated content is going to help you significantly because most companies don't have the needed experience in-house.  This is a very new field, after all.

However, I believe that Heinz is doing the right thing by at least trying.  The online dialogue has begun – starting with ratings and reviews, then blogging, then social networking, and now user-generated advertising.  Heinz is smart to dip their toe in the water, just as many (even earlier pioneers) are dipping their toe into the upcoming 3D Web, popularized by Second Life.  There is an opportunity cost to being too much of a laggard, just as there is an opportunity cost for being too early of a pioneer.  The balance is difficult to strike but great companies did not get great by being timid.

Perhaps instead of user-generated advertising, Heinz should have started with crowdsourcing.  Another consumer food company, Kettle Chips, selected several new user-generated flavors with their "People's Choice" campaign, as I wrote about last year around this time.

The NY Times article also reminds me of the "contrarian" (i.e., informed by decades of marketing experience) views of Dr. Peter Fader and Dr. David Reibstein of The Wharton School, as documented in my Word-of-Mouth Wisdom interview series.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this news.

The most insightful part of the movie, as it pertains to word of mouth as well as green products, is to watch the reaction of EV1 leasees (all EV1s were leased until GM proved the market potential) when they realize that they can not buy their EV1 under any condition.  They organize, they petition, they beg.  Big name actors like Mel Gibson, Tom Hanks, and all other EV1 leasees are turned down.  The organizers get together and offer to buy all of the cars for $1.9 million – their request goes with no answer (according to the movie).  After finding out that the EV1s are being destroyed, they stand outside of the GM parking lot where EV1s are being stored to watch over the cars to make sure that GM doesn't destroy any more.  They literally do this for months on a 24×7 basis.  Talk about love for a car!  It makes iPod owners look downright disloyal.  I guess that is because a car has such a big impact on your life as opposed to an iPod, and the EV1 leasees were so passionately focused on making an impact on the environment.  These consumers were a word-of-mouth revolution waiting to be leveraged by GM.  But, GM being short-term focused like so many companies that are incentivized to think that way due to the short-term nature of making your numbers for Wall Street analysts, completely misses the boat.  [Side note: this short-term focus was really crystallized for me by my friend, Derek Woodgate, who is a corporate futurist and the founder of The Futures Lab, in a discussion we had on why the corporate world needs futurists.  He has a great job, in my opinion, but more on that perhaps later.]

One of the big critiques of the EV1, from a consumer perspective at that time, is the short distance that the car can travel on a full charge (only 55-75 miles on the first generation model, due to the early generation batteries used; but the movie states that the average American only drives 29 miles per day although it doesn't seem like the car was ever marketed to highlight that this range would be sufficient for some 90% of American drivers).  Another critique is the high production cost of $80,000 per vehicle when the lease payments would net around $34,000 to $44,000, obviously a money-losing proposition for GM.  But a former EV1 employee explains that once economies of scale kick in, from good marketing and availability in large metropolitan areas, the production costs would have fallen dramatically and battery technology would have rapidly improved.  This seems like a logical argument to me, especially considering the recent success of the Tesla, which can travel up to 250 miles on a full charge.  It also helps that the Tesla goes 0-60 in 4 seconds and looks like a well-designed sports car.  Unlike the EV1, which had a failed rollout (only leasing 800 units), the Tesla recently sold out their flagship 2007 model in just four months. 

I guess my point here is that GM could have figured it out if they stuck with it, and the consumer emotion evoked by the product was simply incredible.  And I think it is indisputable that GM missed the boat on the launch of hybrids relative to Toyota (who is projected to pass GM in 2007 as the world's largest producer of autos).  In the movie, one of GM's former Board members talks about his support of the EV1 project more from a R&D perspective, given the shift in consumer demand that he saw coming.  The success of hybrids and the launch of the Tesla prove that demand is there, if the marketing is well executed then word of mouth could have done the rest of the work.

What does all of this have to do with the title of my blog post?  Well, I predict that green products are going to be one of the hottest trends for the next decade.  They are ripe for an amazing level of positive word of mouth ("free marketing?").  Obviously coffee and universal access to global information also need little advertising when the product is great (Starbucks invested in their stores and locations, Google invested in the world's best search, and neither invested in advertising – positive word of mouth did that job for them).

There are more and more people that are accepting the consequences of global warming.  Just today, it was reported that another enormous ice shelf broke away in the Canadian Arctic.  As I first predicted in July of 2006, I wrote that the documentary An Inconvenient Truth would be marked as the most impactful documentary in modern history.  After seeing it a month ago for the first time, I have to admit that is a transformational movie.  You simply can't see it and not be emotionally moved by the implication of the evidence presented – it truly is "an inconvenient truth".  If you haven't seen it and want the quick "cheat sheet", this summary is a good place to start.  And 60 Minutes recently had a compelling report – here is an excerpt.

In August, I wrote about Wal-Mart embracing sustainability (and the rapid impact they could have given their immense scale).  And I recently learned (when having coffee with one of their heads of eCommerce) that they include a video on what they are doing about it with every copy of An Inconvenient Truth that they sell.  Here is an example of one of their recent initiatives, among many. 

From Millennials being more socially conscious consumers to Kleiner Perkins investing huge sums of money in alternative energy, there is something major under way here.  There is a shift in consumer demand that is just beginning to be felt (look at the Whole Foods stock rise that I wrote about when reporting on Wal-Mart and sustainability).  Wal-Mart, the largest company in the world, acting early on this shift is a wake-up call for smaller companies everywhere.

The bottom line is that I truly believe when we look back and assess the long-term economic impact of the events of 2006, it will be that the green movement got underway and rolled like a freight train through the economy for the next several decades.  And sparked consumer emotion and word of mouth that had never before been seen.  The stakes are simply too high and too broadly felt for it not to.

If you don't have a green strategy, I suggest you start moving now.  We'll see a lot more green (both green products and the money made off them) in 2007 and beyond.  We can help you rapidly evolve these products by tapping into word-of-mouth analytics and helping you learn what is really resonating (and what isn't) with your customers.

Update on Jan. 2:
I was just catching up on BusinessWeek while at the gym, and noticed that the "green" trend was highlighted in three different "ideas" for the "The Best Ideas of 2006", specifically:

• Super Recycling (also there is a great interview with the CEO of Interface in the good but slanted documentary The Corporation)
• Global Warming
• Green is Good

The only other trend to have as many common ideas is that of user-generated content, a topic near and dear to Bazaarvoice and our clients.  Specifically:

• Trend Mining (one of the many reasons we have invested so heavily in word-of-mouth analytics)
• Get a Second Life (stay tuned for my third Word-of-Mouth Wisdom interview for more on this)
• Free Labor (more on the crowdsourcing, which I have written about often)
• Web 2.0 Goes Corporate

Why do I love this product?  Because, as the title of this post says, it is a "crowdsourced", word-of-mouth wunderkind!  Let me explain what I mean.

First of all, I have written about crowdsourcing a few times on Bazaarblog (see my May post introducing the term, August post on Yahoo! crowdsourcing ads – with a nod to GM doing the same, September post on Google crowdsourcing image labels, or early December post on JPG Magazine crowdsourcing photos).  I have also referenced the book "The Wisdom of Crowds" several times.  20 Questions is the wisdom of the crowds.  It is a database of over 46,700,000 (and rapidly counting) individual games played by "the crowd".  The crowd, of course, is you, as in "you: the person of the year" (as you have recently been named by Time magazine).  Yes, 20 Questions is a huge database of consumer(player)-generated content!

You can play the game for free here.  I first heard about it a year ago, from one of Chris Sherman's articles on ClickZ (theorizing what would happen if 20Q was applied to search engines).  If you haven't played it yet, it is quite entertaining.  I recommend "Classic 20Q", which has been built by players' answers since 1988.  It is hard to beat – pretty much guessing anything you can think of by asking you less than 20 questions.

Second, what does this have to do with word of mouth?  Well, everything!  This game was literally built by word of mouth since 1988.  The basis of most great word-of-mouth campaigns is a great product.  This game became great by people constantly playing it.  Once you play this game, the chances are pretty high that you will tell someone about it.  The more people that play, the "smarter" it gets, the greater the "wow factor", and, therefore, the pass-along factor continues to increase.

So, once you get done with all of your returns, pick up 20 Questions for $14.95 at Amazon.com, CompUSA. or Sears.  All of that AI brainpower for such a small price.  And now you have a great story about crowdsourcing and word of mouth to go along with it!  Finally, for more interesting reading on the background of 20Q check out the Wikipedia entry, especially if you want to tell your friends about folk taxonomy, neural network, AI experiments.

First, Google has introduced an interesting application of crowdsourcing, Google Image Labeler.  Given the size of Google's passionate user base, all Google images could effectively be labeled in only two months.  This is a controversial initiative, with comments from sophisticated Internet users like Ryan W. who says, 

"After about 2 days, when the novelty wears off, why would users do this? Especially enough users to label google’s entire image index of billions of images? No incentive."

to Orli Yakuel who counters,

"Ryan, It’s like asking why people writing in wikipedia, for example.
This is what we do when we spending so much hours on the Net,
we’re either consume or provide information and knowledge FOR FREE."

My vote is that this will work for Google (and it's users).  Why?  Because Google's user base actually cares about Google.  When you use a service every day and get value from it, you become loyal to it.  Not everyone can get their customers to work for them, and many fail trying, but Google is one of those rare companies whose business was built entirely by word-of-mouth (when was the last time you saw Google advertise their service anywhere?).  Out of modern businesses, Starbucks can also make that kind of claim.  Like Starbucks did with their stores, Google plowed millions that could have been spent on advertising on creating the world's best product for their category.  The foundation of word-of-mouth success is a great product.  You will hear this in almost every presentation at any WOMMA conference.

For more information on the power of crowdsourcing, check out my May blog post on the topic.

And that leads me to discuss a bad product, the movie "Snakes on a Plane".  Although this movie has the widest distribution of any movie currently showing and had Web buzz galore, it has pretty much been a flop, only grossing $26 million to date.  Why?  Well, there a range of opinions on this topic.  First, let's look back at history and look at what the word-of-mouth pundits predicted:

• "The Snakes phenomenon will probably go down as one of the most significant early events in this fledgling Buzz industry."
• "Why Will 'Snakes on a Plane' Be a Hit? It's the Internet, Stupid"

And it goes on and on.  I could easily provide you with a list of 50 such articles, but why bother.

There are many predictions on why the movie bombed, including the fear of snakes, the film studios still don't get the Internet, and the fact that the movie is dumb.  But the most plausible reason I found was in a discussion forum where JR wrote,

"A well-deserved end to this ill-conceived experiment in mass internet-marketing and over saturation TV-spot advertising. Word of  mouth still counts. Real word of mouth… and despite the studio's best efforts and big bux, most people can still distinguish genuine word of mouth from studio-purchased word of mouth, even if it is being broadcast by bloggers."

At the end of the day, "Snakes on a Plane" may have faired better than it otherwise would have as a bad product.  But no one should call this piece of trash a hit.  "Snakes on a Plane" was viral online because people knew it would suck – it was fun to make fun of.  At a low production cost, the movie will be profitable, which is more than you could probably say if it didn't have some buzz.  But if it had been a great movie, it literally could have been in the top-20 grossing movies of all time.  Because everyone knew about it (and, therefore, knew it met their low expectations when the initial reviews came in post release).

I am modifying the old adage, "there is no such thing as bad PR", to "there may be no such thing as bad PR when you have a great product".

And, to close, let's talk about word-of-mouth when you have a great product.  A few weeks ago, Starbucks had to pull an email promotion because it went viral immediately due to the ease of email forwarding and the attractiveness of the promotion.  Now that, my friends, is the power of real word-of-mouth!

Update: Caribou Coffee is honoring the voided Starbucks' coupons.  I'm not sure if I view this as a brilliant or desperate move by a company that is worth 6% of Starbucks (on a market cap basis).  I guess it all depends on whether or not Caribou Coffee has a great product (and that doesn't just mean the coffee, I'm also talking about the ambiance of the store).

- from Wired Magazine, "The Rise of Crowdsourcing", pages 177-183, June 2006

As I was reading my latest Wired magazine, I was really struck by this article.  The Internet has revolutionized business in so many ways, but "crowdsourcing" may be the most revolutionary application to date.  Think of Wikipedia, Linux, eBay, YouTube, Google's ads, and the many other businesses that have been created by connecting the power of the crowd via the Internet.

So how does crowdsourcing apply to eCommerce?  Well, it is leading to the creation of entirely new businesses.  For example, look at Threadless.com.  It is on track to earn more than $20 million in revenue this year by crowdsourcing designs for t-shirts.  They sell one-of-a-kind shirts that are vetted by the crowd as the best.  You can see something similar happening on Zazzle, which has a more professional feel (not as much of a MySpace community feel as Threadless.com).  In addition to t-shirts, Zazzle lets you apply the crowdsourced designs on posters, mugs, postage, and cards.  Although you could dismiss these businesses as too niche or fringe to matter, it would be a mistake to do so.  They are revolutionizing merchandising by crowdsourcing. 

Crowdsourcing may be best put in context by James Surowiecki's book, "The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations".  The book title is self-explanatory and describes how businesses can be revolutionized by "the crowd".  Add the Internet and the shift to consumer-generated content, and you create some very exciting business potential.

Think about JCPenney's launch of their new ana line.  The idea for the new private-label line for women came to JCPenney directly from customer feedback.  How does JCPenney evolve this line quickly?  They listen to the customer feedback carefully.  And online product ratings and reviews would enable JCPenney to do this in an archived fashion.  Although word of mouth primarily occurs offline, it is only in the online channel that it is archived for thorough analysis.

Remember the movie "Big" staring Tom Hanks?  What made his character, Josh, so successful?  He could think like a kid and spent his time around kids while designing toys.  The toy executives scratched their heads on how his seemingly absurd approach to his job was actually working, and there is some truth in this movie to today's modern merchandising world.

The fact is that a lot of merchandising research is done with traditional focus groups.  Put a toy in the middle of the table and watch how the kids interact with it while you stand behind one-way mirrors observing.  While this is insightful, it only tells a part of the story and is subject to group think, the personalities of the participants, and the environment that the subjects are placed in.  Do the same type of research by analyzing "the crowd's" opinion of the product, and you will learn far more.  Other techniques include executives doing store tours and speaking with the merchandising managers, which certainly help as well.  But they are also flawed by limited information.  Surowiecki says that the most intelligent decisions are made by the crowd when they are in conflict or disagreement.  And we see this happen frequently with product ratings and reviews.  One reviewer will correct the other with their "better" opinion.  How else do you explain the social phenomenon of over 2,600 reviews of "The Catcher in the Rye" on Amazon.com?

Here are some other interesting examples:

1. At WOMMA's first "Word of Mouth Basic Training" event, I learned about Kettle Chips People's Choice campaign to select a new potato chip flavor to produce based on the input of tens of thousands of customers via their website.  The public relations results from this campaign were unreal, with the media covering this from coast to coast.  And, as importantly, Kettle Chips got hundreds of legitimate ideas (cotton candy flavored potato chips not being one of them) and produced two new flavors (Thai Spice and Cheddar Beer).  They honored those customers that participated with their names printed on the bags, which you can find at your local grocery store (Whole Foods being a major carrier of Kettle Chips).

2. I already beat this example to death in the past, but it is worth linking to again.  Kryptonite is an example of a company that didn't listen to the crowd (see the Fortune article link). 

This is only the beginning.  Source your own crowd and reap the rewards.