I’ve been thinking about the idea of crowdsourcing a lot this year. Last month, I wrote about giffgaff’s unique approach of crowdsourcing not just marketing and R&D, but also customer service. And, for the 33rd and last “The Social Nerdia Show!“ of 2009, I spoke with Robbie Hearn, the Chief of Member Experience at giffgaff to learn more about how this MVNO from the UK operates. Prior to joining company, Robbie was Head of Retention at Be Broadband, a O2/Telefonica subsiduary where he first realized just how powerful it was for a company to have a very engaged community.

Listen to the entire conversation with Robbie on the Flash player below. You can also subscribe to us on iTunes, stream from mobiles on Stitcher, and listen to upcoming shows LIVE on blogtalkradio.

giffgaff officially launched on Nov 23rd. “The project as a whole started to take form 9 months ago,” Robbie told me. “It’s gone from nothing to full launch in that period of time, which is very quick for a mobile company.” At first glance one might assume that giffgaff is just a regular MVNO, but giffgaff is truly changing the way a mobile company interacts with its customers.

I asked Robbie to explain what makes giffgaff so unique. ”We see a need and a gap in the market for a new model. We’re what we call people-powered,” he said. “In essence, we’re trying to really leverage all the great new trends and technologies around crowds; we want to engage our members more than any other mobile network in the UK.” Unlike other companies that try to control everything related to their brand, giffgaff lets its ‘members’ interact with the company and with each other online, and allowing them to be part of the company’s “marketing, R&D, and customer service; recruiting members and especially helping answer questions.”

Crowdsourcing Customer Service

Thanks to Wikipedia and companies like Doritos and Starbucks, we’ve all come to know about various forms of crowdsourcing, especially when it comes to marketing and R&D. But crowdsourcing customer service? Now that’s a new idea.

“Crowdsourcing customer service is almost like a misnomer. You don’t need a huge crowd, just a small group that’s absolutely motivated by helping other people; they are the super users,” Robbie told me. ”We don’t have a call center,” he added. “You go online, you type in whatever question you have, and the integrated search identifies an answer based on information giffgaff has submitted as well as information provided by users on the forum.”  (more…)

Elli Grace is a fashion brand that was launched in February of 2009 by designer duo Sojung “Sue” Yang and Lamarr Nanton. Earlier this month, I spoke with Lamarr, who has 19 years of experience in apparel design and development with companies like Giorgio Armani and JC Penney, at the first Elli Grace retail location in Plano, TX.

See the three videos below to learn more about Elli Grace, Lamarr’s personal story, and some of the geeky stuff they’re doing to differentiate themselves in the fashion world (including blogging and tweeting):

Lamarr shows how to use a mobile device to charge customers from virtually anywhere that has a cell signal or Wi-Fi, after the jump..

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Becca Taylor is a Social Media Manager at HP’s Enterprise Business, which focuses on servers, storage, business and IT software/services, and other B2B technologies. On the 32nd episode of “The Social Nerdia Show!,” I had a conversation with Becca and she told me about her role at HP, what the company is doing in the social media world, and her thoughts on community, participation, and personal branding.

Listen to the entire conversation with Becca on the Flash player below. You can also subscribe to us on iTunes, stream from mobiles on Stitcher, and listen to upcoming shows LIVE on blogtalkradio.

HP is a very large company with over 150,000 employees. “The larger the company gets, often, the more difficult it is to really get authentic social media engagement running,” Becca explained. She added that the benefits of social media in business-to-consumer offerings is much more clear than it is in the B2B realm, but her team is helping change that within HP by identifying the value to the company and its customers.

Her team is called “The Social Media Enablement Team” and consists of 6 people with different roles and in different locations. “Our goal is to work with different teams within the division to get them up to speed on the tools, and most of all, understand from a business perspective that they need to approach social media marketing as they would approach any marketing program, with deliberation, responsibility, and objectves,” Becca said.

Becca has been with HP for 10 years. She actually started at Compaq (which was acquired by HP) doing web documentation. She then transitioned into marketing where she “focused on customer advocacy, on how to best use the internet and various tools to enhance the customer experience.”

About a year ago the Enterprise Business division created a team that focused on social media, and Becca was one of the few who joined the team. “I’m thrilled I did,” she told me, “because I love my job. It’s the best job I’ve ever had.” (more…)

Jonathan Crowley is the co-founder of Black20, a multi-platform digital studio that operates out of Long Island City, Queens. There’s a good chance that you’ve seen or at least heard of one of their viral videos or award-winning web series, which have been viewed by over 60 million people. A recent partnership with 15 Gigs means their entertaining content is going to reach even more people. Prior to co-founding Black20 in 2007, J. Crowley was a part of NBC Digital Studios developing comedy programming for the network’s digital initiatives. You can check out more of their programming at Hulu and Black20.com.

1. Black20 recently partnered with Fox TV Studios’ 15 Gigs to produce Web-based pilots like “Heart Felt.” What kind of relationship do you have with FTVS and how has it been working with them?

We partnered up with FTVS to create innovative and cheap-to-produce content for the web, and always with an eye towards its extension to other platforms like television.  We view it as both an opportunity to develop stories and formats that can really speak to a Web-video-consuming audience and also as a chance to play around with a much more cost-efficient development model.

“Heart Felt” is merely one example of a digital pilot we produced to gauge our audience’s appetite.  In this case we wanted to test whether people wanted to watch a comedy about relationships between people and puppets. The viewership and feedback were very strong, so we now look at how to shape this series for both online and television platforms.

2. Black20 seems to focus on the content instead of spending money on marketing. What are some of things you need to do when creating content that is meant to be spread by the online masses?

We’ve never paid a single cent for marketing or promotion. We’ve relied on our content to virally spread itself. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. It’s tricky predicting what videos will go viral, but we’ve realized content focused on nostalgia or topical events tend to spread much faster. Oh yeah, or anything related to Star Wars. (more…)

Cathy Brooks is a journalist, creative media strategist, and host of the Social Media Hour live podcast. She blogs at Other Than That, which is also the name of her consulting firm, and she has worked for companies like Tech TV (now G4) and Seesmic. In last night’s The Social Nerdia Show! I spoke with her about media, journalism, newspapers, technology, business, and much more. Cathy is not only highly entertaining, she is also incredibly insightful and thought-provoking.

Listen to the entire conversation with Cathy on the Flash player below. You can also subscribe to us on iTunes, stream from mobiles on Stitcher, and listen to upcoming shows LIVE on blogtalkradio.

Cathy’s tagline for her podcast is ‘it’s not about the tools, it’s about what you do with them,’ and it very well reflects her views on technology. She has much appreciation and enthusiasm for “the way that technology is used or not, successfully or not, and the impact that has on the way we buy things, share information, communicate with each other, and just evolve as carbon based life forms.”

The Two Medias

The fact that Cathy has much experience in traditional media led me to ask her about the now very widely use ‘social media’ term. She responded that there are two kinds of media, “media with a capital M and media with a lower case m.” The first one is ‘the media,’ and it includes outlets from large organizations like News Corporation and The New York Times Company, as well as blogs like The Huffington Post and Tech Crunch. “Lower case m (media) are the platforms, the technology, the things we use, the social networks, the real-time stream things like Twitter, Blogtalkradio, Facebook, YouTube, and the list goes on and on,” she explained.

While some would argue that the concept of media is not much more than a channel or a means to deliver some form of content, Cathy think that media has always been social. “Social media to me is a rather redundant term as opposed to an oxymoron like jumbo shrimp. Media is by its nature a social thing and it has become more so in its interactivity, crowdsourced nature, and user generated contributions,” she told me.

The Case for Journalism

There has been much talk about the death of the newspaper and the traditional media organization in the last few years, but Cathy thinks this has been “greatly exaggerated.” She continued to say that while “some of these types of media outlets, some of the mediums, may either die or change greatly, the need for journalism has never been more important.” (more…)