Social Media Experiences

In December of 2012, Adobe acquired social portfolio platform Behance.  Behance was purchased to empower and power the Adobe Creative Crowd, and most specifically its community features (Lardinois, 2012).  Behance is both a platform for creative professionals to showcase their work, and for business professionals to find specific creative pieces and overall creative talent.  While the site currently has around one million members and over 3 million projects posted, with the integration into Adobe’s Creative Cloud, the progression of this site will soon be booming—which is not surprising considering the growth of many other creative sourcing solutions.  With the integration of Behance into the Creative Cloud, Adobe hopes to allow “members to seamlessly create content, seek feedback, showcase their work and distribute it across devices.”  Behance is not the first move by Adobe to strengthen the community and social movement within their products.  The Creative Crowd had always planned to focus on community functionality.  In fact, Adobe was in the process of creating their own community features prior to purchasing Behance. 

                

                 Adobe may be a major new comer to the social creative sourcing market, they are in no way the first, and by purchasing Behance, they are admitting to not re-creating the business model either.  Social creative sourcing, or crowdsourcing design services have been growing since 2008, with popular sites including 99Designs, CrowdSpring, Freelancer.com, Design Crowd and many more. 

It was only a matter of time before this sort of social sourcing would come into play.  The pain points for both the creatives and the businesses have been fierce for an extended period of time.  The main market pain is that Business Customers need design products and have limited access to design firms.  Additionally, there is the complication of measuring the opportunity cost of deciding for one design rather than another.  For the designers, the main market pain is that most designers do not have a customer base that keeps their design pipeline full.

If you have not used a crowdsourcing site before, here one way that they work:

1.     The Business Customer posts a contest on the platform

a.       There is a cost associated with posting the contest

b.      The amount offered per prize is paid when the contest is created. This payment remains in possession of the platform until it is awarded to the winner

2.     The Creative submits a design to the contest

a.       As a member of the site/platform, there is no charge assigned to the submission

b.      The Creative uses specs and briefs provided by the Business Customer

3.     The Business Customer receives all the design submissions

a.       Dependent on the client, prize money and prompt, different amounts of submissions will be made

4.     The Business Customer decides the winning design

a.       Regularly, the site retains 15% of the prize money

b.      The winning Creative will be granted 85% of the prize

c.       In case there is not a winner, because the creative content is not up to par, a portion of the prize money will be reallocated to the Business Customer

5.     The Business Customer has the opportunity to review the different designers and recommend them, even if their designs were not the winner

a.       The best designers will have the opportunity to increase their awareness by receiving good reviews for the quality of their service and work

There are several elements crucial to the success of these social crowdsourcing platforms:

1.       Securing a high-quality base of designers

•       Recognition for artist submissions (regardless of being awarded a prize): 

•       As part of a creative’s profile, the opportunity to showcase their work and past submissions, quantify their engagement levels participating on the platform, and displaying past rankings when possible

•       Providing an artist with added credibility and an area to showcase their work within the platform’s social interface is a meaningful part of the community.  

2.       Creating enough offers to drive a competitive environment

3.       Allowing the Business Customer to give feedback that will affect the Designers future performance

4.       Finally, specifically for Adobe and Behance, leveraging other Adobe solutions (Photoshop, etc.) to expand their crowdsourcing marketplace

So, who is using these sites?  Creatives looking to sell, develop and get feedback on their designs, specifically graphic designers, video professionals, cross-media designers, web designers, interactive designers, photographers, print designers, and artistic students.  The primary business customer for social crowdsourcing sites are secondarily large businesses, and primarily small and medium sized businesses as well as entrepreneurs.  These companies rarely have in house creatives and are looking to outsource their graphic and artistic needs on a project by project basis.  These businesses often get recommendations for designers or know quality designers that they use regularly, but often times these businesses look online.  They Google online portfolios or ask their Facebook or Twitter friends for suggestions.  Many of these people are already using crowd sourcing products like 99designs and Crowd Spring.  Additionally, successful social crowdsourcing sites should target large companies as well, seeing as if they want to attract high level designers, they need to have level customers.

While not all crowdsourcing sites work this way yet, it would be recommended that they guarantee the work selected, and like an e-bay, expects the customer to rate the sellers on the site.  For example, if you are working with a designer, and they fail to send the appropriate files, the customer can dock them, or rate them positively if they do a great job. 

The primary consideration of business customers in selecting a crowd-source site is access to a large and talented user community of artists.  With Adobe Photoshop on the desktops on 90% of artists worldwide, and 8000 users migrating from software to Cloud subscription model each day, the Adobe subscription community is growing and becoming ever more appealing. Behance/Adobe have a chance to really take advantage of the high level of their creative to bring business customers to their specific crowdsourcing site. Adobe has a great opportunity to succeed in creating a vibrant and successful crowdsourcing community with Behance by leveraging their other products and finding best practices from other sites to bring their platform to the forefront.

Lardinois, F. (2012, December 20). Adobe Acquires Social Portfolio Platform Behance To Power Its Creative Cloud Community Features. Retrieved December 20, 2012, from TechCrunch: http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/20/adobe-acquires-social-media-platform-behance-to-power-its-creative-cloud-community-features/