co.labr8.com is a new creative crowdsourcing platform. I had a short but interesting Q&A with Eric Schmitter, the founder of the platform. We discussed the set-up, their marketing & sales strategy, as well as how participants’ contributions are rewarded to stimulate collaboration.

1) What is co.labr8 all about?

There are really two consumers here: The user requesting the ideas, often a business; and the users supplying the ideas.

For the user requesting ideas, I like to think of co.labr8.com as being similar to being able ask a giant room of people to help come up with ideas for a design or request for which your business has a need. For example you could ask “What should my logo look like?” or “What kind of billboard campaign should we run?” The requests could be large, small, quick or long-running - it could be anything! The resulting brainstorming and interaction between all those people – bouncing ideas off each other, adding and subtracting contributions from user to user, would create many new ideas, designs and innovative directions for you and your business. And, it’s not just a lump of random ideas either – since the community votes continually during the project, the best and most relevant idea rise to the top.

And for the user generating the ideas, we have a few incentives. First, people who design, or think creatively do it because they enjoy it. Helping other people out with ideas and information, for many people, is satisfying in its own right – look at the success of Wikipedia and other collaborative ventures on the Internet. But co.labr8.com offers more than altruism – we have a reward system that allows contributing users to earn prizes and cash deposits through PayPal for their effort. Creative users can see their top-voted ideas earn them something other community kudos – although we try to support that as well. We also have an upcoming portfolio system planned where users can show off their ideas as well as partnerships with online career sites so that users can use their time and effort to help self-promote.

2) Who is behind this project? When, where, how did it start?

I bootstrapped the whole venture at this point. It has taken a few years to do it myself during the evenings and weekends. Patents were finalized earlier this year so now we are focusing on getting people to use the platform and provide feedback on future improvements and additions. We are very agile at this point, so we take user feedback seriously and encourage it. We have a few big partnerships in the works, one being a large video game publisher who is interested in using the platform for an upcoming title – so we want to get our kinks worked out before then, obviously.

3) The success of new online platforms largely depends on the number of contributors they are able to attract. What is your marketing strategy to attract new project submitters and contributors?

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What happens when you invite more than a million students, faculty members, business people and social media experts into a community to help write a book on community best practices? The answer is a lot. But not in the way that you would think that it would. Not even close.

Community Manager Aaron Strout was willing to share the absorbing, straight-forward story behind the new book We Are Smarter Than Me. The story:

Last October, we launched our wearesmarter.org community. It was an experiment really. The goal was to write a wiki book focused on how companies, big and small, were using community to improve their businesses. Some like Procter & Gamble were tapping into their crowd of 500,000 “connector” moms to help sell a new product, Dawn Direct Foam. Companies like Prosper.com partnered with their customers to create a micro-loan powerhouse. Brewtopia reached out to it’s customers (and prospects) to help them create the recipe and label designs for their beer.

The end result is a great collection of mini-case studies with some great “how to” blurbs that are geared toward helping any individual or company get started with their own customer community. The “journey” however, was the fun part. For one, many of the contributors to the project had ideas of their own. They insisted on joining the founders of the project — Barry Libert (Shared Insights), Jon Spector (Wharton), Tom Malone (MIT) and Tim Moore (Pearson) – on the project’s weekly status calls. The founders of course acquiesced and not surprisingly found that the crowd had a lot of great ideas. Read the rest of this post >