Images from the Flickr Coversourcing pool

Random House have come up with a very good wheeze to promote the upcoming book ‘Crowdsourcing’. Crowdsourcing, for the unitiated is:

“the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.”

taken from Jeff Howe’s Crowdsourcing blog

It goes like this: invite enthusiastic people who are (a) into books and (b) are good at graphic design to design the cover. Offer them a £500 prize. Make sure their entries are posted on Flickr, notifications of new entries are posted on Twitter, and bring the crowd in to vote (entries are now closed…). And along with the aforementioned enthusiasts who can be relied on to blog about their entries, get some influential folk like Creative Review and Will McInnes to blog about it.

A smart touch in this campaign is the ‘What is Crowdsourcing’ page on the Coversourcing site that is made up entirely of Google links and deli.cio.us bookmarks. It all serves to create a socially driven virtuous circle, and the clever people behind it are Apt. How very apt.