SocialSphere, Inc.

One of our New Year’s Resolutions for 2010 around SocialSphere is to get better at “walking the talk” and taking better advantage of our insights for our business.  Heading into the second week of the year, we're making good progress.  Today, you’ll notice our new website – and a fresh take at the SocialSphere logo.   We hope you like the site, find the content interesting – and reason to come back on a regular basis.

While I mean no disrespect at all to my good friends on the creative side of the marketing business –  the process of designing the new SocialSphere logo (and later the letterhead and business cards) was the best creative process I have ever been involved in.

Here’s why: it was 100% online and 100% crowd-sourced.  While watching a Celtics game one night in late-December, I created an account at 99designs.com, set-up a contest, wrote a creative brief and offered a guaranteed prize of $395 to the designer who would create our new logo.   Over the next 7 days – our contest titled, “Social Media Strategy Firm Needs Sexy Logo” received 551 logo options from designers around the world.  Offering unvarnished feedback from behind the keyboard meant that no egos were bruised and no feelings were hurt from the designers whose logos weren’t quite right -- and trust me, there were many that weren’t quite right, including this one:

And this one:

Every few hours over the week that the contest was live, the team and I would check in on a regular basis to see what was new – constantly providing feedback and advice to the designers who we felt were on the right track or based on their portfolio had a look that we liked.

Like just about everything else in the land of Web 2.0 and life – the more you give, the more you get.  When we started, it was suggested by 99designs that we’d receive approximately 75 logos to choose from.  Our final tally of 551 surpassed that by 7x for a few simple reasons – we offered the right mix of greenback and feedback.  The $395 contest award was on the higher end of the scale for logo work that got us noticed – and we were relentless in our feedback.  Good, bad, indifferent – we offered more than 155 comments to our group of designers and did not stop until we got the look, colors and feel that we were looking for.

At the end of the day, like we preach to our clients, it was pretty simple:

* We found the passionate ones (on 99designs.com);
* We empowered them (creative brief and cash);
* And asked them for more.

One week later, we have a new logo, two weeks after that, a new website -- and couldn’t be happier.  Let us know what you think and what your resolutions are – Happy New Year.