Sam Adams, the American beer company, is using Facebook applications to engage fans for inputs which will permit them to create a custom beer.
Another example of how businesses are using social media to engage and solicit feedback from customers and extend this engagement to crowdsourcing product and services.
Titled ‘The Crowd Craft Project’, Sam Adams’ consumers will be able to give feedback on the company’s latest offering, commenting on a number of categories used to describe the drink such as color and body.
The most popular categories as selected by Facebook fans will then be used by the company’s brewers to develop the new drink which will be brewed in February.
The beer will début in March during what Sam Adams describe as “a well-known interactive annual festival in Austin, TX” – which most likely means SXSW. It will then go on to be served in a number of Austin bars and at the company’s brewery, before experiencing a wider release.
Essentially, the crowdsourcing engagement campaign amounts to free market research for the company, bypassing an agency and going straight to the consumer, and then giving them exactly what they say they want.
The drawback? In my opinion, there are two: first, it is difficult to collect inputs on a tasting product from simply on-line feedback, and second, there is no guarantee of the number of responses. With over 100,000 likes and the perennial popularity of beer itself, it’s likely enough that they’ll get a good response.
