• by Karl Greenberg , January 13, 2011

Perhaps it isn't surprising that NASDAQ, the technology-stock exchange, loves digital social media. What might surprise you is that NASDAQ uses social media and crowdsourcing to launch its own products. The exchange did so to market a subscription-based, real-time data product to people used to getting 15 minutes-old data for free.

John Jacobs, CMO and EVP of the Global Index Group at NASDAQ, said the company went social to get people to offer up ideas on how to make real-time sexy. To launch the product, developed with StockTwits, NASDAQ found a core group of subscribers and queried them about how they defined themselves.

"They loved the term 'data junkies,'" he said, adding that his group mined them for ideas, tag lines and themes. "One guy came up with 'Chicks Dig Data Junkies' and another said he should be asked to come and open the market. So we did that. We chose the group who offered the best ideas and brought them in to open the market."

Speaking at the CMO Leadership Forum in New York on Thursday, Jacobs detailed the campaign and how it illustrates the power of crowdsourcing through social media. "This was so customer driven that it was a job just to keep up with them; they turn into our sales force because they find each other and promote it in ways we could never do on our own."

He said this is the best of times for marketers because "today our customers, stakeholders, employers, and board members are telling us what they think all the time. It's at our peril that we ignore it. We should be saying thank you."

Social media, he argues, has made integrated marketing an avenue for marketers to get closer to sales and product people than in the past, "because what a customer tells a salesperson trickles back to marketing, sales, product development. If we build the right tools, techniques and channels, we can capture the information better than ever before. The conversation used to be one-way. But today we are being told 'this is what I need, what I want, what you should give to me.'"

Jacobs benchmarks several brand efforts that, for him, work in both traditional and social and crowdsourcing levels. Like a lot of people, he likes the Old Spice guy, not just because of the ad creative but also because of how the company extended the program into social media by having him tweet and engage consumers online. "They keep taking it to new levels. They have made him an expert on all things 'women.'"

He also said that Domino's integrated efforts to crowdsource creative by getting customers to take pictures of their pizzas and send them in for an opportunity to appear in ads. "To do that, [consumers] have to buy the product. The advantage of community is people will respond. There are two ways to handle it: some just take it in and maybe respond to individual notes. Others say 'let's step up and join the conversation.'"

But, he said, marketers have to be continuously engaged across every channel all the time. "There must be a continuous conversation. You have to constantly be engaged in it -- it's like apps. If they aren't using you, they throw you away and replace you with something else."