Forrester's Groundswell Award Submission

Instead of belaboring you with facts and data, we want to share a story of how we engaged with our community in a creative way to solve a pressing challenge for all of us. And how that process has energized our community to advocate on our behalf.

By listening to the conversations in the Mashup Developer Community (MDC), listening on Twitter, Facebook, the comments on our YouTube Channel, Google Alerts for blogs…and more, we heard one thing over and over again.

Developers were having a difficult time explaining to their bosses…in everyday terms…the answer to the questions: “So, what exactly is a mashup and why should I care?

Working with our community (online and offline), we began a multi-month process to co-create a satisfactory answer with them.

We believed that collaborating with the community would help them generate more buzz for the mashup term and help our developers foster a sense of ownership and belonging...one that could be harnassed for our goal of evangelizing the value and competitive differentiation that mashups can create for organizations.

It began in March, when Luis Derechin, Co-Founder of JackBe, was on the Fox Business channel. Fox Business asked Luis for the definition of a mashup. His definiton was lengthy and difficult to understand.  After consulting our community strategists, Never Stop Marketing, they wrote back in a straightforward way. “The story needs work.”

Luis backed a “Beat the CEO” contest where we asked the members of the Mashup Developer Community to offer a better explanation than Luis gave of what a mashup is so that “Everyone gets it.”

This contest generated over 40 entries and 1596 page visits.

We liked the answers, but we thought there was still an opportunity to continue the conversation and expand the number of participants thereby energizing our base of fans even more.

We decided to sponsor WOM Slam 2, a DC-based, crowd-sourced Word-of-Mouth/networking event where participants compete and network to help solve a business problem.

Members of the MDC (and other fans/friends of JackBe) were invited and dozens of people (live) and many others (via Twitter) joined in the activity.

Our challenge for the group that night: Help us explain “mashups.”

We got some great ideas, but still felt we could continue to collaborate and co-create with our members.

So, we re-engaged with the MDC, sharing the results and also contracted with crowd-sourcing video and graphics firm, GeniusRocket, to help visually represent the concepts that were evolving.

Out of that came a series of 6 “mashup trading cards.” They are now used on the back of our business cards. There are different representations of “mashups” in more common scenarios (pizza, yogurt, burritos, bouquet, Frankenstein, and a symphony)

Sensing still more opportunity to engage with our community, we went back to the MDC, asking them to vote on which of the cards best represents the mashup ideal. 30 people voted/commented/linked, etc.

What we’ve seen is that this open, collaborative, and co-creative process is exactly what energizes our community to continue to spread the word on behalf of mashups.

When we educate our community about how to communicate Mashups (even if it is as simple as comparing it to a burrito or pizza) and share stories and examples of people like Mike, a “Mashup Hero”, (who used his knowledge of our product to help his employer secure a $4.3 million grant from the Department of Homeland Security), we see the results in their passion.

"...a buddy of mine pointed me in the direction of a product called Presto, developed by the company JackBe. I thought that I had stumbled into my own brain on the web!". - Mike, "Mashup Hero"

What's your favorite mashup? vote here or click below