How we found the surf movie title

How the movie project came to be called “The Old, the Young and the Sea”
We were convinced that a project like this could be more successful if we included the community from the beginning on. Our concept was read by dozens of people before it came public and many improvements found it’s way into the conception by friends and colleagues who put their head and heart into it. At this point we want to say: Cheers and gracias, amigos!

Anyhow, when it came to find an expressive movie title, Steve Pressler – one of the early-on members of the film crew – came up with a simple, yet beautiful idea: Crowdsourcing.

How to crowdsource a movie title
As we had asked for the opinions of many about the concept, the plan was to ask a broader audience to seek the title. A sophisticated method to do this was to allow users to submit their film-title-ideas in the first round and than – in the second round – a voting determined the lucky winners. In cooperation with the Austrian communication and design collective Les Avignons we elaborated a submitting and voting tool on basis of their homegrown facebook app creator called tabspresso – then in an early stage. On facebook, our community was able to submit their own movie title in a custom app on facebook in a first round. In a second round, the community was asked to vote for their favorite title. The raffle was held out by Nomad Earth, our online magazine for sustainable travelling and our partner Kun_tiqi, manufacturer of high performance balsa surfboards who also sponsored pretty nice prizes for the winners.

About custom pages on facebook
Creating a custom page on facebook is a good yet way to involve your community. Regarding the facebook promotion guidelines every kind of promotional activity like prize givings and raffles have to be executed in a dedicated custom area – a custom app. Not everybody is a killer-programmer or has the experience of creating custom pages on facebook. For creating custom promotions on facebook  you can use services like pagemodo or tabsite to create powerful facebook app for promoting your project.

You have to rave to activate the crowd
By supporting our activities in the first round on facebook by more opinion leader oriented platforms like twitter, LinkedIn, Quora and so forth we could get the message out quickly. The young project spread faster as we imagined and over 150 ideas for the movie title were submitted. We – that is Nomad Earth – and our partner Kun_tiqi gained over 1400 fans on facebook in just three weeks and further connected with different professionals in the field of surf journalism and equipment producers. Though before we had to put a lot of effort into activating our friends, colleagues, followers of Nomad Earth and our partners of the first minute. We asked them like mad for participating, sharing, postings on facebook, articles in their blogs etc. It is key to success to not believe that just because you have a nice idea and nice prizes for your crowdsourcing thousands of people will come to participate! It’s always up to you and your motivation to spread the word and activate the crowd. It’s like elections: Every vote counts!

I admit: Initially we were worried the crowd would go for “Chuck Norris”, “Vamos a la playa” or some other hilarious, yet useless title. But: Nope. We had beautiful titles to chose from. After a preselection by our team 10 ideas entered the finals – the voting started. The amount of people voting for their favourite idea was incredible. Magazines featured articles about our project even before it actually started.

Conclusio
“The Old, the Young & the Sea” was a title we couldn’t come up by ourselves – and proved to be a door opener in many ways. The idea behind our concept became tangible for many as soon as we had this expressive title, suddenly people understood what we meant with our project. It’s a really neat and elegant mean of evaluating your concept and to find the right tune many people will appreciate.

It proved to be the right choice to include the community from early on as it showed us that our concept was interesting for tons of people. We want to thank everybody who had made this campaign possible and participated in the quest for a movie title. And we want to encourage others to trust the crowd – there is a lot of creativity out there.