Threadless.com is a T-Shirt company and it has some of the coolest, most beautiful, original T-Shirts I’ve ever seen. Not only that, almost all their designs are “award winners”, in other words Threadless.com is an ongoing T-Shirt competition, in which its customers submit designs and its customers vote on designs they like and if that wasn’t enough its customers also submit photo’s of T-shirt sightings, phew. In this case though customers is almost inaccurate, i mean, they are psudo employees.

Take a look at this frequently asked question:Who designs the Threadless product?
You do!

Threadless.com is an on-going tee shirt design competition, anyone can submit their design and if it gets a high enough score and is chosen by the Threadless crew it will be printed and sold from the site.

Most of the product found on Threadless is a result of the competition. A few of the shirts were printed outside of the contest, some of which were commissioned by Threadless to various well-known designers.

Because Threadless offers a serious cash prize for winners $1500 + $500 worth of credit with Threadless, they get some serious entries from a lot of great designers. For designers that win they get plenty of publicity from it as well.

The interesting thing about this model is it brings up lots of questions of trust, money and ownership. In other-words Threadless only works because of the very high level of trust between the people submitting designs and the people running Threadless.

It is interesting to look at because companies that want to build deeper relationships with customers, and take advantage of WOM, “consumer generated” content, and other more valuable interactions must build trust. Without a fundamental foundation of trust attempts at this kind of marketing will either wither and die, or backfire entirely.

Here are some things that I think help build trust:

• Authenticity – an amorphous term I know, but just try and be genuine, stay away from traditional marketing superlatives and hyperbole
• Transparency – not only talk about what’s happening, what your doing, make feedback and your responses transparent
• Humility – be more human, don’t try and be perfect, and don’t pretend you are either
• Constancy – in visual look, action, words, and behavior

I’d be glad to hear more ideas for how to build trust, I find it a fascinating topic.

Have you ever got in a fight with someone and ended up much better friends? Well I wonder if all the people out there who are slapping GM around with the Chevy Apprentice “negative ads” aren’t actually putting more of a human face on GM? After we slap around the bully aren’t we now somewhat more connected to them? They respect us more, and we realize that they are just a product of their bad upbringing.

I mean, take a look at this ad and don’t tell me you feel a bit better about GM, even if it’s just because it calls the Chevy Tahoe gay.

I’m not going to run out and buy a Tahoe, but somehow GM has managed to humanize themselves just a little bit by not taking down all the negative ads that were created for them.

There’s now an entire site dedicated to voting on the negative ads, go take a look and prepare to be blown away by the creativity

BTW from a publicity standpoint this is an absolute slam dunk, picked up by New York Times, CNET, Nightline, rocketboom (yes, that’s right nightline and rocketboom in the same sentence

Eric Mattson of Marketing Monger is in the process of doing 1,000 podcasts around marketing topics, and i’m glad to say I am interviewed on number 76. Lots of topics covered from co-creation, value chains, competitive advantage, and viral marketing. I talk again on the idea that companies need to have a portfolio of viral experiments, and on a related note check out this comment on JaffeJuice about the 24 hour ad agency

“The 24 Hour Ad Agency.” The focus isn’t on spending 4 months crafting the hell out of a 4-color magazine spread, but on creating new ads hourly, even minute-ly. Match the audience’s appetite for content, versus just living up to the agency and client’s abilities to clock thousands of hours on one idea. It’s as much about constantly measuring the pulse of society and the client brand in that environment, as it is reacting almost instantly to the culture.