Crowd-Sourcing Olivia

In an age of social media and an increasingly interactive web, what could be more cutting edge than a crowd-sourced magazine - that is, a magazine with content decided on by the readers? For Finland's Olivia magazine, creating an issue based on ideas from readers was all part of the magazine's usual forward thinking. 

"Art director Liisa Kartunen was the mother of the original idea," says Mari Paalosalo-Jussinmäki, editor-in-chief. Open Olivia, as the project was called, was launched in September 2011 when the magazine informed its readers that it would be making a co-created magazine, set for the February 2012 issue. Using a specially created platform that readers could access via omaolivia.fi, readers could participate in the creation of the magazine, interacting with the staff.

"Readers submitted ideas for stories and voted for them in a series of steps," says Paalosalo-Jussinmäki. Everything from who should be interviewed, what food should have recipes, who the cover girl would be and what headlines to use on the cover. The stories were set up so that there was a "challenge" for each one that readers should come up with a solution for, and then within each challenge there were phases. For example, first readers would submit ideas on who should be interviewed, then people would vote. In the next phase the angle of the article would be suggested and voted on, then questions would be suggested, and so on. Readers got "points" and could earn badges similar to FourSquare, working their way up the badge hierarchy to earn the top badge: editor-in-chief.

The result was a magazine built up very much based on reader response. "For example, the readers had a big influence on the travel story about the most amazing places in Europe," she says. "They also came up with and developed the story about how to survive workplace relationships. And the main interview with Member of Parliament Silvia Modig, created using the suggestion-vote-suggestion process."

Nearly 5,000 women were involved with 900 actively participated in Open Olivia, and the magazine has garnered a lot of interest beyond its usual readers, including advertisers, with a 20 percent increase compared to the same issue last year.

"We are going to use Open Olivia again to create the January 2013 issue, which comes out in December," says Paalosalo-Jussinmäki. "The experience was delightful. Editorial staff had maybe a little more to do, but the tight and fruitful interaction with the readers was rewarding. We can warmly recommend co-creation like we did with Open Olivia for making magazines. It really brings the readers close to the staff."