Think crowdsourcing to produce health and healthy lifestyles brand energy

Crowdsourcing taps into the creativity, insights and wisdom of everyday people to help brands create more value. It's an open source (outsourced) method for customers to help improve and create new products and services through their comments, suggestions and ideas. 

Here are a few examples:

• istockphoto (which created a marketplace for amateur photographers)

• Wikipedia (an encyclopedia created for thousands of users)

• Dell Ideastorm (launched by Dell to gauge which ideas are most important and relevant to the public)

• digg (where users submit links to sites, articles, news stories, photos and videos and others vote whether they're worth checking out).

Every brand should at least be "consumer-sourcing." By engaging consumers in ways that they value and want through social media, you'll receive tremendous feedback that will help you strengthen your offerings and enhance your connections. In fact, any company that doesn't recognize the power of the consumer to their marketing efforts will eventually be pushed aside.