Any of you that read my blog or listen to my weekly WE Show podcast series know that I like to talk about smart companies that are using community and social media to improve their businesses. I like it even better when one of the smart companies I'm talking about happens to be a client as well.

In this particular case, one of the companies we work with, iRise, is asking the members of its industry community, Catalyze.org, to create a commercial for their company. The name of the contest they are running is "Visualize the Prize" which is a clever play on words based on the fact that iRise provides visualization software. In a nutshell, they are giving away $20,000 in cash prizes (main prize of $15,000) to encourage their customers, partners and anyone with a video camera to co-create a commercial with them.

iRise CMO, Mitch Bishop, had this to say about this innovative crowdsourcing endeavor, “We know we have passionate and creative users, and we want to let them share their passion with us and the broader iRise User community”. Why I love the fact that iRise is doing is that they are really starting to walk the talk unlike many other companies that just pay lip service to online community. As I wrote about in an earlier post, iRise seems to be well on their way to becoming a "WE" company.

To that end, I look forward to seeing how Tom (the Catalyze community manager) and Mitch fair on their journey. Do you know of other companies that are partnering with their communities to crowdsource?