The audience is not always just a consumer, they can take part in the creative process as well. As part of the Keep Moving campaign for BlackBerry by AMV BBDO, graphic novelist and writer Neil Gaiman has collaborated with his fans to create A Calendar of Tales, a book of illustrated short stories.

The campaign invited the public to collaborate with a variety of artists, and Gaiman began by asking his Twitter followers: “Why is January So Dangerous?” He continued with a series of questions every hour about each month of the year. He then sifted through the thousands of responses and selected the twelve best upon which he based his short stories.

The collaboration did not end there. Gaiman continued to reach out to his followers for ideas, including the illustrations to accompany the chapters. After he finished the stories, he asked for illustrations to accompany the text and selected his favourites to feature in the book. The end result is a stunning, limited-edition collaborative art book, bound in wax paper and sealed with a specially designed crest.

Social media being used in this way, closing the gap between the artist and the audience, is an interesting development and raises new questions on what can be done with new avenues of crowd sourcing and communication.