The Ten Commandments of Crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing is not a taboo subject anymore, especially when speaking about business affairs. Nokia uses crowdsourcing. So does General Electric, Air New Zealand, and the United States Postal Service. However things can go very wrong very fast if the rules of crowdsourcing are not followed, and The Business Insider recently posted a 10-step program to keep you on track. Here’s what they had to say.
Rule No.1: Choosing the approach that is right for you. First of all you need to find out what you need the crowd for… Do you need to come up with new ideas, do you want to sponsor something, or just vote which is the best idea you can come up with?
Rule No.2: Eliminate the influence of crazy freaks. You must determine a way to avoid giving too much power to a small group that can have a powerful influence on your results.
Rule No.3: Ask people that know nothing about what you are trying to do. Karim Lakhani , assistant professor at Harvard Business School, after studying the effectiveness of crowdsourced problem solving, explains this rule: “We actually found the odds of a solver’s success increased in fields in which they had no formal expertise.”
Rule No.4: Don’t ask consumers to brainstorm about business products and vice versa. The results can be disastrous if you do not find what sort of approach your brand needs. When the target is the consumer, then the brand can have a very creative approach, but if the brand is business to business, then you need something different.
Rule No.5: Don’t get analysis paralysis. You know what they say: quality over quantity. It doesn’t matter how many people take part in you project, but rather it’s the quality of their answers that does.
Rule No.6: Set clear boundaries for participation. Time Magazine decided to let Internet users vote who gets their annual award. This decision gave the opportunity to practical jokers to set the winner as Christopher ‘moot’ Poole, founder of 4Chan, an online community known for it’s pranks.
Rule No.7: Choose the right incentives. You need to know what the people you are working with want to get the result you are after.
Rule No.8: Everyone doesn’t have to agree. Need we say more?
Rule No.9: Understand influencers. For example, the success behind a recent Old Spice campaign is because the team behind it paid close atention to “who wrote those comments, what their influence is, and what comments have the most potential to help them “create new content.”
Rule No.10: There is still the need of a leader. CEO leader of the Cambrian House project, Michael Sikorsky, explains the reason behind it’s failure: “given a great idea with great community support and great market test data, we would be able to find a team willing to execute it or we could execute it ourselves. We needed amazing founding teams for each of the ideas – this is where our model fell short.”
Thanks Business Insider.