DIGIDAY: Why Crowdsourcing Still Matters

Published April 11th, 2013 by Digiday

Crowdsourcing has its share of critics, but it’s undeniably destined to play a big part in the future of marketing.

Being able to connect and collaborate with customers at scale has implications across the entire organization. Imagine if instead of spending tens of thousands of dollars on focus groups to talk with 20 people for an hour across two markets, you could talk with thousands of customers in real time across the globe. Imagine if your customers could connect with you and with each other and could drive earned media, reduce customer-support costs and shorten your feedback loop on new products. Imagine if your product development team had a constant stream of ideas and suggestions coming from real customers to help influence their R&D. All of this is happening in organizations that focus on crowdsourcing as a core capability rather than just thinking in terms of one-off campaigns.

So why are we wasting everyone’s time with Instagram photo walls?  It may be the right stepping stone, but it is not driving long-term value for brands or for customers. The central problem is that many brands are seeing the concept of crowdsourcing through the lens of campaigns. It is inherently short-term thinking, with the goal being volume of conversation or acquiring new likes and followers. The concept of creating more open and participatory brands cannot be approached through short-term campaign thinking. It requires cultural shifts, infrastructure and a vision for how the involvement of customers in a brand can help fuel it.

When it comes to crowdsourcing, and digital marketing as a whole, we need to think beyond the campaign and start thinking in terms of building capabilities that drive value to new parts of the organization.

Nike is an easy example. For the brand, digital is not a series of campaigns and crowdsourced photo contests. Digital engagement is a layer that is being baked into their products with Nike+ and linked to existing social networks. Digital is a capability that is letting Nike get closer to customers and build community around its various products and sports. Yes, campaigns complement this strategy, but they are not wasting their time focusing on one-off contests and sweepstakes.

Apple is another example of a company that has crowdsourcing principles baked into its products. The iPhone was designed as a vessel for third-party developers to create new experiences around. Apple turned a once self-contained product into a more rapidly evolving interface that crowdsources a large majority of its functionality in the form of apps. Opening up the iPhone to curated apps developed by third parties not only helped it be more useful, fun and versatile but also created a massive network of businesses and individuals who are promoting their tools and the phone as well.

Agencies and brands need to start thinking beyond the gimmicky crowdsourcing campaign. Marketers, CMOs and even CEOs need to set expectations higher for how crowdsourcing can drive value for brands. Crowdsourcing has the potential to be a game-changer for a wide range of brands that have fallen behind their customers.

Mashable: 5 Ways Businesses Can Use Social Media as a Tool for Progress

Published January 17th, 2012 on Mashable

It seems like everyone talks about the value of social media, but very few businesses take full advantage of it. Think about how you use social media in your personal life — to ask for recommendations or advice from friends, to share photos and moments from your life, and to stay in touch. Very few people act as if they’re automated social media bots. So why do companies?

There’s huge potential for companies to get real on social media, but that means asking customers potentially tough questions: What should the company do next? How should the company improve its products or services? It’s scary, uncharted territory for many, but it’s much more efficient to tap social media than to agonize over expensive surveys and focus groups. Most don’t realize that the most valuable “focus group” is the community that chooses to opt in over social media. These friends, fans and followers want to see you succeed (and have a hand in helping you accomplish success).

Here are the biggest missteps when it comes to using social media as a tool for progress, plus some advice on how to overcome them.

1. Companies Don't Ask for New Ideas Over Social Media.

Customers love having the opportunity to influence the direction of companies, but they’re unlikely to provide valuable ideas without being prompted first. Companies need to start by proactively posting or tweeting questions that ask for customers’ thoughts on specific product ideas, marketing strategies, or anything else relevant. And when people answer you, dig deeper! Turn any initial feedback you get into a conversation, and try to create something real from the dialogue.

2. Companies Use Social Media for Self-Serving Information.

Since it’s usually the marketing department that controls a company's social media activity, it’s not surprising that the majority of information companies share over social media is about their own products or services. The problem is that promotional tweets and Facebook posts don’t generate useful conversations with fans. It’s not all about you! Instead, companies should post fun contests, polls, and questions to let their customers know they value their opinion, and that they have a personality.

3. Companies Are Strapped for Time and Labor.

Most companies believe they’d be better at social media conversations with customers if they had more people or time to work on it. While this is probably true, the misstep in this situation is neglecting to realize that effective social media engagement doesn’t have to take a lot of time to be effective. In most cases, those managing social channels just need a bit of direction and focus. Often, just getting together with the marketing, product development or customer service departments can help you set a course that’s both manageable and worth the time and effort.

4. Companies Receive Overwhelmingly Positive Feedback on Social Media.

When I speak with companies about the feedback they get from customers over social media, most are overjoyed by the amount of positive comments they receive. Sure, knowing what you’re doing right can be helpful, but companies need more than positive feedback to help drive progress. For more useful feedback, companies should post and tweet questions that are relevant to specific areas the business explores. Feedback in response to the question “What new watch designs should we offer?” will be more valuable than compliments on how sweet your watch bands and face designs already are.

5. Companies Receive Feedback, Then Nothing Happens.

Usually the people who monitor social media channels within a company aren’t the same people who make decisions about the direction of the company. This means that many valuable ideas that come in through social channels are never even considered. To fully take advantage of social media as a tool for progress, a system needs to be put in place to make sure the ideas coming from customers over Facebook and Twitter are passed along to the appropriate decision-makers. Communication is essential in order that feedback can actually cause change. Also, once customers realize their ideas are being turned into reality, they’ll be more likely to contribute new ideas again.

The good news about social media is that it’s prime real estate for trying out new things and talking to your customers all at once in a way that’s never been possible before.

Ever find yourself violating any of these social media faux pas? What have you done to make your communities more vibrant channels for capturing ideas?

Fast Company: Why you Should Look to Consumers for Product Innovation

 Published March 11th, 2013 by Fast Company

It has long been asserted (famously, by Steve Jobs) that customers can’t tell you what your next product should be. Companies create and customers consume. But the pace of innovation is increasing and customers are gaining access to new tools that democratize innovation. Customers are becoming a critical source of new ideas for brands. They are remixing existing products to make them better, more personalized, or adapting them to do new things. To be competitive, brands need to look outward and cultivate the communities of creative customers that are shaping the future of their products.

Here, we share five examples of creative customers that have remixed existing products in amazing ways:

Remixing iPod Headphones and Ziplock Bags: Lee Washington posted a video several years ago of an idea he had to make iPod headphones better. He recognized--as we all have--that earbuds have a nasty tendency to get tangled. He took a pair of headphones and prototyped a system, much like a ziplock bag, that allows you to lock the headphone cord together. It is a smart solution to an issue we have all been frustrated by. This was not a major consulting project, or the work of an internal R&D team. Lee Washington was a customer who loved Apple, but hated his earbuds getting tangled.

The InkJet Printer Turned Organ Printer: Inkjet printers have a basic purpose. But what if the same system in an Inkjet printer could be hacked and turned into a device that printed cells, or even human organs? In labs around the world, scientists saw that the inkjet technology could be applied to science in a very unique way. They retrofitted off-the-shelf inkjet printers and used them to print cells and human organs. Hundreds of scientific papers were published talking about the process of retrofitting basic inkjet printers to print cells. It is a revolutionary application to a simple consumer product inspired not by HP or Epson, but by creative researchers.

GoPro Camera Hacking: GoPro is an amazing tool that empowers customers to capture high-resolution video. The GoPro brand, in many ways has been defined by the videos, and art, its customers have created. But GoPro customers are also busy hacking and designing new mounts, audio inputs, and even connecting them to drones. Just YouTube "GoPro hack" and a stream of videos appear with consumers remixing the cameras to make them better or capture even more creative and inspiring shots. For example, look at this egg-timer video that turns an IKEA egg timer into an amazing panorama time lapse system. Their solutions may not be the most elegant of designs, but they are problem solving--and this should be a rich source of ideas and feedback for GoPro.

IKEA Hackers: Not everything needs to be tech to be remixed in creative ways. IKEA Hackers is an online community of people that have taken IKEA products and adapted them or mixed them together to create amazing new products. This hanging lamp created from office lamps is just one creation. IKEA Hackers is a world of creative applications and hacks and can be a window into new product ideas or adaptations of existing IKEA products.

Microsoft Kinect: The instant Microsoft’s Kinect system hit the market, people started taking it apart and adapting it for new uses. Customers designed a virtual dressing room, interactive billboards, and spatially aware robots. The core technology in the Kinect system became a set of tools consumers used to create innovations. Microsoft has embraced this movement, hosting Hackathons and creating an accelerator program for startups. The genius in this system is that Microsoft has armed its consumers with building blocks and created the infrastructure to catalyze and discover the various innovations and applications they come up with.

What does this all mean for consumer product brands?

Brands and legal teams will naturally fight these communities. Brands must champion a decision to cultivate and catalyze their most creative customers. Why? Because the smartest people are most likely outside the company, and by cultivating communities, brands can accelerate their pace of innovation while lowering risk and investments into ideas that have no roots in real consumer needs.

Innovation teams need to think beyond “what’s our next product” and start thinking about how they can create more open products that can be adapted and improved over time. Developers have been using APIs and open source software for many years to increase the pace of innovation. Consumer product companies can mimic these more open systems. Just look at companies like Sifteo or Lapka that have created physical products connected to software that are designed to be remixed into new applications.

Finally, companies need to catalyze and embrace the ideas of customers to drive brand affinity and authentic content creation. Every idea, hack, reinvention of a product tells a story. Crowdsourced ideas are a rich source of social content that can drive engagement. Opening brands up to ideas also has the benefit of activating social networks to think creatively about the brands they love. People embrace what they influence, so more open and transparent brands will become the most loved and talked about as well.

Fast Company: How Being Uncomfortable can be Your Best Creative Weapon.

Published February 22nd 2012 by Fast Company

Would it shock you if I told you that we’re ignoring our greatest creative resource every single day--even stifling it? What would you think if I told you that creative resource had nothing to do with what you do every day of your life?

For the sake of this article, let’s define creativity as the ability to solve problems in an unexpected or surprising way. Many of us may be in careers that are perceived as “creative": designers, developers, writers, or entrepreneurs. But we don’t force ourselves regularly to solve problems that are clearly out of our areas of expertise. That’s where we’re squandering our greatest creative resource. With routine, people tend to get stuck in patterned forms of thought. By forcing our minds out of our comfort zones, we can become a part of a more intellectually diverse crowd that helps us continue to learn and challenge our own assumptions.

This concept has been called a lot of things, but one of my favorites is “the curse of knowledge.” As Chip and Dan Heath wrote, when we attempt to problem-solve within our own boundaries of expertise, even within our own companies, we assume others know what we do. Nothing is more dangerous. We become incapable of communicating clearly to others, and end up with an idea that goes nowhere.

So, how do we get out of our own way? By challenging ourselves to feel uncomfortable regularly, to solve problems we never would in our day jobs, or to take on projects where we really have no idea what we’re doing. In other words, make that uncomfortable feeling your new hobby. Sounds a little crazy, but other people and companies have experimented with this with great success.

For example, our team worked with Jonathon Parker, an MD/PhD student, on a design project for audio systems. He got a chance to collaborate with a group of mechanical engineers, designers, and artists (individuals he would have never been able to work with in the medical field) on a short-term idea-generation project. Jonathon humbly told us that he learned so much from the group, but he also provided key input on how the brain responded to audio signals--information they wouldn’t have thought of without his expertise. In this particular project, “wisdom of crowds” took on a whole new meaning.

Parker is a modern-day Renaissance Man. It’s easier than most of us think to become Renaissance Men and Women, even if the capacity to do out-of-bounds things doesn’t exist within our day jobs. It seems as if once every few months I see a new workout program that promises results within 30, 15, even 5 minutes of exercise. While I can’t attest to how effective these programs are for the body, the brain can be exercised in similar increments to challenge patterned forms of thought.

The web has an incredible capacity to connect all different kinds of creative people to form communities of diverse thinkers. As people who desire a greater connection with creativity, we can seek out these communities to do things we’d never expect to do--design the next package for a consumer good, write a jingle for a national ad campaign, or even re-sequence protein enzymes.

On the other end, as companies seeking out sources of creativity, we no longer have to resort to expensive focus groups and studies to test out concepts, or even come up with those concepts in the first place. If the web truly becomes a destination for all sorts of Renaissance Thinkers to exercise their creativity, there’s an amazing untapped creative resource just waiting to be challenged.

So, welcome to the 21st Century Renaissance Community, where your grandmother is learning to code and your colleague in accounting is inspiring the next beverage flavor. What are you doing to make yourself feel uncomfortable today?

Harvard Business Review: The Hidden Power of Mundane Ideas.

 Published April 25th 2012 by Harvard Business Review

Picture this: a nutrition scientist does a study with one person, limiting him to a 1500 calorie diet and having him run for 15 minutes on a treadmill each day. The man loses three pounds in a month. Can we safely assume that this experiment, when repeated with others, will produce the exact same result?

Of course not. So many factors — not the least of which include testing a larger, more diverse sample of people — contribute to the accuracy of any study.

The same holds true for consumer focus groups, innovation contests, and more recently the use of social media sites to solicit feedback from consumers. There's an unfair expectation that at the end of a survey or a campaign, we'll get "the answer" to something big from one magic interaction. Maybe we'll get the winning creative for a multi million-dollar ad campaign in a crowdsourced competition. Or the idea for our next product will hit like a lightning bolt on our Facebook wall, straight from the minds of one of our most loyal fans.

Sometimes we're lucky enough to get an amazing idea from an individual that changes everything, but more often than not, we're getting a collection of kind-of-similar, not-too-flashy ideas that should force us to question what we're doing (and find a way to do it better.) One of our mentors, ProfessorLaura Kornish from the University of Colorado at Boulder, has studied online consumer interactions with brands, like MyStarbucksIdea (a kind of online suggestion box for coffee fanatics). Her verdict: Sometimes it's far more valuable to find patterns in what people are requesting than to find that one, big "I never thought of that" idea.

Here's a slightly different example of this phenomenon in action. A large consumer electronics manufacturer we recently worked with had launched a new hybrid TV and internet technology focused on teens. They'd certainly done their homework. The company interviewed teens in focus groups before launching the product to find out which features to include in their new internet-enabled TV. The TV included many of the teens' suggestions, but didn't catch on in the mass market. Why not?

Building features based on direct feedback was certainly cool, but assumed a basic level of knowledge about teens that the brand hadn't yet mastered. We worked with a group of teens online with the goal of finding out how (if at all) teens see their TV and internet usage intersect. By far, this was the most popular recurring sentiment of the more than 2,400 submissions:

I often watch TV on my computer, but don't really want to browse the internet on my TV. 

These and a few of the other popular sentiments seemed so obvious, but were being overlooked by the brand in efforts to build the next innovative product. Sometimes, products are far ahead of their time because they assume a level of comfort that isn't yet there in the consumer. That's where the insights of the collective can be used to help us question everything. Maybe we don't need to surf Facebook on TV at all, but need to find a way for the big screen to interact seamlessly with the other four devices kids are using while they watch TV.

The same awareness of repeated customer sentiments applies to nearly any business. Sometimes changes can be obvious (a small restaurant gets 35 comment cards requesting a dessert menu, so they hire a pastry chef). Most of the time, we need to force ourselves to ask the right questions and brace ourselves for a thorough analysis of the mundane. That's often where the real innovation lies.