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.

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.