How the Internet Powers Crowdsourcing

The Internet is a perfect incubator for the crowdsourcing phenomenon, because so many different viewpoints are brought to bear on individual problems. Very few social network members go through any vetting process, they simply sign in. There is nothing stopping a musician from entering the photography network and responding to member questions. In fact, two musicians invented the most popular color photography process in the world, Kodachrome. Historically, amateurs and experts alike flocked to these Internet venues where the free exchange of ideas escalated into a healthy competition to supply the most accurate reply in the least amount of time. This natural tendency to ‘strut your cognizant stuff’ is the bedrock of what economists call the “attention economy .”

Netscape’s creation of Mozillia in 1998 gave everyone the chance to work on the popular web browser. Today Mozillia’s Firefox is the world’s number two browser. All this is achieved with volunteers, donating their time and expertise for no other reason than to create an elegant web browser. The two main forces behind the attention economy are: a realization that in an information overloaded world, the value of attention will go up, and (as a result) people will work for recognition alone .

Social networks provide an outlet for creative thinkers who band together in their spare time to produce products that compete against traditionally developed software. Linux competing with Windows, Unix, and Apple. Mozilla competing with Explorer and Safari.

Even though they compete in the same markets as traditionally developed products, social networks and the crowdsourced products that come from them tend to operate in contradictory fashion to the forces that shape large organizations. This is most noticeable in open vs. closed communication behaviors. Organizations often benefit from withholding information and general isolation:

Isolation from competition - While companies develop products in secrecy, open source products draw skills across competitors and industries.

Isolation from customers – Open source projects are often created by the very same people who use them. This outsourcing to the customer eliminates the gap between vendor and customer all together.

Isolation in the form of strategies and tactics unique to one organization - Organizations have slogans to celebrate their unique and proprietary methods; people are “True Blue” for IBM, GE has “Work-Out”. These programs can be great morale boosters but can also serve as barriers when companies or individuals collaborate.

The Internet deconstructs isolationism, information moves too fast to be proprietary, hidden away from customers, or hoarded to be sold over and over again to verticals that enjoy no significant year-to-year change. Isolationist tactics serve to maintain the status quo within a particular organization but also lead to some of the more dramatic missteps of organizations that have been isolated too long:

Failing to consider all the alternatives

Social networks are not shy; they throw everything up against the wall to see what sticks. Although a wasteful process, it is also an adaptive one that succeeds where fixed expert models fail. Consider the following. US automakers continue to make cars with poor gas mileage, long after the realization of a direct correlation between corporate average fuel economy and profit. Based on 2005 numbers, GM lost $1,271 per vehicle in North America, while Daimler Chrysler made $144 and Ford lost $451, Nissan made $2,135, Toyota made $1,715, and Honda made $1,259 . If you look at corporate average fuel economy for the same companies, U.S. manufactures averaged under 30mpg while Honda and Toyota were over 34mpg .

This is not to suggest that all U.S. automakers problems stem from poor fuel efficiency, but it is a fact that the U.S. lags behind Japan and is forced to incentivise sales of SUVs while Japanese hybrids rake in record profits. The startling fact is that many organizations will continue throwing good money after bad until an overwhelming force intervenes. Henry Ford lost many good employees and considerable sales before relenting to building retiring the Model T. Lexis / Nexus maintained a proprietary network for accessing their news & legal database long after the Internet became the media of choice. Social networks assume nothing and crowdsourcing has no organizational memory, no bad habits, or political agendas to silence the voice of the customer.

Starting with the answer

All too often consultants are hired to validate an idea already thought to be a success within the customer company. This practice handicaps the consultant and leads to failure. Crowdsourcing via social networks is a process inherently without preconception. Imagine a hive of bees searching for honey. The hive has no idea where they will find nectar. Every day they canvass the landscape without any preconceptions. Once nectar is found, the hive optimizes its efforts to harvest the found resource. Crowdsourcing is similar to the hive in that it is not reliant on one individual or practice to achieve an outcome. A multitude of potential outcomes and approaches are considered within the efficient framework of crowdsourcing before a decision is rendered.

Groupthink

We as humans have a basic need to be part of a larger group, to be accepted by those around us. The vestigial fragment of genetic code that causes people to not step off the curb first, face forward in the elevator, or look up when others look up, interferes with business decision making and no one is immune to it.

Psychologist Irving Janice coined the term groupthink in 1972 . People who suffer from groupthink exhibit the following symptoms:

• Illusion of invulnerability –Creates excessive optimism that encourages taking extreme risks.
• Collective rationalization – Members discount warnings and do not reconsider their assumptions.
• Belief in inherent morality – Members believe in the rightness of their cause and therefore ignore the ethical or moral consequences of their decisions.
• Stereotyped views of out-groups – Negative views of “enemy” make effective responses to conflict seem unnecessary.
• Direct pressure on dissenters – Members are under pressure not to express arguments against any of the group’s views.
• Self-censorship – Doubts and deviations from the perceived group consensus are not expressed.
• Illusion of unanimity – The majority view and judgments are assumed to be unanimous.
• Self-appointed ‘mindguards’ – Members protect the group and the leader from information that is problematic or contradictory to the group’s cohesiveness, view, and/or decisions.

Crowdsourcing keeps fresh blood and ideas in the decision making mix and can help reduce organizational elements that lead to groupthink: hubris, ideas that fail the logic test, and most importantly, plans made in isolation that don’t represent customer desires and their inevitable failure. One of the striking characteristics of groupthink is the more gifted, intelligent and cohesive your team, the more susceptible you are.

John Maynard Keynes wrote, “Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally. ” Companies that suffer from a lack of diversity in their strategy development often die with their boots on in conventional markets they are unfamiliar with. Failures related to groupthink are the corporate equivalent of the famous red neck last request, “hold my beer.” These companies staggered into markets they were unprepared for because their leadership surrounded themselves with like-minded managers who were incentivised to agree with each other and hired consultants to validate what they already thought to be true. And we love to read about them!

"It's not what you don't know, that can hurt you. It's what you think you know, that just ain't so." Mark Twain

Builders Square Kmart's answer to The Home Depot and Lowe's. Kmart tried to compete with Home Depot and Lowe's but failed to match the modernized management and supply chain innovations of the incumbents. Despite a huge investment by Kmart, Builders Square went out of business in 1999.

Segway Human Transport scooter invented by Dean Kamen, holder of more than 440 patents. The self-balancing scooter was marketed as the most important transportation innovation since the automobile. However, Mr. Kamen failed to realize people could buy a truck load of conventional scooters for the $5,000 Segway price tag. Conventional electric scooters go faster and further than the Segway. Conventional scooters do not rely on a computer to keep their passengers from becoming part of the pavement. Mr. Kamen and the inventors of the Segway seemed to collectively rationalize away all of the superior aspects of the venerable electric scooter. Consequently, the Segway only sold 10,000 units in its first few years. It should be noted that Mr. Kamen filed for another patent in an attempt to vastly improve the Segway’s efficiency (United States Patent 6,062,023).

Burger King "Herb" campaign was one of greatest advertising flops of the 80’s. The campaign centered on the faceless "Herb", a male character that was constantly being criticized for being himself. Viewers were invited to join the “fun” for looking out for Herb at Burger King locations. One of the reasons why the campaign failed was that Burger King never told people what Herb looked like. The campaign’s result was a customer backlash at the impossible task of finding Herb with no possible way to do so. “Herb” may meet all the conditions of groupthink, most significantly, collective rationalization in the potential effectiveness of the campaign. Advertising Age magazine called the Herb campaign "most elaborate advertising flop of the decade".

New Coke, introduced in 1985 as a complete replacement to original coke recipe. In an effort to gain market share over rival Pepsi, Coca-Cola's executives commissioned the top-secret "Project Kansas” to test and perfect a new flavor for Coke. Coke management succumbed to the groupthink practice of self censorship by ignoring focus group data suggesting loyal coke drinkers would “stop drinking Coke altogether” if the new formula replaced the old. Public reaction was so overwhelming; Coke was forced to reintroduce the old formula as “Classic Coke” within three months of new Coke’s launch.

In 2005 Sony-BMG decided to include Digital Rights Management (DRM) software in music CDs sold under the Sony label. Sony suffered from an illusion of invulnerability when it failed to inform consumers the music CDs secretly installed software on customer’s computers. The software’s primary function was to prevent illegal copies of Sony music but it also caused computer malfunctions resulting in a successful class action law suit against Sony. What Sony failed to recognize was the outrage customers experienced when they discovered Sony was trying to control their personal computers. This outrage attracted the ire of software hackers who defeated Sony’s DRM product and widely distributed the hack over peer to peer file sharing networks.

Further Reading:

• Herbert Simon postulated that an oversupply of information creates scarcity of attention. See also http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue2_4/goldhaber/
• Mozillia http://wp.netscape.com/newsref/pr/newsrelease577.html
• Goldhaber, Michael H. Attention Shoppers! Wired Magazine issue 5.12, December 1997
• Google’s page rank technology explained http://www.google.com/technology/
• U.S. Dept. of Transportation, Summary of Fuel Economy 2005
• Janis, Irving L. (1972). Victims of Groupthink. New York: Houghton Mifflin.
• Keynes, John Maynard, (1935) The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company
• Totty, Michael. How to Decide? Create a Market. The Wall Street Journal, June 19, 2006
• Surowiecki, James. (2004) The Wisdom of Crowds, New York: Anchor Books
• Rubenstein, Sarah. Companies Tackle Worker Maladies; Faced With Weak Output, More Firms Aim to Treat On-the-Job Aches, Pains. Wall Street Journal. January, 2005.

Amateur Economy of Crowdsourcing

One of the tenants of crowdsourcing is the ability of many amateurs to assemble and create something of value. Google is most likely the largest crowdsourcing endeavor in the world, with millions of web page owners working together to create value. Google’s winning search technology is a radical departure from other Internet search engines. Google interprets links on web pages as votes. The more links that point to a page, the more likely it is, that page contains what you are searching for. Google also analyzes pages and ranks them by ‘importance’, links from important pages carry more weight than unimportant pages . For example, let’s say you need to find the definition for an obscure word “sesquipedalian.” Typing sesquipedalian into Google we see that in .05 seconds a list of 18,300 pages containing our tongue -twister appears. The first page in the list http://www.thefreedictionary.com/sesquipedalia has only two pages that link to it, a Columbia University page and another page from www.freedictionary.com. Even with only one external linked page, Google was able to deliver an accurate definition for sesquipedalian in the first result. Using Google’s methodology, the Columbia page linking to the definition is ‘important’ and pushes our accurate definition for sesquipedalian - (a very long word (a foot and a half long)), to the top of the results. When thousands of pages, controlled by universities and armatures alike, are combined and weighted, Google proves crowdsourcing can be very effective.

Armatures can be a powerful force; throughout history they have stepped in and redefined or created entire industry categories.

This example speaks to the heart of why crowdsourcing is such an effective problem solving mechanism: Consider the following real word examples and the tremendous social and financial benefits that arose from them:

• The Airplane, invented by two bicycle mechanics
• Personal computer, invented by a physician
• Cotton Gin, invented by a teacher
• Kodachrome film, invented by two musicians
  

Marketing Executives Network Group (MENG) Crowdsourcing Speech - Part 1

On July 17th I was fortunate enough to be invited to speak before MENG on the topic of Crowdsourcing. The following videos are dubed over my PowerPoint slides. My rough notes accompany. Episode one covers:

• “Crowdsourcing” coined by Wired magazine Writer Jeff Howe The Rise of Crowdsourcing. Wired Magazine issue 14.06, June 2006
• Nothing new but the term: Guild systems Granges, etc. practiced “crowdsourcing” long before term was coined (dev of steam engine, Niagara Falls suspension bridge)
• The process is all about people wanting to contribute in a highly social way. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs top of the pyramid “Self-Actualization”

Tenants are:

• Self organization (naturally gravitating to what members like are good at).
• Democratic decision making (Linux votes / Google links / Wikipedia edits)
• Open systems Linux Wikipedia are free, Google open API / Apps (No good “traditional” economic reason for doing this!)
• Unusual Economic Model: Create the environment and then make money of related services. “Shovels & picks to the miners”
• Customer service via mass collaboration

Discuss early involvement in Aetna KM & Clutrain Manifesto

Marketing Executives Network Group (MENG) Crowdsourcing Speech - Part 2

Below is a time-line of major events in crowdsourcing:

Basic categories emerging over time: scientific research, software development, “market as conversation”, reference, business & entertainment. Said another way: creation, prediction, organization

• GenBank 1982 Open access gene sequencing database. Helped some pharma companies to release their sequencing data to the public.
• Linux code released 1991. 1.9 billion dollars (year 2000 U.S. dollars) to develop by conventional means. IDC, 25% of servers and 2.8% of desktop computers ran Linux as of 2004. http://www.linux.org/. 1999 IBM joins Linux community as do Dell, IBM, HP and the Oracle Corporation
• Classmates 1995. first large scale social networking site
• PHP Web scripting language 1995
• MYSQL Database Management 1995 10 million installs
• Apache server software 1995 runs 58% of web 1998 IBM announces support of Apache (joins community)
• LAMP ･Linux, referring to the operating system: Apache, the Web server: MySQL, the database management system (or database server):･PHP, the programming language. http://www.lampware.org
• Redhat 1995 Redhat makes money by selling subscriptions to the support, training, and integration services that help customers in using the open source software
• Mozila foundation 1998 http://www.Mozila.com #2 web browser Firefox
• Google 1998
• Lego Mindstorms, 1998 allows customers to share "hacks" with each other.
• Who Wants to be a Millionaire 1998 Contestants the option of asking an expert 65% accurate or letting the “crowd” decide 91% accurate
• “Cluetrain Manifesto” 1999 First available on the internet then published. “Markets are conversations”
• “Unleashing the Killer App” 1999 Top five business books by WSJ available for free on the internet “Cannibalize Value Chains”
• Gerson Lehrman Group 1999 150,000 members pooling talent in “councils” Also: Society of Industry Leaders, Nitron Advisors, Primary Global
• Epinions 1999 consumer reviews, now owned by Ebay
• SETI @ HOME 1999 NASA experiment in distributed computing 5.2 million members Guinness World Records as the largest computation in history
• Second life 1999 Linden Labs 6,936,647 residents in 3-d user-created world. Created a virtual / real economy on the web. Companies, universities are buying “real-estate”
• Istockphoto 2000, 23,000 photographers selling pictures from $1 to $40, acquired by Getty Images 2006 for $50 million USD
• Tripadvisor 2000 User reviews of 200,000 hotels & 30,000 destinations
• Innocentive 2001, 70,000 solvers work on scientific problems (must propose solution first) http://www.innocentive.com/
• Linkedin 2002
• American Idol 2002 Originally conceived by Simon Cowell as a means of accurately predicting what artists would have mass appeal
• del.icio.us (pronounced as "delicious ) 2003 A social bookmaking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks
• Myspace 2003, purchased by News Corp 2006 top 5 mist visited web site by Alexa
• Flicker 2004 photo sharing
• Zopa 2004 is a bank that uses "Tanda" concepts to allow customers to lend money in a P 2P environment see also Prosper 2006
• Amazon Mechanical Turk 2005 "Artificial Artificial Intelligence”
• Yahoo! Tech Buzz 2005, prediction market on high-tech companies Google runs internal market to help guide the company
• Lifan uses “localized modularization” to crowdsource motorcycles 7 million units produced in 2005
• Twitter 2006 Micro blog, share updates over instant messaging
• Chevy Tahoe Commercials 2006 Chevy failed to filter customer creations and the campaign failed
• P&G 35% of new products from the outside 2007
• Ongoing: NFL, HP decision market 75% accurate
• The Losers People you don’t see on the chart: Network Television / News. U.S. Auto, Britannica, Microsoft (king of closed systems)

Marketing Executives Network Group (MENG) Crowdsourcing Speech - Part 3

Charting the “Wiki-mobile’s” Progress
Phenomenon did not happen by accident: Our increased connectedness, Availability of free, quality knowledge and a mature market made it happen

Connectivity (Internet) creates environment for:

• Rapid diffusion of best practice: PMP, 6 Sigma, ISO, SOX, CMM
• Mash ups (mix & match technology): LAMP, Google maps, Open Source, Linux in Cars, Linux & (Oracle, Dell, IBM, HP)
• Opening of Quality Knowledge Bases: Human genome, (P&G, IBM Patents), Wikipedia, B 2 B Partnerships, Social / Business networking
• Outsourcing to the Customer / Prosumers:
• Plummeting cost of getting on the web (LAMP)

Paradigm Shift - Give More Get More: many companies realize (by accident) they can profit by letting go of what they once held most dear.

• Boeing & aircraft assembly
• IBM Domino & Linux
• BMW & Assembly (computers & software now 50% of car value
• Kimberly-Clark got out of the paper mill business.
• All of these companies discovered that delivering customer experience was key, not their traditional roles. Treating customers / vendors as partners makes these sorts of relationships possible.

Mature Market (Presenteeism):

• Average age of FORTUNE 1000 company = 65 years. 29,139,291 employees.
• Top 10 employers = 5,437,526 and average age of 91 years. Source “One Source”
• Combined with elimination of defined benefits (pensions), outsourcing and looming universal care.
• Many experienced people are exploring “other opportunities” in consulting &self employment.

All forces working in concert make companies like Innocentive possible

The fact that we (Baby Boomers & Gen Xers) need to apply terms to advanced collaboration like “Crowdsourcing” is a measure of how uncomfortable we are with the process.

• Value shift from independent heroic effort to collaborative effort
• Gen “Y” will not need ask permission to crowdsource

Gen Y is not burdened by this:

• They use online collaboration to do their homework
• Constant communication has always been free
• The building blocks of socialization were largely electronically facilitated (online games)
• Instant gratification
• They view electronics, cell phones & the Web as extensions of themselves we see them as tools

Marketing Executives Network Group (MENG) Crowdsourcing Speech - Part 4

Crowdsourcing Economics

Traditional Companies / Orgs:

• Characterized by vertical (silo) integration
  
  
• Product development is tightly held secret
  
  
• Scale by locking out competition, (Apple).
  
  
• Service is a detractor
  
  
• Vendors are told what to do
  
  
• Innovation is for company elite, everybody else “Shut up and row!”
  
  

Crowdsourced Companies / Orgs:

• Create a market: (Linux, IBM) created markets and then gave away core product. They make money by selling services to that product.
  
  

By giving the product away advantages result:

• Price competition is gone (can not be under sold on core product) IBM nullified competition by joining Linux and giving away product
  
  
• Removes financial strain of developing competitive product (Linux)
  
  
• Lots of smart people will help you develop product (IBM, Lifian)
  
  
• You focus on customer relationship and innovation (profit leaders)
  
  

Goldcorp Case Study

Goldcorp owned a 50 year-old mine in Red lake Ontario. Company geologists knew there was gold in the mine but not exactly where (expensive to make mistakes).

• After hearing of the success of Linux, CEO Rob McEwen had an idea to use crowdsourcing to find the gold.
  
  
• Industry protocol is to NEVER release geological data. EE’s were also concerned over their standing in industry “what you can’t find your own gold?”
  
  
• Interesting people joined the challenge: Students, military, physicists, computer graphics
  
  
• Australian company Fractal Graphics won the competition by applying science of geographic information system (GIS) to the “flat” Goldcorp data. Fractial never visited the mine.
  
  

Marketing Executives Network Group (MENG) Crowdsourcing Speech - Part 5

Kiwi Publishing Case Study

Kiwi is a publishing start up with the goal of distributing books in non-traditional markets. Microengagement deployed our Executive Roundtable approach to solving the challenge of identifying a channel marketing strategy and executing it.

Decision Market Case Study

1996, HP and Charles Plott, an economist from the California Institute of Technology, set out on a joint research project whose aim was to set up a software trading platform for a prediction market at HP.

The participants selected for the research project consisted of 30 product and finance managers from HP. They were each given $50 in a trading account and allowed to sell and purchase contracts on the levels they estimated quarterly sales would reach. For instance, if a manager thought sales would be in the range of $201 million and $210 million, he could buy a contract that would pay at the end of the quarter if his prediction was correct. If he revised his personal estimate throughout the quarter, he would likely try to sell the first contract and buy another based on the new estimate. These markets were open during lunch breaks and after business hours, and lasted for a week. The managers were allowed to keep profits earned from owning paying contracts (correct estimates) at the end of the market. When trading stopped, the contract with the highest price (i.e., under the highest demand from the managers) was deemed the ﾒestimateﾓ of the market. The HP marketing manager estimated simultaneously and independently estimated quarterly sales, as usual.

The marketing manager;s projections missed by 13% during the experiment while the estimate of the information market had an error of only 6%. In further trials, the market estimate outperformed official forecasts 75% of the time. Notorious Flash in the Pan The United States government attempted to put information markets to use. In 2001, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a research think tank within the Department of Defense, began funding a project called FutureMAP (later under the name Policy Analysis Market, or PAM).

"Big Board" Mentality

"To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself. "
Soren Kierkegaard

As I travel and meet people who are interested in expertsourcing & crowdsourcing there is one often asked question, while understandable, still leaves me shaking my head.

"How can I crowdsource, we are a public company." or "Our secrets will be lost if we involve outside experts."

The best way to answer this question is with a clip from Stanley Kubrick's movie "Dr. Strangelove." There is a scene in the movie where the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff are in the war room discussing wether or not to allow the Russian ambassador access to the room. George C. Scott plays a U.S. general who is concerned such access will lead to a "security breach" with the Russians gaining secrets on his "big board." (at end of clip).

The scene is silly but it brings up a good point that is relevant in business. Most companies suffer not as victims of corporate espionage (the "big board" scenario) but under the weight of their own secrecy. If a business never takes a chance and engages its: experts, customers, shareholders, or any other constituency, mediocrity is almost certain. In Short, "You can't win if you don't play."

It is a natural human trait to be proud of our achievements. The general's big board represents his value chain, tanks, planes, all things he is proud of and afraid to share with his enemy. It is the unwillingness to share that prevents him from achieving the goal of meeting with his adversary and preventing WWIII. Value chain analysis is critical in a hyper-connected "flat" world:

• The secrets most businesses think are safe, probably are not.
• A competitor, dumb enough to steal and replicate a business process will likely screw up the execution and end up helping the originator (Microsoft Zune).
• The effort expended in developing a value chain such as: a call center, subscription knowledge bank or, digital rights management system may end up handicapping the value chain owner as less expensive, disruptive technologies emerge.

Many public companies such as P&G, Merck, Kimberly - Clark, and The New York Times realized the threat secrecy represented in the form of protected value chains and disposed of them. P&G takes a chance every time it allows an outsider to develop a product, but not developing the next killer product is an even greater risk.

Tim Gilchrist, Microengagement Co-founder

Natural Born Crowdsourcers

Collaboration: Gen Y Will Not Ask for Permission

With all the buzz about how technology is changing the workplace "virtual workforce", etc. When you really examine the impact of technology on work, it has not changed our experience much. We still work the same hours, power hierarchies are the same as the industrial revolution, we do type more (on ever-shrinking keypads).

Throughout history, real change has come via a transformations in mindset and philosophy. People used to remember the year of their birth by who was king or emperor. Even the concept of self has moved from simply being part of the land you tilled to an inwardly focused view, a scaled down Paris Hilton for most of us!

Gen Y represents a major change in philosophical approach to work. By contrast, the generations in charge (Gen X and Boomers), developed very differently:

• Gen X and Boomers did their homework alone
• It actually cost money to make a long distance phone call
• “Play” involved getting on a bike
• “Please wait 6-8 weeks for delivery”
• Computing devices are simply tools, not part of a "digital persona"

The fact that we (Baby Boomers & Gen Xers) need to apply terms to advanced collaboration like “Crowdsourcing” is a measure of how uncomfortable we are with the process.

Gen Y is not burdened by this:

• They use online collaboration to do their homework
• Constant communication has always been free
• The building blocks of socialization were largely electronically facilitated (online games)
• Instant gratification
• Electronics, cell phones & the Web as extensions of themselves

Gen Yers are fundamentally different and will crowdsource with our without permission! It's just the way they are built. One example that stands out is the Duke University cheating scandal. Many of the students actually thought they were not doing anything wrong. They were collaborating on a take home assignment. The Boomers in charge viewed it as cheating.

Look for more examples of this type of generational friction. In the workplace, it's the highly collaborating team that wins, not the individual who thinks thy have all the right answers!

Social Networking and Professional Services: an Oxymoron?

Steve & I were fortunate enough to be interviewed by Suzanne Lowe, President of Expertise Marketing LLC. The product of the interview is an in-depth, 6 part Q&A on her blog. Suzanne brings an interesting perspective to the social networking concentration in that her firm concentrates on the professional services vertical.

If any business group could benefit from social/business networking it is professional services, they live and breathe customer contact. The value they would derive from beginning and nurturing a conversation with their customers in the networking context would be innumerable.

Suzanne's insightful questions resulted in an excellent profile of how professional services firms can use social/business networking, a subject often overlooked by traditional media.

The Crowd Gets into Advertising

Advertising on Peer to Peer (P2P) Networks

Have you ever wondered why the advertising world clings to three major networks, a few hundred cable channels and a handful web sites (e.g., YouTube) to place their ADs when there is a perfectly good crowd out there? Sounds like the proverbial elephant through the eye of a needle, right? After all, peer to peer networks are a perfect expression of crowds banding together to get what they want, resulting in an incredibly powerful medium that is oddly overlooked by mainstream media. According to RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), more than 2 billion songs are illegally swapped every month. You would think traffic like this would draw the attention of major media. Yet still advertisers continually look to, and compete for much smaller audiences in traditional TV & Cable. The reason may lie in the lack of comfort advertisers have with media that got its start with illegal or racy content. If you recall, it was only a few years ago when porn reigned supreme on the Internet. The fact that a "legal" AD might appear next to a pirated movie in the user's P2P search results may be enough to drive the faint hearted away. A few brave companies such as Coke are experimenting in P2P media.

The folks at Jun Group are starting to tap the enormous audience of P2P networks by teaming up with advertisers to legally distribute their content. So, if you are a TV advertiser wondering where your 13-24 year-olds went, look no further than P2P file sharing networks.


Links:

http://www.jungroup.com/phd/lebron.html
Advertising Lab
Forbes Story

PM Network Crowdsourcing Article

This month I have an article relating to the core business process of Microengagement in "PM Network" The magazine of the Project Management Institute. It circulates to the world-wide membership of this fantastic organization. I am am member so please understand my bias. So many aspects of business can be improved through the rigorous application of objective and consistent processes, this was one of my big learnings via PMI, they have much more to offer. www.pmi.org

I will be speaking to the Southern New England Chapter of PMI on June 20th

Full text below:

On the Edge

Crowdsourcing gone mainstream yet, but it could prove to be helpful for project managers.

by Tim Gilchrist, PMP

Crowdsourcing is a new term that describes the process of gathering groups of people together and using their spare time to create something of value. Google is probably the best-known user, but the method has attracted everyone from the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration to Procter & Gamble. All of these projects leverage talent pools outside of the sponsor organization to deliver value in the form of revolutionary improvements in speed, economy and breadth.
The rapid decentralization of expertise with the growth of business and social networks across the Internet represents an opportunity for project managers.
With crowdsourcing, companies can attract thousands of talented people to work for them and achieve goals not possible with a fixed staff.
Here are some examples of projects using crowdsourcing techniques:

Product Development: Procter & Gamble, Electrolux and Philips Electronics all use varying styles of crowdsourcing to aid product development. All of these companies experienced customer demand at a rate that exceeded their ability to develop products in-house. Simply having a fixed product-development staff was not enough. To keep up with market demand, each company formed networks external to traditional product development and either used them in an advisory role or as a means to execute project work directly. Proctor & Gamble posts sub-tasks directly to a public website including the price they will pay for the project to be completed. Members of P&G’s extended development team respond with proposals, and the work is awarded to the best solution. According to Larry Houston P&G’s VP of innovation and knowledge, P&G now counts 1.5 million people in its extended network.

Programming: NASA uses crowdsourcing to handle massive amounts of data streaming back from space probes. “Clickworkers” are volunteers who perform various tasks involving image analysis. 85,000 clickworkers mapped craters on the Martin surface and did so with a degree of accuracy equal to that of an experienced geologist according to a NASA study “Clickworkers results: Crater Marking activity” July 2001. The clickworker program reduces the image-analysis process cycle by months and frees up valuable researcher time.

Google is most likely the largest crowdsourcing endeavor in the world, with millions of web-page owners working together to create value. In a radical departure from other Internet search engines, Google interprets links on web pages as votes. The more links that point to a page, the more likely it is that page contains what you are searching for.

Forecasting: Crowdsourcing can be applied to forecasting various metrics of project outcomes by combining the input of many individuals to arrive at a probable outcome. This is called a decision market. Hewlett-Packard predicts printer sales by forming a group of employees from all around the company and financially incentivising them to make accurate predictions. In the 2004 book “The Wisdom of Crowds” author James Surowiecki profiled decision markets at HP outperforming traditional sales predictions six out of eight times during experimental trials. Drug marker Eli Lilly used the same strategy to successfully predict clinical trial outcomes. Google also uses decision markets to predict how new products will perform in the market.

What does all this mean? Is the future mob rule? No. These phenomena are all linked together. Crowdsourcing takes advantage of the changing environment via the collective knowledge of many thousands of talented, networked people. They can be called upon at a moment’s notice to provide project teams with valuable expertise to meet virtually any challenge. Project management can be greatly improved through the adoption of more flexible, crowdsourced models, such as the software and consumer media verticals already benefit from.
[bio] Tim Gilchrist is a partner in the management consulting firm, Microengagement based in Hartford, Connecticut, USA. Microengagement uses crowdsourcing techniques to get to the simple truth behind organizational challenges.

Further reading:
The Rise of Crowdsourcing. Wired Magazine issue 14.06, June 2006
http://clickworkers.arc.nasa.gov/documents/crater-marking.pdf
Google’s page rank technology explained http://www.google.com/technology/
Surowiecki, James. (2004) The Wisdom of Crowds, New York: Anchor Books

Crowdsourcing Techniques in Management Consulting

Is the future mob rule?

By Tim Gilchrist
Co-Founder, Microengagement, LLC.

The rapid decentralization of expertise with the growth of business & social networks across the Internet is creating monumental change for businesses. These knowledge networks can be powerful tools in the hands of those who know how to access and harness them effectively. Members of these networks - who have "been there, done that" - can be tapped for their diverse sets of knowledge and experiences to solve business problems. We call this crowdsourcing ⁽ⁱ⁾. Traditionally management consultants have relied on centralized knowledge but this paradigm is changing. That's why we created Microengagement^® - to leverage these vast pools of decentralized expertise and bring business issue solutions to your doorstep - more effectively, more quickly and more economically then has ever been possible. Let's talk about unlocking the potential of crowdsourcing, getting thousands of talented people to work for you and achieve goals not possible with a fixed staff, whether internal or outsourced to a traditional service firm. To leverage crowdsourcing, you have to throw out traditional conventions:

Diversify - Your customers probably represent a diverse swath of the population. Chances are the senior management of your company does not. We're not talking about ethnicity of course; we're talking about diversity of life experience, knowledge and problem solving. All three of these of virtues can best be described by the intervention of a young boy during the building the Niagara suspension bridge in 1847. It seems the engineers on the project were out of ideas on how to get the first line strung between the US and Canada. The 800 foot gorge under Niagara Falls could not traversed by boat (the typical method), other ideas included: shooting arrows with lines attached, rockets, cannons, etc. In the end it was a steel worker who suggested a kite contest to deliver the line. The bridge company accepted the contest idea, and a fifteen year-old boy by the name of Homan Walsh won the contest by landing his kite on the opposite side. This successful, crowdsourced project cost the bridge company a grand total of $10. This of course is not a dig on engineers; it is an example of how crowdsourcing can tap a wider range of ideas, experience and perspective, and uncovering more opportunity than looking simply looking within. No expert would consider using a toy to solve a million dollar problem, and thankfully, no kid would consider a million dollar solution when there are perfectly good toys around!


Incentivise - Successful crowdsourcing is like a mini economy. People always do better when there is something of value at stake. Consider sales forecasting. Every company does it and the forecasts are almost always wrong. Why? The practice is often limited to a select few individuals in the organization who directly benefit from increased sales. What if you gathered a diverse set of individuals from around the company who each had some perspective on the forecast at hand, and then you offered rewards for the most accurate predictions. Hewlett-Packard did just that, ⁽ⁱⁱ⁾ by forming a group of employees from all around the company and incentivising them to accurately predict printer sales. During three years of this experiment, the diverse team outperformed traditional sales predictions 6 out of 8 times. Drug marker Eli Lilly used the same strategy to successfully predict clinical trial outcomes.

Stop Meeting - When was the last time you came out of a meeting surprised by its outcome, or, having learned anything truly insightful? Probably a long time ago. The fact is that most organizations use meetings to build consensus, rather than to explore and develop new ideas. In the social network, everyone's opinion matters. There is no reason to hold back for fear of political reprisal because there is no organization to protect. In crowdsourced projects, meetings are held sparingly, special attention is paid to prevent team members from 'flocking' and to make sure they are bringing original thought to the table. Without meetings to hide in, non-performers can be quickly weeded out. Remember, without a fixed staff, talent is all that matters.

Filter - Fact, Joe DiMaggio was not unanimously elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. Cecil B. DeMille never won an academy award for any of his films. Think about that for a minute. Both Joe DiMaggio and Cecil B. DeMille, icons of their professions, were not fully recognized for it. In these two instances, some very bad votes did not get filtered out. In a fixed staff model, teams work on multiple projects over time learning what they need along the way. The solutions these teams offer up to complete projects are limited by the group's learning curve. Crowdsourced projects start with many experts, there is no learning curve, and solutions come pouring in. There is no need to filter solutions as in the fixed-staff world because there you have so few options. With crowdsourcing you access many more options than typically with fixed staff alone. This is why advanced filtering methodologies need to be employed to keep the team on track. You want to keep Joe and Cecil and get rid of opinions that will steer you wrong.

Microengagement^® is a business that harnesses the power of business networking and crowdsourcing to the benefit of our customers. We break down the barriers to information flow and tap new business realities to deliver superior solutions to problems. Some of the critical realities we have observed, and our business addresses, include these:

• Quality information is no longer the sole domain of multi-national powerbrokers. Some of the most valuable information to change our world in the last ten years has come from collective knowledge, shared over the internet via social / business networks:

• Individuals sharing information over the Internet, not large news services, broke the Enron scandal, Monica Lewinski scandal, Jason Blair New York Times scandal, supposed falsification of Bush's military records (Dan Rather), and the Donald Rumsfeld resignation.
• Linux is quietly displacing Microsoft with an operating system that is free, has no development staff, and no marketing strategy.
• The web browser Firefox is developed in an "open source" environment, meaning everyone can contribute to it. Firefox is currently the #2 Browser - without a fulltime development staff or formal marketing campaign.
• My Space and You Tube are two of the most valuable properties on the web, both relying on customers (not staff) for 100% of their content.
• Google gives away the most expensive real estate on its search pages, and much of its software. Google uses other web sites to determine search ranking, not a complicated internal process.

• The very idea of work is changing. Employees cut off from pensions and rich benefit packages are finding other ways to create financial security in the form of consulting and starting small businesses. Others are simply forced out in the prime of their careers.

• Many of those in the workforce suffer from presenteeism ⁽ⁱⁱⁱ⁾. They attend work but do not fully contribute, either because they feel detached from the corporate political agenda, or are underemployed and looking for a challenge outside of work.

What does all this mean? Is the future mob rule? No! At Microengagement^® we see these phenomena as all linked together. The really good stuff, the next big thing, the defining idea was always in the hands of the individual, but the individual never had such a powerful voice than exists with today's business and social networks.

Now large organizations are starting to feel the pressure of networking groups that have broader knowledge than fixed staff model companies, and are not bound to the same economic model as large multi-nationals. How does a Microsoft or an NBC compete with Linux or YouTube whose members are global, smart and work for the glory of recognition? They increasingly can't, and the model must change.

And change it will. Microengagement^® is powered by the collective knowledge of many thousands of talented people. They can be called upon at a moment's notice to provide you with the expertise you need to meet the challenges you face. Instead of crowdsourcing, we simply call it "consulting that cuts to the chase^®". We believe management consulting can be greatly improved through the adoption of more flexible, open source or crowdsource models, such as the software and consumer media verticals already benefit from.

Skeptical? Just consider the following comparisons between Traditional Business Consulting and Microengagement^®:

Traditional Business Consulting

Microengagement®

Uses a fixed staff to provide business services to a variety of customers. This leads to the repackaging of old ideas, essentially selling you what they have in stock. Takes up to months to mobilize. Carries huge overhead in marketing and proposal development that is passed on to the customer (you really do pay for proposals!).Has the majority of its knowledge concentrated in a very few partners. This slows the process down and leads to selling experience and delivering inexperience.

Leverages a flexible talent model "crowdsourcing" derived from large networks of experts. Delivers response time in days, not weeks or months. Has none of the overhead associated with large consulting houses that must carry advertising budgets and write RFP responses by the pound. Taps a broad variety of knowledge spread throughout our networks. The experts you hire also do the work.

How do we do this? There is a huge pool of executive talent that is not tied to one consulting house, company or organization. Hundreds of experienced senior-level managers are members of selective, national business networks. They share their savvy and know-how with each other. They can also share it with you. That's where Microengagement" comes in!

The networks we work with consist of seasoned executives, who must meet high salary and position criteria (Directors, VPs and General Managers). These networks require referrals for members to join, so not just anyone can get in. We do not work with rank-and-file middle managers or junior staffers. These networks also have databases where we can prescreen members' credentials.

We work regularly with these knowledge networks. We know how to navigate them and tap their expertise. We put our own experience to work to frame your issues and get to the points that matter. We summarize your critical needs, post the right questions to our networks, and access the most qualified people. We vet their responses and credentials, and then connect you to one or more key people who can really help.

What business leaders really need is the simple truth - the one that solves their problem. Wouldn't it be great to just be able to access the right senior executives who don't have to re-learn your business. They just provide the right answers that you need.
It's simple, effective and efficient! It's Consulting that Cuts to the Chase".

---

i Howe, Jeff. The Rise of Crowdsourcing. Wired Magazine issue 14.06, June 2006
ii Totty, Michael. How to Decide? Create a Market. The Wall Street Journal, June 19, 2006
iii Rubenstein, Sarah. Companies Tackle Worker Maladies; Faced With Weak Output, More Firms Aim to Treat On-the-Job Aches, Pains. Wall Street Journal. January, 2005.

Phillips uses "Executive Roundtable" Approach for Reality Testing Products

Thinking Simple at Phillips

Microengagement uses our Executive Roundtable approach for customers who want a diverse panel of experts in their field to provide advice and solve problems. Phillips Electronics developed its "Simplicity Advisory Board" to help bring a customer focus to the company. In true crowdsourcing style they choose experts from an unlikely mix of disciplines: fashion design, radiology, architecture, and graphic design. What does fashion design and architecture have to do with my plasma TV? Everything! Don't think of it as four unrelated disciplines flailing about, think of it as just the right parts of each skill coming together to create a well balanced whole. The true power of our Executive Roundtable and crowdsourcing in general is the broad base and diversity of expertise we bring our customers.

Selfsourcing

Electrolux Redesigns Itself

If crowdsourcing involves going to the outside to gain a diverse and fresh perspective then Elextrolux "selfsourced" by looking within its own management team to clean house. They hired McKinsey & Co. to develop a questionnaire, which was sent to 500 managers. Four problems emerged: Managers didn't know enough about their customers, so they couldn't figure out what to develop; products were well-engineered but weren't filling consumer needs; R&D wasn't in sync with commercial product launches; and executives were afraid to take risks (sound familiar)?

This is a refreshing tale of a company looking inside itself to fix problems. The use of a survey instrument to gather data mirrors a Microengagement technique. Surveying a large & diverse group of experts who have a vested interest in the accuracy & completeness of the exercise (improve the company). This is a sure fire way to put the "Wisdom of Crowds" to good use.

From Business Week, November 27, 2006: Electrolux Redesigns Itself

Business Week Article Goes A Cut Deeper Into Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing: Consumers as Creators

Picking up where Wired left off, Business Week's Paul Boutin expands the media's understanding of crowdsourcing. Boutin establishes the link between crowdsourcing and involving the customer. A concept famously studied and brought to popularity by the Cluetrain Manifesto a book by Chris Locke, Doc Searls and David Weinberger that advocates starting conversations with customers as a means of understanding how markets function. What better way than crowdsourcing!

From Business Week, July 13, 2005: “Crowdsourcing: Consumers as Creators”

JULY 13, 2006

Microengagement's Long Lost Cousin (Crowdsourcing)

From Wired Magazine, June 2006

The Rise of Crowdsourcing

Think of a practice galaxies away from traditional consulting - closer to MySpace, and you will have an approximate idea of what crowdsourcing is. Essentially, crowdsourcing is the practice of linking talent seeking organizations to talented individuals. Once an appropriate fit is found, the talent then works to complete a specified task. The major difference between crowdsourcing and Microengagement^TM is that we specialize in management consulting where crowdsourcing focuses on tactical, sometimes minute endeavors.

What Microengagement^TM and crowdsourcing have in common:

• They both take advantage of social networking to match skills to organizational needs.
• They are both disruptive ideas to traditional consulting in that they provide a superior service at a price that is not comparable.
• The speed at which services are delivered is also much faster than traditional predecessors.

Link to story http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/crowds.html


Enjoy the article! Tim Gilchrist

Business Value of Blogs & Wikis

Microengagement Co-Founder Tim Gilchrist discusses how blogs and wikis change the way vistitors interact with web sites.

It has been said the currency of the web is attention. After you strip away impressions generated by ads, click-thrus and sales of merchandise, there is still a gaping hole in our understanding of why people give their attention to a web site. Attention is difficult to measure outside of the lab but it is the key ingredient to any successful web site.

The web and television use attention as currency in similar ways. The economics of both depend on seriously flawed measures of attention, only making inferences as to what the subject is really doing. Expectations on the web are far greater; site visitors can complete transactions, interact with other users and still watch video only TV could deliver a few years ago. All the above are schemes to attract attention of web surfers. Sadly, many web site owners do not understand that a site without some attention-getting device is comparable to a TV channel without motion or sound.

Fortunately the web has several advantages over TV. Although often treated as a one-way TV broadcast, web technology can receive information as well as send. Unlike TV, web surfers are willing to provide their own content. You can start a conversation on the web, and it will continue indefinitely as long as people find it interesting and have the means to participate. Public conversations will happen with or without the involvement of the conversation’s subject. This fact is quite troubling to corporate marketers who are used to controlling all messages relating to their brands. Those days are over. Today, marketers have a simple choice; get involved with the conversation relating to your business or get blind-sided by it at the most inopportune moment. Blogs and Wikis are two phenomena exploiting the interactive nature of the web and changing the way businesses communicate.

Blogs

Blogs are web sites that are designed to allow easy updating of content through a simple graphical interface. There are over 15 million published blogs (technorati) with 12,000 coming online every day (Pew Internet Study). Interestingly, blogs are not the first means of simplified web publishing. Geocities was an early entry in the free self-publishing space. Before Geocities, there were online forums to exchange opinions but for some reason blogs have eclipsed previous self-publishing methods in both public and media attention. Blogs differ from forums in that discussions are hierarchical with the author setting the subject and tone for others to comment on. This feature lends itself to corporate blogs focusing on narrow subjects.

Savvy companies can take advantage of blogs by hosting their own and helping to guide the conversations that shape their brand or industry. A good example of a corporate blog is GM’s FastLane http://fastlane.gmblogs.com/. GM starts conversations on strategic topics and then provides a platform for car buffs to comment. Microsoft takes a different tack by adapting a “don’t ask don’t tell” policy with it’s employee bloggers. Some 800 Microsoft employees run blogs on their own, often discussing details of company projects and roadblocks they encounter (Microsoft.com/community/blogs). Consider this post from employee Chris Anderson on his blog SimpleGeek (http://www.simplegeek.com/).

"There is some concern that the statistical nature of memory gates...will produce a system that will fall over too easily when running in stress conditions."

It would be safe to assume that Microsoft’s PR department would have phrased this differently. Microsoft’s acceptance of the blog as a viable communications method is a step towards an honest, uncensored customer dialogue. Of course, they still pump out traditional press releases. But if you were a reporter or potential customer, where would you go to learn about Microsoft?

Microsoft does have an official blog “Channel 9” (http://channel9.msdn.com/) that includes this wonderfully refreshing introduction:

“Welcome to Channel 9. We are five guys at Microsoft who want a new level of communication between Microsoft and developers. We believe that we will all benefit from a little dialogue these days. This is our first attempt to move beyond the newsgroup, the blog, and the press release to talk with each other, human to human.”

Sun Microsystems also provides space for their employee–bloggers (www. blogs.sun.com). Sun launched their blog space in stages. First creating an intranet blog and then, when a comfort level was reached, Sun took it public with this employee message.

“As of now, you are encouraged to tell the world about your work, without asking permission first (but please do read and follow the advice in this note).”

See entire Sun blog policy at (http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/media/blogs/policy.html)

Corporate blogs have the potential to meet three new business challenges:

• There are no more secrets. Employees will leak valuable product information. Dissatisfied customers will share their poor service experiences on the web. By entering into the blog arena, corporations take a positive step in guiding their brands through the realization that they are no longer a private company asset but a dynamic, open source for employees and customers to develop.
• Once broadly defined market segments such as boomers and yuppies have fragmented beyond categorization. Blogs have the ability to speak individually with these fragments and adjust constantly to their ebb and flow.
• The presence of a healthy blog on a corporate web site can help elevate search engine rankings by delivering a fresh supply of content and hyperlinks every day. All this is done without adding staff. It’s a form of “outsourcing to the customer.”

Banking is a segment at the forefront of this change. As more and more immigrant groups seek the American dream of homeownership, the white middle class demographic is settling into the pack. Recent entrants to the United States have very different views on savings and credit. Differences that create opportunities for banks to further segment their business and capture these markets.

Wikis

Wikipedia or Wiki, (Hawaiian for “quick”) is a phenomena even further out on the horizon, and one that leverages many of the same underpinnings that made blogging successful. Specifically, professional media are no longer the sole source of news and information and individuals can work together to create viable enterprises that are not subject to traditional business rules.

Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org) is the brainchild of Jimmy Wales, a Tampa businessman who set out to build an online encyclopedia that relies on contributions from the general public for its content. Anyone can add to or create content categories within a virtually self-managing process. The site is also self-healing. Occasionally vandals will post carefully hidden obscenities, but the Wikipedia community springs into action, repairing violations in an average of 1.7 minutes.

Wikis have several functions typically presented as links from individual content articles:

• Edit allows anyone to rewrite an article if they want to.
• Discussion feature, leads to a page where authors can discuss what should go into an article, give source references and seek information from other authors.
• History tracks changes to the article and the contributing authors. Version tracking is a key feature of wikis, and one of the main ways to control the quality and evolution of wiki content.

At first thought, it would seem that such an unorganized venture might become mired in a crisscross of conflicting viewpoints. To the contrary, Wikipedia challenges traditional encyclopedias in quality and breadth. In a mere four years Wikipedia has surpassed all other encyclopedias with over 1.3 million articles created by 16,000 contributors. By comparison, The Encyclopedia Britannica contains 80,000 articles and is over 200 years old. Wikipedia is so prolific because it breaks with the tradition of knowledge producers and consumers as separate groups. In a wiki, simply viewing the content makes you part of its evolution, click the “edit” button and now you are a producer. Wikis parallel open source software development in that they encourage consumers of information or code to participate in development. The open source operating system Linux has quickly grown to replace Microsoft in many international markets because it adapts quickly to business challenges, and it’s free.

Not all iterations of the wiki are successful. Recently the LA Times had to shut down its editorial wiki due to an onslaught of vandals posting irrelevant material. Originally, the LA Times wiki was to be a public forum where readers could react to news and opinions expressed by the paper. Readers could even change the content of published stories. Unfortunately, this freedom became the site’s undoing in just a few short days.

Wiki’s Implications for business are similar to blogs in that a portion of the corporate identity is handed over to employees and customers in the hope of expanding the company’s reach. Wikis differ from blogs because they allow even casual site visitors to change much of the content they see. Where blogs leave a record of discussions, wikis are constantly erasing the chalkboard. Consequently they are better suited to dynamic subjects.

Wikis are popping up all over corporate intranets as a means of knowledge sharing. The typical application is to accumulate knowledge regarding a specific subject (e.g., developing a new product) and tap the employee’s knowledge of that subject. There is also a heuristic value in that employees who were not previously cast in the role of product development are often the wiki’s most prolific and valuable contributors. Examples of companies who use wikis on their intranets include: Daimler-Chrysler, Disney, Microsoft, Motorola, Sun Microsystems, Kodak, Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein Bank, and Ziff Davis Publishing.

Taking the wiki outside the intranet and sharing it with customers and competitors is less common. Microsoft runs a wiki from its Channel 9 site (http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx). Here development projects are openly discussed and suggestions for improving Microsoft products can be found. Noticeably missing is an edit feature for non-registered users.

While we still have yet to see a major corporation throw down the gauntlet and allow the world to open source its brand live on the web, that day may not be far off. Just as blogging started, many unofficial wikis that exclusively discuss one brand are already online. Dedicated wikis exist on: Star Wars, Star Trek, Apple Computer, Oracle Computer, iPod, X-files, Law & Order, and just about any video game you can think of. It stands to reason that some enterprising marketer will see how much traffic and attention these wikis receive and create one that is neatly tied to a brand. Just as delicatessen owners in New York City ceremoniously bury the key to their front door on opening day, a major brand wiki will open the door to customer interaction with brands forever, and a new chapter in marketing will begin.



Sidebars

Trends affecting customer involvement on the web:

Search engines have changed the way they index information from analysis and categorization of meta tags to a direct analysis of the page content and measures of how many other sites link to the indexed site. This change has implications for site owners who want high search rankings. Sites that encourage links to them will fare better in rankings. Sites with large amounts of changing content geared to a specific topic will rank higher.

Increasingly, people receive information in small bites from amateur media. As newspaper, TV and radio network distributions drop, people turn to niche media that give them precise information on extremely narrow topics. Filtering tools such as RSS, search engines, Tivo, and podcasts allow consumers to target specific media they want to consume.

No new news. The free flow of information over the web is killing privacy, both individual privacy and trade secret privacy. It is supremely ironic the new blog medium helped bring down Dan Rather, the most famous news anchor of the network news medium. Bloggers also continually scoop corporations on their own press releases and product releases. Most famously, Apple computer suffered information leaks on three of its new products as a result of its own employees sharing sensitive information on blogs. Consequently, some of the hottest news can be found on blogs rather than on heavily censored, corporate media outlets.

Imagine the widespread use of Wikis over traditional in-house R&D? When blogs do a better job of helping customers than help desks?


Further Reading

Blogs:

Big Blog Company: (http://www.bigblogcompany.com)
Blogging for Business: Wall Street Journal article on commercial value of blogs (from 7/20/05 issue, author Kyle Wingfield)



Wikis

WikiNews: an experiment in open source news (http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Main_Page)
WikiCities: off-shoot of WikiPedia for special interest or corporate use (http://www.wikicities.com/wiki/Wikicities)
Social Text: A company dedicated to bringing social networking tools into corporations (http://www.socialtext.com/)
The Book Stops Here: Wired magazine article on Wikipedia (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.03/wiki_pr.html)
The Unassociated Press: New York Times Article on Wikinews (from 2/10/05 issue, author Aaron Weiss)
Using Wikis in a Corporate Context: Research paper by Dr. Espen Anderson, Norwegian School of Management (www.espen.com/papers/EA-CorpWiki-v1.00.pdf)

Why Microengagement emphasizes “Consulting that Cuts to the Chase.”

Now and in the coming years, companies will need to truly innovate to stay a step ahead in a world of increasing global competition, myriad options for constructing (or de-constructing organizations, including) outsourcing) and where both knowledge capital, products and services can be commoditized more quickly then ever. Accessing creative ideas and solutions quickly and cost effectively will be important to success as never before.
From Business Week, August 1, 2005: “How to Build Innovative Companies”