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”