The Roar of the Crowd
Grow your business by tapping into the collective wisdom
of online communities
I am a man who cares passionately about music. And because of that, I was extremely excited a couple of years ago when Apple introduced its iTunes software and online music store. Within hours of installing the program, I was happily buying and downloading music and transferring the bulk of my CD collection to my computer’s hard drive. The ability to organize and shuffle through my entire music library at the click of a mouse was a music lover’s dream come true.
But I soon noticed a strange quirk in the iTunes software. On live tracks, where one cut usually transitions seamlessly into the next, iTunes invariably inserted an annoying moment of silence. Try as I might to eliminate these gaps, I failed.
So I turned to Apple’s online forums and discovered that there was indeed a problem here. Forum members, however, directed me to a “workaround” neatly tucked away in one of the iTunes menus. Although it wasn’t a perfect solution, it worked well enough to ease my growing sense of frustration.
Whether it’s a fix for buggy software or a recommendation for a good Mongolian restaurant in Miami, somebody out there in the online community usually has an answer. Casual Internet users have known this for years. And increasingly, smart businesses are catching on as well.
“There’s work out there that needs to be done,” says Lloyd Tabb, CTO at Palo Alto, Calif.–based LiveOps Inc. and a pioneer in the burgeoning world of “crowdsourcing.” Tabb, whose roots in collaborative Internet endeavors stretch back to Netscape’s Open Directory Project and Mozilla.com, says, “There are people at home who are capable of doing this work. So if we set up a system that makes it possible for people who do it successfully to win [something important to them], they’ll beat a path to our door.”
These systems vary from community to community, but experts agree that two important elements of successful crowdsourcing projects are a clearly defined set of ground rules and clarity of vision.
The ground rules should set the terms of participation and define the rewards — either intrinsic or financial — that participants can expect. They should also spell out the types of behavior that will not be tolerated and provide a framework for resolving conflicts that might arise.
Clarity of vision is also important because participants need to know exactly what it is that they’re trying to accomplish. This is especially true in situations where the goal is finding a solution to a specific problem presented for the community’s consideration.
NineSigma Inc. is a Cleveland-based company that facilitates online problem solving by presenting its clients’ questions to a global community of scientists, academics, and home-based inventors and hobbyists. The company’s vice president of IT, Rick Pollack, explains that a well-crafted request for proposals should be specific enough to filter out hopelessly irrelevant responses. But at the same time, it should be open enough to encourage truly creative thinking.
“An example we use is a project that came in from the textile industry,” Pollack elaborates. “A customer wanted to make a coating for shirts that would prevent them from wrinkling. The way our program managers defined the problem was not as a textile problem but a surface chemistry problem. So when the RFP went out, one of the responses came back from a guy who was working in the semiconductor industry. He had a coating for wafers that met the need. So it was a textile problem, but the solution came out of a completely separate industry.”
Some organizations, of course, might worry about tipping their hand to competitors by discussing their problems online. One solution is to work with a company like NineSigma that effectively stands as a firewall between the questioner and the crowd. But Kenton Williams, director of service delivery and operations for Los Angeles–based Idea Crossing Inc., believes this is shortsighted thinking.
“Any company that’s afraid of crowdsourcing or crowdcasting in terms of what it will reveal [to the public] has not got its head around how powerful the open-source movement has been,” Williams says. “The ideas the people will get back will far outweigh whatever competitive advantage another company can squeeze from that rock.”
It is worth noting that in the latest version of its iTunes software, Apple has finally eliminated the annoying gaps that sent me scrambling to its online forums. Apple, apparently, heard the crowd’s complaint. As Williams notes, for the company that is smart enough to listen, the crowd can be a resource of incalculable value.
The Apple forums, for example, are open to virtually any interested individual who owns a computer and has access to the Internet. And this is the model for the vast majority of the manufacturer and special-interest forums that one finds online.
LiveOps, on the other hand, contracts with more than 9,000 home agents who field a variety of customer service calls from the comfort of their own homes. They form, in effect, a vast virtual call center. “We pay per minute, or we pay per call,” explains Tabb. “We rate the agents and we route to the best available agent. So if you’re good, the phone rings for you a lot and you get more work.”
“These systems,” says Tabb, “are self-reinforcing because they’re governed by rules as opposed to being governed by people. That’s the thing that makes them work.”
— Dayton Fandray
(Read@Work)
Feeling Crowded
Writer Jeff Howe is credited with having coined and popularized the term “crowdsourcing.” His article “The Rise of Crowdsourcing,” which appeared in the June 2006 issue of Wired, remains the most comprehensive guide to this phenomenon and its implications for the business community. From iStockphoto to NineSigma to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, it’s all here. A must-read guide to life in the age of unlimited connectivity.
LiveOps’ Lloyd Tabb cites James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds (Doubleday, 2004) as an essential introduction to the open-source movement. Cheerfully challenging some of our most cherished assumptions, Surowiecki argues persuasively that the judgment of a truly representative crowd often trumps the wisdom of so-called experts. — D.F.
