No Woman is a Crowd...

by Guest Blogger, Lena West, Chief Social Media Strategist at xynoMedia Technology

The title of this post is a play on the old adage: "No man is an island."

I should start by saying that this is not a blog post about getting support for growing your business or to admonish you for not doing the same.

But rather, I want to share some information on a topic that I think truly transforms how growing businesses can access much-needed insight and get help predicting the next 'curveball' in your industry.

Yes, it involves technology, but not in the way you think.

It's called crowdsourcing and the topic is a scorcher. As you might know, I am a blogger for InfoWorld.com and now I'm a features writer for IW - I just wrote my first InfoWorld feature about crowdsourcing.

The whole premise behind crowdsourcing is that the crowd (your market) is smarter or more likely to accurately predict business outcomes than one person (you).

(The following quotes are taken directly from my article on InfoWorld.com)

...crowdsourcing aggregates feedback using customized Web-based databases that enable stakeholders to slice and dice data in ways heretofore unimaginable.

Here's how it works...

You have a business problem or concept that's been wearing away at you, your employees or your Advisory Board. You've tried everything you can think of to get to the bottom of the matter and yet you're still coming up short. Why not go to the crowd and see what THEY have to say?

In the past, you would normally set up a very costly focus group and hope for the best. Or, you would send an email to your trusted people in your network - people who already think like you.  You might get some results, but you certainly wouldn't be able to effectively reach hundreds - or thousands - of people at a time AND be able to catalog their responses in a way that's helpful and meaningful to your business.

Today, you can just head over to Inkling Markets or Predictify, set up an account, ask your question(s) and, let the crowd help you decide. Both services offer free and low-cost options.

When I started researching crowdsourcing for my InfoWorld feature article, the first thought that came to my mind was, "This is a great solution if you don't want a competitive advantage. When you post the question on one of these services, you're basically telling the word, 'Hey, we can't figure this problem out' ".  Hmmmm...not really.

As Lloyd Tabb, CTO of LiveOps, says, “It’s all about the value of the solution versus the cost of revealing the problem. So you have to evaluate on an individual basis: ‘Is it worth revealing this problem so that I can get a solution?’ "

It's not some fad either -- major players are belly-up to the crowdsourcing smorgasboard: Dell, Best Buy, Eli Lilly and Google have all SUCCESSFULLY used some form of crowdsourcing to gain deeper insights into their market or various business challenges.

And, before you ask the question...YES, crowdsourcing IS distinctly different from sending out a link to a Survey Monkey or Zoomerang survey and it offers many more benefits as well.

What differentiates crowdsourcing from focus groups is that focus groups typically bring a select number of people together in one location for a set period of time, whereas most crowdsourcing initiatives are open-ended, soliciting feedback from a swath of geographically dispersed participants who share little in common other than an interest in the topic at hand.

Bottomline: You don't have to share your deepest, darkest secrets in order to leverage crowdsourcing.  The real issues are:

• Do you have the foresight to see how crowdsourcing can really help your business create a competitive advantage?
• Will you do it?

Comments

[Lena L. West]

Diane:

Good for you for using LinkedIn and checking out some of the other tools!

Crowdsourcing is good for decision-making, but it's also excellent for predictions - so in addition to, "Should our next website be pink?" you can ask, "When do you think we'll open our first chapter in China?" or some other such strategic question.

You're smart and I *knew* you'd 'get' this concept. Go for it!

-Lena

[Diane Danielson]

Hi Lena - I haven't used those tools, but will check them out. Thanks for spotlighting them. I've used polls and LinkedIn Answers to get "crowd" insights as mini-focus groups to get some insights into major biz decisions, or to get a read on certain purchasing habits. Just recently we ran a poll about whether our website should be pink or not. Turned out that one-third of our supporters didn't like the pink. Now this was, like you pointed out, already our members who liked us. But, at least from that, I could make an intuitive guess that the numbers could be even higher among people who are not already our supporters (i.e. there would be people who specifically avoided us because of that). So, it helped solidify our decision that our new website will NOT be pink. No sense offending anyone in the crowd if we don't have to.

Diane