Below are the notes from 9 September’s TiE Boston event on crowdsourcing that I moderated.  I thank my Co-Chair Sanjli Gidwaney for capturing this information.

Topic:

“Are two heads really better than one? Do the opinions of many actually yield to better solutions and results for large and small scale companies alike? Several companies around the world are utilizing crowdsourcing models in their business today. From Amazon’s customer review system, to P&G and HP’s use of communities in marketing, product development, customer relations and even basic research and design.  By definition, Wikipedia – a crowdsourcing phenomenon itself – claims crowdsourcing is a distributed problem solving process, while other articles state that it’s the process of outsourcing a repetitive challenge to large groups of people via the internet. Whichever definition you prefer, one thing is for sure, crowdsourcing, with it’s ever increasing popularity, is a powerful business model which cannot be ignored.

We welcome you to our panel discussion to learn ways in which the crowdsourcing model can be used, in order to realize more fully the potential of your organization.”

Panelists:
Jim Storer, Co-Founder of The Community Roundtable
Matt Johnston, VP of Marketing & Community at uTest
Pam Randhawa, VP of Strategic Development at Sermo

Take aways:

What are some of the buzzwords that are commonly used when talking about groups of people working for you?  Community, crowdsourcing, etc..

• Crowdsourcing is different from community management
• Groups of disparate individuals coming together
• They are actually sourcing something for the company
• Bringing together different skill sets to accomplish a process
• When people are voting, or you’re gathering data,etc -  that’s community management
• When people are involved in creating something, that’s crowdsourcing
• There is a blur between crowdsourcing and market research
• When you’re seeking opinions from a large audience, that’s crowdsourcing

What are different types of business models in the crowdsourcing space?

Depends on the purpose of the crowd but generally…

• Subscription model: customers pay for ongoing access
• Transaction model: customers pay for certain access
  • On the demand
  • Servicing intermediaries
• Cost Savings
  • Newspaper model Guardian vs.Telegraph

How do you go from data gathering to a product/service?

• Make sure you have a clear plan of what information you’re gathering and in what form before you start
• Structured Data is key!
  • uTest, tells customers what to test and how to test it
• Unstructured Data is the enemy!
• Moderation of users is important
  • You may need to lead testers/participants back to the original goal if they deviate
  • The system of moderation can be automated
  • Sometimes it’s community management through posting a comment
  • Ideally, you create a self-learning and self-teaching community

What works when managing a community?

• When the community gets larger, leaders will emerge
• Enable the community managers to communicate with community
• You need a business model to keep the community active – this can get very expensive
• It can be difficult to develop payment and accounting systems to compensate the community
• You need to operationalize how to pay community members
• Rules of engagement: How do you want your members to engage?
  • Set guidelines
• Creating deputy members is often a good tactic to help them moderate crowds or sub-crowds
• Praise in public and chastise in private
• Analytics:
  • What participants like and don’t like
  • How long are participants active
  • When are participants most active
  • Always have to match up supply and demand
• Having an executive advocate of the crowdsourcing model is important if you’re trying to employ it in a big organization
  • Need to create clear guidelines, or other departments may start to encroach on the process

How do you protect your company’s IP?

• You have to communicate the rules of engagement to the participants
  • e.g. Participants can’t blog about client products
• Use participant NDAs
• Develop a unique identifier for participants
• The laws become blurred internationally
• Reputation and blackballing act as deterrents/consequences
  • Reputation tells a company who to listen to

How do you handle the participants’ IP?

• It can be built into the subscription agreement with testers, e.g. the company owns the IP
• The system needs to be transparent

How do you incent users and deal with user fatigue?

• Make it fun if you’re not paying them
• Create ongoing interactions
• Look for input from users, what’s important to them
• Outside transaction:  offer e-books or educational video conferences
• Inside transaction:  money and reputation
  • Recognition goes a long way in vertical testing
• Educational opportunities
  • SERMO brings conferences to users
• Content rating system on how your peers view your work
• Ask strongly active participants to share their findings with their peers
• Attach praise to participants profile (badges, “medals,” etc)

Who should use crowdsourcing? How do you build it out?

• Figure out what you want the community to do, and continue to re-examine this decision throughout
• Determine what businesses processes you’re trying to support
• Never underestimate what your strategy is going to be to keep users active
• Determine your business model, how you’ll handle transactions, marketing, operations, etc
• The business model has to be in harmony with the client and the community
• Is your culture ready for a community? Will the community stay on its course?
• Companies have to cater to communities
  • Make sure the value proposition means something to them
  • The community doesn’t work for the company, and you can’t treat them as if they do
• Rule of 90:9:1
  • Small percentage of community will engage crowd
  • 1% of community is adding 90% of content
  • 90% are lurkers
  • Being able to pick the 1% is very hard, engage them early
  • How do you turn lurkers into stars?
    • Nurture and sheppard them
    • Be cautious about what’s happening outside the eco-system where users are blogging or participating on twitter to recruit other members to community

Other notes

• Communities don’t want to be advertised to, they don’t mind being educated, but not sold to
• They want to make their own decisions