Crowdsourcing gives customers the opportunity to play an important role in shaping the things they care about and that will impact them in (1) their use of your products and services and (2) the way they do business with you.

Why Is This Important to Your Company?

Being competitive in today’s light-speed world means being efficient, flexible, and responsive to customer needs and market demands. Crowdsourcing offers a customer-centric approach to tapping into the collective experience, knowledge, creativity, and skills of your customers as they help you be more innovative and effective.

INTRODUCTION

What Is Crowdsourcing?

Who Coined the Term and Why? James Surowieki’s impressively titled 2004 book, “The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations,” wasn’t the first book on this topic, but it did help root the wisdom of crowds concept in the business landscape. A few years later, in an article for Wired Magazine, Jeff Howe streamlined “wisdom of crowds” into the participle “crowdsourcing” and is credited with that word’s provenance.

What Does It Mean? Crowdsourcing is getting input—ideas, substantive content, or other things—from a wide swath of people. It’s a way for a small group to get input from a much larger group. But getting the input itself is just part of what crowdsourcing brings to the table; inherent in the concept is a way for these people to also give their perspective on the merit of those ideas and that content. It therefore takes the old suggestion box concept one step further.

Beyond Suggestion Boxes

In a “traditional” suggestion box, it’s the people that provide the suggestions, and the organization that reads them and decides which suggestions, if any, warrant action. These decisions are, of course, typically made behind closed doors. You write your suggestion on a piece of paper, fold it up, and drop it in the slot. You may or may not ever hear anything about it (chances are you won’t).

In crowdsourcing, however, the suggestors go beyond making their suggestions. While they’re still not the decisions makers—the organization running the crowdsourcing program is—they do get to vote openly on their own and other people’s suggestions. On aggregate, those ideas that people especially like or feel particularly strongly about are ranked the highest. The organization can then take action based on this list, which has been created and prioritized by concerned parties, with a high degree of confidence that the organization is doing what people want done.

So, in a crowdsourcing program, both the content and its prioritization come from your customers (or your readers, subscribers, users, employees, or others; we use the term “customers” throughout this report, but you may be running with a different crowd). These programs, then, are ways to tap into the collective knowledge, creativity, and experience of your customers. In essence, crowdsourcing looks to leveraging multiple voices and perspectives to come up with ideas, answers, solutions, and/or new, different, and effective ways of doing things.

The underlying philosophy of crowdsourcing is that the crowd is wise; that, in the big picture, if enough ideas and perspectives are included, the end result will be better, more innovative, and more feasible than anything an individual or small group could come up with. Perhaps this underlying democratic sense is one reason why crowdsourcing has seen increased adoption by organizations involved with social change, political action, and charitable causes, in addition to businesses.

Crowdsourcing More than Ideas

While this report focuses on crowdsourced ideas—we use the term Idea Site throughout—it’s not only ideas, of course, that benefit from the wisdom of crowds. Many different types of things can be contributed, discussed, and voted on by people. These include just about any form of content, from the written word (articles, stories, reports, proposals, etc.), software applications, visual designs, and more.

Here’s an example: SolarWinds is a provider of computer network management software. It’s onomatopoetically named “thwack” community (http://www.thwack.com) features a Content Exchange, where community members—software developers, network administrators, and others—share content they’ve created themselves. But they not only upload their software apps, templates, and reports, they also comment on and rate each other’s stuff.

Be Careful What You Wish For

When people see how their actions generate positive results, they tend to repeat those actions. As you demonstrate to customers that, by helping you (via your crowdsourcing program), they are also helping themselves (as you improve your products, services, processes, etc., based on their input), you should see an increase in participation. Successful crowdsourcing programs create these feedback loops in which individual contributors get more involved, and new customers want to get in on the act.

Add to this the feeling summed up by former senior director of community development at eBay, Rachel Makool, that, “Most people, when they have an idea, think it’s the best idea ever,” and you’ve got a recipe for a passionate and productive crowd.

All this doesn’t guarantee that the floodgates will open the moment your crowdsourcing program launches. But you shouldn’t be surprised if the ideas come in fast and furious, many of them claiming to be the greatest thing since sliced bread.

So how will you handle customers’ ideas? What will you learn from them? What actions will you take because of them? How will you let people know about these actions? And how will your business be the better for all this?

BENEFITS OF CROWDSOURCING

We see crowdsourcing not as a replacement for other methods of getting customer input and ideas, but as a complement to them. You can get ideas from a wide range of customer touchpoints, including surveys and questionnaires, focus groups, customer advisory boards, call center data, and other sources. And all these methods still have their place. But what’s different about crowdsourcing is that it really puts customers in the driver’s seat. (And, because you need a crowd to crowdsource, it’s a rather crowded driver’s seat at that.) Customers are giving their ideas, commenting on other people’s ideas, voting on ideas, and helping you prioritize what they feel is important. (This prioritization is a key benefit, and an essential one in being able to scale; even with an overly generous budget, you’d never be able to have an internal team read through and rank all your customers’ ideas.)

Dell IdeaStorm

© 2010 Dell

Illustration 1. Dell has implemented over 400 of its customers’ best and most highly regarded ideas via its IdeaStorm site.

Business Benefits

Computer manufacturer Dell has been one of the earliest and most visible adopters of customer crowdsourcing programs, having launched its IdeaStorm site nearly three years ago (see Illustration 1). On IdeaStorm’s origins, Vida Killian, Social Media and Community Leader at Dell, says, “We launched it really based on Michael Dell’s request. We’ve been communicating with customers in a variety of ways: online, phone calls, chat, e-mails, surveys, research, and forums and community sites. So there are a lot of ways in which people have touch points into Dell, and Dell has touch points with customers. However, there wasn’t just one place for people to tell us what they think and tell us what we should be doing. And we really wanted to have that one easy online portal to say, ‘Give us your ideas.’ IdeaStorm did that.

“Today we have over 13,000 ideas, more than 700,000 votes, and almost 90,000 comments. And we’ve implemented over 400 of those ideas.”