The Wisdom of Crowds; Using Crowdsourcing and Turbo Teams to Grow Your Business

If two heads are better than one, then are 20,000 heads better than 20?  It seems that the answer is yes — on so many levels.

There is a sort of dichotomy that I’ve run into over the week that you might find interesting.

Crowds as your Enemy

Earlier in the week, I’ve been completely engrossed by the discussions about the Lacy/Zuckerberg interview at SXSWi where a twittering audience turned into a sort of quiet mob. (in fact, this link will take you to a video where you can see the twitters super-imposed on the actual presentation – fascinating).  I was struck by the quiet dissent that rippled through the audience; valid or not, audience opinion got out of control and continues to live and thrive on the web – documented forever. 

The lesson – even social media savvy people can get ripped by social media.  Never forget the quiet, pervasive and perceivably (is that a word?) more credible and authentic communication channel that is out there.

Crowds as your Friend

The next day, I meet with Jack Ricchiuto and Tom Carlson, local experts on people working together – being smarter together is what they call it.  In this case, the crowd or team is your friend; having the ability to become better predictors of product success than any survey or executive team (more on that in a minute)

So, let’s explore some tools and benefits of having a crowd as not just your friend, but as your new product development team, your trendspotter, your biggest and cheapest source of new ideas to build on your business.

QuestionPro’s IdeaScale – I loved Mack Collier’s post about Starbuck’s Suggestion Site, and just as I was wondering where I could get me one of those handy suggestion site tools — I get a call from Vivek, the big man at QuestionPro telling me about IdeaScale.  He told me it was the Suggestion Site for the other 5 million business owners without million dollar budgets.  That’s all I needed to hear.  I was on it.

There are so many business and marketing benefits to using a tool like this:

1. It puts the focus on what’s important to your customer.  There are many small businesses with very involved customers who have definite ideas about what they’d like to see – why not let them contribute?
2. It creates an even more involved community that start brainstorming and developing ideas as they are posted – it’s like your very own R&D department!  Can’t beat that.
3. PR and notification tool in one.  If you have an involved customer base – they can actually see and track your progress on THEIR idea.  If it’s their idea — you think they’re going to switch to the competition? 
4. Internal accountability – What an excellent way to move projects along and hold yourself and your team accountable for progress.  Your customer is watching every day – so you’d better be moving it along.

Well, that’s it for today – check out the tool and tell me how you’d like to use it!