What organizations can do with the new trend are threefold- 1) listen to what customers are saying; 2) keep customers' talks going; 3) proactively ask customers to tell what they think needs to be done.
The third one touches the idea of crowdsourcing which combines "crowd" and "outsourcing". A crowdsourcing is done through an open call to a large group of people (a crowd) asking for contributions. An example using social media is a request made by Luce Foundation Center for American Art on Flickr to have people help with the task of finding a perfect substitute art piece from their online archive to fill display gaps when certain artworks are out on loan (as image below shows).
The "Fill the Gap!" crowdsourcing is very successful. Many people go to posted their selected artworks to fill gaps. They also interact with each other by commenting each others' choices. Eventually, Luce Foundation Center would fill each gap by following people's recommendations (as image below shows- the previous gap filled!).
Two important factors I've learned from this social media based crowdsourcing project are-
1) 'Crowdsourcability': make sure it's something your target publics know, care about, and are willing to participate in;
2) Execution: when great ideas come out from the crowd, adopt them. It's the best way to keep crowdsourcing efforts going.
Please let me know your thoughts about organizational crowdsourcing using social media. Thanks!
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Jean I liked the example of Luce Foundation Center's use of crowdsourcing. In this case it seems to be a community based approach of involving art enthusiasts to select an exhibit for the window. When crowdsourcing asks customers to ideate about designing products it gets a little more complicated. I wrote about this in my last post, your comments are welcome :)
ReplyDeleteThanks Paromita. I agree the success of this case do rely on the enthusiasm and great insights of the targeted 'crowd'. I guess finding the right crowd is very important.
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