ORM - Drawing from the Wisdom of the Crowd

Throughout human history, the 'crowd' has been dependent on proximity. We had to be together physically in order to create a crowd. Suddenly with the Internet, we are able to create a virtual crowd. And this has allowed people to get together through intent, through shared interest. This is a fundamentally new development in society, allowing communities to form simply out of shared interest, shared passion for a hobby, a craft, an art.

 

This explains how companies as diverse as iStockphoto and Threadless that employ just a handful of people, can generate millions of dollars in revenue every year. Crowdsourcing is a powerful and transformative source of creativity and an economic engine that defies traditional rules by which Jeff Howe, the Father of crowdsourcing, defines it “… as the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call”

 

Jeff Howe explained in his book Crowdsourcing: Why the power of the crowd is driving the future of business that he sees crowdsourcing causing a vital change in the business landscape – “the amount of knowledge and talent dispersed among the human race has always outstripped our capacity to harness it. Crowdsourcing corrects that”.

 

Crowdsourcing relies on would-be customers' willingness to hand over their ideas to the respective company via the online medium, either cheaply or for free, in order to see them go into production. The online part is key, as the Internet allows you to get information distributed freely. So, there’s this availability of high quality knowledge that didn’t exist before, and what we see with these successful forms of crowdsourcing is that they originated organically from the people formally known as customers, and from the people formally known as the audience. 

 

This is where ORM tools come into play. Such tools scour the web and, when configured to your needs, can pick up mentions of anything you want tracked. If you know which ideas and thoughts you want to keep an eye on, ORM tools can pick them up and file them in a manner that suits your demands.

 

You can communicate to your customers that you, as part your marketing strategy, are going to turn your most passionate customers into a powerful talent resource. By going to a targeted online community of experts, professionals or regular people for inputs, you have a wide range of people from all over the world to help you to find a solution.

 

Looking at another angle of crowdsourcing, businesses can draw upon the Wisdom of the Crowds (something James Surowiecki describes in his book) to help or even create marketing strategies. If businesses are transparent in their marketing policy, this will encourage their customers to throw ideas their way in a cheap and efficient manner – translating the enthusiasm of their most highly-engaged customers into valuable marketing. 

 

This collection and subsequent presentation of information gives you an incredible advantage in that all the relevant mentions you want can be mined from a single database, giving you a pool of specific ideas from which you have the ability to choose from. 

 

Though not intrinsically crowdsourcing, businesses of any size, which are in some sort of reputation crisis can implement respective ORM tools to garner real-time feedback that the Internet allows for. With the Internet and its accompanying Social Media platforms giving anyone a voice, there will be no shortage of relevant information that can be galvanized to suit the crisis at hand. 

 

Knowing that your customers’ ideas are being constantly updated with applied ORM tools, your business will gain rewards from being highly responsive to customer needs and interactive by inviting participation from your target market, all promoting brand building through increased exposure.

 

Crowdsourcing has also triggered a dramatic shift in the way work is organised, talent is employed, research is conducted, and products are made and marketed. If businesses are in dialogue with the right community with the right incentives, these respective crowds can often invent, write, and run research and business initiatives more effectively and less expensively than traditional enterprise. Businesses should understand and participate in this amazing phenomenon.

 

Procter & Gamble have long relied on their internal product development staff of over 7,000 people. P&G's CEO, A.G. Lafley realised that 7,000 would not be enough to keep up with the rapid pace of customer demand. Rather than hire more internal staff, P&G turned to crowdsourcing in a major ways: Connect & Develop is their internal program to obtain 50% of their new product and service ideas from the outside by 2010. The old term "not invented here" had been replaced by "proudly found elsewhere". Check out their Vocalpoint initiative too.

 

What’s amazing with crowdsourcing is that it brings a new element to customer service - one which can be implemented through peer work. If you have a problem with something, you post to a group, and the group solves your problem, and this is starting to make its way into regular business. Compaq uses peer-to-peer customer service. With them, if you have a problem with a Compaq server, and you send an e-mail out, it doesn’t go to a Compaq employee – it goes to somebody else in your same position. They found that the time to solve problems has plummeted.

This model is quite revolutionary as the customer-centric nature of crowdsourcing affords businesses and consumers a new level of involvement in the product development process, either through a company controlled system, or through the aggregation of consumer’s thoughts.

 

In today’s economic climate especially, marketers are coming under pressure to produce more with less, and many brands are turning to crowdsourcing to help boost marketing effectiveness. In this future world, brands make money not by inventing products, but by spotting and commercialising creative work. What better way to spot this work than by using ORM tools which have the ability to pull in information you want.

 

Having a depository of ideas to pick from, having an organised body of relevant information at your finger tips will keep you ahead of your competitors, keep you on the cutting-edge of marketing practises, and keep you at the forefront of your respective indsutry. In addition to this, you will be able to utilise it to provide both active and passive reputation management. By incessantly scouring and policing the Web, managing your brand's reputation through crowdsourcing will become undemanding and simple in it's processes.

 

Final thought: On the show Who wants to be a Millionaire – there is a stat: when you are allowed to call an expert there is a 65% chance of them being right, whereas when you let the crowd decide, the studio audience is 91% accurate.