FreshNetworks Blog

We’ve written a lot in the past about co-creation, from Mass Customisation to Community Product Design. In some of the more devloped examples of co-creating with customers crowdsourcing is common – getting feedback and ideas from customers, the people who know your product best.

The online communities that we build and manage at FreshNetworks make use of crowd-sourcing for innovation and insight. We use them to help clients create better experiences when on holiday, or to come up with ways of marketing a product better. Other brands are also making use of their crowd – from Oxfam looking for a new slogan to Starbucks wanting to improve its product – it’s a technique that is being used more and more, possibly because social media now gives us the tools and the audience to do it easily.

An article in today’s Guardian (The customer knows best) looks at how crowdsourcing is being used by brands (and has an interview with our CEO Charlie). As the article points out, getting ideas and feedback from users is not new (they cite the example of the Oxford English Dictionary in the 19th century) but social media tools and, more importantly, their growth and common acceptance, is making it easier and quicker to seek ideas and opinions from customers. It’s also making it easier for smaller businesses to capitalise upon the power the crowd can bring. As the Guardian notes:

The evidence from Starbucks and P&G shows that some of the world’s biggest companies can easily engage a crowd. Smaller businesses, naturally, find it much harder to source an army of volunteers, let alone get them to engage with their brand. Recently, however, a relaunched service from Amazon – a pioneer of customer generated reviews – is creating a market that might be able connect the two. Companies subscribed to its Mechanical Turk (mturk.com) service can post simple tasks, such as image tagging, data collection, basic market research and product comparison, and offer to pay potential click-workers a few pence to complete them.

This is a real sign that crowdsourcing is becoming both more available and more widely accepted – more business (big and small) can make more use of their customers in this way.

Of course opening up your business to ideas and comments can throw up challenges – what happens if you get negativity as well as those positive useful comments we all expect. This is of course true, but as  Charlie is quoted as saying in the article:

…some companies are “definitely nervous” about this new, more open form of business, especially in terms of “opening themselves up to positive and negative criticism online and encouraging debate with their customers who aren’t happy.” He says that the evidence is to the contrary. In his experience, most people who participate online want to be positive

Crowdsourcing offers real benefits to businesses large and small and the evidence is that more and more people are experimenting with it. We expect that this kind of engagement will become even more mainstream in the coming year and even that pretty soon customers will expect to engage in this way.

Some more reading

• Lessons in community from community editors #3: Andrew Rogers, RBI
• Poptent.net – Crowdsourcing Video Platform
• Solving real world problems through online social networks
• Mechanical Turk Targets Small Business

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