Crowdsourcing Definition #2: What is Group Think (and how to avoid it)?
Here’s a question just in to us that we hear all the time “How do you deal with the loud talker problem? You know, the people that just like to talk and talk in an online community and can skew the impression of a need. It’s the same problem that you get when you do a focus group.”
Offline and online there are loud talkers. These are people who say more than others, more often than others, and tilt attention their way. The challenge with loud talkers is that they can persuade a crowd to embrace their views biasing input and resulting in what’s called Group Think. Instead of relying on their own creativity, and relaying their unique perspectives crowd members may opt to agree with the “loud talker,” or go silent in their presence. Why? Because the loud talker often appears to be in a position of power or influence and our sociology has us all wanting to avoid conflict and seek acceptance by powerful or popular members..
So what do you do to prevent the loud talker from hijacking discussion, deterring participation and skewing your crowdsourcing results? Sophisticated crowdsourcing technology includes tools to limit the impact of loud talkers, but ultimately, it comes down to active community management. Here are some tips:
-Nuture all community members and make them feel welcome. As people join, have your community manager introduce themself and let each member know their opinions are valuable.
-Set up balanced incentives that both quantity and quality of contribution. Rewarding volume of activity pushes people to keep contributing, but without rewarding quality of contributions, your top ranked members may simply be the people with the most time on their hands!
-Give loud crowd members less weight – an efficient way that technology can help prevent bias is by down-weighting loud talkers. Sometimes you know who they are when you launch a campaign so can restrict the value of their votes, visibility of their comments and so on. If you spot them whilt a campaign is underway, you can down-weight them on the spot.
-Talk with Loud Talkers. Community managers need to join the conversation with the loud talkers. Let them know that they are heard and perhaps comment back on their ideas to share a healthy debate with the community. Warning – this can go too far, so if the dialogue becomes a rant, it’s up to the community manager to take it offline… which takes us to our next point…
-Know when to shut the talker down. It shouldn’t be a first reaction, but there are right moments where you’ll need to silence a loud talker. If you get the same loud talkers, talking for too long, you allow bias in your community. This move won’t make you popular (check out what people had to say about Digg doing this in October), but levelling the playing field is essential to useful crowdsourcing results.
-Don’t mistake what’s said the loudest as the crowd’s view - The vocal minority rarely represent the majority of members. For example, power users on Flickr might really push for features that pro-photographers use, but those features end up just confusing the average Flickr user (Caterina Fake, the co-founder of Flickr, has talked about this when discussing the early days of Flickr). Keep in mind that the people most passionate about your brand, company or product, are probably not typical users.
What experiences have you had with loud talkers? What are your tips to prevent group think?
Photo Credit: mouton.rebelle
