The community manager in me hates it when people talk about launching a crowdsourcing community as though it is something that’s disposable. I much prefer when people are worried about keeping their community engaged and rewarded. It shows that you are willing to invest in the people that are investing their time in your product or brand. To achieve a a community where people stay and contribute, here are methods I’ve proven to be effective:

5. Trickle the rewards. Members need to be getting something out of the community on a regular basis. If your crowdsourcing community is focused on one big goal (Check out our Netflix scorecard as a good example), think about how you can divvy up the reward so that people don’t get discouraged or lose interest long before the goal is met. .

4. Give incentives for diverse contributions. Different kinds of members need to feel like their contributions are just as important as the next person’s. Consider rewarding active members, friendly members, members who refer others to the community, members who consistently leave insightful comments. It’s also worth rewarding straight up “quantity” i.e. most contributions and “quality” i.e. highest voted contribution.

3. Say little. Make it meaningful. Make your site’s purpose evident and your calls to action clear.  Simply display what’s new to returning visitors and they’ll be more likely to put in more time. Leave room for contributors to have their say, versus having to spend time reading about yours.

2. A little hand-holding goes a long way. Show people what they can be doing. A really  intuitive site is a big part of this, but make it ultra easy with a get-started wizard that coaches new members or a personal reach out from the community manager. Make it your mission to have new members stay versus recruiting another new member… your membership will grow faster!

1. Now tell us about you. Make it your business to highlight everyone in the community – even the “lurkers.” Encouraging sharing of interesting personal or professional facts on profile pages, introducing members with similar interests and suggesting ways for members to contribute are all easy ways to make members feel valued and promote belonging.

Photo by Rasmin

Crowdsourcing isn’t an all or nothing undertaking

Opening up your organzation to let the crowd in likely isn’t as difficult as you imagine. Instead of thinking about crowdsourcing as an all-or-nothing proposition, consider the different stages of innovation where crowd input could help you better perform:

1. the crowd submits ideas – put a call out for ideas
2. the crowd refines ideas – get people to evolve ideas they’ve created or you have
3. the crowd comments/votes – assess preferences and gather input on crowd generated ideas or your own
4. the crowd shortlists ideas – filter down from a mass list to crowd-preferred frontrunners
5. the crowd picks winning idea – from shorlist the crowd creates or you do, get the crowd to rank the top favourite

There are lots of crowdsourcing instances where the crowd participates in all five ways to come up with a winning idea. You can get highly valuable data though, by inviting crowd contributions at just one or two points along the full crowdsourcing path.

Idea generation & favouriting – 1 & 3 Combo: What products and services do you want from us? What do we do best? If wondering how your customers see your brand, how satisfied they are with your service, or what they wish you would launch next to the market – just ask them. Suddenly you will have a vantage on demand, and your market rank that you never had before.

Make expert ideas market relevant – 2, 3, 4 Combo: If you still want to be at the helm of the idea-generation, you might get a crowd of experts to create new product ideas for example and then have the crowd refine and shortlist the ideas to things they want to buy, and maybe vote on what they’d pay for them.

Crowd winner pick – 5 only: Want to launch the product enhancement that most thrills your users? Why not share your top 5 enhancement ideas and let them pick what they want you to deliver. They could even vote with development dollars if they want to fund your technology build.

As soon as you let the crowd in, you’ll see the value of open innovation however small you start. Experimentation and high-value discovery and market prediction is what has led many organizations to make a whole-scale business shift to open innovation.

photo by: mistersnappy

It saddens me to hear leaders reference Henry Ford’s quote “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses” as a justification to innovate in a vacuum from customer and market input.

The rationale for closed, internal innovation is often a belief that the outside world isn’t nearly as capable at discerning product needs as a few people in leadership roles. Or those leaders may feel they get paid to know what the customer wants so they shouldn’t need to ask. Both are backward thinking.

This blog is evidence of what I’m talking about.

I started by wanting to do a blog about the real conversation Henry Ford should have had with his customers… First, I searched the web to read thoughts by citizens worldwide on the “faster horse” quote Mr. Ford. I quickly found Luke Hohmann’s blog which states perfectly what I wanted to say. He had this idea first, he is a more skilled writer, and he’s completed the job faster than I was able to myself.  Open innovators are listening to and capitalizing on all of the Lukes out there. They are driven to achieve the market-relevant invention, the fastest and most economic way possible.

So over to you Luke:

“…innovation occurs from a deep understanding of your customers — their problems, their needs, expressed or unexpressed. Suppose that Henry had asked a customer “What do you want” and the customer has answered “I want a faster horse”. I’m willing to bet that Henry, one of the greatest entrepreneurs of all time, would have explored this a bit further…

Henry: “Why do you want a faster horse?”

Customer: “So I can get to the store in less time.”

Henry: “Why do you want to get to the store faster?”

Customer: “So I can get more work done at the farm.”

Read the full blog

Photo taken by: Willdebeast

Henry Chesbrough is considered the expert on open innovation. He’s written the book on it and regularly lectures about it. He defines open innovation as: “a paradigm that assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as the firms look to advance their technology.”

It sounds a bit confusing! We scoured the Internet and think P&G Connect and Develop defined it in a way that’s easier to grasp: “the practice of accessing externally developed intellectual property in your own business and allowing your internally developed assets and know-how to be used by others.”

The idea behind open innovation is that to keep up with the competition, companies can no longer afford to rely solely on their own internal R&D. Back in 1990, Bill Joy, of Sun Microsystems said, ‘No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.’ Much like open source, there is cooperation voluntarily undertaken by members of the public.

A quick comparison between four common terms:

Outsourcing: a task is completed by a specific body outside of company walls. example: Thoughtworks

Crowdsourcing: a task is outsourced to an undefined public either an individual, or a group. example: Netflix

Open source: a task is completed by an undefined public and openly shared. example: Linux

Open Innovation: a company chooses to share assets and know-how in exchange for gaining access to IP developed outside of company walls. example: P&G Connect and Develop

If you would like to learn more about Open Innovation, you can read Henry Chesbrough’s book, appropriately titled Open Innovation.

Does what they see affect what you get with crowdsourced input?

To get truly valid data on crowd demand do you have to remove the risk of a popularity contest? That’s one of the common questions we get asked around crowdsourcing and voting.

To shed some light on this, we thought we’d share what we discussed with good friend Veer Gidwaney, Founder of Humanity Calls – a platform where crowds of people assemble online to evaluate charities and make donations to those organizations which perform best – set to launch early 2010.

Here’s what we’ve seen as the affects of transparency in the crowds we’ve worked with:

Crowd votes totally hidden

Pros

• Makes people think for themselves & eliminates group think
• Produces incredibly valuable data

Cons

• Seeing “group think” is interesting, engaging and can foster participation
• Without ranking of ideas/solutions into top voted, it can be overwhelming for people to sort through and parse items for voting

Vote totals shown, individual votes hidden

Pros

• Presenting highest vote listing engages crowd, gets them voting
• Crowd’s time gets focused on crowd-deemed highest quality ideas/solutions

Cons

• Biases crowd energy towards top voted ideas/solutions – other high potential ideas never get seen
• Earliest in ideas/solutions biased to get most votes

Individual votes and vote totals seen by all

Pros

• With full transparency, the amount of malicious votes drops dramatically
• Crowd has means to spot and report voting irregularities

Cons

• People swayed to vote for ideas/solutions by the most popular crowd members
• As with just showing vote totals – attention biased to top voted/earliest in ideas

So with limits on all voting models – how do you best limit bias? First, pick the model with the strengths best suited to your crowd and purpose. Second, consider other means to reduce the risk of bias:

• Broaden what’s filtered & presented: Would you get more useful results and participation displaying not only top voted, but most viewed, most commented or a random display of ideas and solutions?
• Get experts to aid in filtering: Might an expert panel reviewing all ideas and filtering to top ideas for a tournament get to the most valuable winning idea?
• Pace/Batch the voting: Consider weekly or monthly showdowns to keep the volume of ideas/solutions manageably viewable by the crowd– with a tournament of finalists at the end.

These are some of our best practices & lessons learned. What have you seen work to limit crowd bias in voting?

Thanks Veer for reaching out to us!

photo by: starbright31