The succes of a cocreation project depends on a wide variety of factors, the incentivation of your community members not being the least important one. We’ve seen many different approaches worldwide, ranging from rewards in hard cash to the more implicit remuneration in the form of awards and public honor.
Motivations of audiences may differ per project or purpose. We found in our projects that community members are delighted by us adressing what interests them most: an in-depth discussion and follow-up on the ideas and experiences they shared. Merely sending out gifts did not do the trick, it once even backfired. The gifts were seen as a business transaction, a cold reward that did not do justice to the personal and intimate dialogue people experienced during the course of the project. The disregard for the relationship that had grown was felt as a profound disappointment.
To some of you, this may sound as a compliment. It is not. Twittering is probably one of the most obsolete, wasteful phenomena I have ever witnessed. After an initial trial I decided to pass, as I could not reason why a flurry of tweets would help me get through the day.
And things are getting worse, as people start syndicating their blogs, pages and profiles. Now an avalanche of sheer triviality is constantly harassing me, keeping me up to date with the momentous travails of people twittering how they ‘are just about to enter a client meeting’ or ‘just had a wonderful sip of frappuccino at Helsinki airport’. Who cares?
Frankly, it becomes irritating. It is like a mind numbing buzz we still have to learn how to cope with. Where have we seen this before? That’s right, advertising! For those who see Twitter as another example of how the web spurs true dialogue, they could not be more wrong. Twitter is not about interaction. It is about sending. It is about telling the world what a wonderful, successful and multitalented person you are. Twitter is a medium for personal branding, helping you create a market image and presence by constant messaging.
We hear it all over the place since the term Web 2.0 was first coined. Learning 2.0, Government 2.0, Business 2.0, and Whatever 2.0. Everything is 2.0. It refers to changes in the particular domain. The Web matured very fast during a short period of time, and the term 2.0 was used to show the importance of the development, of the change. Since then, the term 2.0 is a buzzword. The term is applied to bring ‘old’ concept back to life, sometimes rightly, mostly as a marketing trick.
In this list there’s also the concept of ‘Enterprise 2.0’. When you try to unravel what it exactly means, you would probably come up with a definition like ‘The new way of running an organization’, or ‘Changing the way an organization works’. What is really meant by the term Enterprise 2.0 refers to the usage of new web-based, so called social technologies. Social and technology, strange combination by the way… So it refers to bringing the social ‘Web 2.0’ inside an organization.
On the Internet, more and more people are getting used to make use of social networks like Facebook, or share video’s on YouTube, or express themselves by using Twitter. They are all called social and Web 2.0, just like blogs and wiki’s. People spend more and more time on these networks and sites, and are able to find more information and people. This is great, and, as opposed to e-mail, the reach of these tools is far bigger.
We like to think that we can easily change things in the world. That’s no surprise, Barack Obama makes the Americans believe it can be done, and with the Wisdom of Crowds in mind, many think that crowd-sourcing can easily be applied and be used to change things in the world, that haven’t seem to have changed that much in the last decades, or even centuries.
Why is everyone convinced that we can change that much? And do we understand what change is, what change is anyway? I’m not convinced. Change is a process that is mostly referred to as social change. These processes occur in society, in a community and even in an organization. To succeed, these processes need to challenge existing and sometimes deep rooted cultural behavior. Changing the behavior of a single person is difficult, but changing the behavior of a large group of people seems impossible, at least on the short term.
The topics on social media and social networks are numerous. Social and the power of a large group of users cannot be underestimated. There is even a book titled “The Wisdom of the Crowds”, with the sub-title “Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few”. This is a best-seller book published in 2004.
Without going too much into detail, it is important to make an important distinction here. That is the distinction between humans and other social creatures like ants, termites or even meerkats. Humans have a mind of their own, can think for themselves and make decisions based on their thinking. That is, if you agree with the ability of humans to act by reason instead of drifts. Other creatures like ants act purely based on their instincts. Their behaviour is determined by pheromones that are left behind by other ants. It is a way of self-organizing, there is no planning, control or direct communication.
Since I visited The Mass Customization and Personalization Conference in Helsinki last month, I am puzzled by the confounding variety of definitions.
Joseph Pine told me he did not understand the whole fuzz about co-creation. According to him, co-creation is simply the act of a producer and consumer jointly shaping the fulfilment of a proposition. This ‘experience’ is becoming more and more commonplace as product delivery increasingly relies on a measure of cooperation and added value on the part of the user.
Co-creation has from its inception been synonymous with customer co-creation. It is about acknowledging the potential of the end user as a co-creative or co-developer in the innovation process. Co-creation entails the integral engagement of customers through the different cycles of the innovation process.
In practice customer co-creation is often limited to the ideation phase, the phase of netting the first insights and getting an initial grasp of potential solutions. This sounds pretty straightforward: Just call upon your audience to contribute their ideas, filter and cluster the useful bits and start developing.
This is what actually happens, under the cloak of crowdsourcing: Give us your idea and if it proves to be valuable, we will reward you. This exchange is often devoid of any conversation, apart from the perfunctory remarks from a moderator. The exchange is stripped down to a digital selection mechanism. It is however the conversation that makes co-creation truly valuable.
Brand ambassadors or slick street vendors?
Posted on October 25, 2009 by raul lansink in Branding, CommunitiesIn this era of Word of Mouth, having brand ambassadors proclaiming the virtues of your new & improved product is absolutely essential. But suppose you do not have a pool of ambassadors, what then? Well, you can simply buy them, can’t you? There are numerous intermediaries that offer a database of ‘pioneers’, ‘community leaders’ or simply ‘very cool people’. These individuals can leverage their status and heap praise on a particular product or brand. By association the product becomes desirable. Voila!
So supposedly this vanguard possesses the ability to enchant their tribe, simply by acting as, well, as a vanguard… We should not blame them for believing this. They are told that their voice counts, regardless whether they are recommending cookies or cars. Blinded by their newly elevated status, they grow oblivious the fact that they are actually putting their street credibility on the line. So while they are transferring credibility to the brand, their own personal brand erodes. Once they realize this, they will turn against the brand without any remorse, claiming it to be what it actually was: an alliance of cheap opportunism.
Thanks to Jeff Howe’s seminal work, crowdsourcing has acquired mythical proportions. Crowdsourcing has become the panacea for every problem an organization encounters. Just bring in the guys from ‘outside’ and you will be swamped by amazing ideas. And if you are lucky, they will even do the job themselves. How unbelievable is that?
But it actually happens. Galaxy Zoo shows how a crowd of amateur experts expands our ability to charter the skies. Threadless, the T-shirt design community, and Dell Ideastorm are famous trendsetting examples. The basic principle in each of these cases is outsourcing an act formerly performed by inside experts to an undefined outside group.
The point with this definition is that it is simply too broad. Is it just about aggregating data or ideas by a score of outside individuals? Should there be a measure of interaction between the ‘agent’ and the participant beyond stipulating the rules and saying thanks? Is it about stirring a collective exchange and enrichment of ideas and experiences among peers?
To date, it appears to be all this and more. And why should this be wrong? Crowdsourcing is a web-enabled phenomenon rearing its head in ever-changing shapes. Why this effort to tie it down? Because it encourages misuse. Every week a new crowdsourcing initiative is announced. On close inspection, many of these initiatives are just contests or online research programs:
- People are asked to contribute a design or join a panel.
- They receive a brief with guidelines or a regular set of questions.
- They might win something.
- There is limited feedback and dialogue.
Let’s not fool ourselves; these are all too familiar techniques from the marketing toolbox. Marketing agencies simply repackage their tools, as a tried and trusted way to bask in the glow of a fashionable trend. Simply stating that any open call for ideas or insights, incidentally fed by a few probing questions, is actually crowdsourcing, demotes the whole idea.
Sometimes it gets even worse, as agencies try to solicit ideas and concepts without proper reward. Look at the recent uproar about these practices by Crispin Porter and others. Crowdsourcing is here used as a way to curb expenses by assigning a remunerated task to a group desperate enough to perform this freely.
So what? Nobody is forced to participate, right? If this provides an even infinitesimal chance to win attention, why not try? There are two reasons why this is wrong.
First, there is the ethical argument of honoring someone’s contribution. The value exchange should be balanced. If you willingly ignore this, you are simply out to exploit a vulnerable relationship.
Second, there is a self-interested argument. In my view, the ultimate benefit of crowdsourcing is not the value transaction, but the cementing of a productive relationship with your stakeholders, vastly expanding your ability to act in a volatile world. So better treat them well..
Dialogue is an important aspect of community management. As a community manager, you have to cater to many interests, depending on the objective. First you have the people that are part of the community, you have your client and you have the discussion. As a community manager you have to make sure the process of communication between people will lead to something, for example new insights. The people that are part of the community all have their own personal interests, which may differ from each other and seem not to get any closer. That’s where the community manager plays an important role.
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