A Shift in Crowdsourcing
September 25th, 2009Author: Laura Halsch
It’s not new for companies to ask for their customers’ feedback. Surveys, focus groups, online polls and questionnaires have been providing companies and markers valuable information for years. In recent years though, that practice has:
- Become faster and easier – through social media monitoring platforms, companies can get this same data faster, cheaper and in real-time
- Spread beyond this reactive product feedback (what do you think of our product?) to become something much more powerful (what do you think our product should be?).
We’ve seen the buzz generated from crowdsourced advertisements and the power of crowdsourced product feedback (Dell IdeastormIdeastorm, My Starbucks Idea). And recently, we’ve seen this take on another, potentially more valuable level – as companies tap into their customers and crowds to actually create new products and services.
Three examples below:
Netflix announced on Monday that a seven-man team was the winner of its three-year contest to improve its Web site’s movie recommendation system. Netflix gets a smarter, more accurate algorithm, the winner gets $1 million dollars, and according to the NY Times, even the losing teams are happy. This system is one to watch, as companies like Innocentive allow corporations to post prize-incentives for new innovation, replicating this approach on a much smaller scale.
VitaminWater has been getting buzz over the past few weeks for using it’s more than 925,000 Facebook fans to help decide the next flavor – pushing this idea beyond the Mountain Dew model (which is also back for another year), to include decisions about nutritional benefits, name, design and copy.
Food 52 is a new project from a tag team of food enthusiasts and professionals (@merrillstubbs and @amandahesser on Twitter), who have set out to create a completely crowdsourced cookbook. Each week they host a new recipe contest, in which community members submit recipes and vote on which one will make it into the book. At the end of the year, the book will be published by Harper Studio. Straight-forward idea, but smart community building, and a new, innovative approach from an industry that has been struggling recently.
Three smart approaches to involving communities in product and service development. What are some others?
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Tags: Communities, crowdsourcing, food52, netflix, vitaminwater
