Faster Future: Possibilities now and beyond: crowd-sourcing

Showing posts with label crowd-sourcing. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Create value as if the world exists

There is a final disruption charging at full speed through the old world. It promises to be more fundamental than the disruption to the business of content creation and distribution, more disruptive even than our ability to self-organise to shape what we care about.
It is that we can self-organise to pay for it.

It is this disruption to mass, centralised blocks of capital, the switch to widely-distributed ownership and leadership that this entails, that will have the greatest long term impact on how our society is organised – on how we live our lives.

The web has been like a Big Bang to business as usual – disrupting media, marketing, customer service, new product development, the business of elections, the business of who governs us, how we are educated, how we are cared for and so much more.

But disruption of this people-power kind alone has limits. Even though we can find other people who care about the same things as we do, and in so doing lower the cost of action to achieve the shared purposes we have, long lasting and valuable change is slowed by the huge inertia of big capital.

There are those who argue big capital is just too big to be undone from the edge. But who thought the arrival of the internet would one day herald the end of big media? Today more people read Twitter each morning in the UK than read all the national newspapers put together. The power shift is almost complete in media; The content and distribution monopolies gone.

And so for big capital?

Make no mistake, big capital is holding back real change. Take Facebook. First the VCs have to get paid. Haven’t developed a business model to meet the needs of the networked world? F**you! Pay me! And so we get traditional broadcast style ads interrupting your FB time.

Then the VCs are replaced by Big Capital. Who want dividends. Fast. No time to develop a new model. You’ve caught all those fish in a barrel – let’s go spear them...

Where is the interest in long term benefit to the users? To their communities? To their society?

Clay Shirky has a nice line about news websites which are (shock!) “designed as if the web exists”.

Member-led, peer-funded partnerships offer the opportunity to create value as if the world exists. By which I mean value creation which goes beyond the back slap in the boardroom and the bottom line on the balance sheet, value creation which acknowledges that resources are finite, that people, communities, societies and ecologies are connected and matter to each other.

As I described in a recent post about Mindful Consumption, this kind of approach isn’t for a happy clappy hippy utopia, it provides a genuine competitive advantage: In a connected world where to win is to work together with ever greater numbers of people who care about the same things you do, few are going to sign up to support businesses who are damaging the ecosystem in which they exist.

Exploitation which damages our connected well-being has never been welcome. The fact is that exploitation is visible now more than it ever has been before: The web has revealed our interconnectedness like nothing in history before.

And that is a genie which is not going back in its bottle.

Change will come, big capital inertia can only slow things. And where we are frustrated, where we care most, where we see the most significant damage to our future and to that of those we care about, we will vote with not only our connectedness, our collaboration, our action – but with our personal funds.

Sure, it’ll be slow. We’ll chip away at first – Kickstarter by kickstarter. But one day big capital will wake up to find itself in the place newspapers have.

Monday, August 16, 2010

It's a bit of a... missed opportunity

So. Peperami crowd-sources its latest TV ad. Well. It crowd-sources the creative idea for it. The creative idea comes (via Idea Bounty) from... er... two established professional creatives.

I'm not knocking the concept. Peperami essentially get 1185 people to pitch them on the hook of a $10,000 prize. No doubt an ad agency would bill them more for the creative time. So on the face of it, it looks like a very efficient solution for the brand.

I'd love to show you the outcome but... er... the video can't be shared from the Brand Republic site it's shown on. Score that how you wish (I'll be scoring that very low, just so we're clear).

Anyway, once again, rather like Nokia's collaborative co-creation of a phone, there is only one outcome here. Only one winner. Only one version of 'good' - and that good judged from just one perspective.

And since we know relevance beats quality every day of the week... it's throwing away a load of the long-tail value being generated.

Peperami should be creating a platform for people to make their own shareable versions of the story, ones which matter to them and their mates - not just coming out with the 'big hit' winner - which is meant to one-size-fits-all suit the lowest common denominator.

Every one of the 1185 entries tells Peperami what people think of its brand. But in isolation only.

The process isn't collaborative. It's silo'd ideas in competition with one another. And that isn't how ideas spread (the intended outcome surely is a spreadable idea as a minimum?). What's missed when you miss out on collaboration is that very critical human element - social influence. What does your idea mean to other people? How would other people reshape it? What do they choose to pass on? What do they choose to adapt?

The problem is that the key outcome of this process is aimed at creating a TV ad. When you start with that as a premise, you're bound to take a very broadcast approach; always an odd match with the networked world the idea is aimed at engaging.

And the networked world would prefer your innovations with the crowd focused on making better products - not just better messages.

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Deploying social tech to enhance co-creation means a long-tail of outcomes

Making just one product as a result of a social tech-powered approach to collaborative co-creation kind of misses the point - and out on lots of the value.

It's great for making your product a better fit for the needs of the people you would have use it.
It's great for creating a marketing force for the result - the folk who joined in creating the outcome and who will therefore embrace and champion that outcome to their peers.
It's great for making people feel you are a more open, outward facing, welcoming, brand or organisation.
But if the outcome is just one product, my concern is you've missed out on everything else you've discovered on your journey to making that one product.

For example Nokia's Design By Community project, in which we are all invited to help shape a prototype phone, will end up with just one outcome.

The spec for that one phone is selected by the community each week. From a range of choices, users are invited to vote. And even if (as is likely) there is a long-tail distribution to the spread of votes, only the spec accruing the highest number of votes - the single most popular spec for that week - gets included in the final outcome.

This, like Twitter trends, tells you one thing - what is the single largest grouping.
Yet everything we know about the peer-to-peer network world of the internet tells us that there is greater value in the long tail than in the single largest 'hit'.

So while the single largest group (note, this is very far from the majority in a networked world, while it was very close to the majority in a broadcast one - see 'why hits are worth less in the networked world') may be telling you to make a phone with the largest possible touch screen, 80% or more may be telling you they want something different - be that a small touch screen, a qwerty keyboard, or whatever.

Failing to respond to that, may be missing out on what looks like the smaller prizes, but together, serving global mass niches, they result in the bigger prize.

Watch this mistake get played out again and again as old broadcast ideas get applied to the networked world - where people try to use social tools to bring people together - but deploy them against broadcast concepts.

I fear this may be exactly what our new UK government ends up with as it attempts to use technology to bring more of us into the decision-making process. They will surface and serve lowest common denominators; with the resulting disatisfaction for the majority with the single outcome.

Socialising the processes of collaborative innovation and co-creation means more than just using social tools to find people and to distribute to them. It means understanding the greater value lays in the long tail and ensuring this isn't lost in the rush for the single most popular.

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Announcing: Social Business Innovation Awards

Social business innovation: Efficiency and tranformation through the use of social tools.

We have the best set of tools in history for people to find each other and act together to create and improve on the things that matter to them.

What are we doing with them?

Some businesses and organisations are grasping them to wikifix their products and services, to deliver best-fit R&D and NPD and join in waste-free people-powered communications and marketing. The wikifixing of the world has begun.

Those engaging in the process reach new levels of efficiency thanks to an ever-better fit with the needs of their partners - those formerly known as the customer. (By way of disclosure, that's what we at 90:10 Group help organisations with).

I hope you will join with me to celebrate the best of them - and through this find a path to the communities-of-purpose-driven future of the organisation.

So each month this blog will host a Social Business Innovation of The Month award, nominated by you and voted on by you. The format is very much inspired by Neil Perkin's ThinkTank.

The awards are to recognise great work in open/social business/organisational design/innovation/tranformation/efficiency using social technologies.

The winners will enter a case-study Hall of Fame to be shared with all - and in which the winners can revel in the glory of their peers' admiration ;-). More importantly, we can all get inspiration and guidance.

We'll have some (digital) badges for nominees and winners too (logos etc in production, and if you want to contribute ideas/creative talent please drop my 90:10 colleague Ilkut a line. Make them better than my hastily assembled effort.)

I'm less concerned at this stage about the niceties of defining specific rules (they will emerge), more with encouraging your participation - and that of those you know will care.

So at this stage, let's just nominate what we think is great from anything that's been done right up until now.

I hope one of the side effects will be discovery for those of us working, or planning on working, in this space, too.

But, before we get a chance to vote, we need some nominations.

Just post yours as a comment with a link to anything relevant (slidedeck, blogpost, video etc) and at the end of January we'll open the voting.

Please share with those who will care.

Thursday, September 03, 2009

This is what the money has been waiting to follow

I'm pleased to see Dachis extolling the notion of 'social business design', expanding into Europe through acquisition and picking up mainstream media coverage for it.

As I commented on Dave Armano's blog (Dave is part of the Dachis revolution), I'm delighted to see social business design (and all other descriptions of making business more efficient through crowd-sourced solutions) being legitimised. (Image courtesy)

I've always seen business transformation as the end goal of any organisation's involvement in social media. (It ain't social media if it doesn't change your business). It's behind presentations such as 'Adapting Brands to the Networked World'.

This is true for all forms of organisation - from businesses to institutions.

And I have a growing sense that this is what the money has been waiting to follow.

Because this adaptation of business to the networked world shows direct return on investment - it streamlines businesses, creates new orders of efficiency in everything from product development, to marketing, to recruitment, to you name it...

It delivers business models (and businesses) adapted to the networked world. It enables businesses to exist in a rapidly transforming world.

One small example: The people who can make the biggest difference to your company don't work for it. Adapting to the network means they can.

If there is a part of your business that can't be disrupted by adhoc communities of purpose (forming online to improve on what you currently do) you are in an extremely enviable position.

The social business design thang (and I'm not sure that'll be how we end up describing efficiency through social technologies, but it's a neat short-form for now) is a cost-effective launch model, too.

To deliver you don't need millions of users on 'your' platform , a gazzillion servers and more bandwidth than Twitter when a celeb dies, before some fantasised micro-payment model starts paying back the millions sunk by scale-fixated VCs.

That's why I think investors will find this 'use' of (we really mean participation in) social technologies so much more exciting and potentially rewarding than throwing cash at the next Facebook or Twitter.

So that just leaves one question for me... who is going to pay for the tools and platforms which deliver the real-time, beyond-silo, connections on which social business design relies (the next Facebook or Twitter)?

Perhaps that leads us back to my previous post....

Friday, June 27, 2008

Lessons in co-creation. Ignore them if you want to fail

James Cherkoff shared the June 2008 McKinsey Quarterly document via twitter. The Next Step in Open Innovation (by Jacques Bughin, Michael Chui and Brad Johnson) includes these gems:

"25 per cent of Western Europe's internet users now post comments and reviews about consumer products of all kinds."
"User-Generated media sites are growing in numbers of visitors and participants by 100% a year, traditional sites by 20-30%."
"40% of would be co-creators will refuse to co-create with companies they don't like or trust."

Lesson one: Don't assume co-creation is for the geeks. It's rapidly going mainstream. The majority is no longer silent - it is a participating thinking outloud one.

Lesson two: Don't slap yourself on the back for a 20-30% growth rate in visitor numbers. As Professor Malcolm McDonald reminded me this week, we often fail to look at what the whole market is doing and how we are performing against it. The whole market in this case is growing at a rate of 100% a year. Anything less and you're falling behind, failing.

Lesson three: Trust in your brand is worth 40% of the new value co-creation is unlocking. Work at it, invest in it. Never abuse it.

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

UK brand tags. Share and shape!

Noah Brier's fabulous Brand Tags project has been recreated in a UK version. Now you can bitch about Bernard Matthews.
Brand Tags shows you brand logos then asks you to type in the first word or phrase that springs to mind. The resulting tag cloud reveals the crowd-sourced version of what the brand means to the people who are meant to be consuming it (in theory, at least).
Wonder if I can get a few of our own included?

http://uk.brandtags.net

Friday, June 06, 2008

Former Editor's Letter

Colin Kennedy is one of the big brains behind the very excellent ditto.net (disclosure, ditto is a Bauer Consumer Media project and one I'm glad to help out from time to time).

Ditto puts the role of the editor in the hands of the crowd.

Colin was once the editor of one of BCM's great magazines. Interesting then to understand his journey.

Here's the letter he's written to the Ditto community. You can find it on the ditto blog, too - where you can read it with all the links intact!

"In another life, I used to be a professional entertainment critic. At one point, I was Editor-In-Chief of Empire, the British movie magazine, and its website Empireonline.com.

"I also spent some time developing a new entertainment magazine, but before it even had a chance to fail something called web 2.0 happened – the crowd got wise, the long tail wagged, the world went flat etc. etc.

"In short, it became clear to even old hacks like me that the entertainment guide of the future would require a very different solution.

"For the last eighteen months or so, I’ve been working on how to create what we’re now calling a ’social entertainment guide’. A best of both worlds solution - an entertaining entertainment guide read by the masses, created and edited by thousands of experts (this means you).

"There are more revolutionary solutions to entertainment recommendations of course: toolbar widgets that can capture your taste or gadgets that can scan your desktop – some are great, some are Skynet scary. But I feel strongly that there is a still a role for the relatively old fashioned way: the best staff in the world, working on the best entertainment guide.

"This isn’t simple nostalgia. There are things that an algorithm simply can’t compute - like who was the greatest Bond villain. And there are things that a hard sell online shop has no interest in ranking, like what was the best album title EVER.

"These are the kinds of lists that give all the best magazines 'soul’ and we proudly carry on that tradition here because I believe accidental discovery to be the most thrilling of all. And because it’s fun.

"Ditto definitely has to be fun because (beyond eternal glory) there are few rewards awaiting those who contribute. I could wax lyrical about the ‘personalised recommendations’ we can make once we have profiled your taste and how hard our developers have worked to make contribution effortless, but honestly, the best reasons to vote on our lists is a) it’s fun and b) it really matters - on Ditto every vote counts.

"We may be a very small democracy at the moment but we are built to scale - our existing entertainment catalogues are huge and they are only the beginning. (Organising YouTube comes next.)

"So basically, we’ve got big dreams and little to offer early adopters, but at least we’re not the first: when Jimmy Wales asked his friends to write the first contributions to Wikipedia, I believe he asked. “Humour me”. That’s about right.

"I don’t know if it’s even possible to create a Wikipedia of personal opinion - miracles seldom happen twice - but if you ‘humour me’ for the moment I will personally promise to do everything I can to make your choices really count.

"Besides, the way I see it - sooner or later, someone will create a new type of entertainment guide that covers the best of absolutely everything - might as well be us.

"And if we don’t quite get there… well, we can always try again after ‘Web 3.0’ - the inevitably disappointing threequel."

Colin

Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Powerlabs - harnessing our desire to contribute

I've just stumbled into Powerlabs - the community created by Powerset, a Silicon Valley company building a new search engine based on natural language processing. It's worth a look to see how one socially-focused play is working to harness the power of 'we'.

Unlike the keyword tradition, Powerset reads and 'understands' every sentence on a web page and allows you to ask questions in plain old English. They aren't the only ones doing something similar. There is an increasing understanding that keyword alone is not enough (see Google doesn't know what you're looking for) and a move towards social solutions.

It therefore makes perfect sense that Powerset should share what its doing (in the form of ever-updated demos), encourage contributions and feedback and use the wisdom of the crowd to improve its product. Your reward? Er some 'karma'. And you need a bag full of it in order to access some of the newest and grooviest test stuff.

In other words, the pursuit of knowledge about new stuff first - and access to it - would appear to be your only reward.

Pride and standing in this particular community equate to building your reputation. But I think why/how people value this is because they are banking on an emerging value.

Perhaps it is as simple as the hope that by raising their reputation this may result in something like a job offer?

It is intersting that there are clearly large numbers of people who are apparently willing to contribute on this reputation-building basis alone. And in the process they create a great deal of value for Powerset.

But perhaps the emerging value those of us considering balance sheers too often over look is the sheer satisfaction of working collaboratively, the joy of human cooperation - the basic need to work together that's been in us since we first worked together to hunt on the savannah.

Still - at the end of the day - it was always better if we got a share of the meat...

Monday, December 17, 2007

Star Trek is wrong

It's that time of year when we start thinking about predicting the future. I've just done a little work on that for the consumer media part of emap (the Bauer-bound bit for those who follow corporate affairs).

And before the week is out I'll publish a few thoughts of my own about what'll happen in 2008 (my guesses about 2007: 12 months ago ).

First, I wanted to pause and think about the impact of point of view on predictions. Fairly obviously, It is exceptionally difficult to see beyond that which you are experiencing.

For example. What does the future look like for Gene Roddenberry? Essentially - stick the military in space and give them warp drive. No shock then, that he served with distinction in the US Army Air Corps.

Captain Kirk. Captain? Isn't that a little command and control, hierarchical? Think of most popular science fiction and the visions are the same.

Sometimes they nightmarishly play out what happens when command and control, when the centre, gets too much power and influence over the minutiae of our lives (1984, anyone? Orwell started his working life as a policeman.)

I fell for it myself when I started on my great-unfinished-novel in 1987. If your context is a world of disconnectedness, of centre-out control, this will colour (and generally darken) your view of the future.

The internet (and the web that layered over it) began to emerge in the late 1980s (and became more easily public-facing in the early 90s with the arrival of html - and the joy of documents).

The internet has no hierarchy or central control. No one ordered it built. No one controls who links to who, no one says what can and can't be published, when, where or by whom. No one controls the horizontal, no one controls the vertical...

We haven't had long to digest this networked world, for its influence to seep into your collective consciousness and help us shape the stories of the future we want to tell.

It is a new and all-encompassing context. It changes everything - disrupts everywhere it touches - visions of the future included.

History is our story-telling about the past. Science Fiction is our collective story-telling about the future.

When we do tell new stories about the future, ones inspired by a networked world, it seems likely those stories will be created by the interaction of many people - crowd sourced, co-created if you like. A shared vision of a networked world.

Will they have the blockbuster appeal of a Star Wars? Some will. Some will resonate for many. But even the hits will be wiki-style stubs - a starting point for new stories to grow from.

So, when my predictions for 2008 get slung towards you later this week, expect them to be heavily influenced by the world I live in - and mine is the networked world... and all the brighter for it.

Tuesday, August 28, 2007

The Wisdom of Crowds: The verdict

Hello, and thanks for holding your breath... after 11 days away I am ready to reveal how many emails were in my inbox on my return - and yes it is proof of the wisdom of crowds.

Regular readers of this blog, and my facebook friends, will recall that just before I went away I asked for your estimates on how many emails would be in my inbox this morning.
I managed to confuse the issue by saying I was away for 9 days on facebook - where the guestimates were listed.

So, I've taken the liberty of calculating the average number of emails per day and adjusting the result to take account of my initial bit of misdirection.

The guesses ranged from (for nine days) 7 and 56(yes really) to 432,215 (again, yes, really).
So I removed those extremes from the calculation.

The range I was left with started at 180 and went all the way up to 1000 ( a late arrival sent as a comment on this blog while I was away).

Adjusting for the 9-day/11-day initial cock-up, I ended up with an actual figure of a spookily round 500 emails clogging my inbox.

And the crowd guess?

461. Just 39 off. A margin of error of less than 10%. This from a group of people who know very little about my average email intake!

And most impressively, this average figure is closer to the actual result than even the best single guess (Closest by a smart individual was

Benedikt Hanswille: 550).

Just goes to show - none of us is as clever as all of us!

Update: Aug 31. In yet another spooky coincidence (see The Increasing Incidence of Coincidence) regular contributor BadgerGravling made a wild stab in the dark at how many emails I'd get, but posted it somewhere we both forgot... until now. It seems one of us is cleverer than all of us because he got it absolutely bang on: 500 on the nail!

Let's assume he's the exception that proves the rule...

Friday, August 17, 2007

The wisdom of crowds: A simple test

Like many at this time of year, I'm off for a short break. I'll be offering the very briefest of updates via the twitter feed you'll find on the left column of the blog, but that'll be pretty much it until August 28.

I've asked my FaceBook friends to guess how many emails will be in my emap inbox on my return from a nine-day break from the office.

Guesses ranged from 7 to 900.
The average - if you include the '7' guess is 379. If you discount the '7' you get 410.

None of those taking part 'knows' my daily average.

The theory goes that the actual result should be closer to the group average than the vast majority of individual guesses. You can read more about the theory here in an excerpt from The Wisdom of Crowds.

I'll share the result first thing on the 28th! (now then - no trying to skew the results please!!)

Accepting the power in crowd-sourcing is nothing new, of course. What are the world's money markets if they aren't the average of best guesses?

Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Be your own TV network - another warning for mainstream media

Former Daily Mail journalist James Black has been conducting an interesting experiment which proves the democratisation of information has reached the once prohibitively expensive world of broadcast TV.

James (www.ansathat.com) has been kind enough to allow us to publish his thoughts here on FasterFuture.

"Internet TV - the web 2.0 revolution is knocking at your gates
"Who will be the winners? Who will be the losers? Will journalists be losing their jobs?
"Today is the 50th day of 2007 and the ansaTHAT experiment is over. Its final week bringing a full page story in the Chicago Tribune in the USA and its presenter being voted ‘Web Celeb’ of the week on BBC’s Radio One.
"The experiment also sheds light on the emerging $17 billion internet TV market and how it will impact on the present ‘media industry’.
"The experiment began on 01 January 2007 when ansaTHAT began broadcasting a daily internet TV ‘show’.
"The idea was simple, could an individual create a successful daily internet TV show with little experience, no filming skills, minimal presentation skills, no editing skills, basic computer skills, etc - in other words - the average Joe ?"
"Could this individual then find success in both the UK and the USA within 50 days ?
"The show also had to go against the present perception of internet TV.
"It was not allowed to use YouTube
"Its presenter would be the 'wrong' demographic.
"Its chief content was trivial - literally trivial.
"It had no promotional budget.
"It used basic equipment.
HOWEVER...
It could draw on the skills and enthusiasm of the presenter and unpaid friends of the show.
It did have a basic budget.

RESULTS
"The results made plain from the experiment are startling.
In a short period of time it is possible that semi-professional quality television can be made every day - and made cheaply. The main ansaTHAT website cost $34 dollars to create. The only drawback to what can be made is creativity and time.
"The number of views to the ansaTHAT website compared favourably against those for programmes on a typical lower level satellite TV show, local newspaper, or industry/hobby publication. Programmes / publications that typically cost £10,000 to £20,000 an hour to make, or £5,000 to £25,000 to print.
"The number of approaches to the website to sign them up was two - one from BT in the UK, one from a nameless US ‘organisation’.
"The Google footprint for ansaTHAT reached 36,000 in week two, but presently has reduced to 11,800.
"The number of contacts acquired among the ‘community’ interested in the website was over 400.
"The potential for advertising revenue from the ansaTHAT website was estimated at over £30,000 a year - at a basic level.

Conclusions
"Any 'ordinary Joe' can now become their own TV network for less investment than the purchase of a typical BIG SCREEN TV.
"All they need is a basic camcorder, good microphone and access to a computer.
Of course, they also need a good idea - something that can be shared and appreciated by other people around the world.
"This new army of 'internet TV stars', 'citizen-journalists', and 'webcam warriors', will revolutionise news gathering and interest groups in every conceivable field from how we see the value of a stock or share moving up or down to deciding whether Britney’s ‘bald-look’ is the start of a new fashion.
"The playing field has levelled enough for one-man operators to be able to compete against the big boys.
"The potential impact on those who work in traditional media is also startling - and James Black, the one-time Daily Mail journalist who conducted this experiment is now convinced enough himself to be furiously setting up his own internet TV company) is available for interview.
"The final test is simple - if you watch the final ‘compilation’ on ansaTHAT.com - can you really tell the difference between it and normal TV?
"If your answer is no, then you are in the same camp as the hundreds of advertisers, large and small, who are moving over to Internet TV, the modern day midas-maker."

Fascinating stuff. It certainly shows you can reach audiences and make decent TV cheaply. It also draws on its audience to co-create it - a lot of the right boxes ticked. HowTo TV, hey?

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