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.

Necessity could prove the mother of a better fit with your community

Recently I spoke with an editor who bemoaned the fact he didn't have the staff to perform the simple act of adding a couple of news pages to his monthly magazine - and the lack of resource he had for the website that represents his brand online, too.
I had a simple solution: Hand control to the community - via the gift of submitted User Generated Content (UGC).
Allow that same community to vote for the UGC stories they like most (I don't usually advocate the digg-style lowest-common-denominator approach, but this is to create a result for 'mass media' publication) .
UGC beats rehashing centre-out press releases any day, for me.
Allow the stories to sizzle gently online for a couple of weeks (during which, in a wiki, wisdom of crowds-style errors are corrected, and assertions challenged)
Take those which score highest (those the community has filtered as best fit with what they want to read about) then run the usual 'professional' journalistic pre-publication accuracy and legal checks.
And finally reward, with publication in the magazine (and more... who knows, a job in the end for regular stars?)
Next use magazine to inspire next round of 'Your News'... and allow the cycle to repeat.
Watch like a hawk to learn what it is your community is telling you about their brand. Respond with improvements to magazine and site.
Celebrate, with the people who made it happen.

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...

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...

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?