Applied Crowdsourcing with Dr. Leslie Fine of Crowdcast (VIDEO)

November 11, 2010 By Leave a Comment

This week at Enterprise 2.0, we had a chance to catch up with Dr. Leslie Fine, Chief Scientist of Crowdcast. Crowdcast is essentially an internally-focused market research tool that leverages a crowdsourcing approach to gain insight into the collective intelligence of your employees. In other words, employees can vote on questions posed by others in the organization. (“When will we be ready to ship our product?”, “Will we hit our sales goal?”, etc.)

Leslie was kind enough to walk us through a demo of Crowdcast. Check it out.
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Filed Under: Events, Market Research, Video Tagged With: , , , , ,

Breaking Down Data Silos with Ross Mayfield of Socialtext (VIDEO)

November 10, 2010 By Leave a Comment

As we’ve walked around the show floor at Enterprise 2.0 this week, a few clear themes are emerging: activity streams, adding social layers to business processes, and breaking down data silos. Standing at the intersection of these themes, we found Ross Mayfield, President and Co-Founder of Socialtext.

We had the opportunity to sit down with Ross for a quick discussion about Socialtext, and how it’s surfacing data and breaking down silos within an enterprise organization using social tools. Here’s what he had to say.
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How Crowdsourcing is used at FEMA

November 4, 2010 By Leave a Comment

One of the most interesting and seemingly impactful uses of crowdsourcing technology seems to be taking place within governments. (We’ve talked about this before with Bev Godwin of the GSA and  Haley VanDyck of the FCC.)

Recently, Craig Fugate, Administrator of the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) posted to the White House Blog about how FEMA is using crowdsourcing and public challenges to engage the public, gather input and feedback, and generate new ideas.
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How to Use Crowd Sourcing Tools to Enhance or Replace Focus Groups

October 20, 2010 By Leave a Comment

School of FishFocus groups are probably the most important, yet most overlooked component of a market research plan.  Having a group of people in a room where you can watch their body language and watch their subtle reaction to questions, topics and situations is priceless when it comes to deciding which directions you will take with your market research.

Yet focus groups come at quite a cost: time, money — and lots of both.  While social media and other technical tools and resources provide SOME of this information, they don’t provide all of it.  And this is why I will NOT remove focus groups as a valuable element in the survey process.

But for those of us who don’t have tens of thousands of dollars to invest in the process.  There are some interesting alternatives: social media and crowd sourcing tools like IdeaScale.

Neither of these tools can give you the visual body language component that focus groups provide.  And if that is important to you — then you will have to invest in the focus group process.  But take heart.  Crowd sourcing tools can really help you focus your work so that when you DO get that focus group together – it will be targeted and meaningful.  Maybe you can do one focus group instead of two or three.

What Qualitative Data do Crowd Sourcing Tools Provide

Crowd sourcing tools work give you the opportunity to do virtual brainstorming with an audience.  You can either recruit the audience by sending them an email with a link to your space or you can simply put a link to your space on your web site and send visitors to the site that way.

If you are running a project and have a targeted audience that you can reach, I’d recommend sending invitations to specific people and encouraging them to participate in the space.

If you’re running more of an ongoing listening project, then simply placing a “feedback” tab on your site is sufficient.

Another option is to place a bright orange tab on the side of your web page where people can click to provide feedback-

What’s Possible With Crowd Sourcing

Listening is perhaps the biggest benefit that you can get with crowd sourcing.  One of the benefits of NOT having people congregated in a room with a professional facilitator is that they are more relaxed and tend to feel more inclined to make more unfiltered comments.  The same principle that makes it possible to make bullying comments and rude rants on web sites takes over and people simply tell you what they think.

Using a crowd sourcing tools requires facilitation as well.  People will make comments and contribute ideas and you need to be available to read them. comment on them and filter out the spam that will inevitably show up.

Challengepost.com is Crowd Sourcing in Action

Take a look at the Challengepost.com project.  This web site is literally a marketplace for challenges.  If you’d like to solve a challenge – browse the available challenges and get involved and if you’d like to post a challenge — get it up there.  And if you’re just looking — you can log on and vote challenges up and down.

ChallengePost works on the principles of reward for the best solutions.  Netflix is using it as a clearinghouse for their contests.  Netflix had gotten into a bit of trouble with their contests when people accused them of being unfair.  Their solution was ChallengePost.  Netflix puts up a prize amount.  People contribute solutions to their challenge and the crowd votes the solutions up or down.  The solution with  the most votes wins.

Crowd sourcing is a wonderful new way to enhance and jump start more traditional forms of market research.

Have YOU used crowd sourcing tools like IdeaScale or ChallengePost?  What’s been your experience?

Filed Under: How-To, Market Research Tagged With: , , , ,

How to Write a Market Research Plan

October 12, 2010 By Leave a Comment

market research strategy chartIn the past, we BUDGETED for market research.  This usually included our annual customer satisfaction survey and then we simply looked at our marketing plan an set aside a budget for the new product research we were going to do in the next year.

These days things are a little different.  I find myself recommending a market research plan over and over to small businesses and that means that I had better start explaining what a market research plan looks like.

Why You Need a Research Plan NOW – When You Didn’t Need One in the Past?

The short answer is that it’s a response to several trends that are going on in our lives today – that weren’t there in the past:

  • Social Media – The ability to use social media as a tool to collect feedback and analyze text and chatter from your marketplace about your company and your brand is a relatively new phenomenon.  The challenge is that if left unmanaged and under-leveraged, it goes to waste as a resource of valuable market research information.
  • Time Slicing – This is an interesting behavioral trend among all of us.  You can easily compare it to multi-tasking.   Time slicing, however is more like inserting short tasks in between larger tasks.  Such as checking emails on your mobile device while waiting in line.
  • Mobile Devices – The use of mobile devices as computers and communication tools and quite literally “time killers” opens up a new way to reach our respondents when they have just a few minutes to spare.

The Market Research Plan Outline

  1. Set Goals:  I think it’s important to set a general goal or direction about what decisions you’re going to be making over the course of the year.  For the sake of this outline, I’m treating goals as more general statements such as “Start marketing products online.”  The benefit of making a general goal statement is that it gets your mind focused in a particular direction and allows for some flexibility – which you’re going to need as you start strategizing around the information and feedback that you’re planning on collecting.
  2. Set objectives:  Every research project has objectives and every marketing plan has objectives.  So it stands to reason that your research plan will too.  In this case your objectives around the research plan might include the decisions that you are trying to make right now around that general goal of “marketing products online”.  Some possible objectives might include understanding who our customers would be online, or how our target customer shops online or to what degree do they use mobile devices to shop or research products and services.
  3. Lay out your collection channels. You’ve heard the term distribution channel, well in research I call it the collection channel.  This involves listing all the possible ways that you can collect feedback and information from your target audience.  These might include online surveys, MicroPoll, IdeaScale (Crowd sourcing), mobile device surveys, social media, and some others.
  4. Brainstorm a list of questions.  Now you can start brainstorming questions that will help you make your decisions.  I like brainstorming questions first because it focuses your mind on exactly what you want to know and why you want to know it.  We can always edit the questions later based on what collection channel is best suited for the question.
  5. Assign questions to the collection channels. Again none of this is cast in stone.  But it helps you get your mind around how to best leverage the collection tools that are available to you.  Start assigning your questions to the channels that will provide the best information.  For example – treat your social media channels as you might a focus group. Start conversations with your Facebook Fans and ask questions.  LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter are all ideal channels for getting your target audience involved in helping you develop more specific questions around the issues that your customers care most about.  Not only are you getting input into how to frame questions and what to focus on – you’re getting some additional marketing and PR buzz about your mission and vision about what you’re developing.
  6. Use crowd sourcing tools like IdeaScale to prioritize suggestions.  Now that you’ve gotten ideas from social media conversations – create an IdeaScale space and seed the space with the feedback you’ve learned.  Then launch that page to your social media community and ask them to vote and continue the feedback on this space.  Don’t forget to visit the space and offer feedback to the community on how your development is going.  Again – this is more marketing and PR.
  7. Start putting your online surveys together. Now you might be ready to put some online marketing surveys together.  Keep in mind that NONE of your respondents want to spend more than 5 minutes on a survey.  Just like online videos. their attention span is about 2-3 minutes at best.  After that they are bored and tired and leave.  If your survey takes longer than 5 minutes – you will need to look for alternative ways to ask those questions.
  8. Use MicroPoll to supplement your online survey. MicroPoll is underutilized as a survey instrument.  People LOVE polls because they are short and they offer immediate feedback.  If your online survey takes longer than 5 minutes.  Take a look at which questions you can transfer to MicroPoll.  You can launch a new MicroPoll every week.  This will keep your audience engaged and involved in what you’re up to.  (I think that’s more marketing and PR – while doing research – that’s what I call leverage and multi-tasking)
  9. Can you take it viral? Another important question to ask yourself is if you can take your online survey viral in order to collect feedback from a broader market segment than you are able to reach.  One word of warning.  Viral surveys are most successful when you are asking very broad and socially relevant questions.  In other words – questions around topics that people in a broader community can answer.  NOT technically sophisticated questions or questions that contain customer or sensitive information.  A good question for a viral survey might be “What percentage or sales do you spend on market research?”  This is a general enough question anyone can answer AND the answers across industry segments would be valuable.

Last Minute Tips for Successful Market Research Plans

  • Keep it short and simple.  No more than 5 pages.
  • Leverage the free and low cost tools that are available
  • Brainstorm great questions.  This is the key.  No respondent wants to answer bad questions.

In future posts – I will break some of these down into more focused practical how-to’s.  In the meantime — do YOU currently do a market research plan?  What are your tips, Do’s and Don’ts?

Filed Under: Budgets, How-To, Market Research, Planning Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Interview with Bev Godwin of the US General Services Administration

September 9, 2010 By 2 Comments

Continuing our series of interviews from the Government 2.0 Summit, we spoke with Bev Godwin, Director of New Media and Citizen Engagement for the US General Services Administration (found on Twitter at twitter.com/govnewmedia). Bev sat down to talk with us about ways the GSA is providing new social media-based research and feedback tools to agencies throughout the Federal government to improve the governments connection with the public. She also introduced us to Challenge.gov, a new initiative that allows the public to participate in solving challenges facing the government.

(If you are receiving this post via e-mail or RSS, be sure to click through to the Web version to view the embedded video.)

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CrowdSolving – Beyond CrowdSourcing?

July 12, 2010 By 7 Comments

I’m not very convinced of the “wisdom of crowds.” There are numerous examples of how “the wisdom of crowds” is in fact the “idiocy of the mob.” Look at some political movements or some of the more extreme religions, for instance: a good few of these make no sense, but they have a lot of people who believe them. In Vanatu, an island in the Pacific, there is a cargo cult called the John Frum Cult that thinks building replicas of USA air force bases from World War II will bring the USA and all their goods back to the island. A lot of people believe this.

There is a lot of research from social psychology showing that groups polarize decisions in contrast to individuals. A group will make a more extreme decision (cautious or risky) than an individual. There is also the fact that estimations of physical sizes and weights will tend to show a normal distribution, with the most common estimate, the mode, being the correct one. Here there is wisdom in crowds, or more likely the wisdom of the normal distribution, the central limit theorem and statistics in general. Distributions are wonderful things.

One of the advantages of a large scale survey is that you are able to leverage a lot of people’s experience and knowledge. Recently, a company called “Netflix” in the USA utilized the web and their subscriber base to solve an interesting problem. While it is not the usual meaning of the term the “wisdom of crowds,” it is an example of how a crowd can solve a problem. Netflix (www.netflix.com) rents DVDs to their subscribers. They send the rentals via mail and their users maintain a list of which DVD’s they want. Netflix also tries to predict which DVDs people might like to watch based on the DVDs they have already rented. Amazon does a similar thing in making product recommendations to purchasers. Netflix wanted to improve their predictive algorithm by 10%, which is quite a large improvement. They could have tried to hire all sorts of geniuses, but they instead chose a very unique way to solve the problem. They set up a web site (www.netflixprize.com), posted a huge data set of movie DVDs, data about those movies, and subscriber choices. They then offered $1,000,000 to anyone who could improve their algorithm by 10%. There were two conditions: a deadline (September of 2009) and an agreement that anyone who submitted a solution had to document that solution publicly. Many companies allowed their employees to set up teams and compete, some individuals competed, and teams merged and re-formed over time. In the end there was a winning team: Bellkors Pragmatic Chaos.

In this case the wisdom was not “crowd think,” whatever that is. Instead, Netflix leveraged the web and all the people surfing it to source people who wanted to solve this problem. For Netflix, the $1,000,000 was cheap. They could never have afforded to hire all the people who took part in the contest. They got access to world-class computing facilities, superior minds, and  they received some great publicity as well.

The winning algorithm was a technique called a “Restricted Boltzmann Machine.” It proved that numbers and math matter. It wasn’t the crowd that solved the problem, but the crowd was the mechanism that made the solution possible. I’m inclined to think that this is the real wisdom of the crowd. People can come up with all sorts of strange beliefs; the ability to get people to address your problem is the wisdom of the crowd. It’s another example of how the web has changed the world in a radical way. Twenty years ago, it simply would not have been possible for Netflix to find a solution to their problem so gracefully. I hear there is going to be another Netflix contest. It’s nice that it was the math that was wise in the end….

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Gov 2.0: The Next Internet Boom

May 27, 2010 By Leave a Comment

The Gov 2.0 Expo just wrapped up in Washington D.C. today with the White House urging federal agencies to make statistical data and other information available to the public, the Internet’s next big opportunity may be tapping that information to boost government transparency, efficiency, and responsiveness.
On their end the government has partnered with companies, most notably Ideascale to collect feedback from federal agencies and the community to help governments work better.

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