Social Enchilada

Jun23

social media, crowd sourcing, iran, crowdsourcing

The flip-side of crowdsourcing

I love crowdsourcing.

The concept is simple, yet it’s a disruptive social tool which, if coupled with great ideas, will bring about powerful applications. The business world has already latched on the crowdsourcing with great success.

* Starbucks is making the in-store experience more enjoyable by leveraging insights from My Starbucks Idea for product and business innovation.

* You can rest assure that your next online t-shirt purchase won’t be a flop because Threadless lets the community decide on which t-shirt designs should be produced.

* Product innovation is taking a leap forward through Hypios. It’s a marketplace where companies can broadcast internal R&D problems to an outside network of expert problem solvers.

But are there downsides to crowssourcing? Can it be used for nefarious purposes?

The answer is yes. It already is.

The Iranian government recently launched a crowdsourcing site that will help identify members of last year’s election protests. The site, Gerdab.ir, displays photos of “dissidents” and allows the Iranian public to collectively identify and report the identity of these people to the government.

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Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Jun. 23, 2010

+ 0

Feb25

social media, crowd sourcing

The power of crowd sourcing

I’m in love with the idea of crowd sourcing.

If you’re not familiar, crowd sourcing is allowing a community to submit ideas to your organization and then lets the community vote on which ideas are it’s favorite. These ideas could be product development, product enhancement, or whatever your want. The sky is the limit when it comes what kind of ideas that you’re sourcing.

Dell does a great job with the Ideastorm community. A site that is run by a team of two, has amassed over 10,000 ideas, which have been voted on over 700,000 times! In a recent interview, they stated that their biggest challenge with Ideastorm is figuring out how to disperse all of these ideas to the appropriate people at Dell. In my opinion, that’s a good challenge to have.

Another fine example of crowd sourcing from Starbucks is My Starbucks Idea. Following the exact model as Ideastorm, it’s help Starbucks engage it’s customers in powerful new ways.

When a new user navigates the the My Starbucks Idea site, their greeted with the following message -

“Help shape the future of Starbucks - with your ideas. You know better than anyone else what you want from Starbucks. So tell us”

That is powerful powerful stuff. Starbucks users are made to feel that they have a role in shaping the future of Starbucks and not just through purchasing. Users are alos able to see, which of their ideas, if any, were adopted by Starbucks.

What companies would you like to see crowd sourcing your ideas? What ideas would you suggest?

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Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Feb. 25, 2009

+ 2

Thanks T!

When Alex Zelenak was in the conceptual phase of the Social Enchilada design, we tasked him with giving it a twist. Something that would set this design apart from traditional blog design.…

Posted by Jeremy Hilton on 02/26/2009 11:41 AM

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Jeremy Hilton