An Experiment in Crowdsourcing

Flack Seeds - An essential source of public relations ideas and trends

Friday, July 2

I conducted a little experiment a few weeks ago. I needed to come up with some ideas to help a prospect solve a problem she has marketing her service. The challenge was how to sell cost reduction as opposed to revenue growth. Revenue growth is (at least I thought) an easier sell in difficult economic times.

I hadn't encountered this challenge before, but I knew other communication professionals probably had. Why not turn to the wisdom of the crowds for guidance?

Not all crowds are created equal

I posed my question on a few websites, with varying degrees of success. Here are the sites I tried and their rank of success on a scale of 1 (not useful at all) to 5 (most useful, thanks).

Yahoo! Answers - 2: This site may be helpful for other questions (What should I do when my cell phone falls in water?), but it wasn't good for my complex, business-related question. I got one legitimate response that wasn't very helpful and a few spam comments.
MyRagan.com - 1: This seems like a good forum, and a lot of other questions were being answered. I had high hopes because it's specifically for communication professionals, but I didn't receive any replies.
Twitter - 2: I asked the question from our account, @atkinsonpr, and again heard crickets. Then I reworded the question a bit and asked it from my personal account. One of my friends replied, but it didn't spark an idea for me.
LinkedIn - 5: I was amazed by the quality and quantity of responses. Less than half an hour after I posed the question, e-mails with well-thought-out answers started streaming in. In the end I received 13 responses. All of them were on point and useful. It helps that users who answer a lot of questions (and have good suggestions) can become "experts" so they have some incentive to participate. I highly recommend LinkedIn's Answers feature for any business-related queries.

Other applications for crowdsourcing

In this case I used crowdsourcing to help answer a question and solve a problem, but you can also use it as a trial balloon inside and outside your organization.

Want to see how your employees feel about a potential new program or process? Write a post about it on your internal blog and watch the comments to gauge their reaction. Overhear what they say in the halls.

Wondering if people would be receptive to a new product idea? Figure out where they are online -- your company's Facebook group, a forum, or Twitter -- and ask them. Their feedback may help with that decision and give you some clues about what other products they'd buy from you.

The very act of asking shows that you're listening and that you want to engage with your targets. You might get some great ideas, and you'll surely get some duds.

As with all free advice, you're not beholden to do what the crowd says. As long as the crowd offers, you might as well listen.