The Wisdom of Crowds
Steve King has a nice post on how businesses can use social media as an easy, cheap way of doing market research.
We’re not talking here about quantitative research: if you want to know what the market thinks of your product, you really need a market research firm to do it, using well-designed questionnaires and proper sampling techniques. But if you’re looking for ideas, leads and even solutions to problems, then social media can be a very useful way of getting results. One marketing director held a competition asking Twitter users to define innovation in 140 characters or less; an economist posed a question on LinkedIn that received 1000 answers. (Caveat: King doesn’t say whether they were good answers.)
The beauty of the approach is that costs so little you have almost nothing to lose: at worst, you won’t get anything useful; at best, you’ll have engaged with your customers and learned something that could add genuine value to your business.
February 24th, 2009 at 12:48 am
There are ALWAYS people who bemoan that they know better than those that make decisions and if only people would listen. This is a perfect opportunity because just maybe those people do have something sensible to say…
Maybe not – it is not the wisdom of crowds but the wisdom of individuals within the crowd – if you direct tweet only the recipient can hear you scream…if an idea comes from several independent sources then it just might have some legs…if it’s on an open forum it just might stifle some other creative thinker from making a connection because they will be swayed by the previous posts.
Brainstorming is the wisdom of crowds at work, but there is some new thinking around private brainstorms being more productive and then group workshopped together within a group.