Ok, so the crowd is wise, right? Well, I guess. But, as my Dad always used to remind me: “horses for courses son, horses for courses”.
I’ve been thinking about crowds recently and just how wise they can be with recourse to social media. Part of what we do is help brands and companies interact with audiences and occasionally such activity leans on the understanding that the crowd is wise. But, for us to do our job propoerly, we always need to make sure that if we’re calling upon a crowd to share their wisdom that we choose the right crowd. This might mean identifying a pre-existing crowd whose various skill sets will help solve a problem, or it might involve putting together a crowd with the right people to solve a given problem. Either way, there is a demand that the crowd be not a lumpen mass of people, but that the people within the crowd are there for a reason (more or less).
Increasingly one must think about the different roles different groups play within the crowd and at what point they can be used most effectively. The same group that can help with beta testing your product are unlikely to be the same group to tell you how to market it. Whilst any random group of people can be cobbled together, their guesses aggregated and the correct number sweeties in the jar guessed, the same is unlikely to be true when a brand needs the wisdom of the crowd.
With that, my thought for the day is that crowdsourcing is not about asking a lumpen group of people a question, but rather effective crowdsourcing is about understanding what questions need to be asked, and understanding the various roles a group within the crowd can variously perform that might solve the problem to hand.
Do we also need to segment that crowd we choose?
Or does that defeat some of the element of it being a diverse crowd in the first place?
Not at all, segmentation is key. Rather than using the word ‘segment’, I, in the post, refer to groups within the crowd. ‘Group’ or ‘segment’ are interchangeable.