Crowdsourcing is still a relatively new buzzword in marketing circles, first coined in 2006 by tech journalist Jeff Howe. If you’ve not yet come across the concept, think of applying the principles of outsourcing, to crowds of people or customers.
On the back of the recession the idea has really taken off – it is increasingly recognised as an inexpensive and efficient way for brands to make their products and services more appealing to the customer. After all, many hands make light work, on top of which, what better way to make sure you’re getting it right for the customer than to ask them what they want?
Despite all of this, it seems that crowdsourcing has so far largely failed to capture the attention of B2B marketers. Which is a shame, say those who have researched it and are excited by its possibilities. Scot McKee, managing director of Birddog, says a recent blog post he wrote, entitled ‘Crowdsourcing for B2B marketing’ encouraged a frisson of people ‘bitching and moaning’ about the idea.
“I had people saying that it’s going to encourage design by crowdsourcing, and people designing logos by committee, and that it will be terrible. But crowdsourcing isn’t terrible – it ought to be a hugely beneficial way for companies to gather opinion from the people that matter, before they are committed to making changes that the customers and prospects don’t want.”
So why the negativity? McKee believes that one of the problems lies in misconceptions attached to the idea. Some, for example, might automatically dismiss crowdsourcing as just a fancy new word for market research. After all, market research is generally about gathering a crowd of people into a room, asking them what they think about a product, and using those opinions for marketing gain.
But marketers already engaged in crowdsourcing activity are at pains to point out that there is a fundamental difference between the two. “Crowdsourcing is far, far away from traditional market research, task-based, qualitative endeavours,” says Mark Bjornsgaard, social media specialist at AgencyDMG. “Winning brands understand that the philosophy of crowdsourcing isn’t a cursory, tokenistic marketing exercise, it involves a fundamental reworking of all business processes.”
Immerse yourself
Google provides a helpful analogy – the Google search engine crowdsources links in the sense that it ‘listens’ to where its users are going, and uses that information to give a better search service. “Crowdsourcing is a human, participatory, hands-on, active environment, and in the fullest meaning of the word is about a business immersing itself in its customer base to such an extent that all questions can be answered, at all times, by everyone – employees and existing customers alike,” adds Bjornsgaard.
Obviously there’s a difference between crowdsourcing your employer and your customer base. So how do you know which to pick? For a lot of B2B brands, working in niche sectors and for small audiences, internal crowdsourcing is a natural starting point. As McKee points out, “the crowd can be the business.” McKee cites US retailer Best Buy as a successful, working example of internal crowdsourcing. Its ‘The Company as Wiki’ initiative, he points out, involves principals that can easily be taken on board by business brands.
“Best Buy has created a kind of intranet – which is something that many B2B brands will have open to staff – and uses it to empower them. So it’s saying to them, ‘tell us what’s working, what’s selling, what’s not selling and which systems and processes work within your store’, so that other stores can benefit,” he says.
“From that, the good stuff floats to the top. This is a principle any B2B brand can follow. With that kind of information you can create, say, a list of top 10 hot topics at any given time. The result being that management teams, instead of sitting in an ivory tower thinking ‘what shall we do next?’, are getting real-time ideas and business issues served up on a plate.”
The customer knows best?
For B2B brands with sizeable customer bases, crowdsourcing the customer is also an option. “If you’ve got volumes of customers in the B2B space, and they’re probably more likely SMEs than large players, then I think crowdsourcing could definitely be for you,” says Philip Letts, founder of crowdsourcing specialist company Blur Group. “Why shouldn’t you, for example, organise a competition seeking ideas for your next ad, or announce that you want to produce it with your customers, so that their ideas are promoted within the video or the catalogue.” (If unconvinced, think of the much talked about Windows 7 ad, with its ‘Windows 7 was my idea’ strapline).
“There isn’t a B2B company that doesn’t have an email database – and while you can’t really crowdsource by email you can absolutely create a crowdsourced campaign or tool that you can communicate by email to a known database. What a refreshing change to be a customer and to get an email not trying to flog me something, but to ask for my opinion,” says McKee. It is, he says, the way to come across as a listening brand and to say ‘we want you to be part of our growing brand experience’.
With all of this in mind, what questions should a brand address before embarking on a crowdsourcing initiative? Below are a few pointers:
1. What questions should and shouldn’t you ask your ‘crowd’?
“You should have a reason for crowdsourcing, but you don’t necessarily need to have a specific question in mind,” says McKee. “With market research you go through endless testing processes to make sure you are asking the right questions. You don’t do that with crowd sourcing – you need a question or topic to start with, but the point is that the crowd will decide how worthy that question or topic is. Hopefully you will find if you haven’t got it right that the crowd will guide you towards the ‘right’ answers and vote on them. It’s important to keep dialogue open and relatively loose.”
2. Should you moderate discussions?
“Pure crowdsourcing is very lightly moderated. It takes a brave B2B marketer to do this but can be the ultimate statement of confidence,” says Stan Woods, managing director, of Velocity Partners. “Ironically, the B2B brands best-placed to run a ‘safe’ crowdsourcing experiment are the ones that need it least. They know the answers they’re trying to elicit from the witnesses.”
3. Can crowdsourcing only be facilitated in an online environment?
“You basically need to have some sort of contact point with whoever you are crowdsourcing,” advises Sam Decker, chief marketing officer at Bazaarvoice. “It doesn’t have to be email – you could collect opinions in other ways too – for example on a warranty card, or via the sales person sending a note after closing a sale, saying ‘we’d love to get your comments’.”
However, most agree that online mediums provide the best means to capture data. “You could argue that you put 100 people in a room and say here is a pink coffee cup, here is a green coffee cup – which one do you like? That’s not crowdsourcing. That’s a crowd that you are able to measure from, but the term crowdsourcing is an online term. Howe coined the term in reference to using technology to gather this kind of information so it is, in my mind, online,” argues McKee.
4. What online platforms should you use?
As already mentioned, an existing intranet system or email database can provide the foundations. Adds Woods, “you could get fancy, but existing platforms may well do 90-100 per cent of what a B2B marketer needs [to start] crowdsourcing. Twitter, LinkedIn Groups, ‘walled-garden’ social networks – that you can create with the likes of Ning or Slideshare – YouTube… all of these provide the key infrastructure for a crowdsourcing project. And they’re free.”
5. How do you spark interest in your question and incentivise participation?
“The engagement comes before the [actual] crowdsourcing. Do you have a community eager to solve the kinds of problems you’re addressing – or is it a loose prospect universe that really doesn’t have a lot at stake?” asks Woods.
Once this is established, momentum is the key to ongoing success. For example, if crowdsourcing via an intranet or forum, you might encourage your ‘crowd’ to take on user profiles. From there you can facilitate leader boards of top contributors or the hottest topics. “If you can get your customers to participate and contribute content, that starts to pull other people as well as themselves back to it, and so you start a virtuous cycle that continues to grow. Companies tend to think ‘how can I squeeze the next dollar out of customers?’ – this strategy is more about ‘how do I squeeze the participation out of them?’, because the long term benefit will be much greater,” says Decker.
6. How do I analyse the results of my crowdsourcing activity?
“In the same way you’d test any idea. Is there evidence to support it? Is it really new? Does it solve a real problem?” says Woods. “One client used crowdsourcing in a pretty trivial way, asking their community to name their new enewsletter. To be honest, we thought it would be a waste of effort but it turned out to be a really effective exercise. We got 200 plus entries and shared them all with the community via a short, fun video on YouTube. In the end, it was a really nice community-builder.”
Customer oxygen
So does crowdsourcing have a future presence in the B2B space? Some are beginning to use it but Sam Decker, chief marketing officer at Bazaarvoice thinks it’s still early days. “Crowdsourcing has mainly taken off so far in the consumer space, whether that be with manufacturers or retailers, but I think in B2B it is growing. It is becoming more and more popular, because it creates what I call customer oxygen. It’s about bringing the voice of the customer, in an operational way, into your company. Every company has to pay attention to what the customer is saying, and this is a part of the future in doing that.”
