FLIRTing with the Crowds

The First element of the FLIRT model is Focus. Focus is what connects the collaboration effort to the strategy level of the firm. In the Focus phase, business goals and needs are reflected on the needs and perceptions of the customer, not forgetting to assess what is doable within the constraints of organization strategy and culture. It is thus a crucial element that needs to be considered and established before advancing to more tactical issues. Focus includes three considerations

1. area of collaboration
2. scale of collaboration
3. depth of collaboration

of the crowdsourcing effort reflected upon three evaluation criteria:

1. Needs and goals of the Business
2. Values and preferences of the Customer, and
3. Capabilities of the Organization

Area of business

Crowdsourcing efforts at present can be extended to various fields of doing business, including, but not limited to (some example companies in parentheses):

• innovation (innocentive)
• new product development, product design (threadless)
• existing product feature enhancement (P&G’s vocalpoint)
• production
  • digital content (youtube)
  • physical products (etsy)
• evaluation of ideas, products, services, features, content, etc. (sellaband)
• marketing
  • customer created advertising (doritos)
  • P2P advertising, viral marketing (favoritethingz)
  • P2P sales (sellaband)
• distribution (Fon)
• customer support (many tech companies)

Clearly, crowdsourcing is not ideal for every field of business (Considering crowdsourcing your accounting? Think again.) and suitability varies across organizations. However, with developing channels and tools, their innovative applications and resulting business models, the possibilities grow more diverse each day.

Considering the area of collaboration from the company’s viepoint means finding out what areas could best use contribution from he customers and where the customers would have the most effective input. It is also necessary to think how the effort will help in meeting existing business goals and what kind of benefit will be derived: direct revenue from customers; direct revenue from 3rd parties (advertising, etc); or indirect revenue through gaining customer insight and inviting them to decide on and do things for the company.

It is also important to view the problem from the customer’s viewpoint, as to which areas of business do the customers perceive it as relevant to contribute; asking them to devise better sales tactics for your sales crew is unlikely to spark interest, for the perceived end result for the customer would be simply more aggressive selling (this might be affected by the right incentives, of course).

Finally, the area needs the organization’s viewpoint as well, for it shows where the organization is best equipped to receive input from customers and where it needs changes to effectively do so.

Scale of collaboration

Target segments

At present internet potentially enables the participation of around one billion persons to virtually any online project. However, a company might not aim to engage the whole online population to contribute, but instead focus on selected segments, be they designers, groups with certain interests, consumers of certain products or any other group that is perceived to add the most value to the challenge at hand. Even if the collaboration would ultimately be open to all, as is ideal in crowdsourcing ideology, these groups need to identified as the primary target segments in order to appropriately tailor the tactical FLIRT elements - Language, Incentives, Rules - specifically for them.

From the customers’ point of view, it needs to be considered whether these customers gain value from a fully open community or indeed an exclusive one. With the abundance of different social networks and communities connecting you with the whole wide world, one may derive value from a network that screens its members and offers to them a forum more relevant to them than an open-to-all community. Tremor, for example screens its members by age and influence over their peers (with pre-registration questions), so that there are only kids with wanted profiles around in a given project.

Scale of contribution

Another thing to decide when talking about scale is the range of alternatives people should have when contributing ideas and solutions. Business needs should guide, whether to focus on customer contributions regarding one aspect of a product, the product as a whole, a family of products or multiple product families.

From the customer’s viewpoint, too little choice may hamper creativity and the feeling of truly having an influence, while too much choice can be overwhelming and daunting to begin with.

Furthermore, the organization needs to be able to manage the ongoing collaboration and thus it is necessary to evaluate the range of choices from this point of view as well. Contrary to what some might think, customer control over wider area of business may mean more, not less, work for the organization. Crowdsourcing is, despite its name, indeed less about the customers taking problems out of the company’s hands and more about collaboration and creating together.

Depth of collaboration

Depth of the collaboration refers to the extent to which a company grants its customers insight and control to its processes. Figuratively speaking, it can decide whether to open the door to its lobby, its offices, its control room or its vault. All the different levels naturally have their advantages and downsides: while shallow collaboration (e.g. voting on given attributes) is easily managed and implemented in any context and poses minimal risks for the company, it probably fails in generating for the participators a strong sense of ownership, commitment and engagement in the brand. Granting the customers the control over the ‘crown jewels’ is more likely to spark excitement, trust and commitment in the customers, but naturally poses significant risks of driving the business to an uncontrolled spin, not least because any competitor guised as a customer will have access to the service as well.

It could be summed, that the greater the depth, the greater the potential for commitment and engagement, but at the same time the greater the risk for the company to lose control of its key assets.

When all the abovementioned issues are considered and decided on, a Focus for the crowdsourcing effort has been established. In the next post I will talk about the Language of a crowdsourcing effort.

— A couple of examples of Focus

Threadless crowdsources its T-shirt print design department, in effect eliminating the need for a design department of its own. At the moment threadless focuses solely onT-shirt designs, and is not bringing in alteratives to design other clohing, such as caps, ties*, etc. although this would technically be easily possible and for the untrained eye would probably seem like a good extension. This seems to be quite enough for Threadless members, given the creative freedom and endless possibilities to design a shirt print. Threadless also harnesses its customers to deciding on the best designs on behalf of the company making the experience of ownership and control in the company a strong one indeed. Roughly, the main function of the company is to sell and distribute the items that the customers have created and decided on. This kind of model on one hand minimizes the business risk, for the designs going into production already have an established buyer base. On the other hand, relying solely on customers for designs and decision making can prove difficult to manage, if the community should for some reason turn against the company (as happened to Digg a while ago).

Fon, on the other hand, focuses on crowdsourcing distributing its offer, a free-away-from-home WLAN network, to the masses. Foneros (as they call their subscribers) pay for their Fon broadband connection at home and in exchange get free connectivity wherever they are connected to a Fon network, which consists of all the other Foneros all around the in the world.

*The founders of Threadless indeed do have different services for different purposes, for example Naked & Angry for tie and wallpaper designers, but these are kept strictly separate from Threadless as the founders want to keep a clear focus with threadless.com.