The Buzz Bin

Overexposed crowd image by Victoria Peckham

by Geoff Livingston

One of the strangest aspects of newfound freedom is the want to run riot over everything. You can see this with attitudes towards free content, popular theories, unconference and crowdsourced conference content, and general crowd-sourcing initiatives. In reality, these initiatives bring great creativity to bear (many outweigh the one or the few), but they require management. Unfettered crowdsourcing leads to hit or miss wisdom.

One of the more interesting articles or blog posts I have read on the topic came from the Harvard Business Review’s discussion of Cisco’s recent crowdsourcing effort. Cisco found the effort to be very productive, but it needed to invest significant crowdsourced product management resources to effectively harvest the raw ideas.

MIT’s Alex Penton found the same phenomena in social networks. Idea markets can laud one idea over and over again, which may or may not be a good one. Meanwhile, other ideas are left to sit on the side of the street, regardless of their potential value. Popularity reigns supreme.

This matches my experiences as well. While I’ve seen some magnificent achievements via the crowd, I’ve seen some really bad things become popular, too. Twitter reminds me more of a high school cafeteria than a place of great wisdom, but then every time you give up, something like the Iran election happens.

One of the reasons I am very selective about attending the various unconferences you see is because the crowdsourced content has been hit or miss. For me the various X-camps have to be taken in the sense of mining. I know I’m going to get a lot of raw ore, and the diamonds are few and far between. If the topic is extremely prescient or the people in attendance meet one of my core targeted stakeholder communities, then I’ll go. Otherwise, it’s likely to be a waste of time (you get what you pay for).

Don’t get me wrong, crowdsourcing offers great benefits and true potential.  But like an unregulated marketplace, you may find it works, or goes terribly awry.  Organizations need to implement management tools to ensure they get the full benefit of the crowd.