Using Crowd Wisdom as a Marketing Tool
Crowdsourcing in its various forms has become a powerful technique used to connect with the end users and community, to engage with them, and to leverage their wisdom—all to benefit organizations or other community members at large. Crowdsourcing is a blanket term that refers to sourcing or engaging the crowd or community in one of the following ways:
Crowd Creation: Working with the crowd to have them create content for you based on their subject matter expertise in areas such as software development or building photo repositories. Popular examples include Linux and iStock Photo.
Crowd Voting: Where you engage the crowd to stack rank the data you have, helping you filter through a large volume of information with a very fast turnaround. You will often see brands or organizations hosting voting systems and polls among their fans and followers on social media.
Crowd Wisdom: Leveraging the wisdom of the crowd to solve problems or predict future outcomes. Software quality assurance typically falls in this category. Sometimes stock markets also belong to this category because depending on the crowd’s perspective, the company’s stock rises or falls.
Crowd Funding: An up-and-coming crowdsourcing technique that involves the community raising funds for ideas that might otherwise be denied credit or opportunity.
While each of these techniques is powerful in its own right, crowd wisdom can be an extremely powerful technique for varied disciplines, including human resources, marketing, and business development. When you gather internal wisdom to understand employees’ views on an organization’s current performance, future vision, and potential, it gives you very valuable information about a company’s health index, the employees’ satisfaction, and their trust and belief in the company.
With proper analysis this data helps the organization make important decisions to solve internal issues such as improving employee morale, hiring practices, etc., and external issues, such as the company’s brand positioning and marketing and enhancing sales.
A recent study by Glassdoor.com lists the top ten companies with the best business outlook in the next six months, including analyzing giants such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. This study asked employees of several companies a simple question: “Do you believe your company’s business outlook will get better, stay the same, or worsen in the next six months?”
This simple yet realistic data from the ground is one of the best data points a marketing team can leverage, making crowd wisdom a great resource in positioning a company’s brand. Crowd wisdom, whether gathered through internal or external studies, is becoming an important and inevitable marketing tool. It will be interesting to see the creative ways in which marketing teams use such data to define not just an individualistic marketing strategy but also a holistic competitive marketing strategy.
