Understanding crowd sourcing is vital for business

Jeff Howe's youtube clip on "crowd sourcing" really gives us a good glimpse of its potential for business use. Like Jeff mentions in his video, online users and communities can now replace employees within a company to fulfill particular needs. For instance, product development is a great example. Consider Fiat and its crowd sourced car as proof. Reaching out to the masses to get idea's on new products like Fiat did will become more prevalent - if hasn't already.

What's important is to continue to encourage online users and communities to engage with companies and let their voice be heard. But therein lies the challenge. Companies should "feed" the crowd and make sure they are taken care of for their ideas. Recently, Google failed to do this with their Chrome browser product where they solicited design ideas but failed to acknowledge the winners of the effort. This could create backlash and deter the crowd from contributing ideas.

What are some other challenges with crowd sourcing that you can think of?

Improving Your Ability to Share and Connect

After reading Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook announcement, I'm a little concerned with the direction they are headed with user information. There's growing sediment on the internet that Facebook doesn't respect privacy and that they want to use information gathered on users for marketing purposes. That last part isn't a shocker, after all they are in it to make money, however the lack of user control mechanisms is a little discomforting.

For example, I can't stop from being tagged in photo's or having an obnoxious friend write something on my Wall without my approval. I can easily show up in the stream of live feeds and can be embarrassed for all of my 370 friends to see -- which is something a few of my friends have had to deal with. So you know what that does? It makes us less of a participant on Facebook. We will start to shy away from pictures, not post our friend's wall and ultimately become passive users. This is strictly my opinion, but if Facebook doesn't make a more concerted effort to give us more control over our online social lives, it may backfire and make their "social network" far less social.

Although, there's a lot to question about Facebook's privacy policy, some would argue they have gone to good lengths to give users control -- I'm not one of them. But here is a link on CNET for the pro's and con's of the new privacy settings.

Clive Thompson on Real-World Social Networks vs. Facebook 'Friends'

The article "Clive Thompson on Real-World Social Networks vs. Facebook 'Friends'" is an interesting read. Often when I hear about "Social Networks" I immediately think about the virtual world and not the real world we live in. I wholeheartedly agree with the premise of the article that it's important to improve real world communications through interaction data gathering. It's about time research focuses on real world social networking in the workplace which will hopefully lead to greater efficiency.

I believe as a society we've become so enthralled with online social media and examining it's impact we've forgotten about our real world interactions. We need to be aware that everything we do is social and that a lot depends on how well we communicate with each other outside of the virtual world. I sincerely hope research studies like the one M.I.T. is conducting continues not only in businesses, but in other areas such as health care and improving transportation. The following article in BusinessWeek describes some more "reality mining" benefits.

My First Blog Post

Hello,

My name is Peter, and I'm excited to start blogging. I'm an MBA student at American University and I really believe in the power of social media.


On my honor, all posts on this blog are my own