For years, marketers relied upon focus groups to determine the direction of their brand and business model. These focus groups could easily range from $10,000 to $50,000 with catered sandwiches and a one-way mirror where clients and agencies could analyze the sentiments of doctors, businessman, soccer moms and NASCAR Dads without being seen.
Nowadays, we can use social media to perform the 21st century’s version of a focus group—crowd sourcing. Crowd sourcing, like it sounds, is sourcing your crowd (or followers) into providing feedback on new ideas, creative content, or obtaining better ones for future product development.
Well-known examples of crowd sourcing include:
- iphone apps
- Wikipedia entries
- Netflix’ $1 million contest for technology to improve relevant movie suggestions
- Ebay
- Digg
- Delicious
Corporate brands have benefitted by creating:
Dell’s IdeaStorm website, “where [customer] ideas reign.”
Starbuck’s MyStarbucksIdea website is where customers can share, vote, discuss and see consumer generated ideas for the company. Â Both Ideastorm and MyStarbucksidea act as forums for individuals to submit, rank and have ideas selected and produced by the host company.
In fact, Starbucks’ Strawberry Banana Vivanno Smoothie is an example of consumer taste buds being heard and Starbuck’s concocting a new drink.
And within the next few weeks, Twitter, the marketing communities lead resource for crowd sourcing is benefitting from this technique recently. Its developers will be implementing Lists and Retweets services in response to user demand.
One of the most recent and successful case studies in crowd sourcing came from Glacéau’s vitamin water, who released a new “flavor creator” app for Facebook last month and invites users to vote for a new flavor and vitamin formula for a new product release. They went as far as to offer $5,000 to the fan who creates a winning packaging design.
The crowd gets a product of its own creation, and vitamin water gets a pre-approved-by-the-crowd product for release in March 2010.
Does your business depend on crowd sourcing?
What are you doing to measure and monitor customer sentiment to better improve customer service, product design or sales?
Have you considered how contests and surveys can get your crowd of followers more engaged with your brand?
Social media marketing requires you to first listen and then learn from the public. You can use our Measurement and Monitoring Package to enhance this process.
And when you’re ready to implement an engagement strategy, you can use the other tools at Brand Management 2.0 or email info@brandmanagement20.com to learn how our engagement specialists would harness public support on your behalf.
One thing is certain, crowd sourcing is cheap, and you can accomplish more with crowd sourcing than you could ever with focus groups.