No, seriously. Stop it. I’m tired.
I came and I thought, hey, this is kind of neat-o and it empowered me at first. I thought, “Awesome! They want my opinion! They listen!” and I offered it and the feedback was, “Great idea!” and I watched as you implemented it, then benefitted from it and I felt good. I was great at first, but then after a while, I started to feel a little dirty…a little used…a little like cheap labor, replacing people you probably laid off or decided to save money on not hiring because you were getting so much great value out of my time. Maybe it was because it seemed that you believed you could ‘tap’ my well of ideas or ‘pick my brain’ endlessly? Maybe it was because my generosity goes so far and you overstepped your bounds? Maybe it was because you had a chance to reward my efforts, but dropped me like a wet rag as soon as I asked?
And maybe I CAN be replaced in a second. Free ideas are everywhere and people are offering them up like they are going out of style. No loss for you if I feel used, because there will be plenty of crowds to ’source’ when I’m gone. I’ve officially gone back to feeling MORE insignificant than before you asked me my opinion.
Feel familiar? Wondering what it is about this happy, generous 2.0 world that is starting to turn you from enthusiastic to curmudgeon? Look no further than to Community Freeloaders, especially Crowdsourcing Strategies. Now, not all ‘customer led innovation’ (my preferred phrase) taxes the bejeebees out of customers and community members. Properly handled customer innovation requests make darn certain that the customers feel wholly and completely appreciated. There is not only a plan in place to COLLECT the ideas, FIND the best ideas, IMPLEMENT the ideas and so forth, but there is also a plan in place to REWARD those ideas.
And let me tell you, the bigger/better the idea, the bigger the reward should be.
I’m not talking about paying for ideas, though. Just let me get that out of the way. That provides the wrong incentives. But I’ve talked about reciprocity here before and it’s really important. When asked recently what my ’secret’ to building up my reputation in this area is, I replied:
I don’t like to build my reputation, I like to build others’ reputations.
I would far use my influence or connections to help others succeed than use them for my own benefit. And I’m not just saying that to be cheesy. I really hate tooting my own horn, contacting people for favors, pimping my own stuff and doing anything else that even smacks of getting myself ahead in the world. I used to think that would be my downfall, but I’ve discovered that it is actually my greatest asset.
But ‘crowdsourcing’ is usually about benefiting one source…the company or individual asking for the advice/ideas. Unless the ’sourcer’ can build something into the process that makes certain it rewards individuals contributing in those ‘crowds’. Open Source communities are actually awesome examples of valuable contributors finding rewards organically - access to better jobs, ability to turn their expertise into consulting gigs, wide influence in the community itself, which will lead to speaking gigs, teaching gigs, writing books, etc. The folks at Dell Idea Storm are working hard to find ways to benefit their thousands of contributors, even creating programs to give free merchandise, fly in people with new ideas to work on products with the team (with full credit and rewards), hiring from within their idea community, etc.
I’ve been a long opponent to the term ‘Crowdsourcing’ as it invokes the image of an unpaid group of volunteers giving ideas for free while a corporation rakes in endless profits from them. It speaks to the further exploitation and general suckage of customer goodwill. I don’t think it is related to it’s positive cousin, Open Source. Open source is the term used to describe the state of the source code: can you see it? Is it hidden? Outsourcing is a closer relation, describing the act of saving money by hiring employees from low cost labor markets…only ‘Crowdsourcing’ goes one step further and doesn’t pay the labor at all. Sounds like a sweet deal, right?
Crowdsourcing is another short-term way of thinking about how one can benefit from the relationships one has in communities. Over the longterm, any Social Capital one had will be whittled away from exhausting this free-labor force. Beware of catchy buzzwords, because they are usually all razzle dazzle and no substance.
As Kathy Sierra says, “This ain’t about you.” It isn’t. It’s ALWAYS about helping other people kick ass (another famous Kathy-ism). Instead of ’sourcing’ or ‘tapping’ the brilliance of your customers, why not help them implement those ideas in ways that benefit everyone? In ways that make them the stars, not you?
Oh, and if someone has spent a good deal of their time helping YOU kick ass? You need to step up and find ways of reciprocating asap or else you’ll lose that goodwill.
13 Comments
Re skeeving at the prospect of self-promotion and putting high value on any chance to help others succeed — I really like your calling this your greatest asset.
In the last years of my career as a book editor, I felt strongly that I’d hit a career wall — I was pretty good at working with writers and putting together really useful books, but not so good at sharklike business behavior, at squeezing writers and photographers, at taking advantage of naive young (and affluent) talent that would, for peanuts, give their all to the labor of researching and writing a book just so they could become published authors. I knew I’d never do well in publishing at senior-management levels; it’s a twilight industry that rewards those who can keep squeezing profit from declining revenue, and I’d no stomach for that kind of work.
Today I know that what floats my boat are moments where I know I’ve helped someone kick ass, either by having built an empowering tool, or through the experience of coaching another to use all the good tools that exist today.
Ah, Kathy Sierra. I surely do miss her voice.
Hmm…Full disclosure, I work at Cambrian House, the self-described “Home of Crowdsourcing.”
Crowdsourcing is a buzzword, for sure. Why not help it grow up? Instead of doing the usual, “Opensource = good, Crowdsource = bad,” Use your extremely large reach to help define the word in a positive way, instead of complaining about something that has the opportunity to help engage everyone in a conversation (yet another fan of The Cluetrain Manifesto).
I would prefer the term Crowdsourcing simply referred to anyone wanting to tap into the wisdom and participation of a crowd. Common sense dictates the crowd isn’t going to stick around for long if its efforts aren’t being rewarded, so why even worry about that?
What you describe at the top in italics isn’t something anyone wants to feel. What you describe yourself as doing is how I define Crowdsourcing. Building relationships and using everyone’s strengths to get further than you possibly could on your own, while helping others do the same.
Instead of reacting to a perceived negative, get in there proactively and make it something postive. I firmly believe you have the power to do that.
Interesting conversation and I think I understand both sides of the fence here.
From Tara’s viewpoint, I’ve seen many companies take advantage of the community around them. For example, when I’ve indicated usability issues with a website to a company, they’ve often ask how they could improve their site. Well if it’s a short reply, sure I’ll give it. However, if I have to elaborate on how their entire structure of their site and navigation menu needs to be redone and how best to do that (including some diagrams), forget it, not going to happen. If their site is that bad, they should be hiring a professional to improve it (and I’ll often recommend some companies to them).
Another example from a computer game perspective is betas. Done properly, both sides benefit from the experience. The gamer gets to play the game for free and the developer / publisher gets the community to help them stress test their game and fix any last minor bugs. Done incorrectly, the gamers are basically used as guinea pigs on testing major bugs (i.e. show stoppers) and even figuring out how the gameplay should flow. This is shameful and often very tough on the game testers because they are actually testing an alpha, not a beta, and it’s something that they should be paid for, since there is little to no enjoyment (reward) from the game (since it’s so broken and incomplete).
I do however see Blue’s perspective as well, as I’ve always wanted to see a community content management system that was built from the ground up for this sort of thing. For example, in building a community site, the idea is to get your content from your readers who over time eventually become reviewers of upcoming articles and even authors of articles. Therefore, the more someone contributes to the community, the more they would benefit from it. So within any given pay share cycle, the system would check the incoming funds and distribute them accordingly based upon the share distribution module. So if an author wrote an article that got many more page views than another author, then that author would be paid a proportionately larger amount since their contribution benefited the community more so than the other authors.
That’s why I laugh when I see sites that pay out based upon the number of words in an article. This is nuts, as one author could write half the content of another author, yet attract five times more readers due to what they are writing about and how they write it. Of course in a number of words based payout model, the company who is paying out the authors is the one who benefits the most since their expenses in paying their authors are relatively fixed yet their income is always increasing (assuming they have great authors who don’t clue in and decide to start their own venture).
A response to this post by Cambrian House staff.
<a href=”http://www.cambrianhouse.com/blog/cambrian-house/crowdsourcing-is-not-milking-the-masses-for-free-labour-so-put-away-your-teets/” http://www.cambrianhouse.com/blog/cambrian-house/crowdsourcing-is-not-milking-the-masses-for-free-labour-so-put-away-your-teets/
Sorry for the ugly link. I’ll be back later today to leave a more meaningful comment.
Software companies have been crowdsourcing since day 1 so the negative side of CS is already a well-established business practice that has not changed in the wonderful wacky world of web 2.0 (beta). Open source was the positive response to this form of user exploitation and has achieved much that is worthwhile.
For me the positive side of crowdsourcing is when the crowd that’s sourced is in fact the crowd that benefits - and benefits roughly equally because they all share a common goal. A common goal is unlikely to be for everyone to make equal money from some kind of business idea because that’s not a wish, it’s a want. They are different animals.
Which is why social activist/philanthropic crowdsourcing is the only kind that works for me as a positive force. But this is really based on goal-achievement not idea development. Sharing a goal and asking for the help of others to contribute towards its achievement is not the same as sharing an idea in order to tap into the “wisdom of crowds” to help to develop it. Social goals are by definition “owned by” the social group that supports and benefits from the goal; however an idea that an ideator contributes to a “crowdsourcing” site becomes owned by everyone and no-one at the same time. It literally becomes part of the wisdom of that crowd - which is fine if that is what you wanted when you contributed the idea.
If the term were “crowdbenefiting” or some such, it would be hard to say that it couldn’t be a force for good, but for me “crowdsourcing” says what it does: A rather large sucking sound.
There is something going on at Facebook, they’re asking users to help translate the whole thing, last time I check in English to Spanish were like 10 thousand something of phrases. I don’t think this is the correct way of doing it. Could this be labeled as Crowdsourcing?
I’ll agree with you that there are a number of less than scrupulous people out there taking advantage of what they see as free advice, instead of giving back in turn to the pool of social capital (and in some cases, like Threadless, real capital).
We’ve had an “incident” here in Australia recently where a large organisation deliberately went after advice from a number (many, many) sources in order to build information with no intent of giving back or hiring any of the advice givers. You can read about it at http://silkcharm.blogspot.com/2007/12/raping-web-20-australian-community.html.
Thankfully, I wasn’t one of their victims. Several of the people I consider professional colleagues (and often rivals for business) and friends were. We all now know who the culprits were and they’re unlikely to be able to hire anyone in the social media/social networking consulting community.
This sort of behavior is, as I said, unscrupulous as well as being downright unprofessional. Despite our desire to share, we’re not here to be taken advantage of. I almost think you should name names, although I’m certain that word will get around in a less public way.
Thanks for this.
“Maybe it was because it seemed that you believed you could ‘tap’ my well of ideas or ‘pick my brain’ endlessly? ”
Yaaaa, /that/.
Back when I was getting $250/day (early 90s) it was great fun to spin off an ace now and again. You know, a diamond. There are stories about that in the consulting folk-lore.
But with the expectation that everything is low-hanging fruit … I mean, I don’t want to start packign 12guage with rock-salt, but galllll.dang!
Economic activity is fundamentally social. Attitudes / received wisdom are just the individual aspects of status quo.
In the 2100s I want to be able to hit a triple and bill for 3 hours work, at a rate that reflects the end result. That it took me 15 minutes shouldn’t mean it’s free (as in beer) … took me years to develop those chops.
HNY
–bentrem
Nice, nice, nice.
You´re crossing the tunnel of light.
What you´ve written remains me that the best things I`ve ever done in jobs… were absolutely for free.
I´d like to get back to those old days…
Tara said: “There is not only a plan in place to COLLECT the ideas, FIND the best ideas, IMPLEMENT the ideas and so forth, but there is also a plan in place to REWARD those ideas.”
See, this is the fundamental problem to me, much more so than the issue of “ideas”… business all too often skip straight to the payoff: the idea. It’s the one night stand of the business world. No matter how smooth you try to make the process of a one night stand, you’re not really building the relationship overall.
Yeah a lot of Web2.0 Juggernauts have been built on the backs of the People thass fer darn sure* Flickr + YouTube + i guess MySpace + Facebook come to mind* People do get tremendous Value + Entertainment + Enjoyment from contributing to those Social Networks. Tho when U see the outrageous Valuations they receive largely due to the # of Eyeballs that their Advertisers are Happy to Pay Big Bucks to get in front of it makes U wonder who’s being Rewarded*
Ironically I thought of Cambrian House + I liked what they were doing - might be a way to get yet another Billion Dollar Idea actually out the Door. But i’m always leery of Giving Away Ideas only to have somebody else scarf it + make the untold Millions that are so rightfully MINE!
;))
Jimmy Wales also hates the term “crowdsourcing.”
For wikipedia, wikia and the illuminated budget we call it “community produced.” Since it also has the ownership aspect in the word produced and community because the group must own it…
So maybe we should use this as our tag?
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