Week 2: Crowdsourcing

Resources consumed:

-Interview with Andressen

-Interview w/ Pandora founder

-Twitter followed on Motorola

-Crowdsourcing chapter one

-Brand Communities lecture

-CIA crowdsourcing article

-MySpace auction article

-15 Year Wows London with Memo on Media 

     The first point I would like to make is that when in New Orleans for a vacation with the family, beware of the parking gods! Our troubles on this trip did not allow me to post on my blog this week until tonight. This is the second time that we have had major issues with parking our car while in that city. The valet at our hotel lost our entire set of keys, including 2 laser cut keys that are expensive and only the dealer or factory can make. When they couldn't find them, we were forced to stay 2 extra days while we worked on several options on how to get home. We eventually decided on having a friend in town (Florida) break into our house, get my set of keys, and drive several hours to drop them off. The hotel will foot the bill for the set of keys and we got home much later than anticipated. Of course I did not bring my laptop with me as this was a family trip and as luck would have it, the write-up I completed earlier in the week was on my home computer. I will include all of my thoughts in this post for the week and apologize that I didn't space them out more.

     The major theme of this week was crowdsourcing and putting the power of the voice of the consumer in the businesses hands, for better understanding their feedback, whether positive or negative. 

After reviewing the topics, my learning goals were to better understand the term of crowdsourcing, which I had heard of and knew there was a book with that same title, to watch 2 more videos on the week one CEO's that I admired, and to better understand how companies were using Twitter and which tactics were more effective.

I was able to complete all of my resources without any technical difficulties but did find it interesting that one Charlie Rose interview was able to be viewed full screen while the other was not. Perhaps this was a bandwidth issue or something else, but the full screen experience was much better than an embedded video, which translates to watching any online videos, such as YouTube.

 Before I cover this week's theme, I first caught a couple of interviews to catch up from the copious materials last week that I found interesting. My planned career transition in around 2 year will focus on finance, and more specifically, private equity and business development. I always like to hear an entrepreneur's story and especially enjoyed the different paths and personalities of Pandora's Westergren and Andreesen Horowitz' founder. Each of these guys serves as a role that I would like to one day fill: running a business, or several businesses as Andreesen does, that they truly are passionate about. They both touched on financing rounds of venture capital, whether receiving them for start-ups or giving them to promising ventures. In that same vein, I was also happy to read later in the week about the private equity auction of MySpace, and the diametric views on that company's future. It seems that the world of private equity and alternative investments are murky at best and not everything can be a financial winner, but it is interesting to know that those guys are can turn around some pretty unprofitable/sad businesses. I suppose they apply many of the lessons we read about in business cases more effectively than the next guys and use the power of leverage. 

      Crowdsourcing is something that I have seen more and more without formally studying it, in places like Facebook and YouTube, and especially for years on sites like EBay. I believe Ebay was the first major site to operate strictly on community feedback as a basis for online reputation, which was an exciting time. I have been purchasing items (and occasionally selling) since 1999 on Ebay and have a habit of telling wary friends and family that in all that time, I have never been burned by some crooked transaction. Everything I have ordered arrived as ordered, and on time, and if it wasn't, I was duly informed of the problem. The power of the crowd to work in this fashion has understandably moved to things like customers reviewing products on a website as to overall grade as well as more nebulous aspects such as the "fit" of a shirt relative to its purported size. I find the power of a product getting 4.5/5 stars by thousands of interested reviewers a wonderful testament to that product, since those are all unpaid minutes taken out of the day of that customer to generate that review. I even find it extremely helpful that the newest trend has been to parse the crowd reviews by most relevant, or some other metric so that I can view the most universally helpful information first when making a decision. 

     

      From the marketing perspective, I thought the chapter of Crowdsourcing as well as the video lecture were effective in opening up my eyes to the many applications of the crowd's opinion, as well as highlighting the rapid changes in the industry that I have only observed some of thus far. I think that the Twitter assignment was a great application to teaching us to observe an actual company do their best to interact with their customer base, as well as showing us the right and perhaps wrong ways to do it. We discovered several things about the structure of Twitter, such as putting newer posts on top of a user's feed, that benefits the more loquacious tweeter, and harms the glib. The company we followed only tweeted 4 times over 5 days, which we all agreed was not going to show up on their crowd's dashboard as much as needed to strengthen their brand. The CIA application of crowdsourcing and the article's mention of DARPA's use of forecasting terrorism events served as a parallel to the criticisms of the financial derivatives market being more like gambling, which I enjoyed noting. 

    In conclusion, I didn't find any of the materials consumed this week to be boring, but perhaps less enlightening then the others was the article on a 15 year old "wowing" media with his "revelations" on how teens consume media. Many of the thoughts that he put out, such as individuals not really needing both a twitter and a Facebook account since only friends would follow you on twitter is not mind-blowing to someone like me perhaps, but might have been to an traditional ad exec who hasn't been keeping up with the
rapid changes. In all, a good week to get better acquainted with the processes behind all of those "likes" that we click in Facebook and how that information is being used by smart marketers.