Tag: crowd sourcing

Kraft needs lesson in ‘Crowd Sourcing’

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

The bungled Kraft Vegemite iSnack 2.0 comes down to a really simple problem. Something they (Kraft) do all the time, and I should know, I used to work there.

They can never seem to fully embrace new ideas in their entirety. They want to innovate, but leave the final decisions to senior management. They tend ignore research, or take snippets from consumers. They only ever go half way.

Vegemite iSnack 2.0

Latest news is that they are changing the name – your jar might be a collectors item in 10 years!

What Kraft should’ve done:

Not ask for ideas to chose from, but let the crowd choose and vote – like Digg! It’s crowd sourcing 101. If you want an opinion from the crowd, then you’ve got to let them decide too. That way you have them ‘on your side’.  To choose a brand name for 48,000 is as pointless as letting a very uncool CEO decide. Which is ultimately what they did.

Startup blog says: Embrace the crowd entirely, or don’t bother engaging them.

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Collective Intelligence

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

You are in a room full of people.

You are speaking to them on stage and have their full attention.

You tell them to pretend all the people in the world are in this room

You ask the people who believe they have ‘above average intelligence’ to raise their hand.

All the people in the entire room  raise their hand.

The fact is, exactly half will be above and half will be below… we all assume we are the smart guys, the good guys, the people make things better…. we all believe we are adding positively to the collective intelligence.

But collective intelligence has a slight nuance. It only works when we let people with specialist knowledge fill in our own knowledge gaps and or take the lead in areas of expertise. If instead, we take the average viewpoint of the collective audience we usually end up with a pile of crap. Collective intelligence can only occur when we segregate and allocate information requirements, not when we aggregate. The latest proof of this is Youtube.com

youtube logo

Once upon a time youtube was a reliable source of cool and important videos. Circa 2005 the most viewed, most discussed for the day, week or month was an intelligent reflection what mattered. Now it’s a mish-mash of over produced pop songs, inane  comedians, and soft porn. A sad failure of the digital ‘Wisdom of crowds’. Youtube is still incredibly valuable, it just takes a little more digging these days.

The point for entrepreneurs is this: The crowd is not always right. Taking all advice from the crowd on how to iterate your product, service or website could result in a very average product. Intelligent design is usually the work of intelligent people.

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Industrial Tourism

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

Industrial Tourism is big business. It’s a little know fact the Boeing factory in Seattle has over  180,000 visitors a year.  At $15 a ticket that is approx $2.7 million in high margin revenue.

boeing 787 dreamliner

Local Australia firm fosters brewing has a popular brewery tour at their Melbourne plant (you get a free beer at the end of it) as does Media conglomerate NBC in the Rockerfella Centre in New York. None of this is free, and they are all fully booked pretty much every day.  The thing that is almost as powerful as the cash such Industrial Tourism generates, is the relationship it builds with the brand.

It is pretty cool to be taken into the ‘secret back room’, even though we can all be pretty sure that Boeing or any large conglomerate are not about to give away any secrets on said tours. But this is where startups and SME’s can do it even better. We can let our early adopters into our Factory, Alpha testing, Retail back room, Warehouse, New Product Development session. We can let them expose our secret goodness to the market for us. Especially if we do something awesome like make great software, use recycled materials or anything creative.

So the question for startups is this: How can we let our early adopters and brand evangalists into our secret world to spread our world?

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