If you haven’t heard it yet, you’ll hear this word used more: Crowd-sourcing. While many complain about the tidal wave of “social media” hitting the web being filled with meaningless messages, some businesses are finding money in it. Crowd sourcing is like in-sourcing (doing it yourself) or out-sourcing (asking another company to do it), only you ask “the crowd” of people on the web to do it.
Two fundamental problems of traditional Market Research. One: it’s expensive. Good market research requires either very random sampling (which is hard to do), or large samples, and both cost. Two: The results are questionable, often because of the “Hawthorn Effect” – when the act of asking the question influences the outcome. People don’t always answer truthfully because they grapple with what they feel they should say. Social Media on the other hand is very cheap and often starkly genuine.
How it’s being used. There are companies sending out questions to social media – like how do they feel about a product, or an idea, or what do they want in a service. They tweet it, or blog it, or Facebook it – but they get it out there. Believe it or not, people respond – by the thousands. It has flaws, but for the low cost, and the fact that old school research has flaws too, it’s not a bad alternative. I found a list of 40 examples of businesses using this – here are a few: Pepsi, Netflix, Google, Microsoft, the Democratic National Committee, the Department of Defense (mentioned two weeks ago in this blog), and Cisco. Unilever, an $80 billion a year company in personal and home care products including Dove Soap, dropped their marketing firm of 16 years and joined a crowd-sourcing platform.
So, essentially, “crowd sourcing” solves the cost issue, but not the “Hawthorne Effect”. But I think there’s another effect you haven’t mentioned.
The Hawthorne Effect deals with people saying what they think you want to hear. But there is also what I call the “schoolboy” effect — where people put down answers that they think are funny, just for a laugh and because they believe they won’t be held accountable for what they said.
I’ve not done any research to substantiate this, but I suspect this will be much more prevalent in social media and crowd-sourcing.