Tag Archives: crowdsourcing

The Wisdom of ‘We’

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My column in BtoB magazine this month. Original here.

The manager of the Mansion on Peachtree hotel in Atlanta has it pretty good these days. The Mansion is the top-rated hotel in the city on TripAdvisor.com, with 163 reviews, nearly all of them five stars. The endorsement has enabled the Mansion to hold its premium prices and cut its acquisition costs. It’s also got the staff hopping to maintain the coveted top position.

“Social media is vital to our business today,” said Micarl Hill, the Mansion’s managing director. “But it also keeps us on our toes. People can tell everybody about a bad stay with the push of a button. What they say isn’t always fair, but we take it seriously.”

Recommendation engines like TripAdvisor, TravelPod, Google Places and Yelp are transforming the hospitality industry, and they’re coming to your town.

Mark Snider, owner of the Winnetu Oceanside Resort in Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., personally contacts every single customer who posts a complaint about his hotel on an online review site. Fortunately, it’s not a big job. Winnetu’s No. 1 rating on TripAdvisor drives so much business that Snider slashed his marketing budget this year.

If you think this trend is confined to consumer markets and small electronics, think again. Consider Spiceworks, a thriving community for IT professionals, where members have posted thousands of reviews of everything from computer servers to computer consultants. “When I’m looking at a vendor, I don’t Google it; I Spiceworks it,” wrote one forum member.

At Glassdoor.com, employees rate the companies they work for, review executive performances and swap salary information. How do you think the recruiting business will be changed by this?

And we’re still in the very early going. It’s only a matter of time before review sites pop up in every category of business, including B2B. Facebook and LinkedIn already make polling easy, and Quora is awash with questions about recommended vendors.

This is going to change the rules of marketing. People stopped listening to pitches some time ago, but they didn’t stop listening to each other. What you say about yourself now matters a lot less than what others say about you.

Marketers need to be tuned into these conversations 24/7, spot detractors and quickly try to turn them around. They also need to provide incentives for people to tell others about their positive experiences.

Start by discarding the “see no evil” mindset. Customers will share their opinions whether you want them to or not. You might as well be open about it. Southwest Airlines and Dell Computer encourage customers to lodge complaints on their company Facebook pages and address nearly every one. That’s called responsiveness, and it’s always been a good business practice. Today’s it’s life or death.

Giving Up Control Unleashes Wisdom of Crowds

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From Innovations, a website published by Ziff-Davis Enterprise from mid-2006 to mid-2009. Reprinted by permission.

At IBM, podcasts are now a popular form of internal communication. One IBM executive who used to hold an unwieldy weekly conference call with 500 people spread across the globe now podcasts the same information. Listenership has doubled. At a company in which 40% of the employees work primarily outside of an office, podcasting is revolutionizing internal communication.

It wasn’t always that way. Podcasting was introduced without fanfare at the computing giant, but it quickly achieved traction because employees were allowed to experiment and “play” with the new medium, according to George Faulkner, who is one of IBM’s most visible podcasters.  In fact, one of the first successful internal uses of podcasts arguably had no business value at all: it was an IBM “battle of the bands.”

But that experimentation led to experimentation which yielded practical business applications that have reduced internal communication costs and improved IBM’s outreach to investors and the public. This is one more example of how letting go of control can unleash the innovative energy within an organization.

Sabre Holdings learned this point an enterprise Web 2.0 platform that is changing the ways its employees communicate and creating a company knowledge base. The software is known internally as SabreTown and now is being packaged for sale as Cubeless. It’s social networking software that any company can use behind its firewall.

SabreTown was derived from a website called Bambora that Sabre constructed for consumers. Members define their areas of expertise and agree to answer questions from other members in those areas. The more exchanges that take place, the richer the member’s profile becomes and the more useful the travel database.

SabreTown has helped unlock untapped expertise within Sabre Holdings, according to Al Comeaux, senior vice president, corporate communications for Sabre. With Sabre’s rapid evolution into a globally distributed company (only 45% of employees are U.S.-based today, compared to 85% eight years ago), there was a need to break down barriers of location and time.

Getting employees to buy in to the community meant giving up control over how they used the tool. Sabre rolled out the application internally without restricting the topics employees could discuss. “The more we can get people talking, the more we can capture,” says Erik Johnson, general manager of Cubeless.

More than 200 groups have formed within SabreTown and personal blog spaces are available to everyone. Any information entered into SabreTown is processed by the relevance engine and built into employees’ personal profiles. Sabre is effectively creating a massive knowledge base in which employees willingly populate with their own information. And the company is building out SabreTown’s capabilities to make it into a full-blown social network.

A key element of success was giving up control. Sabre Holdings’ executives say that SabreTown would never have taken off internally if Sabre had tried to dictate how it could be used. By letting people play, innovation took over and business applications emerged. SabreTown is a hit within Sabre and it will pay big dividends as employees share expertise.

As I noted last week, large organizations and their managers struggle with giving up control, but that’s often precisely what they need to do to. Web 2.0 technologies have demonstrated that the wisdom of crowds is greater than the knowledge of any one manager. By giving up control, organizations can gain loyalty and respect. Which, paradoxically, enhances control.