Not all crowds are mad

‘Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds’, first published in 1841, doesn’t paint a very flattering picture of crowds. It’s one of the most influential (and insightful) reviews of the irrational and rather stupid things that people do when swept up in speculative fever.

No doubt crowds still do very silly things (Mackay’s book is cited by some as the best ever written about market psychology). But recent decades have seen a more favourable view of the ‘knowledge of the crowd’ emerge – and recent years have seen that idea taken up in a big way by big business.

Companies are clamouring to hear your ideas – Which of these do you like best? What can we do to make your life easier? Help us design a new product!  Of course, not all are simply mining the public for information to help sales with no wider benefits; many see crowdsourcing as a way to do some good for the world and for the bottom line.

GE’s Ecomagination is perhaps one of the best established and best loved – a forum for imagination and innovation to create sustainable solutions to today’s environmental challenges, with the incentive that GE might just make your idea reality.

Ecomagination is huge. At the other end of the scale (but growing fast) are companies like Threadless – a T-shirt manufacturer that asks its online community of over a million members (growing by 20,000 each month) to vote for their favourite T-shift design out the 1000 that members posted that week. With minimal waste, 200% annual growth and revenues of over $30m, Threadless is demonstrating that a crowdsourced, on-demand model is good for the bottom line and its environmental footprint.
New crowdsourcing initiatives have flowed this year. We’ve had Heineken launching its IdeasBrewery, Tetra Pak’s second-phase renewable idea, Sainsbury’s asking for help to engage consumers in its ‘Love your Leftovers’ and ‘Million Meals’ campaigns, and Unilever’s Sustainable Living Lab, to name but a few. There are also closed communities sharing ideas - we helped Orange set up one of innovators, NGOs and tech experts to help us develop the detail behind the DoSomeGood app.

What’s driving this explosion in co-creation? Writing in the Guardian, Phil Drew offers some interesting analysis, highlighting crowdsourcing as a way to build new partnerships, to engage those causing the problem (consumers) as part of the solution, and as a new way to manage brand reputation: boosting opinions of a company by enabling consumers to shape its future.

But I think the crowdsource revolution is also a natural response to an age of social media. Corporate communications aren’t one-way any more. You’re part of a big conversation, whether you like it all not, and that has real implications for how you communicate what you as a business are all about. Yes, that opens up questions about reputational risk (what do you say? How do you say it? Who says it? What happens when something goes wrong?) but it’s also about opportunity. A rosy opportunity to show that your brand stands for something good, and it wants its fans to help it do it. While the internet is with us, co-creation will grow. Welcome to the world of crowdsourcing for good.