9 Rules for Successful Crowdsourcing

Barry Libert and Jon Spector

Wikinomic communities can often perform real-world tasks faster, better, and cheaper than individuals. But building a successful community is no simple matter. Here, as in all aspects of business, from hiring to marketing, the price of great rewards is great risk. And that has never been so true as in the era of Web 2.0, when a seemingly minor mistake can snowball into a fatal disaster with lightning speed.

Here are a series of guidelines intended to help companies avoid some of the pitfalls along the 2.0 road. They reflect the experience of leaders who have followed that crowdsourcing route.

1. Lead from the Rear

It takes a company a lot of time, money, and effort to build a community. Inevitably, the temptation arises to run it like any other part of the enterprise. That’s a bad idea. The whole point of crowdsourcing is to access the fresh, powerful ideas and instincts of the community. The company’s role is to provide direction and then stand back: Interference with communal processes defeats the purpose.

In other words, the company is not the star of the show, but the producer, working from behind the scenes to make it easy and comfortable for all community members to get involved and stay involved. The words and ideas should be allowed to flow unimpeded: a collective stream of consciousness. When overzealous managers interrupt and derail the conversation, valuable ideas are lost.

When Jeff Bezos opened Amazon’s database to savvy outsiders, he didn’t tell them what to do with it. He announced, “We’re going to aggressively expose ourselves!” He left it to the crowd to figure out how best to use the site, and he profited mightily.

2. Know When to Step In

Communities have built-in self-correcting capacities. Troublemakers get squelched or ignored; bad information gets corrected. On craigslist.org, for instance, whenever an ad breaks the site’s terms of service—say, a seemingly personal appeal turns out to be a link to a Web site—or if a post is miscategorized or is really spam, the community members are all over it like a terrier chasing a cat. More than 25 percent of craigslist postings are flagged for removal by members, and of that number, an amazing 95 percent turn out to be violations.

Still, the threats to community operations are endless and often ingenious. Sometimes they come from those who have a special agenda in mind for the group—an outside marketer, say, who’s hoping to capitalize on a group’s size to peddle his or her own company’s products or even hijack the community to do his or her selling. Sometimes the threats are simply the work of twisted minds—so-called flamers, for example, who seek to entertain themselves by creating trouble. They like to post a controversial, hostile message on a community’s site for the sole purpose of stirring up an angry response and a disruptive debate.

When flamers or other intruders hinder a community’s operations and remain unchecked, the company should not hesitate to step in. By the same token, if the misinformation being bandied about might cause someone to make a potentially harmful or costly mistake, managers owe it to the community—and to the company—to clarify ASAP. In all cases, though, such intrusions should be brief and hedged with explanations.

That same caveat applies to those moments when the community seems a tad too messy or even drifting toward chaos. Let’s face it, people want to type in their own favorite fonts, punctuate any way that suits them, and express themselves in idiosyncratic ways. They also will tell off-color stories, brag about their grandchildren, and generally wander off-topic. All this is understandable and even beneficial in principle: Original ideas often emerge from such spontaneous, off-the-cuff behavior. Communities thrive on the unexpected and the spontaneous.

But if communities wander too far from their mission for too long, company managers need to find ways to weigh in—summarizing the discussion, for example, to move it forward.

It can be tricky to maintain an unfettered environment that encourages original thinking yet never gets so tumultuous or off-point that it fails to function properly. Best to err on the side of laissez-faire. Otherwise, you’ll never know how many groundbreaking concepts and comments your community was deprived of hearing.

3. Form a Club, a Real Community of Like-Minded People

Creating a vibrant community is all about creating a critical mass of good minds and spurring them to spark off each other. But the odds of success improve when the members share the same general outlook—it simply makes it easier for them to communicate and cooperate. Their energy is spent on the company’s mission, not on quarreling over their differences. A mix of jocks and nerds, say, or left-wingers and right-wingers, is less likely to achieve the trust and commitment needed to evoke and maximize the group’s collective knowledge.

A company’s first target group in forming a community should be those who have a clear interest in connecting with the organization—satisfied customers, for example, or residents of towns where the company operates. The secondary goal is to enroll as many bright people as possible.

Creating a vibrant community is all about creating a critical mass of good minds and spurring them to spark each other as much as possible. An exciting circle of like-minded people can be a magnet for others at a time when business needs all the good minds it can find.

Success today depends on amassing intellectual property, strengthening brands, and holding on to fickle customers, all of which require very smart people. They’re in short supply, partly because of the newly global talent hunt and partly because talented people can pick and choose where they settle and dictate their own terms.

The bright people needed to create a vibrant community are likely to be so involved in the conversation that they carry it on beyond the virtual venue. Encourage them to do so, to keep talking and thinking about the community wherever they are. Suggest that they work the room at conferences and exchange phone calls, e-mail, and snail mail—anything to help members uncover shared interests, strengthen connections, and deepen personal bonds.

Size matters, too. The community must be large and smart enough to ride herd on the content it produces, catching and correcting mistakes and improper additions as they occur.

Generally, the bigger the collective brain, the greater the variety of viewpoints and information, and the better the content. As the members interact, they absorb one another’s interests and expand their horizons so that what might have begun as a community focused on marketing, for instance, gradually branches out to innovate in other processes vital to its corporate sponsor.

4. You Can’t Hide, So Don’t Even Try

It’s an inescapable truth of this transparent age that sooner or later—and, mostly, sooner—the errors a company commits will be exposed for everyone to see. When a mistake is made in working with a community, the best course is to admit it without delay, apologize, and make sure it’s not repeated.

When an error surfaces, there’s a natural inclination to hunker down and hope it will all go away. Companies put off responding—or, worse yet, erase e-mails and otherwise try to deny or pretend that nothing happened. Not a good idea. As we’ve seen “on the highest levels,” cover-ups have a way of making matters worse.

The same goes for the tired old art of spinning, the biased and deceptive effort to put the best face on an unfavorable incident. Spin destroys the implied covenant a company has with its community and can create all sorts of havoc.

The bottom line is this: In a world where the inner workings of government and business are daily revealed through e-mails, companies need to erase the word confidential from their mental hard drives. The whistleblowers reign supreme, abetted by those ever-more-powerful online search engines whose algorithms don’t distinguish between good news and bad.

So if a company’s reputation with its community is tarnished by some misstep, denials and evasions are the wrong way to go. The company needs to ’fess up, explain how it happened, and transgress no more. (P.S. It might also find some creative ways to let the community know about the positive things the company has accomplished lately.)

5. Forget about Perfection

Anything that gets members of a community talking is good. Anything that slows that conversation is bad. When a company communication is too flashy or too finely tuned, it can rapidly shut down discussion and make it impossible to get the valuable feedback the company seeks.

We all experience the phenomenon in our daily lives. We’re sitting with friends or family around the kitchen table or at the neighborhood bar, the banter and easy talk bouncing back and forth, when a newcomer joins in. There’s nothing really wrong with him—he’s pleasant and articulate, offering very intelligent, cogent opinions and ideas—but somehow his presence is an intrusion. The jokes fall flat. The flights of fancy are grounded.

That’s more or less what happens when companies’ messages are too perfect, too polished. Overly explained and edited topical material makes people feel as if everything has already been said, thus deterring them from jumping in with their own observations and opinions. Instead, many companies adopt a comfortable, down-home tone, and some even sprinkle their remarks with grammatical or spelling errors. The object is to give the company a human face and avoid language that might be seen as officious or patronizing.

Southwest Airlines, long admired as the master of the discounters, is also a master at communicating with its communities. Its “Nuts About Southwest” blog, for example, is written by different employees each month but is open to customers and the public as well. They weigh in with comments and complaints. That’s why the company likens the blog to an “online watercooler.” The blogs and the comments are all part of a comfortable, easygoing conversation that ensures the company of an interested, involved community of employees and customers.

The tidy perfection of polished presentations is the wrong tack to take with a community.

6. Stir Things Up

There’s nothing quite so blah and unproductive as a homogeneous, complacent community Web site. The sponsoring company is looking for new ideas, instructive feedback, and a glimpse of future customer trends. Instead, it sees nothing but platitudes and familiar comments—many of them favorable, to be sure, but none of them truly helpful. It’s time for the company to step in and stir things up.

What’s needed is a real debating club, one in which all viewpoints on a particular topic are welcome. Companies need to make sure that contrary opinions are encouraged, that members start challenging the revealed wisdoms of the group. It’s in the play of argument and counterargument that fresh ideas rise to the surface.

The goal is to create a site that touches people where they live, that elicits involvement and passion—and that means finding the right proposition.

7. Say Thank You

Companies that sponsor communities need to remember that a transaction is taking place. The members of the communities are sharing themselves and their talents in ways that have value for the companies, and their contributions deserve to be acknowledged and rewarded.

Gather.com, for instance, uses a point system to reward member participation. The more its members join in the discussion, the more points they earn for spending on goods and services provided by Gather’s partners. People who frequently contribute quality content to the site can even earn cash rewards.

Whatever approach a company plans to take to thank its community, the community should first review it to make sure it is perceived as fair and adequate. Anything less will defeat the purpose and leave the members frustrated and annoyed.

Many communities, such as Gather.com, reward their top contributors, but not everyone has equal access to a computer, and many people have a lifestyle that permits only infrequent contributions. Moreover, one provocative or brilliant post can outweigh a string of mundane comments. It’s important for companies to remember those members whose value is very real but cannot be easily measured by number of contributions.

8. This Is Not a One-Night Stand

Communities take time to develop. Attracting a cast of valuable characters who share common interests cannot be accomplished overnight, and establishing and strengthening the personal relationships so necessary to a productive environment is a long-term proposition. This should not be rushed.

While the community is forming, companies need to experiment with content and ways of inciting valuable discussion. Community members themselves should be enlisted in that process, providing feedback and their own suggestions for keeping the idea pot bubbling. At the same time, companies would do well to help members improve their collaborative abilities, perhaps by encouraging them to get involved in other collaborative environments.

Above all, sponsors should pay attention, observing the interactions and flow of ideas within their communities and monitoring community reactions to the sponsors’ initiatives. Sponsors need to develop their own sets of goals for their communities and to establish target dates for the evaluation of their virtual ventures. For a new group, a year or 18 months is soon enough to make a determination of whether the game has been worth the candle.