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Listen to the crowd, but do not lose control!

Let’s be clear I don’t believe the crowd (without being very selective 
about your crowd) alone can give you fully formed insights, npd ideas 
and creative executions. I do believe however that the crowd and the 
web should play an instrumental role in research, planning and 
innovation. So here are 3 ways that the crowd should be used to help 
you crack these types of briefs:

Listen to the crowd

The web hosts conversations on pretty much every subject a researcher 
or planner could ever want to know about. In fact it is the biggest 
research resource we have access to so start using it. There are a 
number of tools including our own pulsar social media monitoring and 
analysis platform that allow us to listen to the crowd. When you start 
listening you will quickly find consumer problems that need solving, 
what brands are hot and not and lots of opportunities to engage with 
Pro-am consumers. Listening in real time to what consumers are 
discussing is addictive and very powerful if it feeds into an adaptive 
planning process.

Ask the crowd

Crowdsourcing is best used in the early stages of a project. Again 
there are lots of platforms you can use – we have developed our own 
platform that we are currently using for www.cocreatelondon.com. The 
process starts by giving consumers a clear question or challenge to 
respond to. What you will get back is a diverse mass of topline ideas, 
thoughts and some fully rounded responses. The role of the planner/
researcher with the help of clever filtering software is to look at 
the patterns from this data. What lays behind the ideas – in short what 
are the insights. Insights that can be used by planners to build 
platforms for innovation or communication.

Crowd wisdom

By opening up ideas in a crowdsourcing community for comment and 
rating you can see clearly user-generated clusters. This engagement 
amongst the community can highlight the strong ideas or themes; but 
just as importantly it can start the process of collaboration and 
co-creation to make ideas better and more appealing.