Tools For Change

The model views the phenomenon from the perspective of a company considering intensive collaboration with customer collectives and aims to identify the different actors on the field as well as their roles in the collective creation process. Furthermore, it suggests a set of elements (the FLIRT ring) that have to be considered and established in order to achieve desired action in the community. I will first briefly explain the different actor groups and then continue on to the FLIRT elements.

I tried to keep things as compact as possible, so some aspects may not fully reveal themselves from this post alone. If you need a lowdown on crowdsourcing I suggest you start here. As this is work in progress, I urge you to comment, ask questions and challenge my thinking.
THE GROUPS

Creators (core)

This is the group of people that is the most enthusiastic about the collaborative offer, and they go to great lengths in pursuit of creating something unique. They submit original ideas and content as well as remix each others’ material to produce solutions that will earn them respect, status, acceptance, reputation, as well as material rewards. In other words, they are the competing to conceive the winning solution.

Critics (inner ring)

Critics are the people that do not produce original solutions, but are highly involved in the conversation around them. They criticize and offer development suggestions to creators but also act as evangelists to the wider audience by actively spreading the word about the stuff they like (or alternatively, stuff they hate) by e.g. blogging. They are often driven by a personal attachment to either the creators, the collaborative company (they might even work for the company) or the field of work, in which they perceive themselves to possess valuable expertise. Like the creators, they seek rewards in increased reputation and status, but in addition also gains in audience and authority. They seek less direct material benefit from the collaborative relationship, but are instead enthusiastic about the conversation itself and often seek to convert non-believers to their view.

Crowds (outer ring)

The larger crowd is participating on a much lower level of activity and involvement than the critics. They tag, recommend, rate, vote, send e-mail links to friends and sometimes write an occasional review. The interaction is therefore quite shallow compared to the previous level. There is however a great wisdom to be gathered from all this grassroots activity: their input elicited carefully, the crowds through their actions help organizing the alternative solutions and understanding their worth. They thus introduce comprehension to the community as they confirm the relevance and value of the best material produced in the inner core.

Outside of these groups are the traditional consumers that do not participate in any way to the collaborative offering, but instead only view content and perhaps buy the items on offer.
THE ‘FLIRT’ ELEMENTS

Facilities

Facilities have to be in place for the participants to have a place for meeting and interaction. However it doesn’t always mean that the company has to build their own social network service from scratch. There are a lot of networks already in place just waiting for a suitable partner to join forces with. In addition, a hybrid service can also come to question, in which some parts (e.g. discussion forums) of the community are maintained by the company while parts of it (e.g. video content) reside on a 3rd party service

Language

The customers are not stupid. They have to be treated with respect. Although this is already a well-worn principle, it continuously tends to be forgotten, most notably by large corporations with the most resources to pour into the issue, such as these examples show. Fake bloggers and ‘user-generated content’ crafted by ad agencies are bound for a beating. The customers’ worldviews and values need to be understood and appreciated.

Also the community’s potential social objects (photos on flickr, videos on youtube, jobs on linkedin, URL’s on del.icio.us) have to be recognized and utilized, since no social network revolves around an idea of just having one (nor does it revolve around your company, no matter how hard you wish it would).

Incentives

Nobody, not even your customers like to work for free. The incentives required by the different groups varoy, and some are willing to work for less than others, and the issue has to be given very careful thought in engaging the community in an exchange meaningful to all participants. It is often not money alone that inspires the customer creators, but also, depending on the context, things such as fame and access to otherwise inaccessible channels or resources might prove as powerful incentives.

Most of the time, you will have to genuinely challenge your customers and offer them a chance to enhance the quality of their life - even if it was just by the smallest amount - in order to stimulate them. Nobody is prepared to waste their free time to trivial, routine tasks with little or no ’show-off’ value.

Rules

Don’t expect to a swarm of creativity by creating an open environment where everybody is free to do whatever might occur to them. Naturally, you have to think about e.g. manufacturing constraints already for practical reasons (Threadless has strict rules for number of colors, resolution, size of design, etc), but also arbitrary constraints can be challenging, inspiring and produce unique and noteworthy results.

Apart from standards for submitted content, also the rules of interaction need to be established for a fruitful conversation. At what point and how a member needs to register can make or break a relationship very quickly.

Tools

The people obviously need to have access to the tools necessary to create and participate. These tools can be provided by the company (like Lego’s Digital Designer, a piece of software that let’s you design your own lego models) or it may be assumed that people already have them (digital cameras / cameraphones in the developed world). Sometimes the distinction is not so clear cut (who will provide the empty cans for the artists in the art of the can competition), and thus the question is always worth a thought.

In addition, the company needs to establish its own tools for gathering the results of the conversation and turning the collective wisdom into action.

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So there you have it. As said, the model is hardly complete, and you should indeed already have some questions coming my way. I will try to answer them the best I can.

Should you use the model or part of it for your own purposes, do give credit where it’s due. You may not, however, use it to gain direct monetary benefit (publish it in a book, print it for selling purposes, etc.) without a permission

PART TWO (2)

The model as it stands at present consists of five FLIRT elements that need to be considered and established as well as a view to the different levels of participation and how these different levels need to be taken into account in a crowdsourcing project.

The FLIRT elements are:

* Focus**
* Language
* Incentives
* Rules
* Tools

Although the model stresses continuous and open development through constant conversation and adjusting, the elements of the model connect to different levels of decision making, and can thus be, at least initially, thought of as sequential. The first task is to set up strategic Focus and goals for the project, after which tactical considerations, Language, Incentives and Rules can be considered. The most technical level is the Tools, and should be discussed only after the previous elements have been established to a sufficient extent. The following figure clarifies the division between the elements:

levels

The levels of participation, on a rough level, are

* Creators,
* Critics & Connectors,
* Crowds, and

* Non-participating consumers

I decided to set out to depict a little more descriptive model of the various levels of participation than the common 1-9-90 model (1% generate content, 9% interact with the content, 90% simply consume the content) not least because, as it seems at present, the participation rate on the low-activity level can be anything from some percents to 80%, depending on the community in question. While it was not possible within the scope of this study to engage in a research studying all the various roles a person can have in crowdsourcing, I nevertheless felt it important to identify the most obvious ones in order to reflect on these the different FLIRT elements, most notably Incentives and Tools.
Origins, aim and methodology

A few words on the origins, aim and methodology of the thesis. The model has been the result of more than half a year of intensively studying the subject of crowdsourcing and related fields. Being a marketing major at the Helsinki School of Economics, the model is constructed and the problems viewed from the viewpoint of a marketer of goods and/or services wishing to engage its customers, existing or potential, in a collaborative effort, campaign-style or longer term, on a given field of business. Given the nascent and still forming nature of crowdsourcing both as a mode of business and field of study, various related fields needed careful examination in building the model. These other fields included lead user theory and customer participation in innovation, word-of-mouth and viral marketing, social media, user generated content and web 2.0, netnography and new tools for performance measurement in digital media, etc.

Outlined roughly, the research process consisted of

1. a general level information gathering and knowledge building on the subject of digital media and customer participation in the 21st century through a) scientific articles, b) magazines and newspapers and c) blogs and other online resources;
2. a cross-case study of a few successful crowdsourcing efforts/businesses;
3. netnographic research utilizing a set of widely read expert blogs, trusted newsblogs, and other online sources directly or indirectly linked to these primary sources (over 300 articles, all of which you can see here); and
4. expert interviews focusing on the validity and relevance of the model, which, as I already stated, are now in progress.

As the thesis was constructed using abductive research logic (in contrast to purely inductive or deductive), the research process was far from linear and the routes from the phenomenon itself to empirical research to scientific theory were numerous and directed in all the possible ways between the three.

In the following post I will dig deeper into the first element of the flirting with the customer - Focus.

*By ‘final’ I mean how it will be presented in my thesis, not as ‘in its ultimate form’, which according to perpertual beta -thinking is not even a desirable state. As the business models it aims to help build, the FLIRT framework retains a possibility to grow and develop through future insight as well.

**Those familiar with the first FLIRT model (If you don’t know it, better that way) probably noted that the first element in the model is changed from Facilitation to Focus. There is two reasons for this:

1. In order to sensibly establish an effort engage customers through crowdsourcing, strategic Focus of the effort, as described in the following post, clearly needs to be the first element to be considered and established before other considerations come to question.
2. The previously first element, Facilitation (e.g. platform for the community, findability, low barrier to participation) is, after all, a largely technical issue, and fits well as a subchapter of the model under Tools (together with tools for creation, tools for harvesting community input, etc.)