Using Social Media and Crowd-Sourcing for Quick and Simple Market Research

Innocentive and crowdsourcing engineering jobs

As a career scientist I find the crowdsourcing concept disconcerting. Perhaps I'm not alone. My science knowledge has been paid for by the gracious companies who hired me. They paid me before I knew anything.

Innocentive and it seekers are milking this investment of others for free. They pay is what seems a lottery system. 135,000 solutions are offerred and one wins!!

I worry that serious science companies will wisen up and say to new engineers: we'll pay you only when you produce and only a lottery system.

Steven W. Webb of OH @ Feb 26, 2009 21:20:56 PM

Innocentive

Yes, Steve. They Innocentive also often references a Solver Community or a community of Solvers, however there really is no sense of Community for registered Solvers on their site. The Solvers are able to view and post comments and solutions to the site, but they are unable to discuss with others or identify others' expertise to truly be a member of any community or to collaborate.

Susan Brown of MA @ Feb 02, 2009 12:05:47 PM

Innocentive

Susan:

Good point about the difference between crowdsourcing and collective intellgence. But that is one problem with new buzz words - their meanings often overlap. I've seen several presentations - including one from Innocentive - where they use both terms to describe what they do.

Steve King

Steve of CA @ Jan 31, 2009 16:03:25 PM

Innocentive

Actually, Innocentive does not use 'collective intelligence' in that they support one solver to one seeker analysis and solution submission. There is no interaction between solvers to collaborate. I think that would be powerful, but that is not what this site provides.

Susan Brown of MA @ Jan 30, 2009 15:22:37 PM

We're OverInfatuated with Crowdsourcing and other 'Easy' Market Research Techniques

Market research, to be done right, is still a science, unlike any of the crowdsourcing platforms cited by Steve. In no way can crowdsourcing yield the definititve, projectable data that lead to identification of new and repositioned brand strategies. Granted, you can attain limited consumer insights, primarily directional opportunities, from the kinds of approaches that Steve espouses, but this is always going to be extremely limited in scope and application. Major problem: the 'universe' you get in an any crowdsourced sample will provide applications pertinent to only that particular universe. We read all to often about folks becoming overjoyed with the results they get via crowedsourcing, but they should always adhere to a major caveat: never attempt to project these kinds of data to broader market segments, otherwise ultimate decision-making can court marketing disaster! Short, simple surveys consisting of a few questions are not always the sole rmeedy. What works best are well thought out questions asked of those respondents who accurately reflect that market against which you plan to direct future efforts!

Arthur Z. Savitt, CEO

WAC Survey and Strategic Consulting

Arthur Z. Savitt of NY @ Jan 29, 2009 00:36:32 AM

Small Business Research

Great ideas, Steve. Market research can be amazingly valuable. When most of us think of market research, we think of stacks of statistics, fancy focus groups, state-of-the-art studies, and expensive surveys. Surprisingly, surveys don't have to be uber-innovative, complicated, or give you a warm, fuzzy feeling to provide quick, cheap, useful customer information. All market research needs to do is answer a few key questions – the simpler, the better.

Kirsten Osolind

CEO

RE:INVENTION, Inc.

kirsten osolind of CA @ Jan 28, 2009 12:35:04 PM

Jim: Agreed. The data you collect via social media crowd sourcing can be messy, hard to work with and almost certainly not statitically representative of the larger population you are trying to understand.

But in many cases it may be the only way to get input, or the only way to afford input. Maybe I should have called this post "collecting feedback via social media crowd sourcing" and avoided using market research:).

Companies with large can use sophisticated tools for this task. Radian6, for example, is a popular social media monitoring tool (www.radian6.com).

Steve of CO @ Jan 28, 2009 11:01:14 AM