A blend of the real and virtual worlds A space where the crowd exchanges its ideas, voices its opinions and imparts its wisdom

World leaders are suddenly taking a big shine to social media. Digital marketers may have been shouting themselves hoarse over the big three networks for years now, but those who have so much clout in the “real world” have been wary, steering clear of the rambunctious animal called social media. It’s easy to see why. They just didn’t see it coming. And when it came, they didn’t understand it. And when they understood it, they couldn’t control it. Kingdoms are easy. Social media isn’t. But things are changing. In July of this year, a country crowdsourced its Constitution. And you can’t get more “social” than that. In Iceland, a group of ordinary citizens put forward the draft of a Constitution which is to be ratified by referendum. The draft took in feedback from hundreds of other citizens, who gave their inputs online. This is an example of the dramatic shift in power from institutions, governments and corporations to the people. This shift has happened for many walks of life. When it involves an open call to get specified content from people in general, they call it crowdsourcing. The term has been around for five years now, but the true meaning and impact of this shift is today being understood forcefully after ordinary people have gone and put heads of state out of home and palace. Few people would question people power in Egypt, for example, where Hosni Mubarak lies hospitalised today, awaiting his fate. Crowdsourcing isn’t just about revolutions and constitutions, of course. It’s also about businesses getting great ideas from “the crowd” rather than just from the select few suits inhabiting their swanky innovation centres. In social media circles, Starbucks is today as well-known for its crowdsourcing as it is for its coffee. What it did was to put up a website, mystarbucksidea, to call for ideas from customers. This caught on like wildfire. Ideas — and pretty good ones, at that — began pouring in by the thousands. Not only were many of these actionable and useful, but they made Starbucks customers feel their opinions counted — which they did. Many others subsequently used variations of this crowdsourcing, tying the ideas to various rewards. Drop in on the mystarbucksidea site to see the sheer variety of ideas coming in on any given day. I see a suggestion to make sugar-free frappes, another to sell Starbucks branded clothing, to support upand- coming artists, and to make steamed coconut milk drinks. Sometimes, it’s a negative event that leads to the crowdsourcing itself. Poor customer service or shoddy products, for example, will get a crowd going. Irate Dell customers coined the term “Dell Hell” for their problems as they posted them online. Sensibly, Dell responded positively and with action to these comments and even went on to be an example of how to use social media positively for its customers. An example of the crowd making its opinions known was when Gap, the apparel maker, changed its logo. Believing that it was time to modernise, they had their creative team make a new logo and proudly presented it online. The result was an unexpected backlash. People hated the new logo, en masse. So much noise and sarcasm over the new logo took place, that after a few missteps with their reactions, Gap reverted to the original — and all was quiet again. It was a nasty lesson for the company, which would have done well to ask people in the first place; except that no one quite realised that now, it’s the crowd that owns the logo. Since the Gap story, many companies and even individuals have gone to the crowd for logo and other design ideas. Crowdsourcing has now moved on to nuanced forms. Crowdsourcing.org describes a format with which an advertising agency goes to the crowd for creative ideas and storyboarding, but reserves the right to final selection and approval based on what their clients have to say. In a sense, the crowd becomes a virtual ad agency. Another way crowdsourcing has been used is to generate authentic brand content. That’s content you can’t get any other way but from the crowd, in fact. Some start-ups are creating websites and apps built wholly on the concept of crowdsourcing. Brazilian startup, Ledface, has set up a platform to crowdsource or use the “collective intelligence” to solve problems. Ledface wants to go beyond being a Q&A site to being based on social interaction to generate answers. Here, the answers aren’t even attributed to any one person, unlike with Quora or LinkedIn’s or even Facebook’s question pages. Whether Ledface will work or not remains to be seen. Crowdsourcing is being used for everything from fund raising to video creation, disaster management to music composition. Unsurprising then, that those in power are figuring out that it’s wise to turn to the wisdom of the crowd.