As I continue my ongoing research about prosumerism, one of the recurring themes is that “the wisdom of crowds” isn’t usually the dominant story. Rather, it’s often about finding a particular uniquely qualified mind, somewhere in the world, to solve a particular problem. But there are situations where the wisdom of crowds seem to really work, and as I watched last week’s NBA draft I realized that it might be just such a situation- and that a team looking to save money might do well to fire their scouting staff all together.

The reason is simple – there is an extraordinary network of bright people following the preparations of players for the draft. Many of them share information regularly. Over time, you start to see a general consensus emerge through all the collaboration taking place – which is highlighted by the striking similarity of many mock drafts. And lo and behold, when I watched the draft it was remarkable how similar the results were to most people’s projections.

Not only that, but the little “surprises” weren’t really scouting stories, at least early on. When Rubio dropped to #5, many fans knew exactly why (contract buyout questions and what teams he’d happily play for in particular). And perhaps there still might be a case that a great scouting staff can locate a good player late in the draft, as San Antonio was once known to do – but I’m not convinced this is the case anymore. I’ve noticed over the last few seasons that many of the players that were noted as the late round “sleepers”, and turned out to be just that, were pegged by many, many mock drafts in advance.

So frankly, that’s what I might do if I was an owner right now caught in a cash crunch – fire most of my scouting staff, and redirect the money to making sure I have a great GM. Long suffering Clippers and Timberwolves fans, among others, will tell you the importance of having a uniquely qualified mind in that spot…

A couple of days ago Naumi had an excellent post on the diminishing returns of collaboration. He highlighted two areas where problems typically emerge - at an individual level (one person can only do so much) and at a project level (only so many people can do one thing). Included in the discussion was the mention of Dunbar’s number, which sets “a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships” at 150. In terms of collaborative overhead, Dunbar speculates that “as much as 42% of the group’s time would have to be devoted to social grooming.”

As I was reading the post, it got me thinking about twitter (as has been happening a lot lately) - and the implications that it might have on various collaborative efforts within society. Many, many people scale their Twitter network well beyond the 150 person threshold, and many of them seem to be extremely active. This would seem to cause potential  problems at both the individual level (the brain getting distracted and the quality of the output suffering) and at the project level (if too many people in a network are responding to an ‘idea’, it could easily become a mess of distracting noise). One area we believe that this is playing out a bit is in relation to comments on blogs. Hypothesis: the quantity and quality of comments on blogs are dropping because of the time being allocated to tweeting and other such activities. The jury is out on whether this a good or bad thing.

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One of the themes that I’ve been talking a lot about recently is that “broadcasting” has gotten an unfairly bad rap as many people associate social media with conversations and user-generated content. As I investigate how social media platforms evolve, I’m continuously finding that these developments, while significant in certain situations, are far less important than people tend to think - and that the future of social media may have a lot more in common with traditional “broadcasting” strategies than is commonly believed. Video viewership patterns on YouTube was one example (with content from “traditional” media sources tending to dominate user-generated content), and the popularity of top celebrities, writers and companies using Twitter as a broadcast platform is another.

The underlying idea here is simple. The vast majority of us cannot create good / entertaining content, no matter what we may believe. Just because millions upon millions of people create blog posts, videos, and tweets on a daily basis doesn’t mean they’re interesting to many people, or even being viewed. And while the rise of social media has led to an abundance of new content, every abundance creates a new scarcity.

In this case, what I think is becoming ever-more scarce is easy to identify - time. I think we’re crossing a major tipping point where people engage with many of these social media tools, get quickly overwhelmed by it all (knowingly or not), and fall back onto select few sites and people who provide the best content people are looking for in the proper context - and it has how these sites and people leverage social media that will be critically important to determining it’s future.

What got me thinking about this again today is Mark Cuban’s most recent post- Who Cares What People Write? To quote the first paragraph:

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When I did a presentation of Twitter at our Enterprise and Government 2.0 event a few weeks ago, I spoke openly about one particular problem I have with social media. In short, I’m one of those people that thinks great ideas come along only once in a while, and I like to take my time to think about them, what it all means, how I might be able to contribute to the understanding of it / development of it, etc. As the blogosphere, twitter, and all the rest have exploded in popularity, not only can the continuous stream of information become overwhelming, but it’s easy to get caught up the game of only talking about what’s new - this week, today, or in the last couple of hours. There’s just so much information out there, that all the older stuff can get buried very, very quickly - as anyone who manages a blog can tell you.

In turn, today I wanted to go back and re-visit what is probably my very favorite example of Wikinomics in action- Motley Fool (investment advice), which launched the Motley Fool Beta Caps community in the Spring of 2006. It’s a site that represents how a company with a “traditional” business model can embrace the principles of wikinomics, community and collaboration in a very thoughtful way - while actually making money in the process. The key is that they have used the insights from their community to enhance their core value proposition, rather than replacing it. (Note: you can read Don’s original post about it from December 2006 here).

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I was in Branding 2.0 panel this week (it was a pleasure sharing the stage with Denise Shiffman, Peter Hirshberg, and Frank Capek - each was extremely thought provoking), and for such events I like to try to come with a perspective that’s slightly different than what people might expect. Here’s the short version of the angle I decided to take:

“Branding 2.0 is about leveraging the web 2.0 to deeply engage with a relatively small community of uniquely qualified minds and/or “prosumers” in order to co-create value propositions, as well as using it to do much better, cheaper, and targeted broadcasting to get the message (or offer) out to everyone else. Given the negative rap that the word “broadcasting” gets today this second part that is often ignored in 2.0 discussions, but it might well be the bigger opportunity.”

What led to this line of thinking was simple – with the rise of the web 2.0 and social media, many people have jumped to the conclusion that it’s all about conversations, communities, and deep one-to-one (or many-to-many) engagement. While I am a believer there is a great opportunity on this front, something has always struck me as odd. If you look at a lot of the literature of community development and engagement, it’s not uncommon to see estimates of about 1% of people / consumers / prosumers actually being interested and talented enough to engage in such communities. From that base, an extraordinary amount of attention is directed towards how to create these communities and make them work – but far, far, less attention is given to how to connect with the 99% of other customers, and potential customers, that are out there. From what I’ve seen, doing so has a lot of similar properties to traditional broadcast messaging – but in a far superior way thanks to the web 2.0. Continue reading…

We’ve mentioned CrowdSpring a few times on this site - I introduced it on May 23rd, 2008, summarized an interview with the founders on June 13th, talked about my own great experience with them on December 9th,  and Alex recently brought them up again in his post - is spec work evil? It’s a fascinating company that plays directly in the prosumer space, and I’m sure the philisophical and economic debate about these types of platforms will continue for many years.

But I thought I’d bring them up again because they sent me an email (because I’m kind of a big deal I’m on their email distribution list as a past buyer) about a very cool contest - LG Mobile Phones has opened a “Design the Future” competition, with more than $80,000 in rewards for people that can come up with the most “revolutionary” LG mobile phone designs. You can find all the details about it here - and join the competition if you’d like, as long as you are American. I’m hoping they have a similar, less ambitious, and more self-depreciating for us Canadians in the near future :).

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As I work on my Twitter case study (highlighting how different brands are leveraging the platform, tied to the 2 x2 I wrote about a little while ago), I’m becoming ever more intrigued by the different ways different people use the platform. With that on my mind, I found the difference between the messages in two articles I found today quite interesting.

The first is an article from the Globe called “Seriously Short Stories“, which highlights how a variety of authors are trying to develop a knack for micro-stories - those told based on the limits of Twitter (i.e. 140 characters at a time). The second is a post from Shel Holtz, which talks about Twitter as a gateway to substantive content - focusing on tweets that link to some greater content (blog posts, videos, etc.). These are two very different mindsets.

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Editor’s Note: this is a re-post. You see the original at www.denisbhancock.com.

Many companies have been struggling with how to deal with employees using social media during “working hours”. In the National Basketball Association (NBA), the prime working hours are game time -when all of the athletes should be acutely focused on helping my fantasy basketball team win the task at hand. In turn, the recent controversies about certain players tweeting at halftime are rather interesting - could they turn out to be a canary in the coal mine for how companies should think about their own employees using things like Twitter?

The first major story that hit the press on this front was when Charlie Villanueva of the Milwaukee Bucks, Twitter ID CV31, decided to tweet during the half time of a game against the Celtics that was tied at 41. His message was as follows:

“In da locker room, snuck to post with my twitt. We’re playing the Celtics, tie ball game at da half. Coach wants more toughness. I gotta step up.”

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For the last little while I’ve been looking at how different brands are using Twitter, in an attempt to come up with a framework for the various approaches being taken. Below is but one of the  two by two matrices that I’ve come up that I think is kind of useful. You can find a more complete discussion of it here, but the general idea is that some accounts are brand-centric, while others are individual centric (the X axis). Some accounts are broadcast-centric and some are conversation-centric (the Y axis). Mash the two together, and you start getting a picture of different approaches that are being taken. I’ve looked at about 40 companies so far for this (a sampling of which are included below)… thoughts?

For most of the last year there’s been one major point in relation to wikinomics that I’ve been trying to make more than any other - that while it’s often seen as synonymous with the “wisdom of crowds“, more often than not wikinomics-enabled strategies focus on finding (and leveraging) “uniquely qualified minds“. This is a subtle but important difference that is most obvious in the first story presented in the book - GoldCorp. Rather than being a tale of how a crowd of people came together to “mass collaborate” and create value, it was an excellent example of using transparency and the web to find those few uniquely gifted individuals that know how to find gold.

However, this line of argument isn’t meant to say that “wisdom of crowd” applications don’t exist - and I continue to look for examples that I find compelling. One that I find quite interesting right now is the NBA Team Ranker. If you launch the application, you are presented with a simple question - “Which team is better?”, from two options (say, the Raptors and the Lakers). It takes only a second to toss your opinion into the ring. But as the application does this micro polling over and over again, rotating through the 30 NBA squads in a series of binary choices, it adds up to a “collective wisdom” - a ranking from #1 to #30 for the entire league.

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