Two recent phenomena make this age old question relevant, for businesses and even for individuals.
Businesses have traditionally relied on Experts or Consultants; the ‘phone a friend option’, when needing information on questions that no employee can definitively answer. This first reaction, of calling an expert, is fast changing in the business world and giving way to reliance on a community of people. Communities are also changing how individuals get answers, on mundane or even complex matters.
First phenomenon: Connecting with lots of People
Business communication has increasingly turned social. People are now staying in touch with a lot more people, powered by these social and mobile methods such as tweets, check-ins, status updates and activity feeds etc. These social tools are evident at industry conferences accompanied by the now essential tweetups, and even in the scores of social tools being announced in business software suites, with each passing day.
Second phenomenon: Real-time Collaboration
Our collaboration tool sets are now working in real time, allowing activity streams to be incorporated in the way we work. Whether it is status updates being incorporated in software or businesses learning how tags maybe the fastest way to organize knowledge; just examples of how enterprise software is getting better at collaboration in real time.
These two phenomena are leading to a more collaborative enterprise which in turn is driving a demand for industry wide communities.
In fact, Passageways is proud to be providing the platform for several such industry wide communities and observing the interaction in such communities is truly insightful. Our own customer community was launched last year – Communitree. This community now has Passageways customers from several countries all sharing ideas, asking questions and even sharing their own nuggets of information that even experts at Passageways headquarters latch on to everyday. What is impressive is that every question asked gets several answers within a few hours and generally from a diverse set of people.
From all empirical evidence, it appears that if you have a large wise crowd (diverse and independent), the crowd WILL beat out the experts in calling the right decision. Of course the crowd has to be somewhat knowledgeable, without being experts in the subject.
In the popular game show Who Wants to be a Millionaire, the "phone a friend" (expert) strategy has resulted in the right answer 65% of the time, quite impressive indeed. But if you really want to be a Millionaire, "poll the studio audience" strategy has been right an unbelievable 91% of the time! We have already seen how Google search, Wikipedia, and the stock market, all of whom rely on the large groups of people, are already teaching us how "poll the studio audience" is a better option than "phone a friend".
So, next time you have a question that really matters, you should try posting it to the biggest crowd you have access to, and not default to the phone a friend option. Can this also be your best bet for next new product idea, for new recruits, vendor selection etc?
Passageways Communitree is already the largest source of new product ideas, new feature suggestions and is the biggest collection of best practices for Passageways products. Our team of 30 employees can’t compete with hundreds of customers all eager to help each other!
We now have the tools to harness the collective wisdom of very large groups of people. This is fuelling the next phase of innovation at Passageways. Your business can't snooze on these trends either, as such community portals and collaborative software platforms are being planned across the business spectrum. After all, individuals and businesses can use this studio audience several times a day!
Yes, I admit - when you are a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail. Yet, it is hard to ignore the power of Facebook and the phenomenal reach of Group On. As part of Passageways, I have watched the collaboration industry closely for eight years. The collaboration industry is arguably the most active space from an innovation standpoint, across the business spectrum. All this makes me a firm believer in the power of communities and hope you will immerse yourself in an online community for your favorite affinities!