Sticky Posts

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Crowdsourcing – A New Trend

Crowdsourcing is a term coined by Jeff Howe back in 2006. Howe describes crowd sourcing as search and selection of services among many participants, thus the wisdom of crowds can be harnessed to produce solutions and results beyond the capability of a single person as well as speed of innovation is exponential.

Blog :: Crowdsourcing – A New Trend

Friday, October 22, 2010

Crowdsourcing - A New Trend

Crowdsourcing is a term coined by Jeff Howe back in 2006. Howe describes crowd sourcing as search and selection of services among many participants, thus the wisdom of crowds can be harnessed to produce solutions and results beyond the capability of a single person as well as speed of innovation is exponential.



Crowdsourcing is ideal for a variety of business. It is also particularly well to trends, promoting technological or social issues.


Technology - Operating system like Linux & open source games like Wesnoth are developed by volunteers. Crowd sourcing is a preferred to improve GUI or code.


Stock Photography - Stockphoto website like iStockphoto has wide range of professional but cheap images.


Fashion Design - Threadless is all about T-shirt design. All its design comes directly from the Threadless community.


Knowledge Management - Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia in many languages. It is a genuine alternative to Google in the field of knowledge search.


Commercial Marketing - Poptent is a crowdsourcing solution that connects brand marketers with videographers to produce low cost, high quality commercial videos for use online or in television.


Automotive - Fiat500 had its fans involvment in the product development. Ideas and inspiration for the design of exhaust, side mirrors and more were generated using crowdsourcing.


Tourism - RUF Travel Community had its RUF Travelers in a step by step manner to generate all the contents for their website.


Music - Sellabrand members got the share in the profits and the musicians got a chance to present themselves and a chance of a professional CD-production.


Upcoming endeavours have been relying seriously on crowdsourcing to either reduce cost or generate profits. It produces a win-win circumstance for CrowdContractors and CrowdContributors. CrowdContractors can use crowdsourcing in combination with other methods. Still very few CrowdContractors have truly engaged this approach on leveraging the crowd and the competency of the Web. On the other hand, CrowdContributors get a opportunity to win challenges that earn them considerable amount of incentives and reputation. They can use technology to assist open debate on each of the assignments and commenting on each other's work.


The use of crowd sourcing strategies is not always without risks. Faulty move in crowdsourcing can rapidly reach any damage to your brand and position. Let’s see how to use crowd sourcing in six steps successfully.


1. Plan a crowdsourcing project
  • Create a good project plan.
  • Create scenarios and strategies for the success of your project.
  • Make adequate procedure for negative publicity.
  • Have a clear view of your objectives & make it organized. Without which the CrowdContributors objectives would be less clear and organized.
  • Put forth lots of discussions and brainstorming.
  • Find member to create the new technology for this project.
2. Move from small to big
  • Start with small clearly defined tasks.
  • Optimize your process.
3. Focus on team member than technology
  • Need for a visible supervisor.
  • Common goal for all team members.
  • Team member participation is necessary.
  • Exploit members for new trends and development through ideas.
4. Transparent communication with CrowdContributors
  • Provide adequate information and specifications.
  • Give timely feedbacks to all relevant questions.
  • Goal, plans and steps should be communicated quickly and directly.
  • Use all means of social media networks for communication.
5. Availability of resources
  • Beginning with a handful of team members to thousands of CrowdContributors would need a rapid shift to powerful servers.
  • Make sure you external communication is not effected due to overwhelm CrowdContributors.
6. Check all legal issues
  • Check all participants’ contribution with copyrighted works & legal issues.
  • Output is free of trademark, etc.
7. Measure success
Each following items can be calculated for a day, a week, a month, a quarter, ever 6 months or a year.


      Users
  • Total of subscribed users.
  • Total new subscriptions.
  • Percentage of new subscription (from 0.5% to 20%, in most websites between 1% and 5%).
  • Total visitors.
  • Percentage paying for premium.
  • Various other conversion goals.
  • Number or percentage users just viewing items (Usually around 90%).
  • Number or percentage users editing items (Usually around 10%).
  • Number or percentage users creating items (Usually around 1%).
      Social networking
  • Total number of inter-people connections.
  • Average people connections per person. This should be < 20 for a beginning community, slightly < 100 for a stable one and around 150 for a very relation oriented community.
  • Dunbar measure: average number of connections between 2 members.
  • Max people or friend connections. 144 people are the max number of known and followed people in real life – online it usually goes over 200.
  • Min people or friend connections. Generally 1, won’t be useful for everyone. This has to be adapted to your business.
      Editions and creations
  • Average, max or min editions number per user, item, category or site.
  • Average, max or min creations number per user, category or site.
  • Percentage of editions per user, item, category or site.
  • Percentage creation per user, category or site.
      Items
  • Average, max or min size per user, item, category or site.
  • Average, max or min number of characters, words or paragraphs per user, item, category or site.
  • Average, max or min links with other items per user, item, category or site.
  • Average, max or min income per user, item, category or site.
  • Percentage of the global income per user, item, category or site.
      Quality
  • Average, max or min time to finish or achieve high quality.
  • Average, max or min size for finished or high quality items.
  • Average, max or min votes per user, item, category or site.
  • Average, max or min back links per user, item, category or site.
  • Average, max or min rolls back per user, item, category or site.
  • Average, max or min duplicates per category or site.
  • Average, max or min abuses per user, item, category or site.
More information - http://www.futureofcrowdsourcingsummit.com; http://www.crowdbuzzing.com; http://www.unternehmershuttle.de;

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Google’s In-Page Analytics

Google introduces in its Google Analytics a new feature called In-Page Analytics, able to contextualize within the pages of data on the clicks made by users, thus providing immediate feedback on their dynamics and how the latter is behaving within the individual portals.

Blog :: Google’s In-Page Analytics

Google's In-Page Analytics

Google introduces Google Analytics with In-Page Analytics, a simple and immediate way to analyze web traffic and figure out how users move within the pages.
Google introduces in its Google Analytics a new feature called In-Page Analytics, able to contextualize within the pages of data on the clicks made by users, thus providing immediate feedback on their dynamics and how the latter is behaving within the individual portals.





Normally, Google Analytics only shows the data collected in the form of numbers and charts, indicating parameters such as number of visitors and number of clicks on various page elements effectual. In-Page Analytics aims to build a bridge between the numbers of the statistics and individual page elements simply by superimposing the first to the latter, with immediate visual feedback.


It becomes so much easier to understand the correlation between the elements of a portal and indicators of traffic, especially by smaller tasks, which do not have the time or resources to carefully study the data reported by Analytics and find the best strategies Optimization of your website.


This new service is currently available in beta version, still with full of bugs and therefore susceptible to considerable improvements to be introduced in future releases.



Thursday, July 22, 2010

Understanding The Emerging Markets

Video on How Companies Break Into Emerging Markets & How Companies in Emerging Markets Break Out

Blog :: Understanding The Emerging Markets

Thursday, June 10, 2010

Strategy Implementation in Balanced Scorecard

Balanced Scorecard (BM) is a strategy and measurement tools. Previously, organizations often governed only by financial goals, but these were not always in accordance with the organization’s long-term vision. Balanced Scorecard is about getting the focus away from just looking at the financial, to look at the organization’s vision and how to achieve it. In Balanced Scorecard, manage and measure goals /parameters of the organization.

Blog :: Strategy Implementation in Balanced Scorecard

Thursday, April 15, 2010

Understanding Lean in a Public Company

LEAN philosophy and some of the tools are really good and can be widely used. LEAN is healthy and relevant in both the public and private sectors. Yet doubtful, the biggest mistake in the implementation of LEAN failing due to 4 reasons

Blog :: Understanding Lean in a Public Company

Friday, March 26, 2010

Shorter hospital stays through better coordination

If hospitals would organize their processes better, hospital doctors and nursing staff could spend much more time treating their patients. This is the result of analyses over many years by management consultancy Porsche Consulting GmbH, Bietigheim-Bissingen, of more than 50 hospitals. The subsidiary of Dr. Ing. h.c. F. Porsche AG, Stuttgart, specializes in implementing so-called Lean processes

Blog :: Shorter hospital stays through better coordination

Tuesday, February 02, 2010

Customer Satisfaction

Organization focusing on customer support mostly focuses on Customer Satisfaction (customer loyalty, competitive advantage, etc.), which can be achieved by various types of survey, follow-up action & industry benchmarking.

Survey Method -
To get the customer satisfaction data, one can use data fetched from following surveys -


- Relationship Surveys:
Provides first impression of customer’s attitude towards a vendor.
o At least has to be performed once a year.
o Below average response rate of a relationship survey indicates
o  Deteriorating relation with customers.
o  Company’s follow up action plan is poor.
o  Bad survey design (irrelevant questions for a good score)
o Mostly performed for expensive, support intensive products/services.
o Predicts company’s overall reputation rather than actual performance.


- Transaction Surveys:
It provides each and every service delivery (support incidents) / specific products / individual support representatives performance.
o It’s a good methodology to measure employee performance / product performance than overall performance.
o This methodology cannot be used for overall performance


- Website Surveys:
This kind of survey is usually carried out for various support related sites or simply a website. It’s either done site as a whole or on an individual articles, which can even be drill down to specific contributors or individual entries.


Follow up Action -
Follow up makes sure that the support team performs an immediate remedial (tangible) action. It can be performed by following methods –


- Take Action:
With a low survey response, use an automated tracking system to inform the organization hierarchy about the action taken with their response time from the line managers to operational managers.


- Maintain Live contacts:
Maintain telephone numbers of unsatisfied customers for verbal contacts.


- Investigate the Reason:
With complex businesses, users cannot just drill down to problems using a simple flow chart. People have to be trained to investigate the reasons through a cause-effect examination.


- Stay Focused:
Information can be collected for a variety of metrics, but still people have to be focus on the key mission metrics.


- Safeguard Survey errors:
Survey errors have to be rectified as soon as it’s observed, to further reduce the errors caused by survey. Make use of close ended questions than open ended questions for accurate response.


- Examine successes:
Highly satisfied customers provide factors as per customer’s point of view.


- Transfer Information:
Inform product managers and support representatives about the whole survey process and the final outcome, so they can provide improvements within their own process.


Industry Benchmarking -
This is usually the most difficult task of comparing results between various companies in the same industry as their scoring methodology is usually different. There is no apple to apple comparison but usually an overall comparison is more effective. Companies hire mostly outside large firms for accurate benchmarking comparisons. Individuals can also be hired to conduct competitive analysis.

Industry Benchmarking can be usually done with more than 2 companies and it’s a meaningful effort if the same set of questions is asked along with the same methodology.

Customer Satisfaction

Organization focusing on customer support mostly focuses on Customer Satisfaction (customer loyalty, competitive advantage, etc.), which can be achieved by various types of survey, follow-up action & industry benchmarking.

Blog :: Customer Satisfaction

Saturday, January 16, 2010

Pros & Cons of Internet Business

Internet Business and private enterprise in India is drawing attention and speculation. The thrills of emerging your internet business, the flexibility to set your own hours with the promise of financial rewards are all magnificent reasons.

Blog :: Pros & Cons of Internet Business

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

.TEL Domain Names - See the New Way to Communicate

With a .tel domain You can incorporate some or all of your contact information and choose privacy settings on which information and contact numbers should be displayed. If you don't want to give out particular information, then don't.


It's very simple to use a tel domain. No hosting, no extra charges. You just buy a tel domain, and you can start setting it up. It will be live on the internet instantly! Update your contact information instantly.



Some Live Examples -


http://elegantmicroweb.tel/
http://elegantjbi.tel/

Friday, January 01, 2010