With Google making some rumbling about real time search this is going to get really interesting.  Much like SEO is used to drive traffic to web 1.0 websites, social bookmarking and social discovery was used to drive traffic to websites in Web 2.0.  Web 3.0 may be where we see another source of traffic generation through different real time feeds and streams.  An indication of this is Mark Cuban’s recent blog post about how he is getting more and more traffic from twitter and facebook than Google.  In his case it is definitely Streams (Facebook + Twitter) > SEO (Google).

Very intent to see where this leads us.

1. Creation (Ex. Open Source Software, Wikipedia)
2. Prediction (Ex. Pickspal.com, Stockpickr, American Idol)
3. Organization (Ex. Google’s PageRank, Digg.com, DMOZ)

The concept of crowdsourcing is really interesting in that it is really self-organization where seemingly chaotic conditions goes through a phase transition to bring about some sort of order. You can find self-organization everywhere from diverse subjects such as nature (Ex. Ants), business (Ex. market bubbles), physics (Ex. equilibrium thermodynamics), chemistry (Ex. chemical reactions), Entertainment (Ex. American Idol, Billboard Music Charts), and of course the Web.

Value is created when one can harness the power to create structure from unstructured chaos. In Physics, this phenomena can be described in mathematics.  This is very much the problem that our team at Search Physics have been trying to tackle when it comes to organizing the information on the Web. Stay tuned for more.

1. Dell Ideastorm – No doubt part of the effort to revive the fortunes of Dell now that Michael Dell is back at the helm. Makes Dell more open and responsive to consumers. Much better than a canned survey from a market research firm since the suggestions are unedited and can be voted upon. I absolutely love the fact that it requires registration so Dell can continue a dialog with these consumers who obviously care.
2. Yahoo! Suggestions – The Yahoo! Suggestions board is being used to gather feedback for quite a few number Yahoo! properties (15 at launch) from Autos to Real Estate. A pretty good first start. The only wish I have is Yahoo! should really promote this a lot more. A lot of the suggestion boards don’t have a lot of traffic nor enough feedback to form a critical mass.
I know that there are a lot of folks in the blogosphere who decry these efforts as blatant rip-offs of Digg, but I think all of these folks miss the point. As a marketer, the hardest thing to do is to create a vibrant and constructive dialog with the consumer. These “Digg-like” Web 2.0 features merely make customer feedback much more accessible, cost effective, and with the added benefit of sifting out issues that are more important than other due to open voting. Remember, Digg didn’t invent voting nor did it invent ranking. Digg’s great breakthrough was they packaged it in such a way which was brilliantly easy. Besides, Drupal had this feature in their content management system since 2000.It would be great if brand marketers and product managers across different industries embrace harnessing the consumer voice to improve products and customer experience. Imagine if car enthusiasts had this capability to suggest new features and product wishes for their favorite vehicles (Detroit anyone?). Or how about struggling airlines use this capability to markedly improve flight service and give us options for better food on flights. It would be very easy for old line companies to begin offering these capabilities by leveraging open source solutions like Pligg (an open source version of Digg).

Remember, companies exists to fulfill and capitalize on a market demand or consumer desire, what better way than to get this feedback directly from your customer’s mouth?

Update: Peter Cashmore and TechCrunch has a pretty interesting post about this as well.

]]> http://stanleywong.org/2007/02/25/harnessing-consumer-voice-to-improve-products-customer-experience/feed/ 1