Week 2- Beginning of the week post

Due to some international travel, I went ahead and read all of the required and suggested articles and watched the podcasts and videos. A full day on day on Delta gave me the time to do this. The first thought I have this week is how in I’m going to be testing out how connected the digital world is this week. I’m expecting to be doing most of my Twitter and blog posts via wireless internet networks that I can pick up on my Iphone in England instead of on my computer like normal.

This week I am planning on looking at the articles and readings which I found most interesting and putting up my thoughts throughout the week. For this post, I’ll look at the article “The Dawn of the Human Network “ about crowdsourcing. My initial thoughts on the article were that it is interesting how this trend is taking pedigree out of the picture and moving it to talent. In the past schooling was used as the basis for hiring since it was the highest indicator of training, knowledge and, therefore, talent. Now companies can hire on actual talent instead of the prediction of it. This could have interesting affects in the future.

Crowdsourcing seems to have the potential to redesign the modern company in terms of structure and funding due to the reduced need for internal marketing and R&D. The active customer involvement is also noteworthy. The use of customer troubleshooting on websites was interesting to me since I dealt with this trend for the first time last week on Twitter. Initially I was annoyed because it seemed to be a big list of person after person saying “Yea, I have that same problem also”, but in the end I found the answer quicker than I would have expected to through a standard question tree online. It’s also important that people can do the jobs they like. This does seem to create better work and to better fit the nature of a least a significant portion of the population. These are the people who were already coaching sports for free or volunteering for jobs which they feel are meaningful.

Finally, this article made me think of three other corporations, one national and two local which I feel do a good job embodying the community concept. The first is REI. I feel that they have branded their experience to create a community both online and in the “outside” world. This leads the members who are willing to pay more for the experience and actually be happy about buying the same gear at higher prices. The other two companies are local to San Diego. VAVI is a local sports and social club that, mainly through word of mouth and the web, has gone from sponsoring a few sporting events to organizing 25 plus leagues, tailgaters, charity events, and so forth throughout the city. The second is Stay Classy. This is a company which markets exclusively to local charities. It works off the premise that once you attend one event you are on their mailing list. This works out great for the charities whose events are now being broadcast to a huge number of people who otherwise would not know about them. It also takes advantage of the fact that when an average person on their mailing list is going out to a bar they will be happier spending their money at the bar which is sponsoring a charity event than the one next door. Both of these websites/companies have done a great job of going from unknown names a year ago to being everywhere in the city today. This was accomplished mainly through word of mouth and the local Gen X community. They understood what this generation wanted and took advantage of huge holes in the local market.