In November, I wrote a piece for PR Week entitled “Empower or Lose Power”, discussing how crowd-sourcing can be used as a way of turning social media into an engine for business / organisational innovation. Turning what can often be the “noise” aspect of social media into actually something useful for your organisation.
The classic example in this space is what Dell did – turning from whole “Dell Hell” blogging issue into the virtuous “Dell Ideastorm” crowd-sourcing space.
Using my PR Week paper as a base and inspired by the King’s Hospital site I set up “HelpUsImproveKings.org” I’ve updated the paper for publication across NMK’s online network (thanks to Magda!).
The main developments of my piece pick up on recent innovations over in the UK – like the Tory’s “Making IT Better” crowd-sourcing campaign. What we seem to be seeing is more organisations understanding the value of crowd-sourcing, and embracing it into their process – whether that’s a policy-making process (like “Making IT Better”) or a product innovation process (like “MyStarbucksidea.com”) or a service improvement process (like “HelpusImprovekings.org”).
Read the full paper below + comment away if you agree / disagree / don’t understand!
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