‘Distributed co-creation’ – we’ve been doing it, now it’s hot

Lists of things you desperately need to know are a dime a dozen in tech. But we always snap to attention when they come from the thinkers at McKinsey, whose insights always resonate and who just released a compelling list of 10 tech-enabled business trends to watch.

Their first item – “Distributed co-creation moves to the mainstream” – hits us right between the eyes.

“…[T]he ability to organize communities of Web participants to develop, market, and support products and services has moved from the margins of business practice to the mainstream,” reads the article co-authored by Jacques Bughin, Michael Chui and James Manyika of the McKinsey Global Institute.

Wikipedia and open source software projects were pioneering examples of co-creation, according to the article. Emerging, more mainstream examples include:

• customer support communities like Intuit’s, where power users solve tech problems for fellow customers of the company’s financial software – at 10 percent of the cost of traditional call centers;
• word-of-mouth marketing initiatives like Procter & Gamble’s Vocalpoint network, where mothers share product experience with their social circle, sometimes doubling product revenue.
• product development, like Facebook’s recruitment of 300,000 users to translate the site into 70 languages.

These are shining examples, but not exceptions. Seven out of 10 executives say Web communities regularly create value for their organizations, according to McKinsey.

This matters to us, of course, since our very reason for being is enabling organizations to create communities (internal, external and hybrid) that transcend traditional corporate boundaries for better performance in product development, marketing, support and many other operations.

Importantly, for such Web communities to succeed, we’ve found that you need more than just a platform, people and browsers. You need what McKinsey calls “the up-front research needed to identify potential participants who have the right skill sets and will be motivated to participate over the longer term.”

We understood that early, which is why NewsGator Social Sites already helps identify key players for a project. Social Sites users create extensive capability profiles and identify their expertise through both narrative descriptions and searchable keywords (called “tags”). Users also tag content (their own and others’), and any contribution can be rated. Meanwhile, Social Sites is continuously crunching enterprise social network activity, including “likes” on microblog posts. Profiles, tags, rating and activity streams together help identify the smartest and most engaged experts on every topic in the enterprise. If this sounds like a lot of data, it is. But it’s all rolled up in graphical maps like these:

This makes it easy to assemble a great team for any co-creation project.

We believe deeply in co-creation both as an ideal and an emerging reality. We see it on the ground every day among our more than 2.5 million enterprise paid users. We’re committed to helping organizations create and foster their Web communities for more powerful co-creation for decades into the future.

If you’d like to discuss how your organization can benefit from co-creation, please contact us at insidesales@newsgator.com.