What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [30]
Open-source Wikipedia is an incredible resource, a collection of human knowledge vaster and more responsive to change than any encyclopedia. No one who creates it is paid. They contribute out of generosity and ego and because they believe they own it. Note that to make the gift economy work, a project doesn’t need its entire community to contribute. Only about 1 percent of those who use Wikipedia create Wikipedia—that is Wikipedia’s 1 percent rule. Indeed, if that were doubled, it probably would create chaos. In Here Comes Everybody, NYU professor Clay Shirky, who studies social software, calculated the output of the authors of one article: “[O]f the 129 contributors on the subject of asphalt, a hundred of them contributed only one edit each, while the half-dozen most active editors contributed nearly fifty edits among them, almost a quarter of the total.” The most active contributor was 10 times more active than the least active.
Wikipedia is not-for-profit. It has spawned a for-profit search service called Wikia, where users are creating even the algorithms that power it. It has commercial competitors, such as Mahalo, a human-powered search and guide created by serial entrepreneur Jason Calacanis, who pays his writers. At the 2008 Burda DLD conference in Munich, Calacanis tweaked Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia and Wikia, for not paying for content. Wales responded that nobody works for free. “What people do for free is have fun…. We don’t look at basketball games and people playing on the weekends and say these people are really suckers doing this for free.” People will contribute their intelligence and time if they know they can build something, have influence, gain control, help a fellow customer (more than a company), and claim ownership.
Customers are also generous with ideas. In 2008 Starbucks launched MyStarbucksIdea.com, where its customers were invited to tell the company what to do (following Dell’s lead with IdeaStorm; both use Salesforce.com’s Ideas platform). The response from customers was immediate and impressive: thousands of ideas, votes, and comments. One customer wanted Starbucks to make ice cubes out of coffee so, when they melt, they would not dilute cold drinks; 7,600 fellow customers immediately agreed. Another customer proposed putting a shelf in bathrooms—for where else can you put your drink when you’ve drunk too much? A few customers found the thought somehow distasteful, but Starbucks called the suggestion a “sleeper idea” that deserved attention.
Some threads emerged from the suggestions and discussion. Many customers wanted express lines for brewed-coffee orders so they could avoid waiting behind alleged coffee aficionados with their half-this, half-that, skinny, three-pump, no-foam, Frappuwhatevers. Some customers asked to be allowed to send in their orders via iPhone. And some customers suggested—and thousands more agreed—that the chain should enable them to program their regular order into their Starbucks card so they could swipe it as they enter, placing the order and paying for it at the same time, letting them skip the cash-register line. One more proposed a pour-it-yourself corner and another asked for a delivery service. The theme—that is, the problem for Starbucks—was clear: long, slow, inefficient, irritating lines. But not one of these customers started with that complaint. Instead, they offered solutions to fix the problem. All Starbucks had to do was ask.
Chris Bruzzo, the Starbucks chief information officer (and a former Amazon executive who learned much about new ways to relate to customers there), built MyStarbucksIdea. The forum was an extension of what Starbucks employees had experienced for years: When they say where they work, “people open up this to-do list in their heads. They have very specific, detailed ideas,” Bruzzo told me. Now Starbucks has given them a public platform to share ideas. Because it is open and customers can react to all suggestions, some ideas