Tapping Your Constituencies

All organizations have constituencies such as employees, customers, and other active/passive participants which collectively have skills and knowledge that typically remain untapped. This occurs in large part because as enterprises grow, it becomes exponentially harder to treat each person as an individual. Technology has some solutions and management would be wise to consider ways to tap both internal and external knowledge more intensively.

On a recent trip my seat mate, a money manager, wanted to talk about book reviews, a surprise as I expected a pitch to buy securities. It turns out his hobby was writing book reviews for Amazon, and it was clear that this was his passion. The genius of the Amazon book review system is that it encourages a handful of people to do a phenomenal amount of free labor for Amazon in exchange for a modicum of public recognition in the form of a ‘top reviewer’ ranking. (My seat mate knew exactly what his ranking was, and expressed some frustration that movie and music reviewers have an ‘unfair advantage’ in the ranking system.)

The lesson from Amazon is that an audience can be more than simply a passive group of consumers; they can be a participatory community that adds value to an organization, doing work that might be prohibitively expensive if performed by employees but often expecting nothing in return other than some peer recognition. Note that a high rate of participation is not required, at least not for the parts that involve a lot of work. In the Amazon example, the majority of the useful reviews are written by a very tiny percentage of their customers. However, a much larger group participates in a small but important way by answering, with a mouse click, the question “was this review helpful to you?” Those votes determine who the top reviewers are, so those clicks are, in effect, the currency by which the reviewers get paid. All done at zero incremental cost to Amazon.

In addition to providing a vast trove of reviews that make the Amazon site more useful to all of its customers, the review system helps Amazon both identify and retain not just the fanatics out there but the knowledgeable fanatics. To use terms familiar to readers of Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point” these people are mavens and the review system is a maven trap. There is information inside the heads of these customers that is of use to both Amazon and to other customers, and the review system helps find those people and distribute that knowledge. And with each review they write, each rung of the top-reviewer ladder they climb, the likelihood that the mavens will switch to another site and start over from scratch, building a reputation out of obscurity, decreases.

These ideas of community and reputation and participation are nothing new; they are how real communities such as towns, campuses, and corporations have always operated. What is new is that Amazon and other alert companies have used technology to scaffold human instinct for social navigation to make it work in a virtual world where communities are both vastly larger than the ones we evolved to understand and where many of the cues (body language, facial expression, appearance) that we rely on simply do not exist.

In some ways these virtual communities are predicated on the idea of respecting the customer, not just as a passive consumer of our products, or one with a certain demographic profile that can be targeted more effectively, but as somebody who may have ideas and information that has value when shared with others. And that idea, in turn, applies not just to consumer goods companies, but again to any organization with large constituencies.

Another example, which illustrates how this approach can be used inside a company, is a knowledge base Xerox built for its field repair technicians. The idea was to get obscure and arcane knowledge about copiers out of the heads of technicians and into a centralized, searchable repository. In order to encourage the repair staff to spend extra time typing their knowledge into a computer, Xerox gave its people the ability to rate contributions on their value, and in turn recognized those who contributed the best knowledge. Some of the technicians were motivated by the desire to be seen as “expert” among their peers, and as a result the repository was a success.

If you have an audience, internal or external, with a lot of individually held knowledge or information that you think could be shared better, it may be worth thinking about fostering a virtual community and using technology to enable that to work at scale. For more information on this topic, feel free to contact your GA team.

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David Rea is VP Technology Assessment at GA since 2000. David uses his extensive experience with a wide variety of software technologies to help assess prospective investments, assist chief technology officers of companies in the General Atlantic portfolio, and advise other members of the firm on technology issues.