Yahoo Taps the Wisdom of the Many
In this week’s feature, “Put Your Customer to Work,” BNET contributor Jen Alsever gives us the lowdown on "crowdsourcing," a technique that involves tapping members of the general public to complete business tasks such as research or marketing. As fate would have it, on Tuesday Yahoo added another resource to the crowdsourcing toolkit with the company's announcement that it plans to create 100 or more new “Brand Universes."
A Brand Universe is basically a way of organizing different types of content on a single subject. Instead of going to the Yahoo's blogs section to catch up on Harry Potter news, then going over to Message Boards to read Harry Potter posts, you'll just visit the Harry Potter Brand Universe to access all things Hogwart: photo sites, message boards, blogs, videos, and news stories, many pulled from existing Yahoo web pages. Yahoo will build 100 such sites this year and has agreed to share traffic and behavioral data with the brand owners. But will they be smart enough to use it?
During the announcement on Tuesday, Vince Broady, Yahoo’s head of games, entertainment, and youth, admitted that some media companies may not welcome the development, since Yahoo won't ask for permission before launching a Brand Universe. But smart companies will remember the Cardinal Rule of Crowdsourcing: Don’t try to control your audience. If anything, companies should be grateful to Yahoo for the unpaid labor. Not only will they get a free online focus group, but they’ll also have free engineers building the thing (courtesy of Yahoo).
Best of all, because the sites won't be sponsored by the brands -- Yahoo will refuse advertising from the owners of parent brands -- each Brand Universe can (in theory at least) cultivate the Holy Grail of crowdsourcing: honest opinion. If they keep their mouths shut and just listen, brand owners will learn a ton about how consumers really feel about their products. Moreover, the brands themselves stand to become more valuable as their fan bases grow.