What happens when you invite more than a million students, faculty members, business people and social media experts into a community to help write a book on community best practices? The answer is a lot. But not in the way that you would think that it would. Not even close.

Community Manager Aaron Strout was willing to share the absorbing, straight-forward story behind the new book We Are Smarter Than Me. The story:

Last October, we launched our wearesmarter.org community. It was an experiment really. The goal was to write a wiki book focused on how companies, big and small, were using community to improve their businesses. Some like Procter & Gamble were tapping into their crowd of 500,000 “connector” moms to help sell a new product, Dawn Direct Foam. Companies like Prosper.com partnered with their customers to create a micro-loan powerhouse. Brewtopia reached out to it’s customers (and prospects) to help them create the recipe and label designs for their beer.

The end result is a great collection of mini-case studies with some great “how to” blurbs that are geared toward helping any individual or company get started with their own customer community. The “journey” however, was the fun part. For one, many of the contributors to the project had ideas of their own. They insisted on joining the founders of the project — Barry Libert (Shared Insights), Jon Spector (Wharton), Tom Malone (MIT) and Tim Moore (Pearson) – on the project’s weekly status calls. The founders of course acquiesced and not surprisingly found that the crowd had a lot of great ideas. Read the rest of this post >

Interested in Open Innovation & Crowdsourcing? Subscribe to RSS!