The Surprising Story Behind “We Are Smarter Than Me”
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.
Where the journey truly veered from its original intentions was when it came to the actual creation of the book content. In spite of providing a public wiki with some sample content to start the idea process, the “We crowd” was more interested in commenting on the project from a distance. Many started conversations about the project (and the chapters) in the discussion forums. Others blogged about the project. And then there were the podcasts and the Community 2.0 Conference where additional content got created. Yes, there were comments (and content) created in the wiki but nowhere near as much as expected.
This left the project and it’s founders with two options. Try and publish a book with 144 pages of disparate quotes, notes and excerpts OR work with some hired guns to create a common voice for We Are Smarter Than Me. We chose the latter and you can now see whether or not we made the right choice. The book has been published and so far is garnering favorable reviews in the mainstream media and the blogosphere.
Looking back, the biggest learning about the project was that the book and the writing process were not enough to deeply engage our “We” crowd. People wanted additional ways to digest and create content around community best practices. As a result, we’ve added our own blogs (anyone is welcome to join), more podcasts and solicitations for ideas on the next book to the site. We don’t know if we’ve got the formula completely right but that’s the beauty of an experiment. You never know whether it’s worked until you try it.
In We Are Smarter Than Me: How to Unleash the Power of Crowds in Your Business, you will discover exactly how to use social networking and community in your business, driving better decision-making and greater profitability. The book shares powerful insights and new case studies from product development, manufacturing, marketing, customer service, finance, management, and beyond. It is written by Barry Libert, Jon Spector, and Don Tapscott (foreword).
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