Document Actions
Barry Libert: How to Harness the Power of the Crowd
This is from the July 26th update at EnterpriseLeadership.
Barry Libert
Author and chairman of the board of Mzinga
Play Podcast (Right click to download)
Procter & Gamble turned to social media, not soap operas, to really connect to its customers. The Vocalpoint P&G community enlisted 850,000 stay-at-home moms to create new products and new services, such as Dawn Direct Foam.
Barry Libert, a social media visionary and the founder of Shared Insights (now Mzinga), knows how to use technology to harness the power of what he calls the crowd. Mzinga provides software as a service solution for online communities. It currently manages about 14,000 communities, and services more than one billion monthly page requests from 27 million users in 160 countries worldwide. Libert is chairman of the board of Mzinga. He and his co-authors set up a community and enlisted members to contribute to a book called We Are Smarter than Me: How to Unleash the Power of Crowds in Your Business. In fact, this is the first book that actually used an online community, based on a Web 2.0 technology from Mzinga, to help create the book. About 4,000 qualified members joined the online community and helped shape the final product. By using the same social networking tools and techniques that their book covers, Libert and his co-authors provide a practical and unique look at online community-building.
He says that building communities isn't all about tools and technologies. "The task requires good facilitation, moderation, and services that go along with them. Remember, people at eBay and Amazon make sure their respective communities work. You need a community manager. The same goes for customer communities and employee communities. Mzinga is the online equivalent to the community sherpa."
In this podcast, Libert talks about the power of communities, the differences between community and business, and the changes businesses must make if they want to build communities.
tags:
