“Those [companies employing crowdsourcing] that view the crowd as a cheap labor source are doomed to fail.”  Jeff Howe – Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business.

Is crowdourcing scalable? Yes. Powerful enabler of a successful business if developed the right way, absolutely! Awesome pool of cheap labor? Not so much. My guess is that anyone working in a (successful) business that is designed around or at least is heavily reliant upon crowdsourcing, feels that the crowd isn’t cheap labor. On a practical basis this sentiment is easily evolved into the well-intentioned mantra you can hear echoing through the halls here at Trada, “the crowd doesn’t work for us… don’t ever treat them like they do!  We work for them!”

For me personally, that mantra was more of an explicit directive when I joined Trada in early December.  One of my responsibilities here is leading our Optimizer Management team, which is the team that works with our crowd. A collection of more than 1,500 paid search optimization and digital media experts, which is growing like a weed. However, my background isn’t in crowdsourcing or community management or anything that cool or trendy. Rather, I have spent the last 10 or so years leading high-performance teams and departments within Yahoo!’s award winning Account Management organization but still very much traditional employee management. 

After tiptoeing around crowd conversations for my first couple of months, I had the epiphany that… hang on… isn’t “they don’t work for us, we work for them” the purest expression of selfless employee management?  Hmmm… maybe we’re not so different after all!

What I have come to realize over these first four months with Trada is that while we should never view our crowd as a source of cheap labor (and that as such, labor cost arbitrage be our competitive advantage… yikes!), on a very practical basis, effectively enabling the crowd does require many if not all the same elements useful in enabling an full-time equivalent workforce.  And why wouldn’t it? The cool thing about the crowd is that they are all people too! 

When working with a crowd, ask yourself the following questions:

• Are you attracting, recruiting, engaging and retaining the right people?

• Have you defined what success looks like and the activities that drive it? Then do you profile and elevate those who best demonstrate those behaviors?

• Have you set clear verifiable objective goals? Do people know what is expected of them?

• Have you established a clear reward system (not just financial rewards, but a comprehensive system that encompasses the other types of motivation)?

• Do you have a systematic approach to process development? Have you understood the variability in how different individuals performing the same role currently do the same activities in very different ways, then worked with a sub-set of folks to define the “best” way to do that activity? Have you shared those best practices with everyone else?

• Do you have a systematic approach to policy review? This means continually reviewing policy and where able, removing legacy policies that no are no longer really necessary. This is often a source of quick crowd pleasing wins… get unnecessary stuff out of people’s way!

• Do you have a systematic approach to technology development? Are you developing new tools or improving the ones you currently provide? Automating the lower-value pieces of any process is a huge improvement since in the same amount of time, they can do more of the things they came here to do. Simple and rewarding.

• Have you developed and shared training and education? Scalable and in an “on demand” format. Refresher for existing folks, but on demand for new folks the second they need it?

• Have you created a collaborative environment for people to hang out?  The virtual coffee bar / foosball table combo?  That special place where new folks ask the more experienced folks how they do what they do? Where relationships are formed that become really helpful back at the desks?

Ultimately, have you done everything possible to get the unnecessary stuff out of people’s way, given them the tools, knowledge and motivation necessary to realize the promise of whatever it was they came here to do in the first place? 

Achieving this for a team of employees is more than a huge win, it would make you feel like superman/woman, overseeing a high performing and likely extremely happy team.  But I would argue that it is even more rewarding if these things can be achieved in the context of a crowd who, unlike most employees, can vote with their feet at a moment’s notice.

For all the right reasons, I initially changed the name of my Optimizer Management team to Optimizer Enablement. I’m now wondering if I shouldn’t change it back.

By Ben Wright, VP Service Delivery & Marketplace

Ben Wright oversees Client Services, Account Management and Optimizer Management responsibilities at at Trada, the world’s first and only crowdsourced PPC services marketplace.