We are Smarter Than Me by Barry Libert & Jon Spector.

The premise of this book is based upon how social networks have created a place to capture the wisdom of a crowd. Successes like Wikipedia (the biggest multilingual free-content encyclopedia on the Internet. Over 7 million articles in over 200 languages, and still growing) have demonstrated how communities can come together to build and collaborate.

This book started with a website www.wearesmarter.org in the fall of 2006 and was birthed by a team effort of 3000 people. The authors present how communities can help companies invent new products and services, improve customer service, boost sales, turbo charge manufacturing, tap into new sources of financing and make everyone a leader. Throughout the book the term "crowdsourcing" is used to define the collaborative effort.

The book is segmented into 8 key Chapters...

v "Go from R&D to R&WE," shows how to use communities to spot new market opportunities, identify benefits, and sharpen new products and services.

v "How May we Help We?", shows how to make use of communities to improve service and increase customer satisfaction.

v "Customer Sell Thyself", provides insights into the use of community-based techniques to reduce selling and marketing costs while boosting customer loyalty.

v "If We Build It, We Will Come," shares lessons about how communities are changing methods and best practices in factories, virtual and other wise, around the world.

v "Welcome to the World Bank of We," explains how to tap communities to help fund business growth and support worthy charitable causes.

v "Make Everyone a C-We-O," sheds light on how to use communities to organize and manage companies.

v "Lead From the Rear," details some of the key lessons at the www.wearesmarter.org site.

The cases that stood out in my mind when reading We are Smarter Than Me included:

v Proctor & Gamble searches for innovation in Web-enabled marketplaces such as InnoCentive, NineSigma and uet2.com. these so called eBays for innovation have led to hundreds of new products, some of which have turned out to be home runs

v The e.Lilly divison of pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly launched Innocentive, the first online, incentive-based scientific network created for global research. P&G says Innocentive has increased the share of its new products originating outside the company from 20% to 35%

v Virgin Mobile has a neat program called Sugar Mama, that used their current subscribers to review advertising and fill in questionnaires and provide feedback. They awarded the users with 75 minutes of free air time. They made this offer to the 4.5 million phone users. Needless to say, they got lots of feedback that has helped Virgin stay one step ahead of the competition.

v The advertising side of marketing has also tapped into the online community crowdsourcing. MasterCard invited visitors to its website to create their own versions of the highly successful "priceless" ads. Winners have been aired on television and posted on the priceless.com site. The contest had no cash prizes yet it drew 100,000 entries.

There are many more case studies to review in this quick read. If you like marketing and advertising and you are interested in being innovative on the web. Then this is a "must read"

I also want to point out that naturally, there are pitfalls in "crowdsourcing". If collaboration isn't done right, it had best not be done at all. Gartner Research has predicted, with 80% certainty, that by 2010, more than 60% of Fortune 1,000 companies will have some form of online community that can be used in marketing. Are you and your organization going to be part of it? I know I am, I just joined www.wearesmarter.org to get my first hand experience of crowdsourcing.

Wishing you an inspiring and profitable week.

Tricia Ryan