Top 5 Apps for Tapping into Collective Intelligence in Business
This is a guest post by Steve Nicholls. Steve Nicholls is a leading social media strategist, author and international speaker who advises business executives on how to implement effective social media campaigns into their organizations. He has been featured as a social media expert in CNN, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, BBC, Huffington Post, among others. His website, Social Media for Business, is a great resource for anyone trying to learn how to leverage social media to aid in their business efforts.
Collective intelligence is the process of tapping into user-generated information online about or relevant to your business, and turning this information into business intelligence to enhance your company operations by improving currently existing products and services, and/or finding ideas to create new ones.
Showing that your company is receptive to user-generated feedback and willing to act upon it whenever needed, such as to improve customer service deemed inefficient by a customer for instance, is an important way to build competitive advantage in this social age.
Making a customer happy will encourage this customer to recommend you – and having your own customers recommend you to their friends online is a very powerful way to gain brand recognition and increase market visibility.
Mobile apps are excellent tools in providing access to collective intelligence. They not only help companies collect crucial information, but are also important vehicles through which companies can participate in online dialogues as well in order to show and share their expertise in their respective fields, building more brand awareness as a result.
Below are 5 mobile applications – each an extension of its respective desktop application – that can help companies tap into collective intelligence:
- Epinions: Epinions is an example of ‘discussion sites’, designed to allow users exchange views on different topics. Epinions is specifically a customer review site where users can provide in-depth product reviews and recommendations, helping others make informed buying decisions. Each review includes the pros, cons and the ‘bottom line’ assessment of a given product. This platform can be extremely useful for companies looking to understand what customers think and say about their businesses.
- Yahoo!Answers: this is another example of discussion sites, but in the form of question and answers. Users can simply ask any question on their minds and get instant answers from other individuals and companies. Yahoo!Answers is thus an interesting platform for businesses to jump in and share their expertise in relevant fields in order to increase their brand awareness. It is also an important platform for businesses to dig into the wealth information accumulated on the site to find relevant information, interesting ideas and pertinent feedback from others that could be useful to their businesses.
- Wikipedia: Wikipedia is the flagship example of ‘Wikis’; sites where people from all corners of the world can contribute to the creation of articles around all kinds of topics. Wikipedia has evolved into a widely consulted online encyclopedia, becoming the biggest online encyclopedia collection of all time with more than 25 million articles so far. This is thus a platform through which users can have easy access to extensive information, and through which organizations can publish content about themselves in order to increase brand awareness and reach a large audience.
- InnoCentive: this is an example of ‘Ideas Platforms’ which are platforms where users can brainstorm and share ideas in the aim of solving problems. InnoCentive focuses on helping companies getting fast solutions to research and development problems. By using crowd-sourcing, InnoCentive allows companies to solve challenges they are facing in the fields of math, chemistry, computer science, engineering, physical science and life sciences. It thus presents a cost-effective and fast way for companies to resolve some of their business challenges.
- Alterian: this is an example of ‘Market Intelligence’ tools, which provide users with an evaluation of a given market through economic and social statistics. This helps companies get ‘the bigger picture’ of the environment in which they are operating and competing. Alterian specifically helps companies achieve multichannel engagement with their target market. It integrates social media monitoring, campaign management and web content management, among other tools to allow companies get more insight into and create effective and engaging experiences with their audience.
Collective intelligence is thus an efficient way to enhance business operations by improving existing products and/or services and finding new potential business ideas.
These 5 mobile apps are excellent avenues for companies to tap into collective intelligence in order to increase competitive advantage and take their businesses one step forward.
Hi Steve, I also recommend you to try Talkwalker Alerts – it monitors the web for you and sends an e-mail to you as soon as your name/brand/competitor’s name/etc. pops up somewhere on the social web. It appears to be the most efficient replacement to Google Alerts as well.