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Remember that once in class we had a debate on whether employers should be allowed to access applicants’ social network profile? Most of you don’t agree doing that because companies shouldn’t cross the line of privacy. What if companies encourage their employees to post or share about their work? Positively, of course.

Recently, there’s a new term called employee advocacy, which means encourage employees to participate in communications efforts and motivating them to share interesting professional content to their external social media networks. It is named by a Finland entrepreneur who created the system to evaluate this.

For more details, take a look at this video by BBC:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=128tqdsVqRg

It will definitely generate a lot of doubt and concern, as asked in the video, companies might use this to judge an employee’s performance. Although, the inventor said it is on voluntary bases, people still feel pressure when there’s really a competition to reward the person who makes most approved post about their job. In addition, they may somewhat feel forced to do so in order to impress their boss. For corporation, this might have side effect when your workers are reluctant but forced to do something.

Personally I think it is not a good idea to do so. First, the post won’t be convincing unless the authors like it themselves. Secondly, if a company really satisfies its employees, they will post compliments and true condition automatically, because one of the reason people use social media, like Facebook, is to show off to their acquaintances. For example, people working in Google, Lego might want to show how good their working place is to make others envious or admire them.

All in all, I think companies should focus on improving working environments since it is way easier to post complaints rather than compliments. And that their employees will be much happier to share the firm in a positive way.

Would you like to be an ambassador for your firm if they encourage you to do so? Do you think it is a good idea for companies to adopt this employee advocacy system in the future?

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Last week we talked about crowdfunding, and some of you shared the experience of participating in a crowdfunding process, mostly in start-up business. Here I am sharing with you a not too recent issue, but an important event happening this spring in Taiwan.

Maybe none of you have seen this before. The background of this story is that more than 500,000 Taiwanese demonstrated on the Ketagalan Boulevard (in front of the president palace). Students repeated the demand for “legislation before review”, but the government didn’t respond to this at all. CNN also reports this, therefore if you are interested in the detail, you can click into the link: http://ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-1114340

In order to let not only people in Taiwan, but draw the attention of the world. The leading team decide to let the news go into public. They set up a crowdfunding project to let the issue be put on New York Times. Guess how long it takes to raise 6330000NTD (around 208300 US Dollars)? Only 3 hours! This also broke the fastest record of reaching a funding goal in Asia. After that, they made an international version webpage http://4am.tw/ within a day. As a result, the campaign and article was printed on the International version of New York Times for two days.

Back to the crowdfunding theme, they choose to use an external crowdfunding website in Taiwan, FlyingV to make things go easier. I think that what makes this project work is they successfully convey the concept to people. That is, we wish we could be heard. Despite the fact that there weren’t really any payback, like product or discount you sometimes get by supporting startups, we are still willing to devote our money to it. What we get is more like a sense of identity and feeling of being involved.

In my opinion, making people understand your concept is a key element for crowdfunding. Only when people know and agree on what you are doing are they willing to pay contribute to your project, especially for public issues.

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Crowdsourcing has become a trend that people share ideas or information to benefit others and in exchange for whether love, glory, love, or more information. What happens when it comes to mapping system?

About five days ago, Apple launched Apple Maps Connect, a tool designed for business owners to both verify and submit new information about their locations, like a phone call and PIN code to the business’ phone number. In addition, companies can add links to their social network, as Facebook, Twitter……..

“No iPhone user wanted to kill Google Maps”

Apple Map came out two years ago, and has led to many complaints for its inaccuracy. Mostly for lacking a significant amount of detail and omit public transit directions. Problems occurs especially outside the U.S., even several major landmarks are labeled inaccurately or even worse, misplaced. As a result, iPhone or iPad users still turn to Google Map for searching and planning routes.

“Catching up on Google”

This is not the first example for Map Application using crowdsourcing. Last year Google acquired Waze, a system which its mapping and traffic information are built by 70,000 volunteer map editors and 15 million active users, and later that year Google added a crowdsourcing element to Google Maps which allows users to upload panorama street view. The company did so to keep its leading place in both website and mobile mapping.

“Owning context is what matters”

For mapping system, accuracy is already a basic requirement. (Google still outperform its competitors for this) People expect more from it, such as knowing the real time condition, sharing your location with friends mutually. I think maybe for Apple it could take advantage of it, like the usage of FaceTime, maybe they could create a social map guide in the future.

Do you think this will work on raising the number of people using Apple Maps? I have a Pad, but still uses Google Map? Maybe you can share why or why not you will use it.

Reference:

– Apple is now crowdsourcing business listings to help make Maps better

http://www.theverge.com/2014/10/21/7034009/apple-is-now-crowdsourcing-business-listings-to-help-make-maps-better

-Google buys traffic mapping service Waze

http://www.theverge.com/2013/6/11/4414244/google-buys-real-time-mapping-service-waze-for-a-rumored-1-billion

-Google Maps vs. Apple Maps

http://gizmodo.com/5918176/google-maps-vs-apple-maps-a-side-by-side-comparison

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The theme of this week is “Crowdsourcing, Crowdfunding and Prediction Market”. As internet becomes more accessible, the use of crowd, which means finding skillful people from outside becomes more popular. As a result, how corporations decide to do so and in what way they can attract people as well as manage them well remains an important topic.

The first article, “The Collective Intelligence Genome” introduces a framework by asking for questions: What, Who, Why and How. Collective intelligence takes advantage of the ideas of not only employees or consultants but many people. Once companies decide to do so, problems like how to appeal enough attenders, especially those qualified to get involved in and make sure that the ideal outcomes occurs.

The second article, “Which Kind of Collaboration is Right for you” divides the ways to collaborate on a project into four dimensions: Innovation Mall (most related to the term crowdsourcing), Innovation Community, Elite Circle, and Consortium. This is based on the extent of participation (closed or open) and governance (hierarchical or flat).

The last article narrows down to the topic “Prediction Market”. Compare to the traditional ways on strategic decision making by limited experts, it is a market which individuals bet on specific outcome in order to win rewards depending on the contract. To me, it is an effective tool for predicting social issues. But when it comes to business, it seems that it is not mature enough yet, so more other data or advice from experts should still be taken into consideration.

The related article I found is “Harnessing the Global Talent Pool to Accelerate Innovation”, by social architect Braden Kelly. It talks about how a company uses the outer talent pool to create more value. Innovation is an important part for a firm’s value chain nowadays. Before doing so, managers have to think carefully of the characteristic of his or her organization, that is, clarify the goal and why it should seek for the crowd as a resource.

And I compared two different operating system: IOS (Apple) and Android (Google Play). While Android uses open resource, IOS has a more closed network with open source components. In addition, Android has a Linux-based platform while IOS makes OSX, an UNIX based operating system used by more private networks like universities and enterprises.

Apple turns to a more closed network because creating consensus products is part of their business strategy. The good thing is that it is able to control and maintain integrity throughout its system, but the applications would be limited since it is impossible for an elite group to create so many. That’s why for developing Apps, Apple moves closer to open network later on; as for Android, it is known as an open-source software. The use of collective intelligence has always played an important role for its development. However, since it is so opened, the security problem has to be taken into serious consideration so that the system won’t be damaged intentionally.