The following article is based on an excerpt from The Network Is Your Customer: Five Strategies to Thrive in a Digital Age (Yale University Press, January 2011).
Besides providing the right tools or platform for collaboration to occur, organizations must ask themselves what will motivate their customers to participate. Why would anyone contribute an article to Wikipedia, news footage to CNN's iReport, or a T-shirt design to Threadless?
In some cases, customers may be motivated by curiosity, personal interests, or deeply held social values. In other cases, they have more commercial goals or a desire for personal benefit. But perhaps the biggest cause of failure in network collaboration is misunderstanding the customer's motivation.
Thomas W. Malone, Robert Laubacher, and Chrysanthos Dellarocas of MIT's Center for Collective Intelligence describe the motivations for network collaboration as falling within these three categories: love, glory, or money.
1. Love
In many cases, participants choose to collaborate with others because of purely social motivations. These motivations may include: altruism (the desire to contribute to the common good); a passionate interest in the topic; work that is entertaining, fun, or creative; participation and connection in a community; the chance to contribute to social values the participant believes in (such as a cause or candidate); or a sense of duty or obligation (perhaps because he or she is already enjoying the benefits of the project).
These social motivations are the kind that spurred supporters of President Barack Obama to participate in the MyBO network for his presidential campaign. They also explain why users contribute to Wikipedia without financial reward or a byline. New Wikipedia articles are typically written by users with a particular knowledge of and passionate interest in a subject. Other users who frequent Wikipedia may take the time to fix an occasional misspelling or error that they spot out of gratitude for the value they gain from the site. The power of the networking tools behind MyBO and Wikipedia is that they allow small acts of generosity to add up and make a very large impact— far beyond what was feasible in our pre-networked past, when it was virtually impossible to amass and assess the contributions of people around the world.
As Clay Shirky has observed, "We have always loved one another. We're human. It's something we're good at. But up until recently, the radius and half-life of that affection has been quite limited. With love alone, you can get a birthday party together. Add coordinating tools, and you can write an operating system ... In the past, we could do little things for love, but big things, big things required money. Now, we can do big things for love."
But what if your cause is not an inspiring political candidate or a charity or a free public service? It is very unlikely that you will get people to contribute for "love" alone, even if they do have a passion for the project. Your customers may love taking photos of local events, but they may not want to share them anonymously on your news platform if you will be earning a profit from and retaining the rights to the images they produce. Fortunately, humans harbor other motivations.
2. Glory
The key to how CNN attracts unpaid collaborators to its iReport news project is that their submissions are not anonymous. If a customer's photo, video, or story appears on CNN's website or broadcast, his or her name is credited for all to see. The opportunity to be seen as a "citizen journalist" contributing to such a renowned network provides a powerful motivation to the iReport customer network.
Even without such a mass-media spotlight as CNN, mechanisms that highlight and confer social status can be an effective motivator for active collaborators.
The top participants in technical forums will answer thousands of questions posed by fellow customers when they are recognized in the forum as a major contributor. Forums can use public markers of status—awards, name recognition—to draw attention to users' high level of contribution; their expertise and knowledge; or their creativity, taste, or style.
3. Money
Of course, sometimes the best way for a for-profit business to motivate network collaboration is to offer money or other commercial benefits.
When Cisco announced its Innovation Prize, or I-Prize, in 2008, the company placed an open call for teams anywhere in the world to identify billion-dollar business opportunities for Cisco's Emerging Technologies Group. After several rounds of winnowing down 1,200 business proposals received from 104 countries, Cisco announced the winners: Anna Gossen, Niels Gossen, and Sergey Bessonnitsyn—a wife, husband, and brother team of two computer science students and an engineer. The three received not only $250,000 but also the opportunity to work for Cisco on their proposed new venture, a "smart grid" framework to reduce the passive consumption of power by electronic devices. The prize award was a small price to pay for Cisco, which estimated that the project could generate a billion dollars in revenue within five to seven years.
It is important to note that although the prize was a good deal for Cisco, it was also an extraordinary reward for the recipients, who were doing work (business plan development) that was not part of their normal careers or businesses.
Some short-sighted companies have seized on the notion of "crowdsourcing" as a means to exploit the same vendors they would normally hire to carry out a professional task. Rather than hiring one firm to complete work, they simply ask many to submit a solution and offer to pay "the winner" at a rate similar to what would normally be professional work for hire. That kind of spec-work masquerading as "collaboration" can yield resentment and a bruised reputation, as ad agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky found when it tried to solicit logo designs for an advertising client with a $1,000 prize.
Businesses should not confuse collaboration with exploitation. But money can be an effective reward when the sum received or the type of work is out-of-the-ordinary for participants.
Hybrids
In many cases, the motivation to collaborate with a business is a hybrid of social, status, and financial rewards.
Threadless contestants (who submit T-shirt designs) may be motivated as much by the chance to see their design advertised and worn by others (they are not, generally, professional clothing designers) as by the cash reward.
In the case of the Netflix Prize, the team that produced the winning solution to improve the company's recommendation engine received not only a million dollars but also extensive coverage in mainstream media, such as BusinessWeek, Wired magazine, and The New York Times.
And although a quarter of a million dollars may have attracted participants to the Cisco I-Prize, the winners were probably equally motivated by passion for their business idea as by their long-shot chance at winning the money.
