Meeting Crowdsourcing startups one day, Cisco the next…and many surprising synergies.

Leslie Barry

Leslie Barry

— 2 min read

Serendipity. A word that’s popped up many times over the last few days.

crowdsource event

I get a tweet. I go to the Crowdsourcing event in Sydney. I go to the Cisco Insight 2010 event on Tuesday. @rossdawson who hosted the Crowdsourcing event is speaking at the Cisco event. I catch up with Ross. We discover other mutual opportunities. He blogs about it here. I LinkIn to someone I met at the Crowdsource event on Monday. This may lead to further opportunities. My blog traffic rises tenfold. All this in 2 days.

Very interesting series of events and some lessons learned.

  • Keep the faith and work hard on your online presence. LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Blogging works.
  • Electronic only ‘relationships’ don’t exist. Nothing replaces meeting in person. One physical meeting creates more momentum than hundreds of electronic interactions. If you doubt this, review which ‘relationships’ on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc are the most meaningful, and 90% of those will be with people you have actually met.
  • Pay it forward. Social media is only effective if you’re giving without expecting anything in return. There are definite business benefits and rewards, but that’s the spin-off, not the objective. A bit like fishing — the pleasure is in being absorbed in the fishing, not just catching the fish.
  • Get involved and participate in a community. Calling all pockets is a waste of time.
  • Understand your unique combination of skills that forms your personal value proposition, and don’t get overwhelmed by the ‘everything has been done before’ feeling that the mass of data on the web creates.
  • If you have a great idea, just do it. now. quickly. See seggr, Task Exchange , Ideas Culture , Freelancer, and DesignCrowd for proof.

OK, back to the Cisco Event. What was interesting? (My personal views)

  • Cisco (a $133B tech product company) cares about social media and the impact and opportunities in our future. So should you. Take it seriously
  • We’re moving towards the Internet of Things rapidly.
  • Collaboration is the major challenge and opportunity going forward.
  • Managing multiple providers is a key differentiator and future skill (Gartner said this a few years ago when they spoke about the move to multi-sourcing and the need for organization to become expert vendor managers). I believe Crowdsourcing will face a similar challenge / opportunity for whoever can get this right.
  • Project / Programme Management has a major opportunity to get more agile here and operate in all these areas — Internal formal PMO’s, Outsourced Project Services, Cloud based PM, Crowd-based Project Management and the various supporting Saas PM tools. Massive opportunity to play across these areas, I think.
  • It was interesting to observe the two ends of the spectrum. Micro business Crowdsourcing vs large scale Cisco both driving the same message and strategy. “Smart + Connected”. In @Cisco’s case, it’s in the Network and in Crowdsourcing’s case, it’s in the Living Network.
  • Cisco also spoke about their internal Virtual Expert Organisation offering, which is actually ‘Private/Enterprise Crowdsourcing’?

And finally, I think I’ve gone over to the Dark Side. I found myself #tagging my written notes ;-)

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