Wonderful work out of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence on Collaborative Innovation Networks (COINS) – see the link here http://www.ickn.org/innovation.html, and if you are interested, explore the rest of their site. www.ickn.org. Also see http://swarmcreativity.net

More to come on this. The work coming out of MIT on COINs is truly fascinating relative to how swarms – marketing, product and service development, or other – really work.

I was recently approached to talk to an organization of education services agencies about marketing.  In my state, these agencies are called educational collaboratives (see www.moec.org – the state organization of collaboratives). The name describes well the ways in which these organizations are meant to work with their member schools and school districts.

In solving marketing challenges for these types of collaborative and membership based organizations, how can collaboration be a possible engine for their marketing success?

If the marketing activity for a membership organization feels like a struggle, it’s helpful to go back to the beginning and ask – is this service, product, or initiative really collaborative?

An educational collaborative brings together its member school districts and schools to find solutions to problems and enable innovations that each member does not have the capacity to pursue alone. But what happens when you find yourself having to sell your solution to a potentially unwilling customer/member?

The days of creating a product in a vacuum and then selling it to your customers by persuasion (ice to the Eskimos) are pretty much past us. Classic wisdom dictates that the creators of a service or product should first make sure it meets a need that the customer actually has – and solves a problem that’s important to them. The next natural phase of this approach is to enlist the customer’s help during development to refine the service or product.  This is customer-centric product development.

But there is a way to use collaboration to take the approach a step further. Think about something like crowd sourcing.

Merriam Webster defines crowd sourcing as

the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people and especially from the online community rather than from traditional employees or suppliers.

Replace the word “obtaining” with “developing”, and you have the concept of collaboratively developing and funding the creation of something that all of the members of the group need.

Co-creation: In other words, skin in the game.

When a new startup seeks crowd sourcing funds, it takes donations from as wide a variety of early adopters (champions) as possible.  Kickstarter is a great example of this; but for some really diverse cases, visit www.crowdsourcing.org. There are some terrific case stories there with examples of how this might work. This model has surged along with the rise of social media as its most powerful engine.

There have been crowd funded startups; crowd sourced volunteers coming together for a single cause; even crowd sourced talent websites bringing together a diverse and varied pool of like talents for hire.  Etsy is a crowd sourced ecommerce site for crafters and artisans that couldn’t afford to have a marketing platform as individuals.  Key is this: these initiatives and projects were created, fueled and sourced by their members and contributors, who are also their customers. Talk about a captive audience.  Is it for everyone? Most certainly not. If you have a diverse base, there will be customers and members for whom the product of this type of initiative does not work to solve their problem. But by making the “ask” for help and resources up front to create a solution, you will find out very quickly if the problem; and the potential solution, can be adopted and championed by enough participants to have merit.

Where many people move together as one unit, to do something that no single one can do alone. Each individual contributes something to the overall endeavor, often something unique.  When bees wish to establish a new colony, they do so in a swarm.

The key to swarming is the reliance on a multitude of diverse actors having input, with each of those actors motivated to contribute to the goal or the project. Each member is fully engaged and they all have skin in the game – think of crowd sourcing.

Swarming allows groups of animals to accomplish tasks they can’t do alone.

Swarm intelligence is about collective wisdom applied to a shared goal, where the interaction is the key.

National Geographic talks about the genius of swarms thus:

A single ant or bee isn’t smart, but their colonies are. The study of swarm intelligence is providing insights that can help humans manage complex systems.

Seth Godin talks a lot about tribes – an idea not so different from a swarm. A tribe is a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea.  A group needs only two things to be a tribe: a shared interest and a way to communicate. Members of a tribe contribute to and take from like-minded people.  Tribes used to be local, but now the internet eliminates geography and crosses boundaries. This makes tribes bigger, more influential, and potentially more diverse.

With choice expanding faster than the speed of light, consumers are less and less interested in an off the shelf solution; and more and more interested in finding something they can believe in.  What ties them together in the hunt for that solution is not geography and not the limits of the marketplace. They pursue an idea, and are brought together by leadership that believes what they believe. And they are willing to do something about it, but need a focus for their collective energy. Create a movement, not a product – and you will be leveraging more power than your own.

Marketing has always been the act of telling stories about the things that we make. But now more than ever, marketing is about engaging with the tribe and co-creating – not just delivering, but co-creating products and services with stories that spread because they grow naturally out of the needs of a group and are developed as a solution for the group.

Seth Godin talks on his blog at http://sethgodin.typepad.com/, about the power of finding the 1,000 people that are in your tribe. The ability to find and organize 1,000 people, he says, is a breakthrough opportunity. One thousand people coordinating their actions is enough to make significant change.

• 1,000 people willing to spend $250 to attend a day-long seminar gives you the leverage to invite just about anyone you can imagine to fly in and speak.
• 1,000 people voting as a bloc can change local politics forever.
• 1,000 people willing to try a new type of service gives you the ability to make project successful.

 “What’s difficult? What’s difficult is changing your attitude. Instead of speed dating your way to interruption, instead of yelling at strangers all day trying to make a living, coordinating a tribe of 1,000 requires patience, consistency and a focus on long-term relationships and life time value. You don’t find customers for your products. You find products for your [tribe].”

Does that 1,000 number seem insurmountable? Realize, then, that you can get to the 1,000 people by finding first the 100. And if you follow that logic further, you can get to the 100 by finding the 10. We used to call these champions; but building a tribe requires more interaction than that. If you find 10 people with tribes of their own that can commit to making your tribe work, and they are willing to engage with you, they will bring their tribes to the task. And so on.