January 20th, 2009 by Nils Maier

Starbucks does it, Tchibo applies it and even the future 44th President of the United States gets it. The magic word is called crowd sourcing and with Barack Obama, it is the platform citizens briefing book. This platform encourages U.S citizens to share their ideas in every single issue. Ranging from economic policy, over social policy themes to foreign affairs – this platform allows citizens to express their reformed suggestions and these will be rated by other users. So far there have been over 44.000 ideas from users in this platform, at which over 120.000 users also reflected in their voting choice.

The legalization of marijuana is the most popular idea at the moment in Obama’s platform, follows close by the commitment to become the “greenest” country in the world. If these popular ideas could help shape a better U.S politics? Well I doubt it. The development of such platform fits pretty well into the communication strategies of Barack Obama. Social media belonged right from the start for Obama’s advisers to one of the central tools in addressing voters. Hence, the development of the actual platform is the logical step in the social media strategy of Obama. Not only the new American President tries to integrate his clientele in product development and service optimization. Even the free economy discovers often the advantage of consumer’s feedback or rather CRM in the area of social media. Of course Dell stands out the most, but Otto, Tchibo and Fiat also communicate with their users to generate successful market oriented products. The advantage of such method is quite obvious in this media. There exists seldom better environment for such a direct way to communicate with the target groups and consumers. I’m positively certain that social media and CRM will go hand in hand near future.

Tags: Crowd sourcing, Digital Crowd Sourcing, politics
category: Brands & Markets, ethority
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