Let your mob do product development and tour swarm market research and marketing.

I'm diving in to the entangled theories developed by organizational academics that might have a connection to social media. There to break my fall and help me land softly was an article from 2008 in the Journal of Macromarketing, namely The Wisdom of Consumer crowds: Collective Innovation in the new Age of Networked Marketing by Kozinets. He divides online creative consumer communities into four; crowds, hives, mobs and swarms.

• in crowds, innovation is a goal in it's own sense, there are many innovators, providing individually small contributions, an example is Crash the Super Bowl.
• in hives, the intention is to produce a  "quality product", innovation as a goal is also an important idiosyncratic, but here, there are few individuals providing individually larger contributions, an example is Skibuilders
• in mobs, you a limited number of experts speak to a interest group, examples are Slave to Target and The Huffington Post
• in swarms, there are numerous contributors with small individual inputs, examples include Wikipedia, Amazon and Google and various types of grassroots classification.

Lastly, there is a piece of advice: let your mob develop your products and the swarm decide which to put into production (market research) and market it. Mobsource then swarmsource/crowdsource.

I talked to a friend of mine who wanted to outsource his start-up challenges. I advised him to do a pilot with his advisory board and am excited about the outcome. I came across a few examples of this beeing done, but is it being done successfully? It's a fine line between getting help for your problems and revealing proprietary information about your business.