Misbahul
Arefin
MBA
SESSION: 2017-18
Department
of Marketing Studies, CU
Most
innovators (whether they’re inside a company or working independently)
cultivate traits like creative risk taking, positive reinforcement and
strategic planning. They need a lot of skills to continuously find new
improvements. However, there is another branch of innovation in which
innovators have a lack idea: COMMUNICATION.
The reason, communications is so crucial is because no
innovation program can exist without ideas. One needs a lot of ideas to
germinate, combine, and transform before getting a truly significant new idea
that can serve the business or consumers. But to create that network of
connections between idea fragments, one needs to involve lots of people in the
ideation process. That’s where crowd sourcing comes in: one brings in the crowd
who can share and validate and connect with one another’s ideas.
But the crowd doesn’t just arrive on the innovation scene.
They need to be invited, excited, and incentivized and to be truly successful,
one needs a pretty big crowd in order to enjoy all the benefits of crowd
wisdom. It means that innovators who have been cultivating other traits (like
creative risk taking, positive reinforcement, etc) need to also learn how to become creative communications specialists, capable of
broadcasting worthwhile messages to large audiences.
SO one can start with the following four main channels of
communication to get the crowd involved:
1) Web Presence
We
know that for the most part, no matter who the
audience is, they are online, which means that your first communications
initiative is finding their key web destinations and placing invitations to the innovation community there(either in widget
or link form).
2) Email
No
matter what the end goal is, email is still one of the highest converting
mechanisms for getting a response. So one has to test his emails to reach out
to the crowd to share the message.
3) Social Media
Social
Media is a great place to share messages with innovators who are looking for
things to enlighten, entertain, and engage them.
4) Public Relations
Writers
and bloggers are one of the best influencers. So, one has to find out whose
voice resonates with the crowd and after that by building a relationship with
that influencers help to spread the word.
