Social Sigma
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Mon, May 19, 2008
George F. Colony, CEO of Forrester Research, has an interesting take on the power of feedback and communities to refine products: "Loic Le Meur ... uses his social networks to hone his ideas -- the smart ones get perfected, the bad ones get shot down. The next day I asked Vinod Khosla, the venture capitalist, what he gets from blogging. Same answer -- it's a way to get instant feedback on his ideas. I call this phenomenon Social Sigma. You've heard of Six Sigma. That's the discipline that companies use to perfect products through process improvement. Social Sigma is using the continual feedback from your customers to perfect your products."
You can certainly use a schedule of frequent, traditional surveys to pursue Social Sigma, but the real potential comes when you create conversations between respondents and your organization. Our new Community Builder lets you do just that: set up forums and wikis where your customers (or employees or resellers or members of any key constituency) can engage with one another and members of your own organization on an ongoing basis.
I believe that Social Sigma represents the next wave of online feedback. In the 1990s, online feedback was just traditional surveys ported to the new medium: same old survey, new venue. By the start of this decade, the big innovation was the transformation of surveys from quarterly or annual events to continuous, ongoing studies. With Social Sigma, online feedback can now really take advantage of the Web, enabling participants around the world to communicate with one another directly and regularly. Imagine it as a focus group convening daily, constantly providing your organization with fresh new insights as participants react and expand on one another's comments. You can then use surveys for quantitative analysis to prioritize the most important emergent ideas.
While Social Sigma itself might not be the next catchphrase, I'm certain that within the next five years every Fortune 500 company will be including Social Sigma initiatives in their research and planning operations.